The Other McCain

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

Seven 2015 Predictions

Posted on | January 2, 2015 | 13 Comments

by Smitty

I don’t know how much insulin Stacy is going to need to recover from the Sugar Bowl–he could be in shock for a while. I predict he’ll root for Oregon with me on the 12th, vengeful bloke that he is. We’ll savor Boehner’s tears for the Buckeyes together.

The NRO has a lengthy list of predictions for 2015. Let me bat cleanup on a few points I didn’t see covered:

  1. Oil prices remain depressed, taking the world economy to the edge of instability. Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela–fertilizer decorates global air circulators. Baleful Barack brings bronze bollocks; Tsar Putin triumphantly treads titanium testicle territory.
  2. Gruber, the ongoing ObamaCare implosion, and  old-fashioned shame cause Chief Justice Roberts to rule judiciously on King v. Burwell. The pearl-clutching, couch-fainting, and sheer epileptic hysteria of the Left reaches geosynchronous orbit. And then the hyperbole kicks in.
  3. The Republican Congress, in the most boring way possible, offers some useful health care reforms. The no-talent rodeo clown takes a break on the putting green and signs the legislation without speech or personal pronouns. The veto pen weeps ink everywhere. The weeping turns into a fountain when the GOP actually carries out the Congressional task of producing 2016’s spending legislation in a timely fashion. Recidivists.
  4. Her Majesty Hillary Rodham Clinton serves up a triple paradox, simultaneously:
    • The only one with the depth of experience needed to un-frack the Impatient Nonprotection & Unaffordable Carelessness Act,
    • The victim of #OccupyResoluteDesk’s foreign policy Hamlet impression during her tenure as  Secretary of State, and
    • This totally reborn, fresh grandmotherly face whose you’d cheerfully vote for you if you appreciate your private property and wouldn’t it be a shame if something tragic were to occur to yours so just  keep that in mind next year you wretched little peasant scum you know she’s been scheming since Watergate to be the first woman president and if you think that she’s isn’t cashing in her chips after letting that little creep from Hawaii win in 2008 then it may be time for a little “Foster” care for you if you know what I mean and I think you do.
  5. Jeb Bush hovers comfortably around 95% committed to running for POTUS. The base will continue to be all “Meh”. More inspirational Governors and Senators will patiently wait in the wings while the Vichy GOP gazes at its navel, pondering whether a re-run of 1992 in 2016 will be its final Whig moment. Sarah Palin offers to play Perot in pumps.
  6. Having closed out 2014 with agitation on Amnesty and Cuba, BHO keeps the hits coming, with executive actions on global anthropogenic climate warming change chaos. It’s really all a desperate, masochistic plea for impeachment, but sadistic Republicans say “No.” The GOP won’t take the bait unless the proximal cause is so obvious that even Debbie Wasserman-Schultz can’t equivocate, but everyone knows DWS outsources her integrity to Lena Dunham and Rolling Stone.
  7. China decides its had enough fannying about and gobbles up Taiwan. Americans are all “Formosa, what?” until they realize that this could mean an interruption in shipments of new ‘Droid- and iPhones, with results clocking in somewhere around here:

Category: Politics

They Get Paid to Make Tough Decisions

Posted on | January 1, 2015 | 26 Comments

You have to admire the work ethic of Twitchy staffers, who must have sorted through gigabytes of raving feminist lunacy to compile “The 10 dumbest Amanda Marcotte tweets of 2014.” Just a couple of representative Marcottean outbursts:

2015 prediction: Amanda Marcotte will keep making a fool of herself.

 

Category: Feminism

Anti-Police Rioters Storm Police Headquarters in St. Louis

Posted on | January 1, 2015 | 166 Comments

“Protesters”? No, this is what a riot looks like:

In what was slated as a peaceful “March to the Arch” by Ferguson demonstrators, more than two dozen people were arrested and pepper spray was used by police. The melee unfolded as protesters tried to storm the St. Louis Metropolitan Police headquarters building.
About seventy-five people marched through the downtown area and eventually went to police headquarters. There, with the building on lockdown, the group took the opportunity to rush an open door. Several people pushed in.
Upon entry, protesters read a list of demands to department officials. Those demands included a meeting with Chief Sam Dotson, Mayor Slay and Board of Aldermen President, Lewis Reed. They also requested an immediate termination of Officer’s Hayes and Flannery. They want amnesty for protesters who have been charged with non-violent offenses, the creation of a diverse Citizens Review Board with subpoena power and a seven day release of all information regarding police shootings, not limited to transparent release of all unedited videos and audio.

(Via Memeorandum.) These “protesters” are anti-democratic, pro-criminal anarchists. The city of St. Louis has an elected government, and the police are hired by that government to enforce law in the city. If a majority of the citizens are dissatisfied with their government, their laws or their police, they may make their grievances known at public meetings, or they may elect a new government.

What these “protests” are about is a lawless minority, who are in fact supporters of the city’s criminal element, attempting to impair law enforcement by creating public disturbances. Their liberal sympathizers in the media are enabling these advocates of anarchy by depicting the rioters as representatives of legitimate interests.

UPDATE: Daily Caller reports:

Mckesson’s videos show protesters walking in chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Later, they can be seen sitting on the floor, hands raised chanting, “No justice, no peace.” One video shows protesters fighting with officials to get through the doors while chanting, “This is what democracy looks like.”

No, this is what anarchy looks like.

This is what incipient fascism looks like. These are brownshirt tactics, representing a menace to public safety by dangerous people whose real goals have nothing to do with either “justice” or “peace.”

 

Category: Crime

Tips For Americans: Take Care Taking Tea To A Brit

Posted on | December 31, 2014 | 23 Comments

by Smitty

This is a quick bit of fun, and an excuse to try out Storify:

Category: Culture

The Left Is Unaware Of Its Tribalism?

Posted on | December 31, 2014 | 50 Comments

by Smitty

Gallagher at The American Interest:

Indeed, one of the chief causes behind the “Peak Left” moment that Walter Russell Mead addressed recently is leftist intellectuals’ inability to recognize that they, too, are a tribe.

Somewhere around the ObamaCare cramdown, I started toying with the theory that the Left (at least its Godless Commie core, if not the surrounding Useful Idiot mass) takes a pecca fortiter approach to its task of unwinding the Enlightenment.

Stipulating that tribalism is unavoidable,

  1. Be a rock solid tribe.
  2. Deny one’s tribalism.
  3. Accuse others of tribalistic behavior.

Once you grasp that denial of ultimate Truth has allowed the Left to indulge in infinite, recreational dishonesty for the sake of amassing short-term power, the last six years of American history come into sharp focus.

The test of American Exceptionalism will be finding a way to overcome the combustion of our values known as Progressivism.

via Instapundit

Category: Culture

Canada Mass Murder: Gunman Kills Eight, Commits Suicide in Edmonton

Posted on | December 31, 2014 | 28 Comments

His life was falling apart, the Daily Mail reports:

A crazed gunman killed six people — two of whom were children — then committed suicide in a Canadian town, police believe.
The man, thought to be 53-year-old Phu Lam, was found dead after an alleged rampage in which he attacked his victims in two different parts of Edmonton, Canada, before fleeing and taking his own life.
Police said that one of the victims was a young boy, and another was a young girl. They also found bodies belonging to four women and two men who were murdered.
One of the victims was named late Sunday as 37-year-old Cyndi Duong, who was killed at a separate home to the other seven. . . .
Edmonton police chief Rob Knecht called the attacks a ‘senseless mass murder’, which he said was a result of domestic violence.
He later described the killings, carried out with a 9mm handgun which was stolen eight years ago, as ‘planned and deliberate’ and said they were the city’s worst mass killings since 1956.
He added the man was well-known to police and had a criminal record dating back to September 1987. . . .
Duong shared the home where she was found dead with David Luu, 41, according to property records viewed by the Edmonton Journal.
Further records reportedly showed the home where seven more bodies were found is owned by Phu Lam and a 35-year-old woman named as Thuy-Tien Truong. According to the Journal, Truong was sued by the Royal Bank in 2013 and Lam filed a bankruptcy proposal in the same year.

The Edmonton Journal‘s article about the victims gives some hint of the problems that led to this horrific event. What needs to be explained is why Lam, despite his criminal record, was not in prison.

 

Category: Canada, Crime

Lena Dunham, Liar

Posted on | December 31, 2014 | 211 Comments

The headline at the Daily Caller:

Gawker Thinks They Found
Lena Dunham’s Alleged Rapist
… And He’s A Democrat

The interesting thing about the Gawker story by J.K. Trotter is that Trotter seems to have the idea that he is vindicating Dunham and discrediting Dunham’s conservative critics. Her published account — which identified a Republican named “Barry” as having raped her — was exposed as fraudulent by John Nolte of Breitbart.com, and Dunham was forced to apologize. Yet, Trotter’s story at Gawker insists that Dunham actually was raped while at Oberlin College:

The 2012 proposal for Not That Kind of Girl recounted the same night of unwanted unprotected sex — and supplied enough specific biographical detail to identify the man being described.
His name is Philip Samuel Ungar, a 2006 graduate of Oberlin. Now 30, he’s the son of former All Things Considered host and retired Goucher College president Sanford J. Ungar. Dunham has never explicitly named him, but his biography closely aligns with her characterization of her alleged rapist—“His father was actually the former host of NPR’s All Things Considered” — in an early draft of the chapter where she describes being assaulted.

Whether or not Philip Ungar is a rapist, he is evidently a liberal Democrat, not a conservative Republican, so if Gawker’s story is correct, this has only further damaged Dunham’s credibility, exposing her as having engaged in a deliberate partisan smear.

There is no such thing as partial credibility. Once a source has proven that they are willing to lie — deliberately and consciously — they lose all credibility, and Dunham has proven herself a liar.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

If Lena Dunham says Philip Ungar is a rapist? This means Philip Ungar is probably a nice guy, even if he is a liberal Democrat.

 

Category: Celebrities, Feminism

Weird #GamerGate Angle: ‘Emotional Fulfillment Through Love of a Robot’?

Posted on | December 30, 2014 | 75 Comments

What’s the most hateful stereotype of videogamers? That they are losers, retreating into a fantasy world as psychological compensation for their real-life failures. It’s kind of like the stereotype of feminists as ugly women who are angry because men don’t like them.

As we view the #GamerGate controversy, then, it’s interesting to see how these two groups interact. Of course, the liberal media have sided with the feminists — because ugly angry women vote Democrat — which means that conservatives are obligated to defend the videogamers. So it’s easy for me to decide which side I’m on, even though I haven’t been “into” videogames since I was a college junior feeding quarters into the Pac Man machine at the Red Rooster Pub. Also, fighting feminists on the #GamerGate front doesn’t mean I agree with every argument made by everyone else fighting feminists on the same front.

Which brings us to this comment, apparently from a gamer, naming feminist anti-gamer Anita Sarkeesian and . . . well, it’s weird:

As ridiculous as my statement is going to sound, I’m pretty sure that Anita [Sarkeesian] is trying to prevent us from experiencing the joys of 2D women. The kind of joys man Japanese men who’ve rejected the pig disgusting ways of 3D women already have.
There is nothing more frightening to these feminists than the idea of a man finding emotional fulfillment through love of a robot, or the idea of woman as opposed to an actual woman. Most of society is set up to shame men who don’t fall in line, also fall in love with a woman. Men who haven’t been approved by women are deemed other, and rejected from society.
The future waifus, and the Hatsune Miku occulus rift sex experiences take away one of feminism and women’s powerful weapons over the male gender. Their dominance over sexuality.
Once man is freed from the institutional forces which oppress him, and force him to find purpose in the approval of women, he will be free to pursue his own dreams.
Finally men will have no need to fight over women, as they will have something that replaces them the same way robots have replaced the male industrial work force of the world. Wars will be ended, and we will achieve world peace.
The masculine will be set free, allowed full creativity, and the world will enter a new enlightened age. We will explore Mars, Jupiter, and the furthers reaches of our solar system. Male and female will be united, working together towards a better future for humanity.
But only if we can free ourselves first.

Like I said, it’s weird, and some have speculated it may be a parody. Yet assume, arguendo, that this is an actual comment by an actual person who actually thinks that way. He is defending his own enjoyment of “2D women” — including animated characters and sex robots — by arguing that men are escaping oppression from “institutional forces” by their retreat into fantasy relationships.

Notice that the commenter uses the term waifu, which refers to a “fictional character . . . typically [in] an anime, manga, or video game” that a fan “is attracted to and considers a significant other.” This blurring of the line between fantasy and reality should raise alarms to any student of psychology, yet it is increasingly common. There are people for whom the characters in movies or TV shows are the most important people in their lives. There are fan sites devoted to, say, Harry Potter films or Orange Is the New Black, and some of these online fan communities have hundreds of members. Likewise, there are numerous sites devoted to Japanese anime series, where the members post their own drawings of the characters or write “fanfic” storylines.

The retreat into fantasy is increasingly common, as is the kind of blurring between fantasy and reality where fictional characters have a tremendous emotional significance for fans. This is really nothing new, nor is the phenomenon limited to males. Think about women who are obsessive fans of soap operas or romance novels, for example. Or think about people who are involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, which began with Diana Paxson and Marion Zimmer Bradley, both influential early figures in the feminist neopagan movement. It would be hard to find a more perfect example of a retreat into fantasy — escapist regression — than people whose devotion to Arthurian legend leads them to spend their weekends dressed up in medieval costume, or feminists whose rejection of modernity leads them to witchcraft rituals with groups like the Covenant of the Goddess or the Reclaiming Collective.

OK, some guys are introverted and socially awkward or are otherwise disadvantaged vis-à-vis the pursuit of female companionship. From the perspective of such a male, he is “rejected from society” because he is not “approved by women.” From his perspective, female “dominance over sexuality” (their ability to refuse relationships with “undesirable” males like him) is among the “institutional forces which oppress him.”

Does that sound crazy? Yes. Is it crazier than the radical feminism of Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn Frye and Joyce Trebilcot? No.

The difference between these two varieties of craziness, however, is that being an advocate of radical feminist insanity is socially approved. There are some 90,000 U.S. college students being tutored in Women’s Studies classes taught by fanatical ideologues who have been rewarded with prestigious degrees and faculty tenure for their skill in articulating feminist lunacy. Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency “is a 501(c)3 non profit charity,” contributions to which are tax deductible.

By contrast, opposition to feminism is effectively forbidden within academia (Larry Summers was forced to resign from Harvard University after he dared to question feminist dogma), and the organizational resources available to critics of feminism are scattered across a handful of conservative groups, none of which gets the kind of enthusiastic publicity that feminists like Sarkeesian get from the mainstream media. When A Voice for Men held a conference this year, they were harassed by feminists accusing them of being a hate group.

Given the remarkable cultural hegemony of feminism, and the consequent marginalization of feminism’s critics, should we be surprised to find that some disadvantaged males are unable to articulate their personal grievances without sounding crazy? No, this is not the least bit surprising. The fundamental goal of feminism is to deprive males of social support, to reallocate society’s resources in such a way as to disadvantage men in order to create “equality,” a term feminists define to suit themselves. And it is here, as we examine feminism’s ultimate objectives, that we discover their totalitarian purposes.

No amount of actual “equality” shall ever satisfy feminists and any attempt to placate them is doomed to fail for the same reason that Neville Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler at Munich did not result in “peace for our time.” Once he had the Sudetenland, Hitler next annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, which was the prelude for agitation about the Danzig Corridor, precipitating the blitzkrieg of Poland. Hitler’s ambition of world conquest could never be satisfied by any partial concession the Western democracies might make, because his ambitions included the destruction of Western democracy, per se.

The same is true of feminism, an anti-democratic totalitarian movement that is no less fanatically committed to the destruction of Western civilization than was Hitler himself. No matter how fluently feminists may speak the language of democracy, their campaigns to silence opposition betray their totalitarian purposes, and it is not difficult to find evidence of their limitless appetite for conquest. Women are now 33% more likely than men to earn four-year college degrees, but has this de facto female supremacy in academia put an end to feminist demands? Of course not. Instead, we find feminists claiming (despite all evidence to the contrary) that women are experiencing a “rape epidemic” on college campuses, manufacturing phony statistics to support their anti-male propaganda, and perpetrating the Rolling Stone gang-rape hoax at the University of Virginia — feminism’s very own “Reichstag fire,” with the role of Marinus van der Lubbe played by “Haven Monahan.”

None of this analysis relates directly to the comment by the male who retreats to a waifu fantasy or dreams of “finding emotional fulfillment through love of a robot,” perceiving actual women as “institutional forces which oppress him.” Clearly, such a perspective reflects psychiatric disturbances analogous to the delusions of “PIV is always rape, OK?” Yet a clear understanding of what feminism actually is helps us understand why so many young men are unable to find effective help for their problems. Feminism’s implacable anti-male hostility excludes the possibility that any man could ever deserve help or sympathy.

Feminism is essentially a philosophical justification of merciless sadism, encouraging women to believe that males deserve nothing but humiliation and destruction, to avenge injuries suffered by women. Feminists thus demand as women’s most fundamental right the incessant slaughter of unborn children (more than a million abortions are performed every year in the United States), the death of innocents being the bloody tribute of their hateful revenge. Feminists denounce motherhood and marriage as oppressive to women, because they believe any woman’s fulfillment of the roles of wife and mother can be possible only by her subjugation under male domination.

No sane man would seek “emotional fulfillment through love of a robot,” but as insane as that is, it’s really no more crazy than a man pursuing emotional fulfillment through love of a feminist.

To see a dishonest hate-monger like Anita Sarkeesian celebrated as an intellectual, and to see a perverted freak like Brianna Wu similarly celebrated as an icon of heroic womanhood, surely must cause honest and rational observers to conclude the world has gone mad.

Insanity has now become so pervasive that perhaps the only question people need to ask themselves is, “What kind of crazy am I?”





 

 

 

Category: Feminism
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