The Other McCain

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

Rape Is a Crime. Or Not.

Posted on | July 2, 2015 | 49 Comments

Zoe Ridolfi-Starr (@ZoeRidolfiStarr) is a liar and a feminist, but I repeat myself. A recent graduate of Columbia University (annual tuition $51,008), Ms. Ridolfi-Starr is an enthusiastic supporter of her classmate Emma Sulkowicz, whose false rape accusation against Paul Nungesser led to his filing a federal lawsuit against Columbia. Ms. Ridolfi-Starr bragged to the Columbia student paper of her accomplishments as the university’s “friendly neighborhood angry feminist”:

Organized to fight gender-based violence on campus, founder of No Red Tape. Helped create the Prison Resistance and Education Project and the Books Not Bars programs for incarcerated youth. Worked for reproductive justice on campus, got free emergency contraception provided at Health Services, and secured the creation of the Columbia Emergency Health Fund to subsidize, among other things, abortions.

What is “No Red Tape”? It’s about depriving male students of due process rights, so they can be expelled merely on the basis of an accusation, under the guise of “fighting sexual violence and rape culture at Columbia University.”

Ms. Ridolfi-Starr was the lead plaintiff in a federal complaint filed by 23 Columbia students against the university in April 2014:

The complaint alleges the Ivy League university discouraged students from reporting sexual assaults, allowed perpetrators to remain on campus, sanctioned inadequate disciplinary actions for perpetrators and discriminated against students based on their sexual orientation . . .
The students’ statement described the complaint in detail, but the group refused to release any copies, saying it wanted to protect those who do not want their names publicized. As a policy, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights does not release information to the public until after a formal investigation has been opened into a complaint.
“Columbia is more willing to silence and punish survivors and their supporters than serial rapists,” the students said in their statement. . . .
Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, a Columbia junior and lead complainant, told CNN on Friday that activists from universities across the country offered plenty of advice and support to the group, saying, “It’s absolutely a national issue.”
Ridolfi-Starr said she was sexually assaulted the summer after her freshman year at Columbia and said the primary goal of the complaint is to pressure the university to make reforms.

We are expected to take seriously the claim that brilliant young scholars at one of the most prestigious universities in the world — a school that admits fewer than 7% of those who apply — are brutal sex predators who perpetrate heinous assaults with such frequency that a “rape culture” prevails on the Columbia campus?

Excuse me if I take note of the distinct aroma of bovine excrement exuding from such claims. Sure, it’s possible that some of these National Merit Scholars and valedictorians are degenerate psychopaths. We must remember that the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, is a Harvard alumnus, so it is possible that some of these young brainiacs at Columbia are sunk into the depths of depravity. However, does anyone really believe that any significant number of rapists are to be found among bookish fellows whose parents pay more than $50,000 a year to send them to Columbia?

And while we’re at it, does anyone actually believe Zoe Ridolfi-Starr is a “sexual assault survivor”? If officials at Columbia University didn’t believe her, why should we? But we find this stated as a fact:

Colleges might soon be required to report cases of sexual assault to local law enforcement agencies.
Virginia, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey have all created preliminary versions of bills that will call for more collaboration between schools and police departments around the issue of campus rape. . . .
However, victims of sexual assault find the new proposal problematic. “If a survivor comes forward and says, ‘Hey I need help, I want to get this guy out of my classes,’ that’s very different from saying, ‘I want to involve myself in a lengthy arduous legal process,'” sexual assault survivor Zoe Ridolfi-Starr said.

Where is the documentation of this “sexual assault” of which Ms. Ridolfi-Starr is a “survivor”? She says she was assaulted, but what actually happened? Can we see the affidavits? While I don’t presume to know the truth of this matter, shouldn’t we be suspicious of people who claim to be victims of serious crimes, but don’t want police to investigate those alleged crimes? And how is it that Ms. Ridolfi-Starr has time to file a federal complaint against her university, but doesn’t have time for the “arduous legal process” of filing a police report about a sexual assault?

The stench of bovine excrement grows ever more noxious, when you realize that complaints like Ms. Ridolf-Starr’s are being employed as emotional leverage to pressure legislators into enacting laws that re-define rape on college campuses. Under the “affirmative consent” regime, every male college student who engages in heterosexual activity on campus is at risk of being expelled from school because if she says she was raped, the accused male will be required to prove that she consented. Exactly how does one prove such a thing? “Affirmative consent” policy shifts the burden of proof, requiring the male student to prove a negative (that it was not rape) and thereby effectively strips him of his due process rights, so if his ex-girlfriend gets mad at him — adios, amigo! Expelled. You’re guilty. You’re a rapist because she said so.

Oh, but don’t get the police involved. Ms. Ridolfi-Starr co-authored a column arguing against investigating rape as a crime:

As survivors of sexual violence and advocates for safe, just campuses, we know these efforts would harm students.
These proposals that effectively require survivors to engage with the criminal justice system fail to grasp the function of the campus system. Schools have a legal requirement under Title IX to protect all students’ ability to access education without fear of gender discrimination, including sexual and dating violence.
Campus processes are designed to focus on what student survivors need in order to continue their education, and are better equipped to help survivors address concrete and often urgent needs that can result from gender-based violence.

“Survivors,” “survivors,” “survivors” — they keep repeating this word as if by repetition they prove what they merely claim.

As for a student’s “ability to access education,” feminists are advocating for policies to deny such access to male students, to have males expelled from colleges on the basis of accusations for which the accuser is not required to offer any evidence whatsoever, in a process that denies the accused male student the legal protections accorded to any common criminal. Any male student who would have sex with a female student under such circumstances is probably too stupid to be among the 7% of applicants admitted to Columbia University.

These policies are about criminalizing sex, period.

Feminists like Zoe Ridolfi-Starr have become accustomed to getting away with dishonesty for so long that they never expect anyone to call them on their bullshit. But some people say Zoe Ridolfi-Starr lies about rape, and until she can prove she’s telling the truth, I’ll call her a liar.

Please sue me, you liar.

(Hat-tip: @DateOffCampus on Twitter.)





 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: Little Round Top & Cemetery Hill

Posted on | July 2, 2015 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Where’s Your Rainbow Filter?
Michelle Malkin: Fanning The Flames Of Another Black Church Arson Hoax
Twitchy: “Unrepentant Racist” George Takei Shredded After Referring To Clarence Thomas As “A Clown In Blackface”
Bill Whittle: Pin The Tale On The Donkey – Democrats’ Horrible Racist Past
Iced Earth: Gettysburg


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: No Truce With The Left
American Thinker: Obama Channels Reverend Wright
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – The Insider Threat By Brad Taylor
Conservatives4Palin: Corporate Welfare Takes A Blow
Don Surber: Killer Robots And Clickbait
Jammie Wearing Fools: Shocker – So-Called Anti-Gay Incident In Utah Was Staged
Joe For America: Donald Trump Won’t Back Down On Illegal Immigration
JustOneMinute: Beneficent Power Outside Government?
Pamela Geller: BBC Admits Pamela Geller Was Right All Along
Protein Wisdom: Oh, Look, Some Libertarians Are Having Second Thoughts About The Goals Of Gay Activists
Shot In The Dark: Doctors Orders
STUMP: Public Finance Disaster Watch – Greece And Puerto Rico Roundup
The Gateway Pundit: Worst Jobs President Ever – Labor Force Participation Rate At 38-Year Low
The Jawa Report: Obama Screws Over Freedom-Loving Kurds To Please Iran And ISIS-Loving Turks
This Ain’t Hell: Gun-Grabber Yee Pleads Guilty To Arms Smuggling
Weasel Zippers: Anti-Police Flag Burners Have To Beat A Hasty Retreat Before Patriots, Ask For Police Help
Megan McArdle: “Affirmative Consent” Will Make Rape Laws Worse
Mark Steyn: Stories About Something


The Glorious Burden/Special Edition

Category: Linkagery

What ‘Education’ Teaches

Posted on | July 1, 2015 | 118 Comments

My stance as a critic of public education began while I was in fifth grade at Lithia Springs (Ga.) Elementary School, but it was not until our eldest daughter spent a year in kindergarten that I realized that the system is inimical to liberty. Your local public schools are destroying America, and are ultimately a greater threat to our nation’s survival than ISIS.

The first lesson of school is, your parents are idiots.

See, this is why we need school: If parents were smart enough to teach their own children how to read and write, there would be no need for this massive government bureaucracy to provide education to our youth. Silly parents! How dare you think yourselves competent to educate your own child! Education is only possible when conducted by a government-trained expert and provided in a government-controlled classroom under the direction of government-certified bureaucrats.

The second lesson of school is, your parents are wrong.

This was not really a problem so much when I was in school four or five decades ago, when our parents and our teachers shared similar or identical religious, moral and political beliefs. Adult authority in that time and place spoke in a single voice that was patriotic, Christian and dedicated to basic values like hard work and honesty.

One might discern, in the values of my parents’ generation — raised in small towns or on farms, survivors of the Great Depression and victors of World War II — a sort of philosophical fusion between Stoicism and Calvinism. Children were expected to learn how to endure hard times and disappointment without complaint. Our parents despised the “spoiled” child who was weak, prone to self-pity and whining, because he had not been properly disciplined. Our teachers all came from similar backgrounds and shared these basic beliefs, and thus were not disposed to indulge misbehavior or to grade us leniently. Corporal punishment was the norm, and the unruly student did not dare question the authority of the teacher to administer such punishment.

The moral consensus of the American Century — a set of values shared by parents and school officials — has since evaporated, and has been replaced by multiculturalism and other “progressive” ideas, which are based on the assumption (ubiquitous in the modern education profession) that parents are all ignorant bigots, so that the duty of the school is to enlighten children with sophisticated beliefs.

Because parents are stupid (unqualified to teach their children anything) and wrong (deficient in sophisticated values), the school’s core purpose — the fundamental mission of the system — is to undermine parental authority and destroy the basis of respect between parent and child.

Once you understand this about modern education, a lot of phenomena that are otherwise inexplicable begin to make sense. For example, why is it that we have gone from a system where public education began with first grade to a system in which schools now have kindergarten and pre-K programs? Once upon a time — and not ancient history, but when I was in school — the government education bureaucracy didn’t begin “educating” children until they were 6 years old. Now, the government takes control of children at age 4, and yet there has been no discernible scholastic benefit from this expansion of bureaucratic authority. Second-graders today are certainly no more competent at spelling and arithmetic than were second-graders in 1966, despite the fact that today’s second-grader is typically in his fourth year of public education.

Gotta get ’em early, you see?

The process of undermining parental authority must begin as soon as children are potty-trained, for how else shall they learn the complete omnipotence of government, to which everything is owed and to which nothing can be denied? Your parents are incompetent idiots whose values are wrong — the sooner the child learns this, the better.

Schools nowadays are very bad at teaching facts, but very good at teaching attitudes, especially those attitudes the enable and empower the continual expansion of government power. An uncritical reverence toward certain intellectual abstractions — “Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!” — is drummed into the child’s head in lesson after lesson. One often encounters college-educated young people whose minds are full of hopeless confusion, so that when attempting to engage them in political discussion, we find they spew forth a mishmash of phrases cobbled together from the preamble to Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the poetry of Emma Lazarus, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Pledge of Allegiance and perhaps a few lines from various patriotic songs. To this jumbled mass of phrases, the young fool is ferociously devoted with what can only be described as a religious zealotry. A single four-word phrase from the preamble to the Constitution — “a more perfect Union” — seems to have been deliberately misrepesented to these young fools. No one has taught them that the Framers were merely describing their purpose to replace the imperfect Union (between the states) as governed by the wartime improvisation of the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they have been taught that this phrase is a sort of mystical commandment to future generations, who must continual strive to make a heaven-on-earth perfection of the government. Well, then, what sort of “perfection” do you suppose they had in mind?

“Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!”

When you are dealing with college-educated fools who seemingly cannot even comprehend plain English (e.g., “Congress shall make no law”) you frequently find that they have smuggled into the debate certain premises that they have never had any reason to examine objectively. A negative view of the past — a place full of slavery, greed, war, sexism and other oppressions — is so pervasive in modern education that the young fool can’t seem to understand why, in his enthusiasm for Democracy, he is embracing ideas that predate the birth of Christ by at least three centuries. Being devoted to this ancient idea with a nostalgic reverence, how then does he justify his enthusiasm for Progress? And how is it, we may ask the young fools, that despite all the Democracy and Progress of the past century, the United States is in some respects now farther from actual Equality than it was when Lyndon Johnson was president?

Our schools do not teach facts about history, political science and economics, but rather teach attitudes about these things. The attitudes they teach are the attitudes approved by the Board of Education, whose members owe their offices to contributions and endorsements from the teachers unions, which in turn are a key constituency of the Democrat Party. In most school districts, at least 75% of the teachers and administrators are Democrats, and in the colleges of education, quite nearly 100% of the professors are Democrats. Could anyone therefore be the least bit surprise that in 2012, Obama won 60% of voters under 30?

“Democracy!” “Equality!” “Progress!”

This rant was inspired by a couple of encounters on Twitter today, first with a conference of feminist educators sponsored by the Gender and Education Association:

Promoting feminist scholarship and practice in gender and education internationally, nationally and locally
Providing an influential feminist voice
Promoting and problematising knowledge on gender and education
Encouraging teaching, learning, research and publication on gender and education
Providing a source of expertise and knowledge for policy makers
Creating networks to facilitate the exchange of information between our members.

In other words, these radical ideologues seek to implement an agenda based on feminist gender theory — the “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — in the grade-school classroom. You get the drift.

After I’d riffed on that a while, I got a phone call from my brother Kirby and, in the course of our conversation, he brought up the Atlanta public school cheating scandal, which put a number of professional “educators” in prison.

For years, I have advocated maximum feasible non-cooperation with the government education system. Get your kids out of public schools, always vote against any referendum for new taxes to fund the system, and never vote for any school board candidate who is endorsed by the teacher’s union. Furthermore, under no circumstance should any honest, intelligent person support the system by working for the system. Better to be working as a convenience store clerk than to assist this corrupt system as a teacher, librarian, or other employee.

The myth of the Good School and the Good Teacher are essential to public support of this system. If honest, intelligent people refuse to work in the system — so that the only people employed as public school teachers are as stupid and corrupt as the criminals who operate the Atlanta public schools —  then the system will collapse under the weight of its own failures. Larry Elder once pointed out an important fact:

One study found that in Philadelphia a staggering 44 percent of public school teachers send their own kids to private schools. In Cincinnati and Chicago, 41 and 39 percent of public school teachers, respectively, pay for a private school education for their children. In Rochester, New York, it’s 38 percent. In Baltimore it’s 35 percent, San Francisco is 34 percent and New York-Northeastern New Jersey is 33 percent.

Public school teachers recognize how wretched the system is, and yet continue to work in the system. Why? Because the public schools pay teachers enough that they can afford private school tuition, because teachers are paid more than the taxpayers who actually fund the school system that employs the teachers!

Anyway, after I went off on a Twitter tirade about the wretched taxpayer-funded catastrophe of public education, one of my followers criticized me for “painting with a rather broad brush.” Well, yes — I’m an extremist in this regard. I don’t want to hear any proposals to reform public schools. I want to hear proposals to abolish public schools.

Shut them down.

Fire all the employees, sell all the buildings, buses, books and other equipment at auction to the highest bidder. Use the proceeds of this asset liquidation to create a tax-exempt public trust that will subsidize low-income parents to send their children to the private school of their choice. Relieved of the burden of funding a government school system, counties and municipalities could enact drastic tax cuts that would unleash economic growth so that the middle classes could afford private education without any subsidy. All children would be privately educated because, once the abolition of public schools becomes a matter of policy, states will pass constitutional amendments forbidding governments from providing, regulating or otherwise interfering with education.

Damn the government school system — a foul and unholy thing! Consign it to the fiery pit of Hell, from whence it emerged!

Remember, I’ve been thinking about this since the fifth grade.

 

Category: Education

In The Mailbox: 07.01.15

Posted on | July 1, 2015 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Ted Cruz And The Supreme Court
Proof Positive: 800-Pound Reagan Statue
Doug Powers: MSM Awakenings – Hey, Maybe Problems Like Greece Have Something To Do With Spending Money They Don’t Have
Twitchy: Photographer Who Posted Recreation Of Iconic Iwo Jima Photo With A Pride Flag “Didn’t Expect The Backlash”


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: The Next Culture War
American Thinker: SCOTUS Ignites New Level Of Resistance
Conservatives4Palin: So What If Greece Leaves The European Union?
Don Surber: Another Faked Hate Crime
Jammie Wearing Fools: Arab Allies Looking Anywhere But To America For Friendship
Joe For America: Hillary Caught Lying Again – Can We Arrest Her Yet?
JustOneMinute: United They Stand
Pamela Geller: Forty Imams Deported From France For Hate Speech
Protein Wisdom: A Follow-Up Re Intentionalism, Textualism, And Originalism
Shot In The Dark: Fighting Residual Anomalous Racism With Acute Personal Racism
STUMP: Digging Into The Near Past – Greece’s Pension Situation
The Gateway Pundit: ISIS Publishes Map Of July 4th FBI Command Centers
The Jawa Report: ISIS Snuff Film (No Really)
This Ain’t Hell: VA Tells Vet “We’re Not Taking New Patients”
Weasel Zippers: CNN Poll Shows Zero Support For Obama’s Gun Control Plans After Charleston
Megan McArdle: Tallying Right-Wing Terror Vs. Jihad
Mark Steyn: Violent Extremistan Versus The Dar Al Gay


The Complete Avengers 50th Anniversary Edition

Category: Linkagery

Reminder: Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | July 1, 2015 | 37 Comments

Tyrelle Shaw.

How many times do I have to explain this? You let enough kooks run around loose — as has been the policy in this country since we de-institutionalized the mentally ill in the 1970s — and people adjust their expectations. People become accustomed to encountering weirdos, freaks and lunatics, jabbering madness to themselves on street corners or posting deranged nonsense on Tumblr blogs. You’re not even supposed to notice there is anything strange about these wild-eyed nutjobs roaming around with facial piercings, tattoos and purple hair. I’ve been denounced as an “ableist” for pointing out that a Tumblr feminist is mentally ill, even though her “about” page listed a long litany of psychiatric diagnoses and her writing was self-evidently crazy.

Well, you can’t call them “crazy” anymore, because then you’re stigmatizing the mentally ill, and stigma is bad. Probably not as bad as getting bashed in the face with a hammer, however.

How a Life That Showed Promise Veered
Into Violence Against Asian Women
The last message to family and friends from Tyrelle D. Shaw, an artist and bow-tie designer who called himself “Mr. Talented,” arrived at 1:38 p.m. on June 16.
“Surprisingly, I saw my afterlife!” he wrote on Facebook. “If I’m correct- I should be reincarnated into a Rat. Guess what? Your life after death already exist. It’s just waiting for you to die. I know! I know! People call me weird, but I’m actually Brilliant.”
The distressing note, in which Mr. Shaw said he planned to take his own life, signified the beginning of the end of a vicious crime spree that had terrified an entire community in New York. It also represented the climax of what the Police Department’s chief of detectives would later describe as “one of the strangest stories” he had encountered in some time.
Over the previous six days, a man had attacked at least four women in Manhattan, smashing them in the face with a heavy object wrapped in a plastic bag. The common thread in the seemingly random attacks: All of the victims were of Asian descent.
The attacks and the resulting manhunt for Mr. Shaw, identified through a surveillance video, spread fear in Chinatown and other Asian enclaves across the city.
In one of the episodes, the police said, the man complained to his victim that Asian women would not talk to him. But could such a thing really explain the assaults?
What happened next would also shock: Mr. Shaw said on his blog that he planned to place his neck in a noose tied to an elevator at the bottom of a shaft. The next person who pushed a button to send the elevator up would, he wrote, “murder me without even knowing it.”
Days later, his body was found. It was a sad, violent end to a short, promising life. On his blog, he had admitted to the attacks and had blamed being rejected by Asian women for committing them. He had tried to talk to nearly 1,500 in less than 350 days, he wrote, and none had said hello: “I just couldn’t understand why Asian Women didn’t find me attractive.”
A friend recalled Mr. Shaw saying he had been found to have bipolar disorder, but could not afford the medicine to treat it. Mental health records obtained by The New York Times from 2013, when he was in jail on Rikers Island, did not show him reporting any manic symptoms, only a history of depression.

Notice the sob-sister feature treatment about the “sad” death of this young man with such a “promising life.” If only he had posed with a Confederate flag . . . Well, that would be a different story. Meanwhile, in the real world, where the New York Times is mournfully reporting the death of this violent maniac, we learn why Tyrelle Shaw was jailed at Rikers Island. You see, he “did stupid things, like stealing a leather jacket valued at almost $1,500 from Bloomingdale’s, or stealing four pairs of sunglasses from the BCBG Max Azria store on Madison Avenue.” To liberal journalists, these are just “stupid things,” not actual crime:

He also lied. Two years ago, Mr. Shaw told a friend he was moving back home to Toronto. But he spent much of the period from June 2013 to June 2014 on Rikers Island after being convicted of stealing the sunglasses, as well as an iPad from a hair salon and an iPhone from the front seat of an ambulance.
He was arrested again in December, this time for trespassing, after he was found in a storage room in a building at 696 Madison Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He spent only a day in jail.
Those who knew him said he had changed. Nia Langley, who met Mr. Shaw through social media, said he was “very giving, very open, very artistic,” that is, at least until the beginning of this year. She said he started posting “weird stuff” online — about being rejected by women, about how he felt as a black man, about how he thought Asians were racist.

The parallels to Dylann Roof seem obvious enough here, and the feminist blog Jezebel sees another relevant comparison:

Mental illness doesn’t explain the violence of the attacks Shaw is suspected of committing. Neither does a feeling of entitlement to women’s bodies, and a frustration when they didn’t respond the way he wanted. But like Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and injured 14 others during a shooting rampage he blamed on women rejecting him sexually, there’s a toxic mess here of untreated mental illness, growing rage and misogyny. In Shaw’s case, that was seemingly compounded by a life of poverty and a grandiose self-image that he seemingly came to realize was disconnected to the way the world actually viewed him.

Slinging this kind of gender-theory jargon about male “entitlement” and “misogyny” is how feminists prove they’re smarter than the rest of us. This particular writer, Anna Merlan, got her B.A. from UC-Santa Cruz and a master’s from Columbia University, which qualifies her to . . . write for a feminist blog. Elite credentials for such menial drudgery, and Ms. Merlan fails to notice a striking aspect that connects Rodger and Shaw — ethnic fetishism. Rodger was half-English, half-Malaysian with a fixation on blondes, whereas Shaw was black and had a fixation on Asians. Can we deduce anything from this? Is there a “moral to the story,” some kind of sociological pattern here? I don’t know, and it might be unwise to generalize from these two examples because Elliot Rodger and Tyrelle Shaw had something else in common: THEY WERE CRAZY!

Wacko, bonkers, zany, cracked, demented, disturbed, off their rockers, nuttier than squirrel farts and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

And what do I keep telling you about crazy people?

There are more than 300 million people in the United States. What percent of them are dangerously crazy? If it’s just 1%, that means there are 3 million potential mass murderers out there. And we can’t lock them all up, because the mentally ill have rights, including the right to vote.

How do you think Obama got elected, anyway?

Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.

 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 06.30.15

Posted on | June 30, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Go Home, Hillary, You’re Drunk
Doug Powers: Good Luck – Obama Advising Greece On How To Stave Off Financial Ruin
Twitchy: Media Accused Of Ignoring Black Church Fires After Obsessing Over Single CVS Arson; NAACP Speaks Up
Jack Kingston: The Sad Truth About King v. Burwell


OVER THE TRANSOM
American Power: Jeb Bush Calls Confederate Flag A “Racist” Symbol
American Thinker: Obergefell v. Hodges And Tax Exemption For Churches
BLACKFIVE: July 4th
Conservatives4Palin: Gov. Palin – Building America’s Future
Don Surber: Gay Marriage No Longer Helps Proponents
Jammie Wearing Fools: Gay Marriage Supporters Handle SCOTUS Decision With Class And Dignity
Joe For America: Medical Marijuana Isn’t Medicinal
JustOneMinute: Say It Ain’t So
Pamela Geller: Jihad In New Jersey – Muslim Arrested For ISIS Plot, Brothers Named Co-Conspirators
Protein Wisdom: No, Intentionalism Didn’t Kill The Rule Of Law
Shot In The Dark: I Love A Happy Ending
STUMP: Things Fall Apart – Greece And Puerto Rico
The Gateway Pundit: FAKE HATE – Black Activist Admits Hanging Confederate Flag From Black Soldier Memorial
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Hillary Is Oppressed
This Ain’t Hell: Pilot Says F-35 Can’t Dogfight
Weasel Zippers: Amazon – No Confederate Flags, But Hezbollah Onesies, Hamas Flags, And Even Taliban Action Figures Are Acceptable
Megan McArdle: The Moral Of The Greek Story
Mark Steyn: That Flagging Feeling


End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun)
Exceptional Americans: 50 People You Need To Know

Category: Linkagery

The Feminist Martyrdom Complex: Climbing Up on the Digital Cross

Posted on | June 30, 2015 | 35 Comments

 

Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) is a bisexual Marxist with a history of severe mental illness, but other than that, I can’t imagine why her writing would be controversial or attract angry criticism. On the other hand, being a Marxist weirdo also gained the young British blogger a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University (the Ivy League having become a place where heterosexual capitalists are unwelcome). Finding that her 2014 book Unspeakable Things approvingly quotes love advice from Soviet commissar Alexandra Kollontai, I remarked:

Anyone who cares to read Unspeakable Things . . . will discover that Laurie Penny is as wholehearted an evangelist for sexual perversion as she is a wholehearted enemy of democratic capitalism.

This is not to say that Ms. Penny lacks talent. Indeed, she is a clever, articulate and persuasive advocate of pure evil. In this, she is much like Jean-Paul Marat or Leon Trotsky — remarkably intelligent, possessed of impressive talent as writers and capable of penetrating insight and yet, unfortunately, fanatical devoteés of dangerous and antisocial ideas. Trotsky was no doubt hard at work thinking up some new plan to advance the worldwide proletarian revolution right up to the instant Ramón Mercader‘s ice-ax slammed into his skull.

One of the wonders of democratic capitalism is how it gives its worst enemies weapons with which to attack democratic capitalism. The wealth that provided Ms. Penny’s education (her parents are successful lawyers who sent her to posh schools) was created by the economic system she desires to destroy, and her weapon is the high-tech system of computer-assisted communication whose development was funded by the white, male capitalists she so ostentatiously despises. This petulant and selfish brat was raised in affluence and grows richer every day as she is paid handsomely to spew her degenerate sentiments onto the Internet, collecting royalties from (and generating profit for) her publisher.

Having made a success of this ironically lucrative racket, and admired by the kind of fools who typically admire such monsters, Ms. Penny nevertheless has a persistent problem: People who don’t like her also have access to the Internet, and employ this technology to tell her what a deplorably bad person she is. Well . . . how dare they?

You come to expect it, as a woman writer, particularly if you’re political. You come to expect the vitriol, the insults, the death threats. After a while, the emails and tweets and comments containing graphic fantasies of how and where and with what kitchen implements certain pseudonymous people would like to rape you cease to be shocking, and become merely a daily or weekly annoyance, something to phone your girlfriends about, seeking safety in hollow laughter.
An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation and abuse. . . .
In my experience . . . the charges of stupidity, hypocrisy, Stalinism and poor personal hygiene which are a sure sign that any left-wing columnist is at least upsetting the right people, come spiced with a large and debilitating helping of violent misogyny. . . .
If we want to build a truly fair and vibrant community of political debate and social exchange, online and offline, it’s not enough to ignore harassment of women, LGBT people or people of colour who dare to have opinions. Free speech means being free to use technology and participate in public life without fear of abuse — and if the only people who can do so are white, straight men, the internet is not as free as we’d like to believe.

Ms. Penny’s 2011 column at The Independent is a typical feminist gesture: “They hate me because I’m a woman! Misogyny! Harassment!”

How much did The Independent pay her for that column?

Think about this. Ms. Penny was only 25 years old at the time and yet, because of her privileged background and elite education (Wadham College, Oxford) had managed to get herself hired as a political opinion columnist at an influential publication. Is anyone surprised that her impudent know-it-all tantrums provoke outrage? And is it surprising that, when readers become (quite understandably) irritated by lectures from this arrogant whelp, they respond by targeting her with what we might call ad feminem slurs and threats?

Like so many other feminists, Ms. Penny would have her readers believe that only feminist writers are subjected to online abuse, and that only “white, straight men” perpetrate it. Let anyone inquire with Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin, Katie Pavlich, Dana Loesch or Ann Coulter if they wish to learn what sort of hateful misogyny the Left directs against conservative women. Nor, for that matter, are women the only ones who must endure such abuse. Go ask Rick Santorum, Herman Cain or Marco Rubio what kind of harassment, threats and smears they have been forced to endure. Indeed, you could ask Jeff Goldstein what it was like to be harassed by the dangerously deranged Deb Frisch.

The Left celebrates cruel, selfish cowards like Laurie Penny, who gain fame and wealth by denouncing the success of honest, decent people. She is a typical totalitarian, dishonest and sadistic, her politics inspired by a malign appetite for the power to make other people shut up.

All because she is so “lonely . . . ugly and unloveable,” you see.

Having secured herself a platform from which she can promote bad ideas — and get paid for doing it — Ms. Penny then got paid for writing a column in which she demanded action to silence those who criticize or disagree with her. And she wonders why people consider her a Stalinist.

Leon Trotsky could not be reached for comment.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Curb Your (Sexual) Enthusiasm

Posted on | June 29, 2015 | 84 Comments

In case you haven’t noticed, feminists are (a) trying to increase the number of rape accusations by (b) changing the concept of “consent” in such a way that (c) any unhappiness with a sexual encounter justifies a woman claiming that it was coerced or otherwise less than fully consensual, as part of (d) an obvious effort to make heterosexual activity less common, if not altogether illegal.

People think I’m joking or exaggerating when I refer to “Feminists Against Heterosexuality,” but it is becoming difficult to ignore how the anti-male ideology of feminist gender theory is reflected in “rape culture” discourse. Consider what one web site calls “101 stuff about consent”:

  • Sexual consent is an active ongoing process that involves free, non-coerced choice and shared responsibility about when, whether, and what to do sex-wise.
  • Consent has to be clear, explicit, communicated well and checked in on a lot.
  • Enthusiastic consent is mandatory before engaging in anything of even a mildly sexual nature.

Have these lunatics consulted any sane adults about how normal sex actually happens in the real world? Or do you see how, because “feminist gender theory . . . requires the de-normalization of everything,” this insistence on “active” and “explicit” consent is part of an agenda that seeks to inspire impressionable young people with a paranoid hostility toward normal sexual behavior? Note well that enthusiastic consent must be obtained before even “mildly sexual” activity and it is “mandatory” that there be an “explicit” negotiation process toward a sort of verbal contract as part of this “active ongoing process.” Yet any normal person who has ever had normal sex knows quite well that if two people are genuinely “enthusiastic,” no such negotiation is necessary. It is an insult to the intelligence of any sexually experienced adult to pretend that this is how sex normally happens, and it is disturbing to think that young people are being lectured in this manner.

Do young people no longer have desires, instincts, urges? Have words like “passion” and “seduction” and “romance” lost all meaning? Does anyone expect hormone-addled teenagers parking in the moonlight on Lovers Lane to conduct their adolescent trysts like diplomats negotiating a trade agreement? Is there no longer any expectation or hope for spontaneous magic in human sexual behavior? What kind of dingbats are giving kids this wretched advice about sex?

QueerTips
The best queer sex ed class you were never offered.
Run by the kickbutt people of Planned Parenthood of the Southern Finger Lakes’ Out For Health initiative.

This is a Planned Parenthood initiative in upstate New York, with offices in Tompkins County, Chemung County, Schuyler County and Steuben County — an area in and around Ithaca, site of Cornell University. Is anyone surprised to find this perverse “Queer Tips” nonsense being promoted in the vicinity of an Ivy League campus?

In the 21st century, where elite universities are hives of LGBT activism, we would be shocked to learn that any student at Cornell was interested in normal sex. Cornell students are highly intelligent, and only an extremely stupid student would attempt to engage in normal sex on an elite campus in the current climate of “rape culture” hysteria. A heterosexual male can expect to be expelled from Cornell if a partner claims rape two months after their drunken hookup, on the basis of an administrative tribunal in which he is deliberately deprived of the due-process rights that the Constitution guarantees any common criminal.

Ah, but he is not a common criminal! He is a heterosexual male on a university campus, where heterosexuality is seen as inherently oppressive to women, and males are denounced as oppressors. And where, of course, Feminism Is Queer as I explained:

[T]his is not “fringe” feminism or “extreme” feminism. This is simply what feminism means for university students in the 21st century. Feminism is Queer is a 2010 textbook whose author, Mimi Marinucci, is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Washington University.

If anyone wishes to argue that I’ve dredged up an example of feminism that is not “mainstream,” let them make their arguments to the legislators and other officials who sanction the propagation of this ideology in America’s universities. Let the defenders of “mainstream” feminism examine the syllabi, textbooks and faculties of Women’s Studies programs and see what students are actually being taught and by whom.

If anyone is skeptical about this agenda, let them turn their attention to “Introduction to Feminist Theory” as taught at the University of Buffalo, where a student was overheard to exclaim: “Every time I walk out of this class I just become more sexually confused!”

You cannot blame teenage college students for this kind of confusion, when they are being bombarded with with radical ideology. Sexual confusion is everywhere, so that Planned Parenthood — a taxpayer-funded organization most people think of as a provider of contraceptives — now offers “QueerTips” on how to negotiate “enthusiastic” consent before doing “anything of even a mildly sexual nature.” Evidently people in upstate New York are so stupid they don’t even know how to fornicate without advice from these self-appointed “experts.”

What is being lost is the voice of common sense. Feminist ideologues, gay activists, legal authorities, education bureaucrats, academic theories — these are the people controlling the discourse about sexual behavior, and all of them in one way or another have their own personal and political axes to grind. The voices of normal people happily leading normal lives, and who hope their children can also grow up to find this kind of normal happiness, are silenced and marginalized because common sense is dismissed or derogated by the cultural intelligentsia. Remarking on the effect to enact the “yes means yes” or “affirmative consent” standard as legislation, Judith Shulevitz of the New York Times observes that “criminal law is a very powerful instrument for reshaping sexual mores”:

It’s one thing to teach college students to talk frankly about sex and not to have it without demonstrable pre-coital assent. . . . It’s another thing to make sex a crime under conditions of poor communication. . . .
“If there’s no social consensus about what the lines are,” says Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and a retired judge, then affirmative consent “has no business being in the criminal law.”

What neither Shulevitz nor Gertner nor any of the other intellectual critics of “affirmative consent” are willing to acknowledge that it seems specifically targeted at punishing heterosexual males. The feminist purpose, we can perceive, is to make the risk of a rape accusation so high that men will become afraid of sexual involvement with women under any circumstances. Already on most campuses, any male who expresses sexual interest in a woman is subject to the accusation of “harassment.” Should he actually attempt to initiate romantic activity — a kiss or a hug — this can be construed as “sexual assault” if the woman finds his advances “unwelcome” or “unwanted.” Yet even if she welcomes his interest and appears to be a willing participant in sexual activity, the man is still at risk that she will afterwards decide she was raped. Paul Nungesser’s lawsuit against Columbia University argues quite plausibly that Emma Sulkowicz was in love with Nungesser and that she falsely accused him of rape as an act of spiteful revenge because he was not interested in a romantic relationship with her.

Many young women are now full of such insane rage against males — really, you need to read my Feminist Tumblr series — that it is difficult to imagine why any boy smart enough to get into college would dare so much as speak to any of his female classmates, much less try to have sex with one of them. This climate of sexual fear and hostility has been deliberately incited by campus feminists to enhance their own power and influence, as well as to create a political issue that can be exploited by Democrats. One would have to be absurdly naïve to think it a coincidence that “rape culture” emerged as a topic of controversy at the same time Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign began gearing up for 2016.

Love is dead. Feminists killed it.

Having made it impossible that men and women could ever love each other — for how can the helpless victim of male supremacy be expected to love her oppressor? — feminists are now determined that sex should also be eradicated. Nevertheless, even while the feminist crusade to abolish collegiate heterosexuality reaches a fever pitch, students are being told it is “mandatory” to negotiate “enthusiastic consent.”

Somewhere at a university this fall, a boy and a girl will step outside a crowded frat house party and embrace beneath the autumn moonlight. She will nod her assent to his suggestion that they should pursue the matter further. Then the young man will look into her eyes and say, “Well, we could go back to my place. However, before we do, the university’s affirmative consent policy requires me to tell you exactly what I’m going to do to that hot little body of yours . . .”

That should make for an interesting conversation. Who knows? They might fall in love. It’s not illegal yet. Not even at Cornell.





 

Category: Sex Trouble
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