The Other McCain

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

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

University Student Raped, Police Say; Another Crime Feminists Will Ignore

Posted on | August 28, 2015 | 15 Comments

Rape suspect Sakhone Phianemanh.

The new school year has barely begun and there are already reports of sexual assault on campus. A 20-year-old Chico State University student said she was abducted while walking home from a party:

An Olivehurst man who allegedly drugged and raped a college student who became separated from her friends after a Chico party faces 30 years to life in prison.
Sakhone Phienemanh, 28, pleaded not guilty Tuesday in Yuba County Superior Court to four felony counts for two separate acts of sexual assault, including rape and oral copulation by force and of a person too intoxicated to consent.
Judge Julia Scrogin set bail at $500,000 and issued a criminal protective order for the suspect to stay out of Chico and to not contact the woman.
A second suspect remained at large and a multi-agency investigation is underway.
On Saturday, a 20-year-old Chico State University student told deputies she did not consent to getting into a vehicle and traveling to Olivehurst, and she was forced into sexual acts after refusing to participate, according to a declaration for probable cause for arrest filed with the court.
She had become separated from her friends on Friday night after they all left a party to get something to eat, Yuba County Undersheriff Jerry Read said. She remembered being very drunk and recalled some details of fading in and out of consciousness as two men sexually assaulted her in an abandoned home. Deputy District Attorney Shiloh Sorbello said there is evidence that the suspects forced her to ingest cocaine while she was in their control.
She told suspects several times she wanted to leave and eventually fled the house and found a nearby civilian between Second and Third avenues around 6:30 a.m., at which point she called 9-1-1.

Have any feminist bloggers commented on this crime? No, because this is not the kind of rape feminists care about. Sakhone Phienemanh is not himself a university student. He is not white, he is not “privileged,” and his arrest therefore does not merit attention from feminists, because Sakhone Phienemanh does not symbolize the “phallocentric social order” of “male power” that feminist theory identifies as “rape culture.”

Feminist ideology requires that privileged white males be punished for their privilege, which is why a non-existent “campus rape epidemic” has been manufactured by activists, politicians and media. Female students are being encouraged to accuse male students of sexual assault, and university administrators are under pressure to expel male students after disciplinary hearings where the accused student is denied the due-process rights that any ordinary criminal could have in a court trial.

Using federal law (Title IX) as a weapon against male students, campus activists are indoctrinating female students to believe that they are victims of rape if they have any sexual encounter they later regret. This “regret equals rape” formula was exposed in a lawsuit against Washington and Lee University:

Judge Norman K. Moon denied W&L’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing John Doe — as he is referred to in the claim — to continue to seek damages resulting from his expulsion from the university. John believes he was wrongly accused of sexual misconduct, and Moon appears to agree.
On Feb. 8, 2014, John and his eventual accuser, Jane Doe, met at an off-campus party. The two danced, talked and kissed.
The two eventually went back to John’s residence and talked for awhile. Jane then walked over to John and allegedly told him, “I usually don’t have sex with someone I meet on the first night, but you are a really interesting guy.” Jane then began kissing John and the two had sex.
The next morning, John drove Jane home and the two exchanged cellphone numbers. Shortly after the encounter, the two became friends on Facebook. The two exchanged friendly messages.
During the summer of 2014, Jane worked at a women’s clinic that handled sexual assault issues. After speaking to people there about her encounter with John, she began reclassifying the encounter as sexual assault.
When she returned to campus in the fall, Jane claimed on a study abroad application that she had been sexually assaulted. She also attended a presentation by W&L’s Title IX officer Lauren Kozak. Kozak claimed that “regret equals rape,” and introduced the concept as a new idea people were now supporting.
Once Jane learned that John had been accepted into the study abroad program, she filed a sexual assault claim, now eight months after the encounter.

What seemed to be an ordinary hook-up in February was thus reinterpreted as rape in October, and John Doe discovered that male students have no rights on the 21st-century campus:

Kozak conducted the investigation. John alleges in his lawsuit that he was given six hours notice to meet with the investigators but was not told why. When John met with Kozak and learned of the allegations against him, he was not shown a copy of Jane’s complaint.
John was denied legal representation, and when he tried to postpone a meeting with Kozak, she allegedly told him: “That’s fine. We’ll just submit the investigation report without your side of the story.”
With this, John was forced to give his side of the story and provide Kozak with a list of potential witnesses. Only two of the four names given were interviewed because, as Kozak would later tell him, she had enough facts.

Even though multiple witnesses contradicted Jane Doe’s account of events, John Doe was expelled from the university, and his lawsuit alleges that he was a victim of illegal gender bias.

A similar dynamic of regret-equals-rape was apparent in another John Doe case, this one involving students at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Two students engaged in consensual sexual activity in February 2014, but the female student later felt “personal regret for engaging in sexual activity beyond her boundaries,” according to a ruling by Judge Joel Pressman. This led to the typical Title IX process, in which the accused male student was the victim of “fundamental unfairness,” Judge Pressman ruled, because of an inaccurate investigation report presented at a disciplinary hearing where the accused student was prohibited from challenging the the contents of the report. When the student subsequently appealed his suspension, UCSD officials retaliated by increasing the length of his suspension. Mark Hathaway, an attorney for the student, issued a statement after Judge Pressman ruled against UCSD in July:

“It’s encouraging to see courts recognizing that sexual misconduct complaints on campus cannot be resolved at the expense of Constitutional rights and fundamental fairness. . . . Colleges and universities must treat all students fairly, regardless of gender. All too often the male student is just presumed responsible and given no access to any campus resources. Hopefully Judge Pressman’s ruling will help correct the imbalance.”

Feminists deride any concern for “fundamental fairness” to male students facing such accusations, claiming that false accusations are rare and that most rapists go unpunished. Basing their logic on the “1-in-5” statistic — survey data suggesting 19% of female college students are victims of sexual assault — feminists promote the belief that male students are routinely getting away with rape. Therefore, according to the logic of this feminist argument, whatever the risk that any particular male student could be falsely accused, this is outweighed by the risk that a guilty student will never be accused because his victim is intimidated by a “rape culture” that feminists claim protects “male power” on campus. An increase in the number of rape accusations thus becomes a goal unto itself in a feminist crusade which seeks to ensure that an accusation alone is sufficient to guarantee the expulsion of the accused male student.

This is why feminists ignore cases like the reported abduction and rape of the Chico State student. Random criminals can prey on college girls without lending credence to the feminist claims of a “campus rape epidemic,” which is exclusively concerned with punishing male students for engaging in heterosexual activity. Feminists never accuse gay students of “rape culture,” nor can any female student ever be punished for her sexual activity. The punitive force of Title IX is aimed entirely at heterosexual males, who are treated as a suspect class whose mere presence in the university environment poses a menace to women.

 

By fomenting anti-male paranoia — Fear and Loathing of the Penis! — feminists inspire college girls to resent any expression of sexual interest from their male classmates. Lectures about sexual assault are now mandatory in freshman orientation, and students are also warned against “harassment,” a category of offense so broadly defined that any male student could be at risk of an accusation if he so much as speaks to a female on campus. A pervasive climate of hostility and suspicion between the sexes seems to be the goal of feminist activism on the 21st-century campus, where policies increasingly convey the message that men are unwelcome intruders in the higher education system. Males are already a minority (43%) of U.S. undergraduate enrollment, but this number is apparently still too high to satisfy feminists who are certain that college boys, protected by “male privilege,” routinely perpetrate sexual assault on campus and go unpunished for their crimes.

This punitive attitude toward male students, who are presumed guilty as soon as they are accused, explains why the campus rape cases that make headlines are so often doubtful in nature. In June, Radley Balko asked the obvious question, “Why do high-profile campus rape stories keep falling apart?” Citing several of the most prominent cases — including the rape hoax that Rolling Stone perpetrated at the University of Virginia — Balko wrote:

Each time a new high-profile story falls apart, a larger portion of the public becomes less likely to believe the next one. . . . The anti-campus rape activists often claim that false accusations of sexual assault are practically nonexistent. . . . But that so many of the accusations that they themselves have chosen as emblems of the cause have been proved false or debatable suggests that they’re either wrong about the frequency of false accusations or that the movement itself has had some extraordinarily bad luck.

It is not bad luck that explains this, however, but rather the feminist insistence that accusation should always result in punishment. Activists keep highlighting cases like Emma Sulkowicz’s (the Columbia University student whose protests earned her the derisive nickname “Mattress Girl”) because these were cases in which the accusation did not lead to punishment. Exploiting sympathy for rape victims, and claiming that female students are re-victimized when their accusations are not believed, feminists seized on the Sulkowicz case as proof that “male privilege” protects rapists at elite schools like Columbia. However, when the accused student, Paul Nungesser, made his case in a lawsuit against the university, it was obvious why Nungesser had not been punished. There was exculpatory evidence, in the form of Sulkowicz’s online communications with Nungesser, supporting his claim that Sulkowicz was “a woman scorned” who accused him of rape in an act of revenge for his failing to reciprocate her desire for a continuing romantic relationship. Of course, it is ultimately impossible to know for a fact what transpired privately between Nungesser and Sulkowicz on the night of August 27, 2012, but there was certainly not enough evidence to judge him guilty of rape, and the argument presented in his lawsuit convinced many people that Sulkowicz was simply a vindictive liar.

Feminists continued to celebrate Sulkowicz as a victim even after Nungesser filed his lawsuit, however, because this is practically a religious requirement for the feminist faith: Always believe the victim, no matter how much evidence may indicate she is not a victim at all. In the feminist ideological scheme, all women (collectively) are victims of injustice and oppression for which all men (collectively) share blame. When feminists are pursuing “social justice,” no man is ever completely innocent, and yet some men are more guilty than others. Because abolishing “male power” is feminism’s revolutionary goal, destroying the reputation and career prospects of an Ivy League university student like Paul Nungesser is obvously more important than prosecuting a two-bit street hoodlum who rapes a college girl.

Feminists ignore stories about rape when the perpetrators are common criminals, no matter how horrific their crimes against women may be, because the purpose of feminist rhetoric about rape is not to increase women’s safety, but rather to attack the prestige of successful men. Rape accusations against male students at elite universities serve that feminist purpose in a way that the prosecution of a common criminal does not. Some rape victims therefore don’t really matter to feminists, which is why you have probably never heard of Monika Korra.

In December 2009, Korra was a 20-year-old sophomore at Southern Methodist University. A native of Norway and a member of the SMU women’s cross-country team, Korra attended a party hosted by the school’s soccer team. She and three friends were walking to their car about 1:30 a.m. when three men in an SUV abducted Korra at gunpoint. “Before I knew it, I just had someone grabbing me from behind and I had a gun to my head,” Korra said in an interview with WFAA-TV. “They raped me one at a time, two at a time, three at a time.”

Korra was stripped naked, blindfolded with duct tape and, after being brutally assaulted for more than a hour, was dumped by the side of the road. Korra survived to write a book about her ordeal, but you have never heard of her until now. Why?

Left to right: Arturo Arevalo, Alfonso Zuniga, Luis Zuniga.

The three men who kidnapped and raped Monika Korra — Arturo Arevalo, 29, Alfonso Armendariz Zuniga, 29, and Luis Fernando Zuniga, 27 — were not college students. All three are Mexican citizens, and all of them were believed to be in the U.S. illegally. Arevalo had been deported to Mexico after being arrested on a theft charge in 2001. Arevelo is related by marriage to the other two perpetrators, who are cousins. All three men were arrested within days of their crime (one of them was caught with Korra’s stolen cellphone) and Korra testified at the trials of both Arturo Arevalo and Alfonso Zuniga, who received life sentences, while Luis Zuniga pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Unless you live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, you probably never heard of this crime, and no feminist will ever mention it, because feminists do not care about college girls who are gang-raped at gunpoint by illegal immigrants. No, the only reason feminists pretend to care about female students being raped is because the phony “campus rape epidemic” provides a pretext for demonizing male college students, a justification for “activism” that (not coincidentally) gives feminists more money and political influence. Whatever else feminism is, it is always a cynical hustle, a scam perpetrated by selfish women who will tell whatever lies are necessary to enhance their own lucrative careers, and who will ignore any facts that do not serve their purpose.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

A Reminder for ‘Male Feminists’

Posted on | August 28, 2015 | 34 Comments

They hate you, too:

tell a self proclaimed male feminist that he cant be a feminist and watch him turn in to the biggest misogynist abusive s–t within 0.2 seconds. happens 100% of the time.

That 31-word post got more than 25,000 notes on Tumblr in the past year, and the same Tumblr feminist had this to say:

leftist men are just as horrifyingly and violently misogynist as all other men, including old conservative christian dudes, but they get away with so much because they dress up their misogyny in a specific “social justice” language and call themselves feminists rather than just straight up saying that they hate women, and they think women are only good for sex, having babies, and domestic labor like right wing men do, but they both hate women the same.

Insofar as “lefist men” and self-proclaimed “male feminists” describe the same group of men, the question arises whether any man can escape feminism’s general condemnation of males. Obviously, some men still believe that feminism is something other than mere man-hating, and some feminists may also encourage men to believe this. What we never see, however, is feminists who condemn the man-haters among them. It would seem that the first commandment of feminism is, “Thou shalt not speak praise of a male, nor defend any man against thy feminist sister.”

Feminism’s discourse about men is relentlessly negative, and no feminist ever criticizes these anti-male sermons, because to do so would result in her ex-communication from the cult. Therefore, if any man dares to object to a movement that seems to contemplate the annihilation of males as its ultimate goal, he can be sure that feminists will unite to denounce him for doing so: “How dare this despicable man quote our words as evidence against us? This is misogynistic harassment!”

Men must never call attention to feminism’s deliberate hatefulness, because no man has any right to defend himself against women who wish him dead. The mere fact that a man notices how feminists express malice toward him — merely because he is male — is considered proof that he is a particularly egregious oppressor. Not even the most sympathetic “progressive” man can ever be exempt from feminism’s all-encompassing hatred of males. Yet left-wing men are so eager to appease these spiteful women (whose votes are necessary to electing progressive politicians) that their allegiance requires them to absorb a constant barrage of insults from their feminist “allies” without complaint

We can only conclude that progressive men think they deserve to be hated by women, and who am I to say that they don’t?





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | August 28, 2015 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

The yellow crane stunned him. Now? That color here at the weekly update meant what it meant. Shaking, he sent the text.

* * *

He hoped she came today, the smoldering redhead at the arboretum the last couple of weeks. She’d sit at noon and launch a white paper crane. She was such a beauty, the gardeners said nothing. He’d point out his yellow one and start a conversation.

* * *

Parking delayed her. She seethed, arriving five minutes late. Two men gaped as she released it, one in horror; the other, lust. They heard a distant *BOOM*.

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

War on Women? Feminist Blames the Patriarchy for Roanoke Killings

Posted on | August 27, 2015 | 59 Comments

Susan Cox (@Blasfemmey) writes for Feminist Current:

More male violence against women; reporter
Alison Parker killed during live broadcast
Virginia TV reporter, Alison Parker, was shot dead during a live broadcast by a man who formerly worked at the same news station. Also killed was camera man Adam Ward. There are no words for this ever-increasing death toll of women killed by men who felt entitled to take their lives.

Previously, Ms. Cox wrote on Twitter:

“This crime is no doubt linked to the misogyny for
female reporters of men trying to silence them.”

 

Is feminism just blind prejudice? Do facts mean nothing to these idiots?

Here is an interesting fact: On Nov. 9, 2012, the Roanoke shooter Vester Flanagan received a warning from his supervisor at WDBJ-TV for wearing an Obama sticker on Election Day. a violation of company policy that stated news employees “must refrain from participatting in active partisan politic.” Flanagan was clearly a personnel problem at the station and, after he was fired in 2013, he sued WDBJ-TV for wrongful termination, claiming he was a victim of discrimination because he was black and gay — the same grievances Flanagan cited in the 23-page manifesto he faxed to ABC News on Wednesday.

Yet here is feminist Susan Cox declaring she had “no doubt” that Flanagan’s crime was “linked to the misogyny for female reporters of men trying to silence them” — an imaginative claim that had nothing to do with Flanagan’s actual motive, which was a personal grievance:

A memo from WDBJ regarding Flanagan’s termination is included in court records obtained by CBS News. The memo says that when Flanagan was told he was being fired, he responded by saying, “You better call police because I’m going to make a big stink. This is not right.”
According to the memo, Flanagan went on to berate staff members — including Adam Ward — who was present and recording the incident. When Flanagan was ultimately escorted from the newsroom by police, he handed another staff member a wooden cross that was on his desk and said, “You’ll need this,” the memo says.
Another WBDJ memo in the court filing says all employees at the station were informed Flanagan was terminated and that “anyone seeing him on company property should call 911 immediately.”

It appears that Adam Ward was more of a target than Alison Parker, who was only an intern at WDBJ-TV when Flanagan was fired:

Flanagan’s contentious 10-month reporting stint at Southwestern Virginia’s CBS affiliate, WDBJ (Channel 7), ended in much the same way several jobs had since 2000: with a trail of colleagues with whom he did not get along, poor job-performance evaluations citing his volatile behavior and at least two lawsuits alleging racial discrimination and unfair treatment. . . .
Ward had been at the station when Flanagan was fired and aimed a camera at him as he flipped off the newsroom during his forced exit. The station manager, Jeff Marks, said Parker was an intern when Flanagan worked at the station. He could not recall a specific run-in with her but said, “He had conflicts with so many people here, I don’t remember all the specific ones.”
Marks said Flanagan . . . was “a man with a lot of anger.” He added: “It came out in his relationships. He had trouble working with fellow employees and he had a short fuse.” . . .
Flanagan’s first job was as an intern at KPIX in San Francisco for five months in 1993. . . .
Dawn Baker, who anchors the newscast at WTOC in Savannah, Ga., said she remembers Flanagan as a nice, if goofy and at-times aloof reporter during his two years with the station in the late 1990s. But even then, she said, he had a habit of bucking his bosses­ while practicing questionable journalism.
During his time in Savannah, Flanagan used his legal name professionally, but Baker said eventually his colleagues found out he was using the name “Bryce Williams” socially. . . .
It appears that Flanagan’s problems began at WTWC in Tallahassee, Fla., in 1999. He worked there 13 months, and he alleged in a lawsuit that he filed after he was fired that a producer had called him a “monkey” and said that “blacks are lazy.” . . .
The station denied the allegations and said he never reported any racist behavior. Managers said in response to the suit, which the station settled, that Flanagan was fired for poor performance, misbehavior toward colleagues and the use of profanity.
Don Shafer, news director at XETV in San Diego, said on the air Wednesday that he had hired Flanagan at WTWC and later fired him for chronic “bizarre behavior.”
“We brought him in, he was a good on-air performer, a pretty good reporter,” he told viewers, “and then things started getting a little strange with him.”

Was this “misogyny toward female reporters trying to silence them”? Or was this just another a “grievance collector”?

A grievance collector will move from the passive assumption of deprivation and low expectancy common to most paranoid personalities to a more aggressive mode. He will not endure passively his deprived state; he will occupy himself with accumulating evidence of his misfortunes and locating the sources. . . .
Grievance collectors are distrustful and provocative, convinced they are always taken advantage of and given less than their fair share.

Oh, “convinced they are always taken advantage of” — like feminists.

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Gunman Blames Racism After He Kills Two Young Journalists on Live TV UPDATE: Charleston Church Shooting ‘Sent Me Over the Top,’ Killer Claims

Posted on | August 26, 2015 | 77 Comments

Vester Flanagan, a/k/a Bryce Williams

Alison Parker and Adam Ward of WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, Virginia, were doing a live broadcast this morning when a disgruntled former employee of the station approached and shot them both dead with a semi-automatic pistol. Vester Flanagan, who had worked for WDBJ-TV using the on-air name “Bryce Williams,” posted a video of his crime, along with Twitter messages saying that Parker had made racist comments and that Ward had reported him to the station’s human resources office — an apparent reference to the circumstances of Flanagan’s firing. After fleeing the scene of the double homicide and being pursued by police, Flanagan fatally shot himself. The killer had a troubled past, NBC News reports:

The general manager of the station, WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia, said that Flanagan had a reputation as “being difficult to work with” and was fired because of anger problems. . . .
Flanagan had a two-decade career at a string of local television stations. . . .
KPIX, the CBS station in San Francisco, said that Flanagan worked there as an intern and a writer from 1993 to 1995. An employee at WTOC in Savannah, Georgia, confirmed that Flanagan worked there in the late 1990s.
And in 2000, Flanagan sued a Florida station that had fired him, alleging racial discrimination, according to a newspaper report at the time.
“Vester was an unhappy man,” Jeff Marks, the general manager of WDBJ, said on the station’s noon newscast. “He had a reputation for being difficult to work with.”
Marks said that Flanagan was fired “after many incidents of his anger coming forward” and was escorted from the building by police.

David French at National Review cautioned against viewing this as a racial incident, although it now seems clear that the gunman himself viewed it that way. This is the problem with identity politics: If someone has personal problems, and they can find a political ideology that seems to explain those problems, then the “personal is political,” as radical feminist Carol Hanisch famously said, and who are we to argue? If someone says they are a victim of racism, sexism or homophobia, and then they use claims of victimhood to justify violence, how seriously should we take their political arguments? It’s a hall of mirrors. If we say Vester Flanagan was just a disgruntled kook, what does that make Al Sharpton? Isn’t he just a more successful disgruntled kook?

UPDATE: ABC News reports:

In the 23-page document faxed to ABC News, the writer says “MY NAME IS BRYCE WILLIAMS” and his legal name is Vester Lee Flanagan II.” He writes what triggered today’s carnage was his reaction to the racism of the Charleston church shooting:
“Why did I do it? I put down a deposit for a gun on 6/19/15. The Church shooting in Charleston happened on 6/17/15…”
“What sent me over the top was the church shooting. And my hollow point bullets have the victims’ initials on them.” . . .
In an often rambling letter to the authorities, and family and friends, he writes of a long list of grievances. In one part of the document, Williams calls it a “Suicide Note for Friends and Family.”
He says has suffered racial discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying at work
He says he has been attacked by black men and white females
He talks about how he was attacked for being a gay, black man
“Yes, it will sound like I am angry…I am. And I have every right to be. But when I leave this Earth, the only emotion I want to feel is peace….”
“The church shooting was the tipping point…but my anger has been building steadily…I’ve been a human powder keg for a while…just waiting to go BOOM!!!!”

So he was black and gay, but it was mainly the racism he was angry about? These disgruntled killers seldom bother to edit their manifestos very carefully, which might have something to do with why they’re disgruntled. We probably shouldn’t expect coherent prose from homicidal maniacs, I guess

 

Category: Crime, Racism

Feds Raid ‘Rentboy’ Site

Posted on | August 26, 2015 | 65 Comments

While the hack of the adultery site AshleyMadison-dot-com was making headlines, the FBI was investigating a male escort site:

A criminal complaint was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging the CEO of Rentboy.com, Jeffrey Hurant, and six Rentboy.com employees with conspiring to violate the Travel Act by promoting prostitution. . . .
As alleged in the complaint, Rentboy.com is a male escort advertising site founded in 1997 which hosts thousands of paid advertisements. While the site has disclaimers stating that the advertisements are for companionship and not sexual services, Rentboy.com is designed primarily for advertising illegal prostitution. The website charges subscribers a minimum monthly fee of $59.95 and up to several hundred dollars to advertise sexual services.. . . Between 2010 and 2015, Rentboy.com had over $10 million in gross proceeds.
“As alleged, Rentboy.com attempted to present a veneer of legality, when in fact this internet brothel made millions of dollars from the promotion of illegal prostitution,” stated Acting United States Attorney Currie. Mr. Currie thanked the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Field Office in New York, and the District Attorney’s Office for New York County for their assistance in the investigation.

The New York Times reports:

The chief executive, Jeffrey Hurant, 50, and six other current or former employees appeared in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Tuesday afternoon on charges of promoting prostitution. . . .
Charles Hochbaum, the lawyer for Mr. Hurant, said outside court that the case represented a First Amendment issue.
“My client advertises for people who are willing to be escorts, to accompany people for their time and be paid,” he said.
“He’s upset and confused about how this legitimate business could become the subject of a Homeland Security investigation,” he said. The Homeland Security Investigations arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was involved in the investigation, apparently because it believed the site promoted prostitution across state and national borders.
“I don’t think we do anything to promote prostitution,” Mr. Hurant said. “I think we do good things for good people, and bring good people together.” . . .
Some of the complaint details “the Hookies,” or the International Escort Awards, which the website holds each year. The site’s marketing banter for the awards described them as “covering all aspects of the oldest profession as presented in the newest media,” according to the complaint.
At the 2015 Hookies, held this year at a West 42nd Street hotel, an undercover agent approached Mr. Hurant, who gave the agent a business card with the email address [email protected] on it and explained that the Hookies were about celebrating sex “so good, you had to tell someone.” . . .
Another of those arrested was Edward Lorenz Estanol, 23, an escort, Hookies award nominee and former social-media coordinator for the site. He charged $300 an hour, or $3,000 for a weekend, the complaint says. On his personal website, he wrote that “escorting is a great way to explore your sexuality and get paid doing it,” the complaint says.
Another is Diana Milagros Mattos, 43, a former saleswoman, who had “a Twitter account in which she identified herself as the ‘escort whisperer’” while she worked at Rentboy.com, the complaint says, and tried to help escorts increase their social-media presence so they would get more clients.

Despite my large “social-media presence,” I haven’t made $10 million blogging since 2010. Maybe I should change my slogan to “Blogs So Good, You Had to Tell Someone.”

 

Category: Crime, Gays
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