The Other McCain

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

In Which @BrittMcHenry Destroys Her Career ‘In the News, Sweetheart’

Posted on | April 17, 2015 | 92 Comments

A bad case of “Don’t You Know Who I Am?” Syndrome:

ESPN reporter Britt McHenry has been suspended for a week after video surfaced of her berating a parking lot attendant and telling the attendant to “lose some weight, baby girl,” The New York Post reported Thursday.
Washington-based McHenry was angry about having her car towed on April 6, The Post reports, and began dressing down the attendant despite being told the incident was being captured on security camera.
“I’m in the news, sweetheart, I will (expletive) sue this place,” McHenry said in the video published online by LiveLeak.
“Yep, that’s all you care about, is just taking people’s money,” McHenry said. “With no education, no skillset, just wanted to clarify that. … Do you feel good about your job? So I could be a college dropout and do the same thing? Why, cause I have a brain and you don’t?”
As she walks out of the lot, she tells the attendant to “lose some weight, baby girl.”

More at Fox News and the New York Post.

She posted an online apology, which probably won’t be enough to retrieve her from permanent infamy. Does she really believe that her career at ESPN is because “I have a brain and you don’t?”

She’s from the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia and attended Stetson University (annual tuition $40,040). She graduated with high honors and attended Northwestern University grad school. So, yes, she’s obviously smart, but does she think the parking lot attendant had those advantages and opportunities? Does Britt McHenry think her looks had nothing at all to do with her getting hired at ESPN?

Look, I’m not an egalitarian. Quite the opposite. To quote John Randolph of Roanoke, “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.” Yet the true aristocrat does not behave the way Britt McHenry behaved. Certainly, no lady acts the way she acted. Anyone can lose their temper and say regrettable things — certainly I have — but no true aristocrat would treat working people that way. No true aristocrat would flaunt their privilege by attempting to personally humiliate someone for doing their job.

Raised with the values of the Poor But Proud yeomanry, I have a dim view of the Elite University set, the beneficiaries of fortune who assume they are naturally superior to any Ordinary American. And the very worst such creatures are the Daddy’s Precious Darling types, the snooty rich girls who consider their mere existence to be an achievement. If you’ve ever encountered Daddy’s Precious Darling, you know what I’m talking about. Two of my favorite songs — “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan and “Rich Girl” by Hall and Oates — are about this type of female. In the Dylan song, he describes an upper-class girl who has fallen on hard times:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine,
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall.”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you.
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin’ out.
Now you don’t talk so loud.
Now you don’t seem so proud,
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and the children of fortune ought to exhibit gracious humility as a becoming expression of gratitude for God’s blessings. Yet so often, they’re the “Rich Girl”:

High and dry, out of the rain.
It’s so easy to hurt others when you can’t feel pain.

This was exactly Britt McHenry’s attitude toward that parking lot attendant. Young, privileged and pretty, an up-and-coming media personality, mocking an obscure working woman as having “no education, no skillset” and boasting “I’m in the news, sweetheart.”

Surely by now some feminist has interpreted the online rage against Britt McHenry as “misogyny,” but that misses the obvious point: Everybody knows her type, and everybody hates her type. A good-looking girl gets all the breaks, especially if she’s a rich good-looking girl, and our universal contempt for the spoiled-rotten Suburban Princess isn’t because we’re sexists, but because everybody who’s ever had to deal with one of those high-maintenance brats knows what vicious, selfish sadists they can be.

The kind of hideous cruelty displayed by Britt McHenry is an unfortunately common consequence of Special Snowflake™ Syndrome. We may contrast Britt McHenry to Justine Sacco of #HasJustineLandedYet infamy. Nobody had ever heard of Justine Sacco. She wasn’t a TV star, but BOOM:

“I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours,” she told me. “It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are.”

That’s where Britt McHenry is now. We have to wonder if public disgrace will teach her a lesson, or if other Rich Girls will study that lesson.

 

Category: Celebrities

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | April 17, 2015 | 7 Comments

by Smitty


“Is that you, Grandma?” asked Alisha. They poured tea and pored over photos.
“Yes, I couldn’t have been more than 7 at the time.”
“What kind of bird are you holding?”
“Been 80 years. I’m blessed just to see it.”
“No worries, Grandma.” Alisha produced a smart phone and sent a close-up of the bird in the photo to a database in the Cloud for resolution.
A wait cursor later: “A Spotted Puffbird, Grandma!”
“Wonderful!”
Tea and chatting ended abruptly with the door kicked in.
“EPA! YOU’RE UNDER ARREST FOR VIOLATING THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT…”

 

 

Via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction, Uncategorized

Yes, But It’s France

Posted on | April 16, 2015 | 43 Comments

Ace of Spades:

The French (socialist) government is peddling a study claiming one hundred effing percent of French women are harassed on public transportation.
One hundred percent! Every single female!
Now that’s how you do fake statistics, my friends: Go big or go home.

I’m not sure the numbers are fake. The French are a nation of degenerate swine. They are the nation that gave the world Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Monique Wittig. Do French men behave like animals on public transportation? Do they treat all women like whores? Sure. It’s part of French culture. You know, like wine, socialism, defeat, surrender, hating Jews and collaborating with Nazis.

France: An entire nation that’s worse than Massachusetts.

 

Category: France

What’s Causing the ‘Acid Jihad’?

Posted on | April 16, 2015 | 34 Comments

Headline via @GatewayPundit:

Rejected Lover Hurls Acid
in Face of Former Model

If you want to know what this does to a woman’s face, Pamela Geller has photos of “acid jihad” victims who include Shameem Akhter, 18, Najaf Sultana, 16, Munira Asef, 23, Memuna Khan, 21, Zainab Bibi, 17, and Naila Farhat, 19, all of them from Pakistan. Gosh, why would this particularly sadistic crime, which is typically committed in revenge for spurning a man’s romantic interest, be so commonplace in Pakistan?

That some men react violently to rejection is an unfortunate fact of life. Heartbreak can turn to rage, and some guys just don’t know how to take “no” for an answer. We know this. Irrational violence happens, but what if conditions in a community are such that it becomes more difficult for young men to find wives? What if there is an actual shortage of women, so that the guy whose girlfriend breaks up with him has very dim prospects of finding another girlfriend . . . ever?

What is the effect of polygamy in Muslim cultures? Where men may legally have multiple wives, and where polygamy is socially accepted, this inevitably produces (a) a shortage of women available for marriage, and (b) a surplus of young unmarried men. And then there is sex-selective abortion in societies where there is a strong preference for sons:

By midcentury, when today’s millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed. As I wrote in my book America Alone, unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. . . . [W]e’re likely to be in a planet-wide rape epidemic and a world of globalized industrial-scale sex slavery.

So said Mark Steyn in his book America Alone, a problem confirmed by recent developments:

Growing evidence suggests that in countries like India and China, where the ratio of men to women is unnaturally high due to the selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect of girl children, the rates of violence towards women increase. “The sex ratio imbalance directly leads to more sex trafficking and bride buying,” says Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. A scarce resource is generally considered precious, but the lack of women also leaves many young men without marriage partners. In 2011, the number of cases of women raped rose by 9.2 percent; kidnapping and abductions of women were up 19.4 percent. “At this point, we’re talking correlation, not causation. More studies need to be done….[But] it is clear from historical cases and from studies looking at testosterone levels that a large proportion of unmarried men in the population is not a good thing,” says Hvistendahl.

If you think Troy University students on Spring Break are dangerous, what do you expect when there are millions — I repeat, millions — of young Chinese, Indian and Pakistani men who have no prospect of love, sex or marriage in their own countries? Remember, at least one expert has said that ISIS is able to recruit young Muslims who are lured into jihad by fantasies of capturing girls and women as sex slaves.

Oh, look: ISIS is attacking Ramadi.

Nothing to worry about for you, Middle-Class American. Not yet. But think of 2025, 2035, 2045 . . .

 

Category: Islam, Pakistan, Sex, Sex Trouble

The Law Was Made For Her Majesty, Not Her Majesty For The Law, Ye Peasants

Posted on | April 16, 2015 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Her Royal Highness continues the coronation tour with demonstrations of Her Majesty both great and small:


Conservatives need to understand that Her Inevitable Inevitability is certain, and focus on cowering safely off to the side.

Category: Democrats, Hillary Clinton

The Crazy Is Always There

Posted on | April 16, 2015 | 35 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

Deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt was in court today in Carroll County, Maryland, facing charges of violating the peace order that prohibited him from contacting John Hoge. Reports that Bill would be representing himself in this case inspired much mirth online. It’s strange how, from a perspective of sanity — you know, among people who have an actual life — these weirdos seem to come and go. There was a time, a couple of years ago, when Schmalfeldt’s bizarre antics were a subject of regular updates here, but once he stopped harassing me, I stopped paying attention to the Neckless Wonder. Yet his insanity persisted to the point where now Schmalfeldt went to trial — and got off with a stern warning from the judge. Meanwhile, in Alabama . . .

Remember Roger Shuler? Sure you do.

He’s the Democrat lunatic who became Shelby County Jail inmate No. 288928 because of his bizarre vendetta against Alabama Republicans. Shuler came to my attention because, in 2012, he was promoting various lurid smears against me and others who had been targeted as enemies of Brett Kimberlin and Neal Rauhauser. Just another crazy weirdo on the Internet who had to push it to the limit:

A Shelby County blogger, who spent five months in jail before agreeing to remove stories from his website about the son of a former governor, has now been ordered to pay $3.5 million in a defamation lawsuit filed by a former campaign manager for Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange.
The blogger had written about an alleged affair between Strange and the campaign manager.
Jefferson County Circuit Judge Donald Blankenship on Monday entered a default judgment against Roger Shuler and his website Legal Schnauzer for $1.5 million in compensatory and $2 million in punitive damages. The judge wrote that all the elements for the judgment were present, including that a false and defamatory statement was made.
Jessica Medeiros Garrison, a Birmingham lawyer, filed the defamation lawsuit in 2013 against Shuler. She had managed Strange’s 2010 campaign for Alabama Attorney General and served as Chief Counsel and Deputy Attorney General in 2011.
“The facts are clear and the judgment speaks for itself,” Garrison stated in an email Tuesday to AL.com. “The absolute and blatant disregard for the truth has to come with consequences. I am very happy to finally be in a position to set the record straight,” she wrote.
Bill Baxley, one of Garrison’s attorneys, also said the ruling “speaks for itself.” He said he doubts his client will be able to collect any money from Shuler, who had his house foreclosed upon a year or so ago.

In 2013, I wrote an American Spectator column about Shuler, “Crazy in Alabama.” I also wrote a column about another Internet weirdo, Barrett Brown, “The Kook Who Knew Too Much.” In case you missed the news, Barrett Brown got sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Bill Schmalfeldt, Roger Shuler, Barrett Brown — some of my friends wonder how it is I manage to attract the attention of so many lunatic trolls. It’s as if I exude a magnetic force field of craziness, but the mystery is actually not so mysterious. About a dozen years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled me a “neo-Confederate,” and this was amplified by leftists (including gay columnist Michelangelo Signorile) who claimed I was a “white supremacist.” At the time, I was working as an assistant national editor at the Washington Times and my bosses advised me (“advised” in this context being a near-synonym for “ordered”) not to respond to these accusations. This enforced silence was unpleasant, as I was of course eager to refute these smears, but my bosses were probably correct: If your enemy is lying about you, why publicize their lies by commenting about them? The SPLC is a reprehensible organization that has subsequently been implicated in inciting violent maniac to attack the Family Research Council. To be smeared by the SPLC is a badge of honor and yet, because I did not immediately respond to the accusations against me when they first targeted me, this gave rise to the Internet Legend of Robert Stacy McCain, White Supremacist — with consequences that have been at times comic and at other times tragic.

In September 2009, while I was covering the Tea Party rally in Washington, D.C., Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (whose blog had once been fairly important among conservatives) decided to unload the SPLC/Signorile “white supremacist” on me, and I fought a two-week blog war to prove my point: Charles Johnson is a worthless damned fool. Everybody at that time recognized that CJ had gone of the deep end. He had started losing his grip in October 2007, when he began smearing Pamela Geller as a “neofascist,” and his slow descent into madness (ranting against “creationists” and “climate denialists”) had been watched with quiet chagrin by Charles’s former allies. Once he attacked me, however, Johnson’s defection to the Left suddenly became a matter of public knowledge, and actually got noticed by the New York Times.

The Little Green Meltdown was big news back in 2009. It had the incidental effect of creating a sort of residual echo for the Internet Legend of Robert Stacy McCain, White Supremacist. Because there are many friends who can vouch for my bona fides, this doesn’t really bother me — “Don’t Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation,” as Joan Jett said — and my indifference to this really seems to make some people crazy.

Every once in a while, usually after I’ve had some notable success, my Twitter timeline will suddenly get a burst of craziness from trolls who think they have discovered the Hidden Secret of Right-Wing Racism. What has actually happened, however, is one of two things:

  1. Some idiot did a Google search and came up with the same stuff that I already dealt with back in 2009. “Asked and answered,” but the troll doesn’t know this.
  2. One of the Usual Suspects (perhaps one of Neal Rauhauser’s sockpuppet accounts) has decided to replay the same tactic that has failed so often before.

Now, I’ve got better things to do with my time than constantly reply to the same nonsense, so I usually ignore this stuff. “Oh, look, another idiot with 72 Twitter followers calling me a racist.” The problem is that some of these trolls become obsessed with me. Barrett Brown once wrote an entire book chapter about me, which his publisher rejected because who the hell cares about Stacy McCain, right? I’m just a guy with a blog. I’m not a politician or a TV star. Furthermore, there is the evidence that Sherlock Holmes would call The Dog That Did Not Bark: If I am really such an odious hatemonger, wouldn’t I occasionally, y’know, monger some hate?

That is to say, wouldn’t a white supremacist be blogging about white supremacy? Obviously, this isn’t who I am, because this is not what I do. Yet there is a certain type of person who thinks, “A-ha! I’m an expert at this Internet Detective stuff, so I will prove what an awful racist this guy is! I will expose him for the Evil Right Wing Hater that we all know he must be! And then I will become the Most Famous of All Internet Detectives! People will love me!”

So they run off chasing that phantom and, when they fail, they become convinced that I’ve played some kind of dirty trick on them by evading their Internet Detective skills and they go nuts. This explains my tendency to attract crazy trolls and, speaking of which, Charles Johnson has created a Secret Blog Commenting System that will allow him and his dwindling mob of kooks to discuss their weird obsessions without fear that someone will screen-cap their insanity.

Here, I’ve got $20 that says this latest Wile E. Coyote Acme Rocket Skates™ genius plan will fail. What will happen, I predict, is that someone inside the Secret Blog Commenting System will say something that pisses off Charles Johnson, resulting in one of his periodic spasms of ban-the-dissenters fury. Screen-caps of the Secret Blog Commenting System discussion will then be published, with embarrassing consequences for Charles & Friends. Of course, this will be of interest only to those of us who remember who Charles Johnson was, back when he really mattered, which was many, many years ago.





 

Category: Barrett Brown, Bill Schmalfeldt, Charles Johnson, Roger Shuler

Her Fakeness, Hillary Clinton

Posted on | April 16, 2015 | 75 Comments

David Martosko reports at the Daily Mail:

Hillary Clinton’s astroturf candidacy is in full swing in Iowa.
Her Tuesday morning visit to a coffee shop in LeClaire, Iowa was staged from beginning to end, according to Austin Bird, one of the men pictured sitting at the table with Mrs. Clinton.
Bird told Daily Mail Online that campaign staffer Troy Price called and asked him and two other young people to meet him Tuesday morning at a restaurant in Davenport, a nearby city.
Price then drove them to the coffee house to meet Clinton after vetting them for about a half-hour.
The three got the lion’s share of Mrs. Clinton’s time and participated in what breathless news reports described as a ’roundtable’ — the first of many in her brief Iowa campaign swing.
Bird himself is a frequent participant in Iowa Democratic Party events. He interned with President Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election campaign, and was tapped to chauffeur Vice President Joe Biden in October 2014 when he visited Davenport.
‘What happened is, we were just asked to be there by Troy,’ Bird said Wednesday in a phone interview. . . .
The other two, he confirmed, were University of Iowa College Democrats president Carter Bell and Planned Parenthood of the Heartland employee Sara Sedlacek.
‘It was supposed to be a strategy meeting,’ Bird recalled, ‘to get our thoughts about issues. But then all of a sudden he says, “Hey, we have Secretary Clinton coming in, would you like to go meet her?”‘
‘And then we got in a car — Troy’s car — and we went up to the coffee house, and we sat at a table and then Hillary just came up and talked with us.’

You can read the whole thing. The point isn’t so much that Democrats are being brought in by the campaign as “plants” at these events, but rather that the media are playing along and pretending that the events (and the people at the events) are “spontaneous.” That is to say, the media are just there to provide free campaign publicity for the Democrat. Meanwhile, the real journalism is in the National Enquirer:

The ENQUIRER learned the list of Hillary’s lesbian lovers includes a beauty in her early 30s who has often traveled with Hillary; a popular TV and movie star; the daughter of a top government official; and a stunning model who got a career boost after allegedly sleeping with Hillary. Hillary made the huge mistake of mixing public and private messages while using her personalized email server – before risking a massive scandal by refusing to make the documents public. . . .

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Can we believe this supermarket tabloid? Just remember it was the National Enquirer that broke the John Edwards cheating scandal. They’ve got more credibility than Rolling Stone.

 

Category: Hillary Clinton

The ‘Mechanism of Social Control’

Posted on | April 15, 2015 | 38 Comments

“Since sex is something men do to women . . . men dominate and control women. . . .
“In other words, heterosexuality is the foundation of the social structure of male dominance, and successfully attacking it could bring down the whole house. . . .
“Is consensual sexual activity which entails male dominance and female subordination a form of social control? . . .
“The need for a unified feminist theory of sexuality is clear. If one concludes, as many feminists have, that heterosexuality is the primary and most powerful mechanism of social control, then understanding its meaning in all forms is imperative if male dominance is ever to be overcome. . . .
“Heterosexual instrumentalism practiced at the interpersonal level allows men to dominate and control women, which, in turn, provides the underpinnings of a system where women are controlled in all settings.”
— S.P. Schacht and Patricia H. Atchison, “Heterosexual Instrumentalism: Past and Future Directions,” in Heterosexuality: A Feminism and Psychology Reader, edited by Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger (1993)

The authors of that quote were both professors of sociology. Professor Steven P. Schacht taught at Southwest Missouri State University and Professor Patricia Atchison taught at Colorado State University.

Professor Schacht is a rather extraordinary example of male self-hatred, which he has further expressed in a remarkable essay, “Teaching About Being An Oppressor: Some Personal and Political Considerations.” Click through and read it. No Onion satire could possibly exceed Professor Schacht’s absurdity. It might be helpful to know that he received his Ph.D. for a dissertation entitled “Obscene Telephone Calls as Instruments of Male Dominance.” Just in case you are not yet convinced that Professor Schacht is a textbook case of pathetic self-loathing, however, please read his essay “Why Men Should be Feminists”:

Perhaps like many men who claim a feminist identity, the path I traveled to grasp such an outlook has been meandering, often painful, and not well marked. The seeds of this very divergent course of personal being were initially planted by a woman who was, among many other beautiful things, an artist, a poet, a radical feminist, and my mother. She spent untold hours trying to share with me the anguish and the hope of her feminist vision.
In my pre-adolescent years I accompanied my mother on numerous pre-Roe v. Wade protest rallies — the chant “women unite, stand up and fight, abortion is a women’s right” still clearly rings in my ears — often helping her paint banners and signs to carry as we marched. She took me with her to anti-Vietnam protests at the University of Minnesota campus (1968-70), several rallies for George McGovern . . .
As one would expect, almost all of my mother’s friends were strong feminist women themselves. My mother’s feminist values in raising me were very much reflected and consistent with other important women in my childhood.

Did I mention that his father was a former Air Force pilot? How do you think that marriage turned out?

[M]y parents separated for several years during my mid-teen years, each taking turns living in the family home with the other maintaining an apartment. Since my father was a pilot and away for many days of the month, in a sense, their separation had probably already occurred years before their formal breakup. Both dated, my mother even publicly became a lesbian, openly stating and showing her affection for her female partners, while my father pursued flight attendants and other younger women. My parents eventually did reunite, but this was because of my mother becoming critically ill, and their personal differences remained quite apparent.

Professor Schacht’s mother died when he was 19. Honestly,  it seems easier to interpret his story not as proving “Why Men Should Be Feminists” but rather “Why Women Should Not Be Feminists.”

That is to say, if you are a woman whose hobbies include anti-war rallies, pro-abortion protests and campaigning for liberal Democrats, and all your friends are “strong feminist women” . . .

Well, there is a Greek island near the coast of Asia Minor. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. If the first phrase that comes to a woman’s mind when she thinks of heterosexuality is “mechanism of social control,” she might just want to take the shortcut to her ultimate destination — over there on the other side of the Mytilini Strait — rather than ruining some unfortunate guy’s life by pretending to enjoy heterosexuality.

As for “feminist men,” obviously there is no hope at all for them. Professor Schacht recounts his academic career:

I would only spend two years teaching at SMSU. Like many positions to follow, in spite of having high teaching evaluations and a quite active publication record, I was basically fired for being too radical, too feminist, too queer, and an obvious gender traitor of sorts. Consistent with my SMSU experience, since leaving graduate school in 1990 I have held six different positions, spent a year unemployed, been divorced twice, and am presently recovering from colon cancer. Moreover, during the early years of my return to my mother’s feminist ideals, I increasingly found myself being betrayed and rejected by men (especially those in academia). Conversely, many of my attempts for seeking acceptance from feminist women were met with a cool reception, often filled with indifference, mistrust, and even hostility.

There’s a song by Beck. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

 

Category: Sex Trouble
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