The Other McCain

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

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | April 10, 2015 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

King Korbill at Valley Myzods


Sky brooding: doom of the gods,
King Korbill surveys the field,
where destiny would soon drink.

“Ten-to-one odds. Perhaps yield?”
inquires Marshall Kornods,
indulging in common-think.

“A final trump we will wield,
ere River Myzods runs pink,”
the monarch he grimly nods.

Enemy horde on the brink,
and his kingdom’s doom well-sealed,
Korbill is freed from the odds.

Battle is joined and the stink
of death fills Valley Myzods.
Upriver: Wizard Zygiell’d

Loosens the barrier clods
holding Myzods at a kink;
watery wall was concealed.

The flood drowns marauding sods.
Korbill’s demise is revealed.
Remorseless sky gives a wink.

via Darleen at Protein Wisdom

UPDATE: s/broken link/Wizard Zygiell’d/ in the fifth stanza to keep the form correct. Writing fantasy makes this easy; just throw in some whacky name where a rhyme is hard to come by.

Category: Friday Fiction, Protein Wisdom

Rude E-Mail Is Rape or Something

Posted on | April 10, 2015 | 31 Comments

So, Tucker Carlson’s brother accidentally hit “reply all” on an e-mail in which he said rude things about Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.This became THE MOST IMPORTANT STORY IN THE WORLD for Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, who seems determined to spend the rest of his career writing about this.

BREAKING: MISOGYNISTIC E-MAIL UPDATE!

Dear God, man, give it a rest.

If your point was to prove that Tucker Carlson’s brother is a sexist pig, congratulations — you’re a winner. But where is it written that all organizations must employ only sensitive people who adhere to your Erik Wemple Code of Polite E-Mail Decorum?

 

Category: Journalism

Why Is Feminism So Crazy?

Posted on | April 9, 2015 | 33 Comments

 

People sometimes need to be reminded that the modern feminist movement began in the late 1960s, arising from the New Left at a time when bizarre radical ideas were common among young anti-war activists. Weird sexual practices were widely promoted. Leaders of the Weather Underground adopted the slogan “Smash Monogamy” to describe their bisexual orgies and communal living arrangements.

The radical milieu included terrorist bombings, armed violence and assassination plots. And, as I’ve mentioned before, a lot of people were doing a lot of drugs at the time. So I was reading Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-75 by Alice Echols and on page 221, she quotes Marilyn Webb’s description of the “very intense shared experience” of a two-week feminist retreat in 1970:

“What we actually did on the retreat was talk theory and practice, eat, clean, cook, take one group mescaline trip, which had the effect of welding us together in an intense and inexplicable closeness. Lesbianism was not on the agenda, although in retrospect it should have been obvious that homosexuality would be a future result for some of us.”

In a note on page 347, Echols names the attendees at this retreat, in addition to Webb, as Marlene Wickes, Coletta Reid, Susan Gregory, Susan Hathaway, Tasha Peterson, Betty Garman, Charlotte Bunch and Judy Spellman. Both Gregory and Hathaway had been lovers of “Chicago Seven” conspirator Rennie Davis. Peterson was the daughter of another “Chicago Seven” conspirator, anti-war activist Dave Dellinger. Charlotte Bunch subsequently divorced her husband and in 1971 founded The Furies, a lesbian collective that originally included Peterson, Hathaway and Reid, who had participated in the earlier retreat.

As their first action, The Furies decided to push the issue of lesbianism at a retreat which had been called to determine the future of the foundering D.C. women’s center. . . . [Furies member Helaine] Harris . . . characterizes the group’s style at the retreat as disruptive and dogmatic:

The Furies went as a lesbian-feminist front. Someone from the group attended each workshop and tried to steer the discussion onto lesbianism. Basically we were telling women that we really believed that they should leave their husbands and boyfriends and become lesbian-feminists. [We contended] that was the only choice that they really had.

Echols quotes Furies founder Bunch: “The entire retreat was us ranting and raving in every corner.” Keep in mind that these were not “fringe” people within the feminist movement. Bunch’s 1972 manifesto “Lesbians in Revolt” is included in the curricula of many university Women’s Studies programs, and I again refer readers to Professor Bunch’s official biography at Rutgers University:

Charlotte Bunch, Founding Director and Senior Scholar, at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University, has been an activist, author and organizer in the women’s, civil, and human rights movements for four decades. A Board of Governor’s Distinguished Service Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Bunch was previously a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a founder of Washington D.C. Women’s Liberation and of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly. She is the author of numerous essays and has edited or co-edited nine anthologies including the Center’s reports on the UN Beijing Plus 5 Review and the World Conference Against Racism. Her books include two classics: Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action and Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights.
Bunch’s contributions to conceptualizing and organizing for women’s human rights have been recognized by many and include: her induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in October 1996; President Clinton’s selection of Bunch as a recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights in December 1999; her receipt of the “Women Who Make a Difference Award” from the National Council for Research on Women in 2000; and being honored as one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s Enews in 2002 and also received the “Board of Trustees Awards for Excellence in Research” in 2006 at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey . She has served on the boards of numerous organizations and is currently a member of the Advisory Committee for the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Division, and on the Boards of the Global Fund for Women and theInternational Council on Human Rights Policy. She has been a consultant to many United Nations bodies and recently served on the Advisory Committee for the Secretary General’s 2006 Report to the General Assembly on Violence against Women.

For some reason, this official biography neglects to mention the part about Professor Bunch tripping on mescaline and trying to convert the entire feminist movement to lesbianism.

Feminism began with radical weirdos — kooks and Communists and drug-addled lesbians — and the insanity of the movement today is a hereditary trait, a legacy of lunacy bequeathed by feminism’s foremothers.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, Democrat state Rep.Liz Bennett invited a pagan Wicca priestess, Deborah Maynard, to give the opening prayer at the state legislature. Have you been paying attention?





 

Category: Sex Trouble

A Coven of Liars: Sabrina Rubin Erdley, Emily Renda and Catherine Lhamon

Posted on | April 9, 2015 | 57 Comments

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

One of the first journalists to raise serious questions about Rolling Stone‘s rape hoax story, Richard Bradley makes this point:

Sabrina Rubin Erdely started with a thesis and went in search of someone—and some place—that fit her thesis. She found Jackie and the University of Virginia. But, she admits, if she had discovered that Jackie was a liar, it wouldn’t have caused her to question her thesis.

Erdely’s article began with her belief — i.e., rape is commonplace on American campuses, and university officials are indifferent to the plight of victims — and all her “reporting” was intended to confirm this belief. Rather than following the facts wherever they might lead, Erdely instead ignored facts that did not fit her pre-existing belief, and therefore accepted Jackie’s gang-rape lies without investigating them properly.

Erdely’s article was not only a baseless smear of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, but a vicious libel against University of Virginia officials who were presented as heartless enablers of an out-of-control culture of sexual violence. The crucial link in Erdely’s dishonest work — the person whose assistance made it possible for her to produce this cruel fabrication — was a young UVA activist named Emily Renda.

K.C. Johnson at National Review highlights Renda’s role:

“Last July 8, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone, telephoned Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual-assault issues as a staff member at the University of Virginia.” So opens the Columbia Journalism School’s review of Rolling Stone’s retracted story about the University of Virginia. The piece confirms that it was Renda who informed Erdely about Jackie, the fabulist whose tale became the spine of the Rolling Stone article. Though the CJR labels Renda a “rape survivor,” she appears never to have filed a complaint with the university, much less with the police.

What did he say? Johnson links to Renda’s June 2014 testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which begins with this three-sentence paragraph:

Like many others who work on the issue of campus sexual assault, my connection to this cause is a personal one. Nearly four years ago, six weeks into my first year, I was raped by a fellow student on my campus after a night out with friends. In the time following the assault, I became active in peer sexual assault education, worked for the University of Virginia’s Women’s Center, interned with the Commonwealth Attorney’s Victim Witness Program, worked with U.Va. administration to improve prevention and response efforts, and chaired Take Back The Night, a national campaign to raise awareness about sexual violence.

Nowhere in her testimony does Renda say that she reported to police or to university officials that she was raped, nor if anyone was prosecuted or disciplined as a result. This omission is curious. If her “connection to this cause is a personal one,” wouldn’t Renda want to tell the committee how officials dealt with her personal trauma? However, I think Johnson may be going too far by asserting that it “appears” Renda never filed a complaint. Maybe she just didn’t think these details relevant to her Senate testimony, as compared to this part of her testimony:

One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame — that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for that”; questioning how no one else at the party could have heard what was going on if she was telling the truth; or discouraging her from seeking help because “you don’t want to be one of those girls who has a reputation” for reporting “that kind of thing.” These statements haunted Jenna. She told me that they made her feel crazy, and made her question whether her own understanding of the rape was legitimate.

This story about “Jenna” is actually about Jackie, whose lurid (and evidently fictitious) rape saga Erdely told in Rolling Stone. Renda testified to the Senate how the case of “Jenna”/Jackie came to the attention of university officials:

Survivors who receive disaffirming responses to initial disclosures are more likely to experience negative mental health consequences as well. These negative and victim-blaming responses from her peers reinforced Jenna’s sense of fault, and prevented her from coming forward to the University’s administration or the Police. When she finally sought assistance from the Dean of Students’ office, after struggling and nearly failing out of her classes for two semesters, it was difficult for the university to conduct a meaningful investigation because much of the evidence had been lost, and witnesses were more difficult to locate.

Whoa. Full stop. Do you see the significance here? Jackie was having an academic problem and “sought assistance” by offering the excuse that her poor performance in the classroom was a traumatic symptom of her gang-rape. We now know that, despite the urging of university officials, Jackie refused to file a criminal complaint or to identity her alleged attackers, and also refused to cooperate with the more recent police investigation of the claims made in the the Rolling Stone story.

Phi Kappa Psi has been exonerated, and the disclosures about her “Haven Monahan” catfishing scheme have destroyed Jackie’s credibility. It therefore appears that everything Jackie told Emily Renda was a lie, and Renda then repeated these lies in her own Senate testimony. Now, back to K.C. Johnson at National Review:

As for Jackie with Rolling Stone, for the CJR, Renda’s word about her status as a victim of crime is enough.
Renda appeared in the Monday New York Times’ summary of the Columbia exposé, described not only as a “rape survivor” but “the expert at the university on sexual assault issues.” Now, however, Renda was a critic of Erdely’s work and the decision to highlight Jackie’s story. “Ms. Renda,” reporter Ravi Somaiya wrote, “offered another reason that she felt the Rolling Stone article was flawed: The magazine was drawn toward the most extreme story of a campus rape it could find. The more nuanced accounts, she suggested, seemed somehow ‘not real enough to stand for rape culture. And that is part of the problem.’”
Nowhere in his article did Somaiya reveal that Rolling Stone never would have learned about Jackie but for Renda. Indeed, as Columbia uncovered, the UVA employee had even vouched for the fabulist’s credibility: “Obviously, maybe her memory of [the rape] isn’t perfect,” she said, defending Jackie in advance against worries Erdely might have. Informing Times readers of Renda’s critical connection to the Rolling Stone fiasco might have undermined the Times’ desire to portray her as an expert on the topic of campus sexual assault.

What Johnson is pointing out here is the circular logic of self-validating authority that the “rape survivor” Emily Renda presents as the crucial credential of her own expertise. Neither Rolling Stone nor the New York Times would dare question Renda’s authority, so that when Renda vouched for Jackie, this was like the Certified Rape Survivor Seal of Approval as far as Erdely and Rolling Stone were concerned. When it turned out Jackie was a liar, however, the New York Times cited Renda to criticize Erdely’s reporting. Yet it seems quite likely that Erdely never would have thought to make the University of Virginia the focus of her story, had it not been for Emily Renda’s Senate testimony about “Jenna”/Jackie getting gang-raped at a frat house.

The feminist mantra about rape — “We must believe the survivors!” — conveys an unquestionable authority to any woman who says she has been raped. K.C. Johnson, however, points out that we know nothing at all about the circumstances surrounding Emily Renda’s own status as a “rape survivor.” While we cannot draw any inference from this omission, it is nevertheless indicative of a journalistic failure. Has any reporter even bothered to ask Emily Renda if she reported her own rape to police or university officials? Is the basis of her “rape survivor” authority not even worth asking a few simple questions?

Excuse me if this seems impertinent or disrespectful, but this goes back to something that happened last summer. George Will wrote a column about the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria in which he said that university officials are learning “that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” His suggestion that being a victim of rape is a “coveted status” on campus made Will a target of vilification, although anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that what he said (or, at least, what he intended to say) is quite true. Emily Renda’s status as a “rape survivor” has become the basis of her career as an activist, and Jackie’s tale of being raped at the Phi Kappa Psi house made her a source so authoritative that she was cited in Renda’s testimony to the U.S. Senate and was pursued by a reporter for Rolling Stone. So, yes, at some level, victimhood is a status sufficiently “coveted” on campus that Jackie was willing to lie to obtain that status. We have certainly seen how “victims proliferate” in this manner, and even several clear cases of rape hoaxes.

It is reportedly estimated that between 2% and 8% of rape accusations are false. Whether it’s 1-in-50 or 1-in-12, false accusations are not an insignificant danger, even if the vast majority of such accusations are true. What we have to ask — as George Will meant to suggest — is whether false accusations are incentivized by an environment where university officials “make victimhood a coveted status.”

In other words, are false rape claims more common on campus than elsewhere in society? Furthermore, isn’t it likely that the recent feminist “rape epidemic” hysteria would inspire an increase in such false claims? And if a reporter like Erdely set out to confirm this feminist narrative, wouldn’t her sources necessarily be activist types who care more about advancing the narrative than telling the truth?

Erdely’s journalistic catastrophe was predictable, and Richard Bradley calls attention to a letter that UVA Dean of Students Allen Groves sent to the authors of the Columbia Journalism Review’s investigation of the Rolling Stone hoax. Groves describes how his presentation to the UVA Board of Visitors in September 2014 was misrepresented by Erdely, who wrote that Groves “downplayed the significance of a Title IX compliance review” with a “smooth answer.”

Erdely’s description is contrary to fact, as established by video of the board meeting. Erdely also quotes a federal official describing Groves as “irresponsible.” That federal official is Catherine Lhamon, Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Lhamon’s appearance in Erdely’s story is hardly a coincidence. The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reports that Lhamon and Emilly Renda are part of the same federal apparatus:

[Lhamon] has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.
Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.”
Lhamon has been invited to the White House nearly 60 times, according to visitor’s logs. Renda has been invited six times. Both were invited to the same White House meeting on three occasions. One, held on Feb. 21, 2014, was conducted by Lynn Rosenthal, then the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women. Twenty-one people, mostly activists, were invited to that meeting. Lhamon and Renda were invited to two other larger gatherings — one on April 29 and the other on Sept. 19.
It is unclear if both attended the three meetings. Renda did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Renda and Lhamon also testified at a June 26, 2014, Senate hearing on campus sexual assault. It was at that hearing that Renda cited Jackie’s story that she was brutally gang-raped by five fraternity members — a statement that was inconsistent with Jackie’s claim to Erdely that she was raped by seven men. According to the Columbia report, Renda first told Erdely about Jackie’s allegation on July 8, nearly two weeks after her Senate testimony.
During her testimony, Lhamon claimed that “The best available research suggests that 20% of college women, and roughly 6% of college men, are victims of attempted or completed sexual assault.” That “one-in-five” claim about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus has been heavily disputed.

Now, read the second page of Chuck Ross’s report:

In his letter, Groves wrote that he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking correspondence between Lhamon and Erdely. Likewise, The Daily Caller filed a FOIA request but expanded the inquiry to include emails Lhamon and her assistant sent to Renda.
In his letter to Coll and Coronel, Groves wrote that he was “one of the professionals vilified by name” in Erdely’s article.
He claimed that Erdely completely mischaracterized remarks he made at a Sept. 2014 meeting with university trustees about sexual assault and that Lhamon disparaged him with comments she made to Erdely. . . .
Despite the context provided by Groves, the Department of Education is not backing off of Lhamon’s comments to Erdely.
“We stand by the statement Catherine made during her interview with Rolling Stone,” Dorie Turner Nolt, the agency’s press secretary, told TheDC.

This is serious. Here you have Erdely misrepresenting a UVA dean’s words and a federal official disparaging the dean on the basis of that misrepresentation, and the Department of Education declares that it will “stand by” this smear? More than that, however, Lhamon and Renda appear to have a very close connection through the White House task force, and both were sources for Erdely’s now-discredited article.

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

P.S.: I emailed the University of Virginia Communications Office to ask if they could provide information about Emily Renda’s rape.





 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble

The Liberal Bubble: ‘They Can’t Fathom That Somebody Disagrees With Them’

Posted on | April 9, 2015 | 133 Comments

So says a Silicon Valley CEO, describing the liberal echo chamber inside the tech industry that frigthens Republicans into silence:

One startup CEO who has worked in Silicon Valley for more than a decade says that while it’s popular to talk politics in the workplace, the underlying assumption is that everyone has similar views.
The CEO, who generally votes Republican and donates to GOP candidates—he spoke on background to conceal his right-leaning views—said that in 2012, “you wouldn’t want to say you’re voting for Romney in the election.” At the same time, openly expressing one’s support for Obama was “incredibly common.”
His opposition to raising the minimum wage is just one area where he diverges with most of his colleagues. “If you say something like, ‘We need a higher minimum wage,’ you don’t get critiqued,” he said. But he would never reveal his more conservative outlook on the matter.
“They can’t fathom that somebody disagrees with them,” he said. “And I disagree with them. So I’m not going to open up that box.” . . .

You can read the whole thing. How do these bubbles develop? It’s the universities, stupid. Go back and read William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale. In 1951, Buckley described the way liberalism had become an unquestioned belief system inside elite academia. Once liberalism had attained hegemonic authority on university campuses, its intellectual prestige was assured. If it is “smart” to believe in, say, Keynesian economics, then impressionable young people who want to seem smart will parrot the Keynesian orthodoxies. Bad ideas that become fashionable in academia are thus diffused into the larger society, as all the smart young people are herded off to college and indoctrinated in these ideas, before entering careers with other college-educated people.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

What happens is that people who never encounter doubt develop a fanatical certainty in their beliefs, and confuse these mere opinions with moral virtue. Consider again the question of Keynesian economics. I am not a government official and thus have neither influence over nor responsibility for our national economic policy. So my opinions about economics — I happen to be a devotee of the Austrian School — are nothing more than opinions. While I can urge others to read Mises and Hayek, and support politicians whose positions are more consonant with these views, it’s not as if doing this makes me better that other people. One sometimes encounters people who strike a “More Libertarian Than Thou” posture, but advocates of economic freedom tend to be tolerant people generally. By contrast, the advocates of interventionism (Keynesians, Marxists and Welfare State socialists) are invariably bullies possessed by a fanatical certainty in their own moral superiority. They expect to be admired and praised for their liberal zealotry, and are insulted if you fail to genuflect in their presence.

Liberalism is to academia what Islam is to Iran. If your worldview is decisively formed within the insular climate of an elite university, the equation “liberal = smart” is a formula you can never permit yourself to doubt, unless you are willing to admit that you have been hustled, scammed and bamboozled. A fellow with a diploma from Harvard or Stanford cannot confront the possibility that he has been swindled like an ignorant hick playing a carnival game at the country fair. This would inflict an irreparable injury to his self-esteem. He therefore seeks to avoid encounters with people who do not share his child-like faith in the Gospel of Liberalism. Thus, in any environment where liberals obtain power, they use that power to exclude and silence dissent. This is how liberals gained hegemony in our colleges and universities, in journalism and the entertainment industry, and how in the Obama Age they seek to institutionalize a Permanent Liberal Regime in government.

 

Category: Education, Intellectuals, Liberals

Rand Paul Is Not Stupid

Posted on | April 8, 2015 | 32 Comments

“Turn the camera around,” as Andrew Breitbart said. Make the media’s bias the subject of discussion. Rand Paul did it right today:

Rand Paul says he doesn’t want to be grilled about abortion until Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz answers similarly tough questions. . . .
Paul, the Kentucky Republican senator who launched his 2016 presidential campaign this week, bristled at a question about abortion while talking with reporters in New Hampshire on Wednesday.
“Why don’t you ask the DNC, ‘Is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus?'” Paul said.
His comment came after The Associated Press published a report that said Paul had ducked questions about his views on what exceptions — if any — he’d support if abortion were to be banned.

The media routinely ask Republicans these “gotcha” questions — in effect, acting as propaganda agents for the Democrat Party — while giving Democrats a free pass. Allahpundit:

The great majority of Americans oppose late-term abortion; the vast majority, maybe a unanimous majority at this point, of Democratic leaders support it without restriction. They are, without exaggeration, absolute fanatics on this subject.

Matt Vespa reports a poll: 52% of Americans say life begins at conception. This means 48% of Americans are wrong.

 

Category: Abortion, Media Bias, Rand Paul

Why Facts Matter

Posted on | April 8, 2015 | 30 Comments

“Bad causes attract bad people,” I observed in 2013, when explaining why deranged, dishonest and deviant personalities had been attracted to the “Free Kate” banner, supporting teenage sex offender Kaitlyn Hunt.

 

Honest, sane, normal people would never associate themselves with such a bad cause, and so bad behavior by Kaitlyn Hunt’s supporters — including death threats against the parents of Hunt’s victim — was not really surprising. When the Hunt case first made national headlines, however, some well-meaning people were deceived into believing that this criminal was in fact a victim. By misrepresenting a few key facts (especially the ages of Hunt and her victim), Kaitlyn Hunt’s family promoted the idea that she had been unfairly targeted for prosecution because of homophobic prejudice. Once the true facts of the case became known, however, much of the original “Free Kate” support disappeared. Decent people were offended at the deliberate deceptions involved in this campaign, and realized that real victims don’t need to lie. What this left behind as the rotten core of the “Free Kate” gang was a comparative handful of immoral or emotionally disturbed people who simply don’t give a damn about truth. Such people are dangerous.

“Whatever chance that Hunt might avoid punishment seemed to evaporate in August [2013], when prosecutors filed a petition notifying Judge Robert Pegg that Hunt had violated the court’s order for her not to contact the victim in the case. Prosecutors said that before Hunt was expelled from high school in March, she gave the younger girl an iPod, which enabled her to receive messages Hunt sent her. Over the course of the next five months, prosecutors said, Hunt sent the girl some 20,000 text messages, about 25 ‘lewd’ photographs, and an ‘explicit’ video in which Hunt recorded herself masturbating and moaning. This led to a new felony charge of ‘transmitting harmful materials to a minor’ against Hunt. The content of several text messages indicated that Hunt and her mother encouraged the younger girl to conceal this illicit breach of the no-contact order, and also tried to convince the girl to lie about the original charges in the case.”
— “Kaitlyn Hunt Takes Plea Deal in Florida Teen Sex Crime Case,” Oct. 3, 2013

Facts matter. If someone who claims to be a victim has a proven habit of dishonesty, we can infer that their claim of victimhood is likely a lie.

Dysfunctional personalities do not want to admit they are the cause of their own problems. Bad people do not want to accept responsibility for their wrongdoing. Liars do not want to admit they have lied. And phony claims of victimhood are one way that such people try to avoid blame for the harm they cause others. What I call the “Accuse the Accuser” strategy (the liar’s attempt to discredit truth-tellers) is often part of this pattern of behavior. A psychologist has named this strategy DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender:

DARVO refers to a reaction that perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim into an alleged offender. . . .
It is important to distinguish types of denial, for an innocent person will probably deny a false accusation. Thus denial is not evidence of guilt. However, I propose that a certain kind of indignant self-righteousness, and overly stated denial, may in fact relate to guilt.
I hypothesize that if an accusation is true, and the accused person is abusive, the denial is more indignant, self-righteous and manipulative, as compared with denial in other cases. Similarly, I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of lawsuits, overt and covert attacks, on the whistle-blower’s credibility and so on.
The attack will often take the form of focusing on ridiculing the person who attempts to hold the offender accountable. The attack will also likely focus on ad hominem instead of intellectual/evidential issues.

You can read the whole thing. (Hat-tip: GraceGabriel51 on Twitter.)

Facts matter. Because wrongdoers may dishonestly attempt to portray themselves as victims, when we encounter this type of conflict — people pointing accusatory fingers at each other — we must closely examine the facts. What do we actually know about this dispute? How did it begin? Who is telling the truth? Why would either party have a motive to lie?

What very often happens in online political conflicts of this type is that the person engaged in DARVO (or “Accuse the Accuser”) will try to depict their accuser as guilty of ideological error. A liberal accused of wrongdoing can discredit his antagonist (at least in the eyes of his liberal allies) by claiming to be the victim of a “right-wing smear” perpetrated by “racists,” etc. Anyone familiar with Soviet history knows how, during the purges of the 1930s, the victims of Stalin’s paranoia were always accused of “Trotskyism” or some such phony political deviation.

Facts matter. If you think you cannot be deceived by these kinds of tactics, your confidence in your judgment — the fanatical certainty with which you cling to your political ideology — is a weapon the liar can use to manipulate you.

When feminists create a false narrative about a campus “rape epidemic” that does not actually exist, they seek to make belief in this narrative a test of political commitment. Loyalty to the cause requires that every feminist support this campaign, and any feminist who expresses skepticism will be accused of betraying the movement, giving aid and comfort to the male enemy. This feminist narrative is about “systems of oppression,” as Elizabeth Bruenig said, so that admitting that the narrative is false would require you to ask if women’s “oppression” under male supremacy is as real and systematic as feminist ideology claims.

Facts matter. The exposure of the rape hoax Rolling Stone perpetrated at the University of Virginia is an important fact.

Do not be deceived. People who are willing to lie about rape will lie about anything. Bad causes attract bad people.





 

Category: Crime, Feminism, Sex Trouble, Uncategorized

Fertility Delayed Is Fertility Denied

Posted on | April 8, 2015 | 125 Comments

 

The Census Bureau issued a new report yesterday about the increase of childlessness among American women and, although they provide only a press release and XLS data (rather than a full report), the highlights of the data are perhaps ominous:

The percentage of U.S. women in their 30s and 40s who are childless is rising, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau show.
Some 15.3% of U.S. women aged 40 to 44 were childless in June 2014, up from 15.1% in 2012. . . .
For women in their late 30s, the rise in childlessness is sharper. Around 18.5% of women 35 to 39 were childless last June, up from 17.2% in 2012.
All told, 47.6% of U.S. women aged 15 to 44 were without children last year, up from 46.5% in 2012.
The data are the latest to show that childlessness is on the rise in the U.S. as more women (and their partners) delay marriage and childbearing.
Because fertility declines significantly for women in their 40s — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define a woman’s child-bearing years as 15 to 44 — demographers carefully watch these women to get a sense of how many children Americans are having, or not. . . .
With more women having their first child in their mid 30s, late 30s and early 40s, American families may be shrinking: The number of women aged 40 to 44 who had only one child roughly doubled between 1976 and 2014, Census said.

 

A more in-depth Census report on the 2012 numbers shows that, in 1976, 10% of women 40-44 (a cohort born 1932-36) were childless, whereas in 2012, 15% of women 40-44 (a cohort born 1968-72) were childless. An ethnic breakdown of the 2012 numbers shows important differences:

White (non-Hispanic)
0 …………………. 16.4
1 …………………. 19.2
2 …………………. 36.6
3 or more ……. 27.8

Hispanic
0 …………………. 10.0
1 …………………. 15.5
2 …………………. 28.7
3 or more ……. 44.9

Non-Hispanic white women were 64% more likely to be childless than Hispanic women, whereas Hispanic women were 61% more likely to have at least three children. Notice when you break it down this way:

White (non-Hispanic)
0 or 1 ………….. 35.6
2 or more ……. 64.4

Hispanic
0 or 1 ………….. 25.5
2 or more ……. 73.6

Considering so-called “replacement level” fertility (2 children per woman), we see that Hispanic women are 14% more likely to be at or above this level, whereas non-Hispanic white women are 40% more likely to be below replacement level. And if we look at the Census report’s data comparing U.S.-born women to immigrants, we find these numbers:

U.S.-born women, ages 40-50
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.93
Childless ………………………….. 17.2%

Immigrant women, ages 40-50
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.24
Childless ………………………….. 11.4%

So, immigrant women on average had 16% more children, and U.S-born women were 51% more likely to be childless. Now let’s break down the numbers by educational achievement:

Not a high school graduate
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.6
Childless ………………………….. 11.6%

Bachelor’s degree
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.8
Childless ………………………….. 19.9%

High-school dropouts, on average, had 44% more children than women who had college diplomas. Childlessness was 72% more common for college graduates than for high-school dropouts.

If you’ve studied population demographics, you realize that trends like these generally take decades to develop, and that finding cause-and-effect correlations is difficult. That is to say, people’s beliefs developed in childhood, their behavior as teenagers and the prevailing cultural trends in their young adult years will have an effect on whether they eventually have children. Today’s 40-year-old woman was born in 1975 and turned 18 in 1993, so if she is childless now, this necessarily implicates her choices and behaviors in the 1990s, as well as the belief system with which she was raised in the 1970s and ’80s.

Women’s behaviors are necessarily affected by men’s behaviors. If men are avoiding marriage and fatherhood — as Dr. Helen Smith’s Men on Strike documents — it will be more difficult for women to become wives and mothers. It may also be the case that men who might want to be husbands and fathers lack either the social skills or the financial resources needed to attract wives. Alternately, we may theorize that a general social climate of distrust and hostility between men and women make marriage and parenthood more problematic.

Studying demographic trends involves the complex interaction of multiple variables over time. However, it is important to note this: People make trends and not the other way around. That is to say, the individual is always free to act independently of the larger social trend, to swim against the demographic stream. You can make your own high-fertility subculture within a low-fertility society. My being a father of six is the result of beliefs and choices in the same way that other people become childless as the result of their own beliefs and choices.

People want to “fit in,” to have the approval of their peers and of the societ around them, and so being “conformed to this world” is the usual way of life. There is a prejudice I call “middle-classness,” which encourages young people to believe that they must have the credentials and accoutrements of middle-class life — college education, professional career, new cars, home ownership — or else be considered failures. This kind of concern for social status is perfectly understandable, yet in our striving for status (and encouraging our children to do the same) we can easily succumb to the kind of mentality that has produced the trend toward childlessness manifested in the latest Census Bureau report.

Did all these women decide to be childless? No.

If you could go back to 1993 to interview the 18-year-old who today is a childless 40-year-old, she likely would say she wanted to be a mother “someday,” under certain circumstances. However, those circumstances did not arise and thus “someday” never arrived.

The Contraceptive Culture encourages women (and men) to believe that fertility is entirely a matter of personal choice, but any fertility specialist will tell you this is a myth. The woman who has not become a mother by age 30 will have a significantly higher risk of experiencing infertility if and when she does try to become pregnant. And even if she has no medical problems with her reproductive health, the woman who delays motherhood past 30 will on average have fewer children in comparison to women who have their first child before they are 30.

Fertility delayed is fertility denied. Demographics is ultimately a matter of arithmetic, although the numbers involved represent human lives and the choices we make based on our own beliefs.

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

RELATED:





 

Category: Census, Contraceptive Culture, Family, Immigration, Marriage
« go back — keep looking »