The Other McCain

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

Congratulations, ‘Dishonest Fascists’ — #GamerGate Destroys Max Read

Posted on | July 21, 2015 | 78 Comments

“Never underestimate your enemy,” is a maxim of military strategy. Before you decide to go to war on the Internet, first consider the fate of Max Read, who was riding high as editor of Gawker until he decided that insulting #GamerGate was a smart move. He chose poorly.

Custer at Little Bighorn, the French at Dien Bien Phu — military history offers many parallels to Max Read’s fateful miscalculation, but perhaps the best would be Gen. John Sedgwick. On May 9, 1864, Sedgwick was directing the placement of Union artillery near Spotsylvania, Virginia. Annoyed that his men were ducking to avoid fire from Confederate sharpshooters a thousand yards away, he said: “Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” A moment later, Sedgwick was killed by a bullet from one of the Confederates whose marksmanship he had disparaged. Hubris, meet nemesis.

The resignation Monday of Max Read as editor-in-chief of Gawker, along with his executive editor Tommy Craggs, will not likely be interpreted by major media as a vindication of #GamerGate, because most of the media share the same shallow prejudice that led Read to declare his disdain for #GamerGate as “a small, contemptible crusade . . . of dedicated anti-feminist internet trolls.” Well, he who laughs last, et cetera:

Tommy Craggs, the executive editor of Gawker Media, and Max Read, the editor-in-chief of Gawker.com, are resigning from the company. In letters sent today, Craggs and Read informed staff members that the managing partnership’s vote to remove a controversial post about the CFO of Condé Nast — a unprecedented act endorsed by zero editorial employees — represented an indefensible breach of the notoriously strong firewall between Gawker’s business interests and the independence of its editorial staff. Under those conditions, Craggs and Read wrote, they could not possibly guarantee Gawker’s editorial integrity.

So, in departing from the Web site he helped destroy — because Gawker’s foolish war against #GamerGate has cost them more than a million dollars in ad revenue — Max Read inflicts still more damage, by declaring that there is no longer any “editorial integrity” at Gawker. Because “editorial integrity,” apparently, means smearing private citizens at the behest of extortionists. Or, to quote the Headline of the Year:

Gawker Staff Smears Feces On Itself, Boards a
Schoolbus Loaded With Gasoline and Napalm, Then
Intentionally Drives That Schoolbus Into a Cargo Train
Transporting Toxic Waste and Retarded Clowns

The weird thing about this is that Max Read and other Gawker staffers seem to have no clue what led to their fateful error:

What Craggs and Read fail to accept is that this is not an editorial board with a scoop of monumental importance who are being shut down by some squeamish money managers because the story rubs certain powerful interests the wrong way.  They are defending a gutter trash post that would never have been written, much less put up, if the site had any integrity of any kind, editorial or otherwise, and if they actually did care about the writing staff and their fellow editors as they claim, they wouldn’t want to put the future of the entire company at risk by leaving it up there to be Exhibit B in Hogan’s lawsuit.

Yes, Gawker is being sued by pro wrestling legend Hulk Hogan and if they had a lick of sense (which they obviously don’t) they would not have published a shabby story that made them look recklessly irresponsible.

“Exhibit B,” indeed.

“This most recent scandal . . . is not an anomaly. It’s exactly what you get when you mix bad leadership, bad incentives, and selfish, self-loathing people. . . .
“It is essentially a twelve-year spree of destruction, pain and waste. . . .
“No wonder Gawker crosses the line. They have no idea where it is.”
— Ryan Holiday, New York Observer

It is not as if Gawker publisher Nick Denton had no prior notice that Max Read is a hubristic fool. Consider how Read reacted when they lost a major advertiser in October 2014:

On October 1, the computing giant Intel pulled its ads from Gamasutra, a trade website for game developers, over an essay called “‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over” by a journalist named Leigh Alexander. . . .
Intel surrendered to the worst kind of dishonesty, and we allowed it to do so without ever calling it out. So let’s say it now: Intel is run by craven idiots. It employs pusillanimous morons. It lacks integrity. It folded to misogynists and bigots who objected to a woman who had done nothing more than write a piece claiming a place in the world of video games. And even when confronted with its own thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, it could not properly right its wrongs.

Really, Max? Did you not stop to think of the psychological projection involved in accusing Intel of “thoughtlessness and irresponsibility”?

It was you, Max, who supported Sam Biddle when he celebrated the “bullying” of gamers and declared “nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission.” Yeah, Max, I’m sure you and your buddies at Gawker laughed it up at that little joke, while you were congratulating yourselves on your “editorial integrity.” And as for those “misogynists and bigots” you contemptuously dismissed?

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

You see how #GamerGate became nemesis for Gawker. This was assymetrical warfare. Whereas liberals are used to attacking people whose instinct is to flinch and apologize when accused of ThoughtCrime — sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. — gamers are like Homey D. Clown: Homey don’t play that, see? They take pride in their disdain for political correctness because, in the world where they work and play, nobody gives a damn about anything but the fun of winning:

In its arrogance, the media thinks its usual tactics of smear and shame will work on gamers as it has on so many other people, but gamers are a completely different breed. They’re technologically adept, incredibly persistent, and professionally trained trash talkers. They have little to lose and consider this a fight for their home.
In a battle of insults and patience, gamers will win every time.

When a friend, Beth Haper, first alerted me to the cultural significance of #GamerGate, I was skeptical. Really? A bunch of gamers were going to expose the bias and corruption of the media? This seemed improbable, but the fact that #GamerGate was arrayed against feminists drew my interest because, of course, I was working on a book (Sex Trouble, $11.69 in paperback, $1.99 on Kindle) about radical feminism’s War on Human Nature. Let us stipulate that #GamerGate is not “political” in the usual Left/Right Democrat/Republican way that Americans typically think about politics. Nevertheless, as fate would have it, the exposure of the Zoe Quinn/Nathan Grayson connection made gamers aware how unscrupulous women could exploit feminist politics and how unprincipled journalists were willing to assist this tawdry little racket. (See “The #GamerGate vs. Gawker War.”)

In war, your allies are whoever is fighting your enemies, and the motives of your allies matter far less than their skill in battle. Say what you will about #GamerGate, they are skilled and determined fighters.

Operation Disrespectful Nod is making believers of anyone who ever made the mistake of underestimating them. Just ask Max Read.

General Sedgwick could not be reached for comment.





 

Category: Media Bias

In The Mailbox, 07.20.15

Posted on | July 20, 2015 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Thuggish Transgender Gals
Michelle Malkin: Jihad On U.S. Troops Is Not A “Circumstance”
Twitchy: Q: Is White House Reconsidering Funding Of Planned Parenthood? A: (Has One Syllable)
Conservative Review: House GOP Promotes Muslim Brotherhood’s Whitewashing Of Islamic Terror


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: O’Malley, Sanders Booed Off The Stage At Netroots Nation
American Thinker: Feds Get The Power To Seize Medical Records On “Fishing Expedition” With No Subpoena From Judge
Conservatives4Palin: Gov. Palin – Real Healthcare Reform Vs. Obamacare
Don Surber: Dekanawida And The Iroquois Confederacy
Jammie Wearing Fools: In Case You Were Wondering, Laughingstock Lunatic Rachel Dolezal Still Identifying As Black
Joe For America: Marine Warns ISIS In America: “Beware – That Soccer Mom Pushing A Stroller Has A Glock And Will Leave You In A Pool Of Blood”
JustOneMinute: Go, Carly!
Pamela Geller: In Ohio, Another Muslim Indicted On Charges Of Supporting The Islamic State
Protein Wisdom: This Is The Brave New World Where Gender Is Fluid And Relationships Are A La Carte
Shot In The Dark: Forfeit
STUMP: Milwaukee County Pensions – Scott Walker, Pension Obligation Bonds, And An Actuarial Booboo
The Gateway Pundit: Pentagon Tells Recruiters “No Guns” Allowed At Recruiting Stations, “Close The Blinds” For Protection
The Jawa Report: Black Man Who Supported Confederate Flag Killed By #BlackLivesMatter
The Lonely Conservative: Now Hillary Clinton Isn’t Even Letting Supporters Speak To The Press
This Ain’t Hell: Americans Stepping Up For Recruiters
Weasel Zippers: Liberal Media Bias Is A Myth Alert – CNN Mentions Of Confederate Flag, 493; CNN Mentions Of Planned Parenthood Baby Body Part Trafficking, 7
Megan McArdle: Friday Food Post – Five Gadgets You Don’t Want
Mark Steyn: The Superbowl Of Superholes


Anniversary Sale: The Last Falangist Now Only 99 Cents

Category: Linkagery

Is the ‘Male Feminist’ Cuckold a Hoax?

Posted on | July 20, 2015 | 141 Comments

Of course, somebody called my attention to the New York Magazine story by “Michael Sonmore” (obviously a pseudonym) who uses feminist arguments to rationalize his wife’s adultery in their “open marriage.” I commented briefly on Twitter but wanted to ignore the story because (a) yuck, and (b) I suspect the story is a hoax. Like Rolling Stone‘s UVA rape hoax, “Michael Sonmore” tells a narrative that is too perfect in its exposition of feminist themes. For example, “Sonmore” describes himself as “an economically dependent househusband coping with the withering drudgery of child-rearing.” Really? Here is a guy in his 30s who is quite obviously well-educated, yet he is “economically dependent”? Times are hard, maybe, but surely they’re not that hard. Maybe a guy with a liberal arts degree can’t find work in whatever field he considers his specialty, but he can still work, right? Well, “Sonmore” tells us, he chose this dependency: “I quit working to stay at home with the kids,” which he describes as his “total withdrawal from the economy and the traditional sources of masculine identity.” See? Too perfect.

If a story seems too good to be true, it’s probably not true, and I suspect “Sonmore” is a hoax designed to elicit reaction — particularly, sexist reactions from men — which will then be cited as proof of what misogynistic pigs men really are. And here’s your big clue that the editors are pulling our collective leg:

She didn’t present it as an issue of feminism to me, but after much soul-searching about why the idea of my wife having sex with other men bothered me I came to a few conclusions: Monogamy meant I controlled her sexual expression, and, not to get all women’s-studies major about it, patriarchal oppression essentially boils down to a man’s fear that a woman with sexual agency is a woman he can’t control. We aren’t afraid of their intellect or their spirit or their ability to bear children. We are afraid that when it comes time for sex, they won’t choose us. This petty fear has led us as a culture to place judgments on the entire spectrum of female sexual expression: If a woman likes sex, she’s a whore and a slut; if she only likes sex with her husband or boyfriend, she’s boring and lame; if she doesn’t like sex at all, she’s frigid and unfeeling. Every option is a trap.

OK, that’s the point at which I called “bullshit” on this story. Whose “sexual agency” is “controlled” by monogamy? Both partners are equally obligated to fidelity in marriage, but to suggest that this is “patriarchal oppression” driven by “a man’s fear” of “a woman he can’t control” is a psychological projection, a reversal of reality.

It is the male’s (relatively) greater sexual independence — a natural fact of biology — that has been the underlying source of feminist resentment for more than four decades. Anyone who believes otherwise is deluded, and so we must ask, could there actually be a “Michael Sonmore,” a man so thoroughly brainwashed by feminist theory that he can’t see through this ideological falsehood?

It’s possible, perhaps. But this recitation of feminist jargon — “patriarchal oppression” and all that — is simply too perfect.

Ace of Spades calls our attention to the implicit racial context of this story. The wife is hooking up with “Paolo”? Too perfect.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike:

Never underestimate feminists’ infinite capacity for deception. Feminism is like a gigantic Ziggurat of Hatred built entirely of lies.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

Feminism: Gender Competition and the War Against Human Nature

Posted on | July 19, 2015 | 32 Comments

Freedom, prosperity and happiness require people to develop and encourage an attitude that can be described in five words:

Voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit

This is the secret of capitalism, the secret of democracy, and it also the secret to a successful career and family life. Selfish, envious people — those who view life as a zero-sum game, where one person’s gain is always another person’s loss — are the very worst people in the world. And speaking of feminists . . .

Every week, we are subjected to stroppy Gawker posts and soporific op-eds in national newspapers about how a woman in the technology industry who was fired for poor performance was secretly a high-achieving go-getter brought down by entrenched sexism and patriarchal oppression.
And every week we’re told that the reason more women aren’t working in technology is a combination of sexism, outdated social attitudes and stereotypes, historical prejudices and too few educational support programmes for women.
We’re told that women find it more difficult to get jobs and that when they do get jobs they’re subjected to hostile workplaces, sexism and bullying and that they’re paid less than their male counterparts for the same work.
We’re invited to believe, contrary to the evidence all around us, that the highly-progressive, socially-conscious and liberal-minded technology industry is in fact one of the most retrograde and oppressive places for women to work.
But here’s the dirty secret about the shrill and insatiable “women in tech” movement: none of that is true.

Read the whole thing by Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart.com. Feminism is simply organized selfishness — unhappy women using political ideology to rationalize their own failures and resentments. Presenting men and women as hostile groups engaged in a competition — gender warfare — provides unhappy women with an all-purpose scapegoat for their disappointments: “Smash patriarchy!”

Of all the many excellent points Milo makes, it’s hard to single out a favorite, but this one is crucially important:

7. Identifying As A ‘Woman In Tech’ Is The Kiss Of Death For Your Career
That’s not because employers don’t believe women should have equal access, but because it tells them certain things about your personality. Namely, that you’re likely to be trouble. They worry, with some justification, about bogus sexual harassment claims, which are rampant.
If there’s a problem in the tech workplace it might be that women can bring frivolous gender discrimination lawsuits against their old firms, costing companies in some cases over $100,000 in lawyers’ fees to dismiss, at little or no cost to the woman, who was fired for perfectly acceptable reasons.

The phenomenon of “go-away money” — where any woman who makes a discrimination or harassment claim is handed a year’s salary as payment to leave and avoid the costs of litigation — is a well-known racket, and it is typically not the productive, efficient, team-player type of woman who makes such claims. So if an employer has reason to believe a female applicant is “likely to be trouble,” as Milo says, she won’t get hired. The private sector doesn’t give a damn about “social justice,” they just want profit, and they don’t want to spend money defending against a lawsuit filed by some disgruntled idiot with a Women’s Studies degree.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Sunday: Insert Clever Title Here

Posted on | July 19, 2015 | 8 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Feeling kinda fried this Sunday afternoon after overdoing it last night at the buffet. Usual reader advice applies.

Just phoning it in this week.

Loose Endz kicks off this week’s Rule 5 roundup with Comic Con Cosplay Goodness, followed by Goodstuff who invites us to explore heavenly bodies with Stephanie Arias. Also, Marilyn Monroe! Randy’s Roundtable checks in with Nichole Meyer, Ninety Miles from Tyranny serves up the trifecta of Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls with Guns, while Animal Magnetism has Rule Five Noncompliance Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon. At First Street Journal, the burning question of the week is “Are All Finns Blonde?”

EBL’s herd this week includes College Party Time Rule 5, Gandhi’s Women, A Hillary Cocktail, and Ariana Kelly.

A View from the Beach offers Murder in the First Women, “Sweet Child Of Mine” – 4 Violins, Another Time, Another Beach, Maryland Moron du Jour, Fluke Populations Floundering, “Who’s Zooming Who?”, Tuesday Morning Rise and Shine, “Gentle on My Mind”, Camping Idea, and Sigh! Cave Girls Not Really Cave Girls – would cavegirls surprise you? (They would!)

At Soylent Siberia, it’s your weekly coffee creamer, Monday Motivationer enjoying the woods, Tuesday Titillation Reflections, Humpday Hawt Solo Spassfabrik Dessert, Leonard’s Lunchtime Lesbians, Rainy Day Repast, Falconsword Fursday In Focus, Danke, Corset Friday, Never Got the Reacharound, T-GIF Friday Wave Propagation Harmonics, Weekender Awesome, and Bath Night: Got Snooch?

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Abigail Ratchford; his Vintage Babe is Suzanne Pleshette, and Sex in Advertising this week is covered by Guess. At Dustbury, we have Deborah Mailman and Anastasia Perraki.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s Rule 5 post is midnight on Saturday, July 25.


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Category: Rule 5

‘Rape Culture’ or ‘Libel Culture’? Lawyers for Rolling Stone Blame the Victim

Posted on | July 19, 2015 | 45 Comments

 

Rolling Stone‘s bogus gang rape story, which falsely accused a University of Virginia fraternity of a crime that never happened, led UVA associate dean Nicole Eramo to sue the magazine for $7.5 million. Eramo said the story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely “portrayed [Eramo] as callous and indifferent to allegations of sexual assault on campus and made her the university’s ‘chief villain’ in a now-debunked article.”

The central problem of Rolling Stone‘s story was that it relied on the unverified claims of a UVA student identified as “Jackie” who, upon closer scrutiny, was revealed to be mentally unstable. “Jackie” had perpetrated a “catfishing” scheme, inventing a fake boyfriend she called “Haven Monahan,” in a misguided effort to attract the romantic interest of a male friend by making him jealous. To her friends, Jackie identified this fictional character, “Haven Monahan,” as the instigator of her gang-rape; she told a different version of the story to Erdely, who failed to interview Jackie’s friends; Jackie refused to cooperate with police investigating her claims; and police obtained evidence indicating there was no party at the fraternity house on the night in question, contradicting the story Jackie told Rolling Stone.

 

The startling recklessness of Erdely and her editors at Rolling Stone was the subject of a devastating critique by the Columbia Journalism Review, and it seemed Nicole Eramo’s defamation lawsuit would be a slam-dunk. However, in a motion to dismiss Eramo’s lawsuit, attorneys for Rolling Stone now place the blame on UVA officials who vouched for the veracity of Jackie’s gang-rape claims:

On Thursday, Rolling Stone magazine responded in court to a $7.5 million lawsuit filed by University of Virginia associate dean Nicole Eramo over a now-retracted article titled “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA.” For perhaps the first time, there’s a suggestion that the University may have contributed to the faulty story. …
The plaintiff claims she was cast the “chief villain” of the story, doing nothing to help the victim and presiding over an academic institution that was “indifferent to rape on campus, and more concerned with protecting its reputation than with assisting victims of sexual assault.” . . .
Perhaps most interesting — and a sign of how Rolling Stone will defend itself going forward — is the letter that the publication sent to Eramo’s lawyers in February. This confidential letter has never been made public, but Eramo’s lawsuit briefly referenced it. And so, Rolling Stone decides to detail how it first responded to Eramo “because Plaintiff has chosen to describe such communications in her Complaint, despite their inadmissibility.”
The letter . . . makes the case that Rolling Stone had “good reason” to focus on the University of Virginia because it is “one of only 12 schools selected for a compliance review by the Department of Education’s Office” and “has been the scene of well-known sexual and other violent assaults.” . . .
The letter rejects the premise “that because Jackie’s account of her gang rape is somehow flawed or false, all references concerning Dean Eramo or UVA are likewise false.”
But maybe most provocative is the letter’s discussion of a woman named Emily Renda. . . .

“Ms. Erdely did not stumble on Jackie’s story. She was directed to Jackie by Emily Renda, then working closely with Dean Eramo in the Student Affairs office — the same Emily Renda that included Jackie’s account of being ‘gang-raped’ in her Congressional testimony about campus sexual-assault policies. There is no question that both the author and Rolling Stone had full faith in Jackie’s credibility and the accuracy of its Article at the time of publication. In no small measure, Rolling Stone believed in the credibility of Jackie’s story because it came with the imprimatur of UVA, and of Dean Eramo specifically.”

The boldface is in the letter. The publication is essentially arguing that Eramo vouched for the credibility of its main source. And this is potentially important because the letter states “at bottom, any libel inquiry turns on what Rolling Stone knew and believed at the time of publication” and a footnote in the letter also says that Eramo is “unquestionably a public figure.”

You can read the whole story at the Hollywood Reporter.

This is dynamite, my friends. What Rolling Stone is saying is that officials at UVA — specifically including Emily Renda — were responsible for the “flawed or false” story that Jackie told Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Renda had included an account of Jackie’s claim (identifying her as “Jenna”) in Renda’s June 2014 testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee:

One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience . . . These statements haunted Jenna. She told me that they made her feel crazy, and made her question whether her own understanding of the rape was legitimate. . . .
Survivors who receive disaffirming responses to initial disclosures are more likely to experience negative mental health consequences as well. These negative and victim-blaming responses from her peers reinforced Jenna’s sense of fault, and prevented her from coming forward to the University’s administration or the Police. When she finally sought assistance from the Dean of Students’ office, after struggling and nearly failing out of her classes for two semesters, it was difficult for the university to conduct a meaningful investigation because much of the evidence had been lost, and witnesses were more difficult to locate.

Reading that testimony very carefully, we see that “Jenna”/Jackie first contacted university authorities because she was on the verge of flunking out of school. However, subsequent reports have indicated, the reason there was no official investigation of Jackie’s rape claim was that she herself refused to cooperate with an investigation, either by the university or by city police. Given what we know about Jackie’s “Haven Monahan” deception — a lie she told her friends — the common-sense conclusion is that Jackie didn’t want police involved because she feared that she would be exposed as a liar, and that she might be charged with making a false police report. It seems Jackie shrewdly took advantage of the system, exploiting her fictional gang-rape claim to get “support” when her academic failure put her at risk of expulsion.

Jackie told UVA officials a story about how “victim-blaming responses” discouraged her from reporting her claims of gang-rape and, when Renda testified to a Senate committee about this, Renda misrepresented why “it was difficult . . . to conduct a meaningful investigation.” It was “difficult” because (a) Jackie was lying, and (b) Jackie didn’t want an investigation that she knew would prove she was lying. As to the alleged “negative mental health consequences” Renda cited, Jackie’s friends “made her feel crazy” because Jackie was crazy and is crazy, and if UVA officials had urged Jackie to seek psychiatric treatment, I’d bet $20 that any competent shrink would have diagnosed Jackie with borderline personality disorder. Jackie appears to be a textbook BPD case, and the question is why Emily Renda, who was a student activist rather than a psychiatric specialist or an experienced criminal investigator, should have been entrusted with the authority to (a) decide Jackie was telling the truth, (b) present the Jackie/”Jenna” story to a Senate committee, and (c) then act as liaison between Jackie and a Rolling Stone reporter.

It would appear that Emily Renda conspired with Jackie to convince Sabrina Rubin Erdely that Jackie’s story was true and, needing an official scapegoat to blame for UVA’s alleged failure to investigate this gang-rape, they blamed Nicole Eramo. Now, attempting to exculpate themselves for falsely demonizing Eramo, Rolling Stone points the finger at Emily Renda, saying that because Renda was “working closely with Dean Eramo in the Student Affairs office . . . the credibility of Jackie’s story . . . came with the imprimatur of UVA.” In other words, Rolling Stone blames the victim (Eramo) for the wrongdoing of Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s dishonest sources, Jackie and Emily Renda.

Whether or not Rolling Stone succeeds in getting Nicole Eramo’s suit dismissed, we see how their lawyers are pointing the finger of blame at the system of “support” for sexual-assault victims over which Eramo presided as a UVA dean. The irony, of course, is that this system was established as a result of federal laws, and Obama administration policies, which had targeted UVA for investigation because the university had allegedly failed to properly investigate sexual assaults on campus. What happened when UVA was presented with Jackie’s false accusation shows how the feminist “campus rape epidemic” witch hunt puts university officials into a Catch-22 dilemma. Who do we blame for this?

Left to right: Sabrina Rubin Erdley, Emily Renda, Catherine Lhamon

Catherine Lhamon, Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been identified (by independent journalist Richard Bradley, among others) as heavily implicated in Rolling Stone‘s UVA rape hoax. Erdely quoted Lhamon calling UVA Dean of Students Allen Groves “irresponsible.” Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller reported how closely Lhamon and Renda are connected:

[Lhamon] has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.
Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.”
Lhamon has been invited to the White House nearly 60 times, according to visitor’s logs. Renda has been invited six times. Both were invited to the same White House meeting on three occasions. One, held on Feb. 21, 2014, was conducted by Lynn Rosenthal, then the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women. Twenty-one people, mostly activists, were invited to that meeting. Lhamon and Renda were invited to two other larger gatherings [in 2014] — one on April 29 and the other on Sept. 19. . . .
Renda and Lhamon also testified at a June 26, 2014, Senate hearing on campus sexual assault.. . .
Groves wrote that he was “one of the professionals vilified by name” in Erdely’s article.
He claimed that Erdely completely mischaracterized remarks he made at a Sept. 2014 meeting with university trustees about sexual assault and that Lhamon disparaged him with comments she made to Erdely. . . .

As I wrote in April:

Lhamon, Renda and Erdely are part of a coven of liars who have conspired to fabricate a crime that never happened in order to justify this ongoing “rape epidemic” hysteria. This dishonest campaign of purposeful falsehood is being orchestrated directly from the White House as part of a systematic effort to create regulations that deprive college students of their due-process rights.

This is the real bottom line: Under pressure from feminists, the Obama administration has promoted policies that put male students at risk of false accusations, which are adjudicated in campus tribunals where the accused have none of the basic civil rights accorded to any common criminal in a court of law. Simply by setting foot on a university campus, under new policies imposed by federal authorites, a male student forfeits his due-process rights. He may be branded a rapist on the mere say-so of his accuser, and subject to immediate disciplinary action — including expulsion — without a police investigation, without a right to have a lawyer present during question, and without ever having an opportunity to confront his accuser in court.

Rolling Stone was complicit in this White House-orchestrated scheme to deny the constitutional rights of male students. The false narrative that Erdely told required a villain, and Nicole Eramo was blamed.

“Haven Monahan” could not be reached for comment.




 

Category: Uncategorized

FMJRA 2.0: Balls To The Wall

Posted on | July 18, 2015 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Are We Hiring Someone So Challenged As To Require A “Business Suit Onesie”?
First Street Journal

FMJRA 2.0: Wait, What?
BlurBrain
The Pirate’s Cove

Jay Laze Gets a Lesson in Rhetoric (Or, How NOT to Debate a Feminist)
Regular Right Guy
Living In Anglo-America

Rule 5 Sunday: The Persistence of the Bunny
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach

In The Mailbox: 07.13.15
Proof Positive

Communist Professor’s Daughter Is a ‘Lesbian Feminist Witch’ on Tumblr
Regular Right Guy

What Feminism Is
Regular Right Guy
Living In Anglo-America
Maggie’s Farm

The Gruesome Ghouls of ‘Choice’
H2O Positivo
Regular Right Guy

In The Mailbox, 07.15.15
Regular Right Guy
Proof Positive

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez: Islamic Terrorist Kills 4 Marines in Tennessee
The Daley Gator
Regular Right Guy

In The Mailbox, 07.16.15
Regular Right Guy

In The Mailbox: 07.17.15
Proof Positive

Daily Pundit Is Just Insufficiently Cynical Regarding Donald Trump
Regular Right Guy
Rotten Chestnuts

Top linker this week:

  1.  Regular Right Guy (8)

We’re still missing a bunch of pingbacks from people we’re used to seeing in the standings. To make sure you get credit, please e-mail your links to me before noon (Pacific time) on Saturday, July 25, since WordPress is being arbitrary in its hate lately.


Category: FMJRA Award

The #GamerGate vs. Gawker War

Posted on | July 18, 2015 | 88 Comments

Gawker’s irresponsibly cruel “outing” of a Conde Nast executive — a laughable farce, and yet also an exercise in horrendous sadism — prompted Vox Day to remind his readers of #GamerGate’s “anti-Gawker action, Operation Disrespectful Nod, which has already cost Gawker more than $1 million in advertising dollars.” This would appear to be the kind of activity that the #StopRush mob used against Rush Limbaugh and I am therefore ambivalent. Is turnabout fair play? Do we degrade ourselves by using the Left’s tactics against the Left? Or, if we refuse to fight fire with fire, are we engaged in a self-defeating unilateral disarmament? Knowing what damage the Left so gleefully inflicts on its chosen targets (because I have been such a target), I hesitate to condemn retaliatory counter-offenses, but I also have qualms about advocating such measures, however necessary they may sometimes be.

Guerrilla warfare tends to bring out the worst in people, but when the gamers found themselves in the cross-hairs of the Social Justice Warriors, did anyone expect them to just roll over for the likes of Anita Sarkeesian? Oh, hell, no. “War to the knife and knife to the hilt” — the targets of cultural aggression vowed to destroy the aggressors.

So, why did #GamerGate go to war against Gawker? It’s a long and complicated story, but a major focus of #GamerGate rage has been the Gawker-owned game journalism site Kotaku:

If anyone from Gawker or Kotaku had bothered to interview someone like Sargon of Akkad, Christina Hoff Sommers, Mundane Matt, Ashton Liu, Adam Baldwin, LeoPirate, Allison Prime, Jennifer Medina, Daddy Warpig or any of the moderators from Kotaku in Action, it would have been made abundantly clear that it wasn’t that Kotaku avoided talking about journalism ethics, it’s that Kotaku avoided doing anything about their failure at upholding even the most basic of ethics principles in the world of video game journalism.

This involves a controversy at the heart of #GamerGate, the affair between “Depression Quest” developer Zoe Quinn and Nathan Grayson, who wrote for (Gawker-owned) Rock Paper Shotgun before joining Kotaku. You can read more about this scandal at “A People’s History of GamerGate,” but the essence of it is this: Quinn was accused of gaining favorable coverage of her work — which is allegedly useless and awful — by providing Grayson and others access to her nasty poontang. And when these allegations of quid pro quo were published by one of Quinn’s embittered ex-lovers, Quinn’s defenders accused her critics of misogyny.

Let us stipulate that two things can be simultaneously true:

  1. The field of game development attracts a lot of Alpha Nerd males who may have bad attitudes about women;
    and
  2. Zoe Quinn is an opportunistic hustler who realized she could use sex as bait to garner lucrative advantages, including “free” publicity from unprincipled journalists who would accept graft in the form of occasional access to her nasty poontang.

Both of these things could be true, but because of the leftward bias in media, Misogynist Alpha Nerds is an important story, whereas in contrast, Zoe Quinn’s (Alleged) Opportunistic Poontang Hustle is something that no bien-pensant can acknowledge.

While I know nearly nothing about the videogame industry, I’ve spent the past two decades covering politics and therefore know a lot about corruption and opportunistic hustlers. And I also know that there are journalists whose stock in trade is not their skill as writers, but rather their slavish loyalty to the Democrat Party and the Politics of Social Justice. Many writers of limited ability have learned that they can attract unmerited praise — indeed, as in the notorious case of Stalin’s journalistic henchman Walter Duranty, they can win Pulitzer Prizes — if they are willing to tell lies that benefit the Left.

Speaking of writers of limited ability, Adam Weinstein got fired by Gawker last month and offered these comments in a blog post about the tawdry mess made by Gawker’s gay “outing” story:

Relatedly, none of this vindicates any of the psychotic, hateful, performatively sanctimonious self-marketing of Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yianawhatever, “gamergaters,” and the bevy of cold, craven, retrograde pre-fab apartment-dwelling souls who are waging an inane jihad against Gawker Media, feminism, and cultural justice. They are wrong. They are twisted. They are abusive. And I could give three hot farts about their crocodile tears for David Geithner and his family. What pisses me off the most about this lapse in editorial judgment is that it’s (again) enabled this barely coherent rabble of internet bullies to signal boost their dumb assertions about Gawker en masse, and to get them taken seriously for a dumb nanosecond. Gawker is not that bad, and those critics are not that smart.

This gratuitous smear of Dr. Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos and #GamerGate — “psychotic, hateful . . . retrograde pre-fab apartment-dwelling souls . . . barely coherent rabble of internet bullies” — tells us more about Adam Weinstein than it tells us about his enemies, and it may also tell us a lot about the underlying problem at Gawker. Whether or not publisher Nick Denton is a leftist ideologue, he has apparently employed leftist ideologues who in turn have made Gawker into a hive of leftist ideology. Like so many other modern media enterprises, Gawker is like one of those Stalin-era “progressive” organizations that, having failed to exclude Communist Party members, were taken over by Communist Party members. By the time Ronald Reagan realized that Communists were trying to take over Hollywood unions, Reagan himself had already unwittingly joined two Communist “front” organizations.

As anyone who has studied the Cold War knows, the Communists relentlessly smeared their enemies. Character assassination was elevated into an art and science by Soviet propagandists, and Reagan himself was among the many enemies of Communism who learned what vicious methods the Left employs against those who tell the truth about the Left. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not cure the Left of its habitual dishonesty, and hired liars like Adam Weinstein continue to practice the deceptive arts that were pioneered by the Bolsheviks and their stooges many decades ago. You may think it is unfair to compare 21st-century leftists to Comintern agents and their “progressive” dupes of the 1930s and ’40s, but to whom is it unfair? At least Walter Duranty could imagine that the socialist utopia was a viable possibility, whereas the Left in the post-Cold War era can have no excuse for their dishonest promotion of “social justice” delusions. They are not leading us toward a Progressive Proletarian Future, because they know that no such secular Heaven on Earth can ever exist. Rather than Building a Better Tomorrow, the Left is now inspired by nothing but abject nihilism, destroying society because they hate society and, also, because they enjoy destruction.

I would call Adam Weinstein a terrible human being, but that would not be accurate. He is an inhuman being, an amoral monster who delights in perverse cruelty against honest people. Firing him was one of the few good things Gawker has ever done, but I suspect that the editors who fired Adam Weinstein are actually worse than he is. He is like Trotsky, an evil man who was assassinated by an agent of the evil he helped create.

Ramon Mercader could not be reached for comment.





 

Category: Journalism, Media Bias
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