The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Godless Commies: The Critical Theory Cult and The Devil’s Pleasure Palace

Posted on | September 1, 2015 | 72 Comments

 

“The greatest difference in the universe . . . is the difference between nothing and something, between an infinity of darkness and a single point of light. . . . It is the difference between atheism and God.”
— Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

A decade ago, when my oldest daughter Kennedy was 16, I drove her and her friend Mandy to Creation, a Christian music festival in Pennsylvania. As we were driving along, something inspired me to start talking about Communism, and I mentioned that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, this was a miraculous event that answered the prayers of millions. Then I explained how, growing up a Baptist in Georgia, I learned to despise “godless Commies,” who had persecuted Christians in Russia, China and everywhere else Marxist-Leninist regimes gained power.

“You kids have no idea what it was like,” I said, attempting to explain the constant terror of growing up in the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear standoff with the potential to annihilate humanity. As a boy growing up, I knew that my Uncle Casper fought the godless Commies in Vietnam, and when I was in second grade, the local park in Douglasville was named in honor of a hero in that war:

Robert Gerald “Jerry” Hunter left his native Douglas County to attend the Citadel, where he graduated with honors. He joined the Air Force, became a fighter pilot, and was deployed to Vietnam. On May 25, 1966, Hunter was on his 34th combat mission when his F-105 jet was shot down near the Laotian border. He bailed out — his comrades saw the parachute — and it was initially believed that he had survived. The 25-year-old pilot was listed as missing in action, and the Air Force promoted him from first lieutenant to captain while rescuers searched for him. Hunter’s family, including his young bride Laura, prayerfully waited for word that he had been recovered safely. Seven weeks later, however, the sad news came that his remains had been found in Laos, where he had apparently died of injuries. First Baptist Church in Douglasville overflowed with mourners at his funeral and local businesses closed early that afternoon in honor of Captain Hunter, Douglas County’s first casualty in the Vietnam War.

Kids don’t know that history, and they are fortunate not to live under the shadow of the existential menace of Communism, the bloodiest tyranny in the history of the world. So on that summer day in 2005, I tried to explain to my daughter and her friend why the Soviet Union — the “Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan called it — inspired such resolute opposition from Christians. Marxism is an explicitly atheist philosophy, and the Communist is bound by no morality whatsoever. Communists are always deliberate liars, who believe that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” justifies any deception necessary to advance their cause, and Communists kill without remorse, unrestrained by conscience. The disciples of that deadly doctrine were responsible for the deaths of some 100 million people in the 20th century. The collapse of the Soviet Union was achieved only after decades of conflict and tension between the free world, led by the United States, and the International Communist Conspiracy headquartered in Moscow.

This history, and the sense of what it meant to grow up in the Cold War era, was what I sought to convey to my daughter and her friend on that drive through the Pennsylvania countryside. During this improvised lecture — something of a sermon, really — I kept repeating the phrase “godless Commies,” which subsequently became an inside joke between us. My daughter and her husband came to visit us over the past weekend, and her friend Mandy joined us for a family dinner, and I got a laugh out of them when, discussing recent news events, I asked the rhetorical question, “You know what the problem is, don’t you?”

“Godless Commies!” Mandy replied.

Yes, the battlefield has shifted, but the enemy remains the same, and this post-Cold War “twilight struggle” of the Culture War is what Michael Walsh examines in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. Walsh’s choice of the word “subversion” is apt, because the effort by Marxists to subvert the culture of the West did not stop after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Godless Commies are everywhere in 21st-century America — in academia, in media, in Hollywood and in government. It is remarkable that Hillary Clinton, who certainly could be described as what anti-Communists used to call a “pinko” or “fellow traveler,” finds herself challenged for the Democrat Party nomination by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist. Clearly, this is not the Democrat Party I was raised in, because there is a world of difference between old-fashioned AFL-CIO liberalism (my father was a member of the Machinists union) and the neo-Bolshevik radicalism of today’s “progressive” Democrats.

The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is an examination of a subversive worldview that has been variously called “political correctness” or “Cultural Marxism,” which Walsh identifies by its academic moniker Critical Theory. Whatever it is called, this intellectual virus was brought to America in the 1940s by a group of left-wing refugees — including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich — who are generally known as the Frankfurt School because of their former associations with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Embraced by the avant-garde of American academia, the ideas of the Frankfurt School has enormous influence after World War II. One of their key ideas, given a patina of “scientific” credibility by Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, was the belief that the traditional family was a breeding ground of fascism. This provided the Left with a trite pseudo-Freudian explanation of anti-Communism as rooted in neurotic insecurities. The Frankfurt School’s “diagnosis” of conservatism as a form of mental illness was notoriously echoed in 1964, when a left-wing smear offered the consensus of nearly 1,200 psychiatrists that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was “psychologically unfit to be President.”

However, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is not a dry factual history of the Frankfurt Schools ideas and influence. Michael Walsh is a highly literary man — a screenwriter and novelist, and former classical music critic of Time magazine — who seeks to evoke the humane impulses of artistic creativity in opposition to the soul-crushing forces that Critical Theory empowers. Exposing the hostility of this crypto-Marxist ideology toward that which is spiritual in man’s nature, Walsh appeals to the finest traditions of Western culture, deriving his book’s title from Franz Schubert’s first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss. Walsh’s book bristles with references to classical music (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner) and philosophy (e.g., Aristotle, Rousseau, Nietzsche), as well as literature and films, including Casablanca, High Noon, The Wild One, The Godfather and Independence Day. Adding to this arsenal of high culture, however, Walsh also dares to invoke the religious foundation of Western civilization, citing the Book of Genesis to explain the eternal conflict of human history: “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die . . . ye shall be as gods.”

Believing this satanic lie made Original Sin our inherited condition, and human rebellion against God’s sovereignty began with the impudent desire to usurp divine authority — a “liberation” that results in violence, misery and death. Like the serpent in Eden, the godless Commies tempt us to imagine ourselves freed from God’s law, so that law is no longer a matter of transcendent morality, but is instead simply a matter of power. The destruction of religious belief is necessary to the success of this political wickedness, and the all-powerful State must also destroy the family, as Walsh explains:

Like Satan, the modern leftist state is jealous of the family’s preprogatives, enraged by its power, and it seeks to replace this with its own authority; the satanic condition of “rage,” in fact, is one of the Left’s favorite words (e.g., in 1969, the “Days of Rage” in Chicago) as well as one of its chief attributes. The ongoing, expansive redefinition of what constitutes a “family” is part of the Left’s assault. . . .
Soviet Communism . . . understood this well. Destroy the family, seize the children, and give the insupportable notion of a Marxist post-Eden replacement paradise a purchase on power for at least one more generation. American youth who grew up in the 1950s, as I did, heard numerous horror stories of Russian children who informed on their own parents. . . . Probably the most famous was the thirteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, an instantly mythologized Soviet Young Pioneer who informed on his father to the secret police and was in turn murdered by “reactionary” members of his own family, who were later rounded up and shot. Whether the story is actually true — and post-Soviet scholarship suggests that it was largely fabricated — the Soviet myth required just such an object lesson and just such a martyr to the Communist cause.

Nothing is more important to the Left than the political “cause” because no personal loyalty — not even to one’s own family — can be permitted to challenge the power of the total State, which arrogates to itself the authority to direct and control every aspect of our lives. Pavlik Morozov’s betrayal of his “reactionary” parents is a model for how the government school system now requires children to reject the moral authority of their parents. Teaching the child to hate Mom and Dad — to despise his parents as ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic bigots — is the most important lesson of the modern public school, and this lesson is reinforced daily by the educational bureaucrats who are paid with tax dollars to indoctrine children with an anti-religious, anti-family, anti-American ideology. But I’m ranting again, eh?

Godless Commies! We can never hate them as much as they deserve to be hated, nor can we hate them as much as they hate us, because they hate us with a fanatical fury that a Christian cannot even imagine. It would be a sin to hate anyone that much, but the godless Commies don’t believe in sin, and so they are free to indulge their hatred, which is infinite.

The Critical Theory cult promises to create a utopia of “equality,” yet lacks any real creativity, because it is inspired by a spirit of destruction manifested in a limitless lust for power, with which to punish its enemies. Walsh points out how Herbert Marcuse “celebrated ‘polymorphous perversity,’ advocating the liberating power of sex” as a means to weaken “the foundations of the society he sought to undermine.” Yet this attack on sexual morality produced consequences that the prophets of “liberation” failed to foretell, as Walsh explains:

The attack on normative heterosexuality . . . invariably disguised as a movement for “rights” . . . is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory. . . If a wedge could be driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men . . . then that poliitcal party that had adopted Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs. . . .
The result has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work n the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the “hookup culture” . . . to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male “rape culture” hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.

This result was “predictable,’ as Walsh said, to those who understood human nature as a fixed quantity that could not be infinitely molded to fit the theories of godless Commies. Yet if the soul-crushing misery the Left has delivered is nothing like the paradise of “equality” they promised, the cult of Critical Theory has at least kept its promise to destroy the traditional American society that was always the target of the Left’s vengeful hatred. Very little remains of the America that triumphed in World War II and then endured the “long twilight struggle” to emerge victorious in the Cold War. Having captured control of the educational system, the godless Commies have relentlessly purged religious faith from our nation’s schools and colleges, so that no sincere Christian could possibly hope to be hired in American higher education, even if any Christian were willing to work within the satanic pulpits of academia.

Is there any hope at all? Can we defeat these godless Commies and rescue civilization from annihilation by the cult of Critical Theory? Michael Walsh believes there is still reason to hope, if only the American people can summon the courage to keep fighting:

Facing overwhelming odds at Thermopylae, the Greeks under the Spartan king Leonidas responded to Persian demands that they surrender their weapons with these words for the ages: “Molon labe.” “Come and take them.”

We live in an evil age, and are confronted with the infinite darkness of oblivion, yet there is still hope in that single point of light that is the difference between atheism and God.

 

Category: Books

In The Mailbox: 09.01.15

Posted on | September 1, 2015 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Mystery of ISIS and Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy
Da Tech Guy: Ted Cruz in Hollis, NH
Doug Powers: Obama’s Mixed Messages Contributing To Climate Change, Mass Confusion
Twitchy: “This Is Why America Hates Us In DC” – Ron Fournier Calls Out Paul Begala For “But Bush!” Hackery
Conservative Intel: Hillary – Kill Joe!
Shark Tank: “Wassermann Schultz Should Go To The Ovens” (Video)


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Migrant Crackdown Sows Chaos In Europe
American Thinker: Officers’ Letter To Congress On Iran Deal Not A One Day Story
Conservatives4Palin: Obama’s DOJ Continues To Stonewall Investigation Into IRS Corruption
Don Surber: Ben Carson Wins WV Straw Poll
Jammie Wearing Fools: Not A Peep From Obama On Execution Of Houston Police Officer, but Plenty Of Climate Change Psychobabble
Joe For America: Ted Cruz Puts Blame For Cop’s Death Where It Belongs – On Obama
JustOneMinute: Progressive Banking
Pamela Geller: Scholars Catch Up To Robert Spencer, Realize Ancient Quran Challenges Islam’s Origins
Protein Wisdom: “No Fiction Is Worth Reading Except For Entertainment”
Shot In The Dark: Our Underachieving Cro-Magnon Governor
STUMP: Pension Quicktakes – How About That Stock Market? And Red Light Cameras?
The Gateway Pundit: #BlackLivesMatter Radio Show Calls For Race War – “Kill Whites And Cops”
The Jawa Report:
The Lonely Conservative: Washington State Professors Will Punish Students Who Use The Wrong Words
This Ain’t Hell: Rest In Peace, Forgotten Angel
Weasel Zippers: Moonbats Lose In Montana – Appeals Court Cites First Amendment, Okays Jesus Statue On Big Mountain
Megan McArdle: Printing Money Goes Haywire In Venezuela
Mark Steyn: Sewers And Servers


Out today! S.M. Stirling’s The Desert and the Blade

Category: Linkagery

‘Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder’

Posted on | August 31, 2015 | 184 Comments

Online dating apps are fueling an “apocalypse” of hook-up culture, Nancy Jo Sales reports in a frightening Vanity Fair feature:

[Alex] says that he himself has slept with five different women he met on Tinder — “Tinderellas,” the guys call them — in the last eight days. Dan and Marty, also Alex’s roommates in a shiny high-rise apartment building near Wall Street, can vouch for that. In fact, they can remember whom Alex has slept with in the past week more readily than he can.
“Brittany, Morgan, Amber,” Marty says, counting on his fingers. “Oh, and the Russian — Ukrainian?”
“Ukrainian,” Alex confirms. “She works at—” He says the name of a high-end art auction house. Asked what these women are like, he shrugs. “I could offer a résumé, but that’s about it … Works at J. Crew; senior at Parsons; junior at Pace; works in finance … ”
“We don’t know what the girls are like,” Marty says.
“And they don’t know us,” says Alex.

Hey, guys, let’s add a word to your vocabulary: Herpes.

Did you know that herpes is incurable, and that condoms don’t protect against herpes? You could ask Ella Dawson to explain this to you. Ms. Dawson was a student at Wesleyan University (annual tuition $47,972) who said she “never had unprotected sex,” but experienced a “tidal wave of shame” when she was diagnosed with a herpes infection. (Ms. Dawson graduated in 2014 with a bachelor of arts in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, “theorizing the feminist possibilities of erotica,” so I guess that makes her an expert of sorts.) A 2010 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the herpes rate “was nearly twice as high among women (21%) as men (11%), and more than three times higher among African-Americans (39%) than whites (12%). The infection rate among African-American women was 48%.” For obvious reasons, promiscuity increases the risk of infection, and the CDC found that about 27% of those who reported 10 or more partners are infected with herpes.

So while Alex is congratulating himself on hooking up with five “Tinderellas” in the span of eight days, he should perhaps be thinking in terms of epidemiology. Yet the herpes virus may ultimately be less harmful than the emotional damage inflicted by mindless promiscuity:

Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder (“Hinge is my thing”), is no slouch at “racking up girls.” He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”

See? Marty understands the game he’s playing. Pretend that you’re emotionally available — “a boyfriend kind of guy” — and “racking up girls” via online hook-up sites is not difficult nowadays for any reasonably attractive young man. The more a guy succeeds at that cynical game, however, the lower his estimation of women in general, because each “win” for him just proves how easily girls can be deceived. No amount of feminist “consciousness raising” can change the fundamental reality of human nature. Casual sex is a game in which guys have a decisive advantage, and therefore any girl who plays that game is a fool. When so many young women are willing to play this foolish game, however, it produces a culture shift that hurts women:

“It’s rare for a woman of our generation to meet a man who treats her like a priority instead of an option,” wrote Erica Gordon on the Gen Y Web site Elite Daily, in 2014.
It is the very abundance of options provided by online dating which may be making men less inclined to treat any particular woman as a “priority,” according to David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the evolution of human sexuality. “Apps like Tinder and OkCupid give people the impression that there are thousands or millions of potential mates out there,” Buss says. “One dimension of this is the impact it has on men’s psychology. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men don’t have to commit, so they pursue a short-term mating strategy. Men are making that shift, and women are forced to go along with it in order to mate at all.”
“For young women the problem in navigating sexuality and relationships is still gender inequality,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who specializes in sexuality and gender. “Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious and when something is not — they can go, ‘She’s girlfriend material, she’s hookup material.’ … There is still a pervasive double standard. We need to puzzle out why women have made more strides in the public arena than in the private arena.”

Will feminists ever wake up and realize that human nature is an immutable reality impervious to ideology? Viewing sexual problems as a quasi-Marxist struggle between two classes — men and women as collective groups — does not necessarily help any individual woman and may arguably make her life more difficult. Strategies recommended by feminist ideology may seem to “work” for lesbian sociology professors who view all males as hostile and dangerous, but political rhetoric about “gender inequality” doesn’t help the college girl trying to negotiate personal relationships. Are we to believe that Professor Armstrong (author of the 2002 book Forging Gay Identities) is best qualified to advise young heterosexual women on how to find a guy who will treat her right? Nancy Jo Sales reports the anecdotal evidence:

At a table in the front, six young women have met up for an after-work drink. They’re seniors from Boston College, all in New York for summer internships, ranging from work in a medical-research lab to a luxury department store. They’re attractive and fashionable, with bright eyes highlighted with dark eyeliner wings. None of them are in relationships, they say. I ask them how they’re finding New York dating.
“New York guys, from our experience, they’re not really looking for girlfriends,” says the blonde named Reese. “They’re just looking for hit-it-and-quit-it on Tinder.”
“People send really creepy s–t on it,” says Jane, the serious one.
“I think that iPhones and dating apps have really changed the way that dating happens for our generation,” says Stephanie, the one with an arm full of bracelets.
“There is no dating. There’s no relationships,” says Amanda, the tall elegant one. “They’re rare. You can have a fling that could last like seven, eight months and you could never actually call someone your ‘boyfriend.’ [Hooking up] is a lot easier. No one gets hurt — well, not on the surface.” . . .
They say they think their own anxiety about intimacy comes from having “grown up on social media,” so “we don’t know how to talk to each other face-to-face.” . . .
“It seems like the girls don’t have any control over the situation, and it should not be like that at all,” Fallon says.
“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says.
“Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now, and I think it really is kind of destroying females’ self-images,” says Fallon.
“It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.
“Honestly, I feel like the body doesn’t even matter to them as long as you’re willing,” says Reese. “It’s that bad.”
“But if you say any of this out loud, it’s like you’re weak, you’re not independent, you somehow missed the whole memo about third-wave feminism,” says Amanda.

No, ma’am. You got the memo. It’s just that you seem to be smart enough to realize that the memo was completely wrong. What feminist ideology tells young women they should do — being sexually “empowered” and expecting this empowerment to lead to “equality” in their relationships — is the exact opposite of what common sense based on an actual knowledge of human nature would advise them to do.

The accumulated wisdom of centuries still holds true. If you want to be loved, be lovable, and if you want to be respected, be respectable. As I tell young women, don’t just “play hard to get,” be hard to get. A girl who acts like trash thereby forfeits the right to complain that guys treat her like trash. One of the worst things feminism has done is to attack the sexual “double standard” by encouraging women to lower their standards, to screw around heedlessly and to view short-term “relationships” as an acceptable substitute for actual commitment.

This strategy of “equality” doesn’t work to women’s advantage. It has never worked and will never work, and any girl who plays that game is a fool. Yet feminism teaches women to blame men for taking advantage of the foolishness that feminists themselves encourage. If millions of women are on Tinder offering themselves as hook-up partners, how are men to blame if they react to “a perceived surplus of women” by playing that game? “Hit it and quit it.”

Certainly, I would never advise my kids to play that game. No decent parent would ever want their daughter to be offering herself to random strangers online, and decent parents would be horrified if their son brought home a woman he’d picked up that way. “Tinder trash” for a daughter-in-law? No, son. Leave those trashy women alone.

Remember that herpes is incurable, 21% of women are infected, and I’ll bet the rate of herpes infection is even higher on Tinder.

(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas on Twitter.)





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Sunday: Hot Babes In Space

Posted on | August 30, 2015 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I don’t know why I didn’t do this last weekend, considering it was Worldcon weekend…oh, right. Anyway, I want to kick off this week’s Rule 5 post with a Kelly Freas cover from the March 1974 Analog, for Jerry Pournelle’s “High Justice”, because Kelly was an awesome artist and a fine human being besides.

From sfcovers.net, which you really ought to check out.

Kicking off this week’s roundup is Goodstuff with (appropriately enough) Sigourney Weaver, Godzilla, Heroes and Science! Next up is Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress – Double Trouble, and Girls With Guns; Animal Magnetism chips in with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, while First Street Journal continues paying tribute to our women in the military with Training.

EBL’s herd this week includes Tunisia, Sorority Girls Gone Wild, Biden and the Ladies, Come Fly With Me, Notorious, and Southie Dancers.

A View from the Beach has Another Good Thing From Sweden – Elsa Hosk, Chesapeake Shad Have Worst Year Since Whenever, “Muskrat Love”, Humor is Truly Dead and Buried, Nudes in the News, Clinton.com Catchup, “I’m Back”, Cruz Takes on the Lesbian Mafia, and Monday Morning – How About a Cute Kitten Post?

At Soylent Siberia, it’s your AM Alpine Coffee Creamer, Monday Motivationer Fair Game, Tuesday Titillation, Humpday Hawt Dream Catcher, Fursday Formal, Corset Friday With Steampunk and Tats, T-GIF Friday Lesbians, Weekender Luxury Model, and Bath Night Pitcher This.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Emily Didonato, his Vintage Babe is Margaret Colin, Sex in Advertising is all about Giving Your Boyfriend Wood, and it’s time for the obligatory (preseason) 49ers cheerleader! At Dustbury, it’s Amy Macdonald and Lucero.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for the Rule 5 Sunday Labor Day Weekend Edition is midnight on Saturday, September 5.


High Justice
Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: For The Strength Of The Wolf Is The Pack…

Posted on | August 29, 2015 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

War Against Human Nature: Radical Feminism’s Anti-Maternal Rage
Trevor Loudon
Noisy Room
The Right Planet
Nice Deb
VA Right
Grumpy Opinions
Watcher of Weasels
Political Hat
The Camp of the Saints
Maggie’s Notebook
Viewpoints of a Sagittarian
Batshit Crazy News

Rule 5 Sunday: RIP Batgirl, Viva Jeannie!
Animal Magnetism
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Ninety Miles from Tyranny

Radical Feminism and the ‘Equality’ Trap
The Pirate’s Cove
Political Hat
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

FMJRA 2.0: God Bless Saturday
The Pirate’s Cove
Blur Brain
Batshit Crazy News

Solomonic Wisdom Needed
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

‘No More Fun of Any Kind!’
Constantinople Not Istanbul
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

In The Mailbox, 08.25.15
Batshit Crazy News
Proof Positive

Immolation for the Hugos
Batshit Crazy News

Feds Raid ‘Rentboy’ Site
Constantinople Not Istanbul
Batshit Crazy News

Gunman Blames Racism After He Kills Two Young Journalists on Live TV
UPDATE: Charleston Church Shooting ‘Sent Me Over the Top,’ Killer Claims
Constantinople Not Istanbul
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

University Student Raped, Police Say; Another Crime Feminists Will Ignore
Constantinople Not Istanbul
Batshit Crazy News

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
Batshit Crazy News

War on Women? Feminist Blames the Patriarchy for Roanoke Killings
Constantinople Not Istanbul
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

A Reminder for ‘Male Feminists’
Lonely Conservative
Living In Anglo-America
Constantinople Not Istanbul
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 08.28.15
Batshit Crazy News

Romans Had Slavery, So I Guess The Roman Alphabet Requires Replacement
First Street Journal
Batshit Crazy News

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (15)
  2.  Constantinople Not Istanbul (6)
  3.  A View from the Beach (5)

Special thanks to the Watchers’ Council, who voted War Against Human Nature: Radical Feminism’s Anti-Maternal Rage into fifth place among non-Council posts for the week, and to Nice Deb, who nominated it. Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police

Category: FMJRA Award

Dear Feminists: You Think Too Much

Posted on | August 29, 2015 | 75 Comments

Not everything has meaning. Not everything requires critical analysis. Not everything is in need of a theory to explain it.

Some things are really simple. They are what they are, and the temptation to intellectualize everything should be resisted. Consider, for example, a New York Times column by Emily Witt:

Who could be cynical about the rise of friendship? In recent movies, female friends have banded together to shoot guns from trucks (“Mad Max: Fury Road”) and sing a cappella (“Pitch Perfect”). On TV, they have spooned in Greenpoint (“Girls”) and found common ground in prison (“Orange Is the New Black”). Their stoner antics (“Broad City”) have liberated us from the slob dads of sitcoms. Once limited to sassy supporting roles, female friends are now the primary source of romantic tension themselves: making passive-aggressive phone calls, taking baths together, serving as sugar daddies, lying to each other, busting ghosts. Unlike traditional romance, friendship doesn’t force us into archaic gender roles or complicate our professional or sexual independence. It’s now the boyfriends who are vestigial, appearing only in bit parts like “timid suitor” or “obnoxious co-worker.”

(This is because feminist bloggers now instantly attack any movie that doesn’t pass the lesbian-approved “Bechdel Test,” and everybody in Hollywood is scared to death of feminist bloggers. In order to satisfy blogger demands, males can never be heroic in movies, nor can any woman be cast in the role of “hero’s girlfriend,” let alone “damsel in distress.” Third-wave feminism requires that males be “vestigial,” because women must be so “empowered” that men are either peripheral characters — clowns and tagalongs — or else sinister villains representing the Oppressive Patriarchy.)

Running parallel to this artistic phenomenon, however, is an anthropological one. Lately, we’ve been inundated with images of real-life best friends, triumphantly displayed. It’s difficult to get through a day on the Internet without looking at photos of women flaunting the depth of their intimacy by posing over dinner or watching television together in matching pajamas. We now flick through images not of celebrity couples but of celebrity friends: Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj eating hamburgers in matching varsity jackets; Taylor Swift with Karlie Kloss, Lorde, Selena Gomez, Ellie Goulding, Lena Dunham, her cat Olivia, the entire runway lineup of a Victoria’s Secret show; the U.S. women’s soccer team. The meme factories have responded to the popularity of pictures of best friends with maximum output, harvesting groups of women posing on beaches and in limos from celebrity Instagram feeds and presenting them in slide shows . . . and labeling these images as “#friendspiration” and “#squadgoals.”

(Note the use of the authorial “we” here. Who is “we”? Why does Emily Witt presume that everyone is plugged into the same Internet feeds, so that they are “inundated with images” and it is “difficult to get through a day” without seeing the phenomenon she describes?)

Picture-perfect groups of friends on Instagram make me wonder whether Bridget Jones’s idea of “smug marrieds” could also apply to “squads” and why “The Stepford Wives” hasn’t been re-envisioned with a friendship plot. The portraits seem to be asking a lot of impolite questions: Do you have as many friends as we do? How did you celebrate your birthday? Do you regularly drink prosecco over plates of fruit at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar? Have you betrayed your gender by preferring the company of men? You don’t have a friend with whom you publicly exchange photographs of your manicures? What’s wrong with you? If female friendship is so uplifting, then why do these photos make us feel the opposite — unbalanced and unsure?

(Again with the authorial first-person plural. Emily Witt presumes to know how “these photos make us feel,” when she’s actually describing how they make her feel, i.e., envious of the lives of the celebrities whose photos she sees while obsessively checking the online feed that inundates her with these images. Clearly, “we” need to log off Instagram, get outside more often and, perhaps, ask “our” therapist to adjust the Prozac dosage.)

I used to think that friendship as performed for an audience would end with middle school, but the past 10 years of technology have changed that expectation.

(Obviously, she’s one of those unhappy-childhood types who are forever reliving their middle-school identity crises.)

In social media, friendship gets fixed and mounted. It loses its dramatic tension. It becomes a presentation of happiness, an advertisement for friendship rather than an actual portrayal of it. Sometimes, scrolling through photos of women I know looking carefully hungover in front of a perfectly composed brunch, or lying on a blanket in a park in crop tops, or posting screenshots of their exuberant text messages, I’m reminded of something Marnie once said on “Girls”: “I thought that this would be a good opportunity to have fun together and prove to everyone via Instagram that we can still have fun as a group.”

(If you ever find yourself thinking about life in terms of lines from a Lena Dunham HBO series, it’s time to have that talk with your therapist about the appropriate Prozac dosage.)

Mimicking the advertiser’s strategy, these pictures of delightful fun inevitably provoke a feeling of lack or longing in the consumer of the image.
When I think of depictions of friendships that have moved me, I find myself thinking mostly of books — of those passages in novels that illuminate friendship by its moments of thorniness, by the heartbreak it can cause.

(Of course! It’s about characters in novels. People who read too much fiction think everything is about characters in novels, in the same way people who spend too much time on Instagram think everything is about people on Instagram.)

Real friendship is complex. It’s the sadness of Elizabeth Bennet when her friend Charlotte Lucas marries the odious Mr. Collins in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” It’s Leah and Natalie’s complicated dance of haughtiness and need in Zadie Smith’s “NW.” It’s the once-a-week limit Vivian Gornick has with her friend Leonard in “The Odd Woman and the City” (because men can be friends too). The best works of art about friendship resonate by showing how our closest friends have a way of ruining our attempts to present ourselves as perfect; how those picturesque moments are belied by other truths.

(My friendships have never been “complex.” Never once in my life have I engaged in a “complicated dance of haughtiness and need,” probably because I don’t sit around reading novels, filled with a bittersweet nostalgia for middle school or obsessively staring at pictures of Taylor Swift on Instagram. Seriously, lady, you need to have that discussion with your therapist about your Prozac dosage.)

Friendship stories might have replaced tales of romantic love, but the best ones stop themselves from purveying easy clichés of their own — whether clichés about feminist solidarity or about mean girls (sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two). Close friendships are worth celebrating — but it is how they look at their least photogenic moments that proves their veracity.

And so concludes this New York Times mini-essay. Emily Witt is to Instagram selfies what Hannah Arendt was to Adolf Eichmann.

Curious as to who wrote this bizarre column, I found her online bio:

Emily Witt . . . has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique.

Oh, that explains it. Those of us who went to state universities didn’t sit around reading novels or having “complex” friendships that were a “complicated dance of haughtiness and need.” Nor do our daily lives as adults consist of scrolling through celebrity Instagram photos, wishing we could hang out with Lena Dunham and her friends.

Only if your Daddy can afford to send you to elite universities (annual tuition at Brown, $46,408), followed by several more years of postgraduate education, can you indulge in that kind of stuff and then get paid by the New York Times to share your thoughts about it using first-person plural pronouns so that you presume to speak for a “we” who share your peculiar obsessions. Speaking of peculiar obsessions, Emily Witt (who got her bachelor’s degree at Brown in 2003, majoring in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Art Semiotics) wrote an 800-word article for the New York Times with the headline, “In Praise of Sensible Panties,” which included sentences like these:

“Good design is as little design as possible” is one of the famed German industrial designer Dieter Rams’s Ten Principles for Good Design, and in the underwear from Swiss brands like Zimmerli and Hanro, as in a Braun appliance from the 1960s, Rams’s mandate for elegant minimalism finds fulfillment. . . . .
A country’s underwear preferences say a lot about its ideas of the erotic. . . .
Ultimately, what intrigued me about the underwear I saw in Germany had something to do with its directness — the way it resisted gendered ornamentation of the body.

You see? Even your underwear must be subjected to critical theory, if you’re an intellectual with degrees from three elite universities.

You really have to feel sorry for her Dad. Just imagine Mr. Witt’s conversations with his golf buddies.

“How’s your daughter?”
“Fluent in Portugese and resisting gendered ornamentation.”

This is why you should keep your kids as far away from the Ivy League as possible. Even if you could afford the tuition, you’ll still have to pay for a lifetime of therapy and Prozac.





 

Category: Feminism, Intellectuals, New York Times

Romans Had Slavery, So I Guess The Roman Alphabet Requires Replacement

Posted on | August 28, 2015 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

Via Instapundit, it sounds like some people at his university may be smoking mother nature:

University of Tennessee tells staff and students to stop using ‘he’ and ‘she’ – and switch to ‘xe’, ‘zir’ and ‘xyr’ instead

What’s blatantly obvious to even the most casual observer is that a certain “gay rights official at the university” needs to stop being such a conservative reactionary, like the author of this post.
A truly “new language regime” that “will make the university ‘welcoming and inclusive'” should scuttle the archaic alphabet that has “people feeling ‘marginalized'”. Why not replace it with alternating sequences of LOLcats, LOLdogs, and other equal vivacious creatures? Such an alphabet could be rotated weekly, and impossible to compose via traditional scribing instruments, to be more even-handed toward those who are not even handed.
This blog doubles down on its strident call for pushing technology and societal communications right off the cliff, in order to save both from the millennia of testosterone-driven oppression. Let us enable the logic-free future we deserve. Or, to quote Andrew Klavan:

Update: once again, trigger warnings start with the character set.

Category: Culture, Instapundit

In The Mailbox: 08.28.15

Posted on | August 28, 2015 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry
Louder With Crowder: Buzzfeed Caught Blatantly Lying While Trying To Defend Planned Parenthood
Proof Positive: Return With Us Now To Those Thrilling Days Of Yesteryear…
Michelle Malkin: What Is Obama’s Top Population Control Freak Hiding?
Twitchy: FBI “A-Team” Investigating Hillary For Possible Violation Of The Espionage Act
Shark Tank: Border Patrol Sued For Hitting Illegal Aliens’ Boat
According To Hoyt: Fauxtrage


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Ronda Rousey For Cinnamon Swirl French Toast Breakfast Sandwich From Carl’s Jr.
American Thinker: The Left Always Tells Us Who They Fear – Carly Fiorina
Conservatives4Palin: Gov. Palin – “Lamestream Media! Stay Out Of My Bible!”
Don Surber: Thank You, Jorge Ramos, For Pointing Out Why We Need A Closed Border
Jammie Wearing Fools: Insane David Brock Group Blames Koch Brothers For Flooding New Orleans After Katrina
Joe For America: Taking Back America And Europe – Anti-Islam Pushback Ratchets Up
JustOneMinute: Hillary Time
Pamela Geller: Canadian “Hate Speech” Proposal Threatens Free Speech
Protein Wisdom: Virginia Shooting – Time To Ban The Rainbow Flag
Shot In The Dark: Scope Creep
STUMP: Public Pensions Watch – California, There Ya Go
The Gateway Pundit: Donald Trump Can Absolutely Win The GOP Nomination, And Here’s How
The Jawa Report: Ann And Trump
The Lonely Conservative: Judge Blocks EPA Water Rule, EPA Imposes It Anyway
This Ain’t Hell: DNC Mistakes Polish Vets For American Vets
Weasel Zippers: When Will ABC Release The Whole Vester Flanagan Manifesto?
Megan McArdle: Micromanaging Cops? #blacklivesmatter Can Try
Mark Steyn: Anchor Baby, Slip A Passport Under The Tree For Me


Don’t forget! The deadline to submit links for inclusion in the FMJRA is tomorrow at noon, and the deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for Rule 5 Sunday is midnight tomorrow. Thanks in advance for your contributions!


The Desert and the Blade

Category: Linkagery
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