The Other McCain

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

Rule 5 Sunday: Bowls, Boobs And Other Entertainments

Posted on | December 28, 2014 | 17 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Well, here we are at the last Rule 5 Sunday post for 2014. Thanks to everyone who submitted links throughout the year!

A welcome relief from politics and other insanity.


It’s interesting to note that as we look back through this year’s FMJRAs, there have been many weeks in which the Rule 5 Sunday posts lead the pack in terms of links, despite* the meaty fare of culture, crime and politics** provided every week here at The Other McCain, the true spiritual heir to the mantle of the late lamented Police Gazette. I am genuinely humbled by this and cannot thank people enough for the support. Now for the bad news – while there are plenty of boobs in the links below, there is little and possibly no content related to the ongoing college football bowls. So here’s a gal in a Calgary Flames jersey instead.

Expedient college football bowl substitute.


As usual, some of the following links are to pix generally considered NSFW, so exercise discretion when you click.


Leading off this last post for the year is Average Bubba with some pre-Christmas Rule 5, followed by Goodstuff with Lily Cole, Ninety Miles from Tyranny with the Hot Pick Christmas Edition, Morning Mistress for Christmas,  and Girls with Guns – Look What She Found Under The Christmas Tree! Animal Magnetism has the Post-Christmas Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, Loose Endz has Double Barreled Rule 5 Fun, and First Street Journal departs from his usual military interests to give us the women of the NYPD.


EBL’s thundering herd this week includes some Winter Solstice Rule 5, the Wanton Women of Wangbu, Mandy Rice-Davies (RIP), Mattress Girl, Darlene Love, Postmodern Jukebox Christmas, Diana Bang, Miss Planned Parenthood America, Furries, Rams v. Seahawks, and Turning Japanese.

A View from the Beach brings us A Greek Tragedy with Maria Menounos?, “Love Me Two Times”, Merry Christmas, 2014, The Wombat’s Christmas Eve News Feed, Not Even Close (cave girl), Naughty and Nice, Wombat’s Monday News Fodder, Rosie Jones Christmas Special, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, and Redskins to Pluck Eagles?

Postaldog returns with a triple dip of Maitland Ward, Charli XCX, and Nikki Sims.

Soylent Siberia serves up the coffee creamer, then it’s on to the Soylent Solstice Spassfabrik, Monday Motivationer Cassidy, Think Pink, When In Rome, Evening Awesome Nicole, Humpday Hawt Pussycat Pussycat, Christmas Eve Spassfabrik, Corset Friday Spassfabrik, T-GIF Friday Drop And Give Me…, Fiery Formal, and Bath Night Shower Scene.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Emily Wickersham, Sex in Advertising is covered by Victoria’s Secret, there’s a bevy of Vintage Christmas Babes, and of course the obligatory 49ers cheerleader. At Dustbury, it’s Emma Watson and Des’ree.

Thanks again to everyone for the linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for the first Rule 5 post of the new year is midnight Saturday, January 3.

*Or perhaps because?
**But I repeat myself. Or do I?


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Category: Rule 5

Feminism: Equality in Misery

Posted on | December 28, 2014 | 142 Comments

Miriam Mogilevsky (@sondosia) is allegedly a human being, although manifestly lacking in empathy and filled with a hateful appetite for sadistic revenge, which is to say she is a feminist. Her numerous efforts to destroy civilization include her advocacy of atheism, because those who hate humanity usually begin by hating God. She developed advanced skills in intellectual perversion at Northwestern University and is now working on her master’s degree in spiteful evil at Columbia.

If my description of Ms. Mogilevsky seems tendentious or perhaps even unfairly pejorative, it is because I’ve decided to adopt her own practices, as evidenced by her column on “affirmative consent”:

This fall, the new affirmative consent law in California, which requires all universities that receive state funding to adopt definitions of consent that translate roughly to “only yes means yes” rather than simply “no means no,” reignited a number of age-old debates about the meaning of consent and sexual assault. One of them is the claim that anti-rape advocacy is attempting to redefine perfectly good sex as rape, and that in this new climate, men cannot ever be safe from being accused of rape no matter how careful they are. . . .

(Translation: Anyone worried about this is paranoid.)

I’ve heard these sorts of remarks too. “I don’t even bother asking women out now,” or “I haven’t had sex for years because I’m scared they’ll call me a rapist.” I feel sad for these men who clearly want sexual intimacy but feel that they have no choice to give it up. And I also feel angry, because this is not what we’ve been saying, and yet they insist that we’re telling them they can’t have sex at all. . . .

(Actually, “we” — that is to say, feminists — have been saying exactly this for decades, as Ms. Mogilevsky would have to admit if she weren’t so disingenuous about her own anti-male ideology.)

I don’t want anyone to be lonely, insecure, and sexually unfulfilled. I don’t want anyone who wants to have sex to be unable to have it. I want everyone to have the confidence to pursue and find the types of relationships they’re interested in. I want everyone to feel worthy and valuable even if they haven’t found a partner yet.
But I also want people to pursue all of this ethically. That means that if you’re ever unsure if someone is consenting, you stop and ask. And if you don’t think you are able to do that, then you should abstain from sex until you are able to do it.

You can read the rest of that exercise in deliberate dishonesty, but let’s pause to notice how Ms. Mogilevsky attributes legitimate concerns about a real danger — false accusations of rape — to men being “lonely, insecure, and sexually unfulfilled.” In other words, feminists have expended enormous effort to terrorize college men with these threats of spurious rape accusations, but if men react rationally to the threat, Ms. Mogilevsky will attribute this to the psychological weakness of males. The sadist revels in the belief that her victims are pathetic and helpless.

Despite her youth, Ms. Mogilevsky has spent years promoting the idea that others are in need of her sexual instruction. In a 2012 column for the student newspaper at Northwestern University, she delivered an unhelpful sermon about “hookup culture”:

Sure, there’s a chance you’ll go to a party one night and meet someone who just happens to like having sex the exact same way you do, but it’s a pretty small chance.
Those lucky people can probably skip the rest of this column, but the rest of us should remember that you can’t get what you want if you don’t ask for it.
Unfortunately, expressing yourself clearly isn’t easy when you’re slurring your words, which brings me right to my next point: In order for hooking up to be safe and fun, we need to stop depending on alcohol as a social lubricant. . . .
I don’t think that casual sex is intrinsically wrong, unhealthy or dangerous. I do think, however, that most of us are going about it the wrong way. For those people who want no-strings-attached sex, hookup culture could be a great thing — just not the hookup culture that we currently have.

Ms. Mogilevsky was active in SHAPE (Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators) at Northwestern, and is eager to lecture others, as she writes in her recent column about “affirmative consent”:

I wish I could explain consent to all of these men. I wish they could attend one of my workshops about consent, where I help people learn to understand body language, find language to help them ask for and give consent, and show how these skills apply to all areas of life, not just sex.

You see, college men? Your problem is not that you might be falsely accused of rape because you hooked up with a drunk chick whose morning-after regrets morphed into a plan for revenge. Rather, your problem is that you haven’t been lectured by Miriam Mogilevsky.

Only after she has expended a few hundred words about men’s allegedly irrational fear of false rape accusations does Ms. Mogilevsky finally admit how much she enjoys inspiring such fear:

It is possible that someone who doesn’t have to face a high likelihood of being sexually assaulted feels subjectively as bad when they imagine the possibility of “accidentally” assaulting someone as I feel when I imagine the possibility of being assaulted (on purpose).
But for me, personally, the fear of being assaulted is so much worse. . . .
This is why I am glad that men are starting to feel that surmountable fear. I don’t want them to live in terror. I don’t want them to avoid sex out of fear. (That would be how the other half lives.) I do want them to accept their fair share of the responsibility, though. And yes, that means more fear than they may be used to.

Ah, here we have it at last: Fear and Loathing of the Penis!

This existential dread of masculinity has evidently become pandemic among certain sensitive young feminists in recent years, and I’m not sure why, although I suspect it has something to do with the brutal porn-influenced appetites that seem to have taken hold among some young men. Yes, let’s just go ahead and talk about this unfortunate reality:

Due in part to what they see in pornography, teenage boys have no qualms coercing young women into having anal sex, according to a new study, with some of these encounters possibly crossing the line into rape.
Researchers interviewed 130 men and women aged 16–18 from diverse social backgrounds in three different locations in England. The report, published last month, states that young people “frequently cited pornography as the ‘explanation’ for [engaging in] anal sex,” although masculine competition between boys to see who could engage in the activity the most often also played a role.
They found a “key element” in this risky new behavior is the “normalization of coercion and ‘accidental’ penetration. It seemed that men were expected to persuade or coerce reluctant partners.” . . .
Experts say the new research adds to a growing body of evidence that young people, influenced by pornography, are eager to try out the techniques they see online, often with little empathy or regard for the other person’s well-being.

This is obviously a serious problem, but feminists find themselves compelled to avoid confronting the problem directly because:

  1. Criticizing pornography, per se, might result in feminists losing the financial and political support of organizations like the ACLU and the Democrat Party that have long been allied with the pornography industry;
    and
  2. Criticizing anal sodomy, per se, would put in jeopardy feminism’s de facto alliance with gay rights activists whose lifestyle involves the avid pursuit of this practice.

We therefore find that the spread of porn culture has made it something of a competitive sport for young males to inflict upon women a particularly painful sort of degradation, yet feminists dare neither to criticize porn not to criticize specifically the type of assault they most fear. The result? A lot of vague talk about the importance of “consent” and the need to learn “skills” in negotiating sexual activity.

Tell you what: I’m just going to link this first-person account about how such “negotiation” works in real life, so you can click that link, read her story and then join me in deploring the normalization of such activity. And here is feminist Meghan Murphy’s testimony:

My first boyfriend was pissed that I wouldn’t have anal sex with him. Not just because he, you know, wanted to try out all the super sexy things he’d learned watching porn, but because I’d done it before — with other guyswho weren’t him. No fair, amirite?
The fact that the whole, entire reason I wouldn’t have anal sex with him was because I’d tried it already with a couple of other guys and the experience ranged from completely boring and unpleasurable to extremely painful eluded him. My pleasure wasn’t the point. The point was 1) No fair, wah! (i.e. why did other men “get” something he didn’t), 2) The thought of emulating something he masturbated to in porn turned him on, 3) Possible pleasure for him . . .

You can read the rest of that, which must have been embarrassing for Ms. Murphy to admit, but such frankness is preferable to the veil of euphemistic obscurity that has concealed from honest discussion exactly why college women seem so angry about men and sex, an anger that helps fuel the “rape epidemic” hysteria that leads to “affirmative consent” policies and a phony Rolling Stone story about a freshman girl being raped atop a pile of broken glass by a gang of Phi Kappa Psi brothers led by the non-existent “Haven Monahan.”

HEY, YOU IDIOTS: STOP DOING GIRLS IN THE BUTT.

There, I said it. No matter how much porn performers may make anal sex seem like the ultimate in pleasure, it’s not, at least not for normal people. All evidence suggests that college girls are as willing now as at any previous moment in human history to engage in normal sex. The problem, however, is that some college guys have become bored with normal sex — perhaps because it is so widely available — and are therefore seeking thrills by coercing college girls into abnormal sex.

Exactly how are we to fix this problem? How is “affirmative consent” supposed to work? When a college guy meets a college girl at a party, should they have a loud and explicit conversation about what they’re going to do together — making sure that there are witnesses to their sexual agreement — before they leave the party? Can you imagine the testimony at the ensuing university discipline hearing if she claims he broke their agreement? The dude’s fraternity brothers can be expected to testify that the girl agreed in advance to the activity she claims was non-consensual, while her sorority sisters will testify that she’s not that kind of girl and would never voluntarily do such a thing.

The attempt to enforce “affirmative consent” policies should certainly provide amusement for university officials forced to listen to this kind of testimony, although perhaps some administrators will find it sad and ironic. Here is this intelligent girl with an excellent SAT score and a near-perfect GPA tearfully insisting that after guzzling booze at a party she had no idea that the guy who invited her to his dorm room intended to have sex with her. Then here is the guy, also with a high SAT score and a near-perfect GPA, saying that he has no idea why this girl is so angry at him just because — oops! — he accidentally put it in the wrong hole. Also, he didn’t reply to her text message the next day, so now she’s telling everybody he’s a rapist, which could put a damper on his social life.

It’s difficult for me to muster much sympathy for either the guys or girls in these predictable “he-said, she-said” situations, but I have exactly zero sympathy for an inhuman monster like Miriam Mogilevsky. Anybody who can afford to attend Northwestern University (annual tuition $47,251) is too rich to demand sympathy from me, even if she wasn’t a hate-filled atheist. But her sadistic glee at the thought of inspiring fear in men was certainly enough to earn my complete contempt:

When I first read that Bloomberg piece about waning “hookup culture,” my initial reaction was, honestly, to shrug. Let them be scared. Let them avoid sex and intimacy. I’ve certainly done that because I was afraid of sexual assault.

Yet she must add to such injury the insult of pretended sympathy:

[Men] seem afraid because they still don’t understand that their female partners are human beings with their own subjective experiences, experiences that they would do well to listen to and try to understand.
I don’t want men to live in fear. I don’t want men to stop flirting with women and asking for their number. I don’t want men to start refusing sex with eager, consenting women because what if they’re actually lying and not consenting.
I want them to listen to us. I want them to respect our agency. I want them to let us write the story together with them, rather than writing each chapter themselves and then handing it to us to read, perhaps accepting some critique if they are especially gracious.

“Hell hath no fury,” et cetera. We should never wish ill on people, and must be content to know how unlikely it is that anything good could ever happen to someone as hatefully dishonest as Miriam Mogilevsky.





 

 

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism

FMJRA 2.0: Day Late & A Root Boy Slim Short

Posted on | December 28, 2014 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Winter Solstice Edition
Political Rift
Animal Magnetism
Batshit Crazy News
Average Bubba
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

Merry Christmas, Haters
Cragin Media
Inoperable Terran
Granite Grok
The DaleyGator
Batshit Crazy News

Cop-Hater Kills Two Cops in Brooklyn Ambush; NY Times Obfuscates Motive
Batshit Crazy News
Political Rift

Feminism’s New Enemy: ‘Rape Truthers’
The Pirate’s Cove

FMJRA 2.0: For The Northern Lights, And The Southern Comfort
Batshit Crazy News
The Pirate’s Cove

Also: ‘Shut Up, Because Rape’
Cragin Media
Batshit Crazy News

Mandatory Reading: “Collectivism and the Presumption of Guilt”
Batshit Crazy News

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.22.14
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

Military Reform: A Key @GOP 2016 Issue
Batshit Crazy News

No, Actually, You Don’t
The Lonely Conservative
Political Rift
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach

He’s German, and a Feminist
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 12.23.14
Batshit Crazy News
Regular Right Guy

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.24.14
Batshit Crazy News
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

She Never Fails to Amaze
Political Rift
Cragin Media
Batshit Crazy News
Dustbury

‘The Worst in Demagoguery’
Batshit Crazy News

Feminist Amateur Hour
Batshit Crazy News
Dalrock

A 21st-Century Feminist Family
Political Rift
Batshit Crazy News

Set Aside All Traditional Modes Of Argument, And The Left Does Make Sense
Batshit Crazy News

Feminist Logic
Batshit Crazy News

Worse Than Dinkins
Batshit Crazy News

The Fraternity Initiation Rape Story
Batshit Crazy News
Political Rift

No, The Homo Bureaucratus Infestation Is Not A Representative Sample
Batshit Crazy News

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (21)
  2.  Political Rift (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for the first FMJRA of the new year will be noon on Saturday, January 3.


Category: FMJRA Award

Sarah Palin Is Doing A Far Better Job Of Not Running For President Than Jeb Bush

Posted on | December 28, 2014 | 22 Comments

by Smitty

She seems to be having a much better effect on actual conservatives in office than His Jebness:

Governor Palin endorsed 22 candidates for various offices during the midterm finals, including senators, governors, lieutenant governors, congressmen, and attorneys general. Of those so endorsed, an incredible 20 were elected – contrasted with, for example, Hillary Clinton’s record of 8 wins out 24 endorsed candidates.

Beyond the success of her endorsed candidates lies a much deeper reason for Palin being seen as “Achiever of the Year”: those Palin endorsed in their respective primaries who then went on to win the general election battles. As in the past with, among others, senators Ted Cruz, Kelly Ayotte, and Deb Fischer, and Governor Nikki Haley, who owe their elections in their primary campaigns to Palin’s endorsement at a critical juncture, so too could new senators Ben Sasse and Joni Ernst, and new Alaska governor Bill Walker (and, remarkably, his Democrat lieutenant governor Byron Mallott) be considered to owe all or a substantial part of their nominations to Palin’s endorsement.

For all her detractors’ cries of “irrelevance” and “she’s just a reality show entertainer” (those two being among the nicer epithets), Palin goes on, election cycle after election cycle, populating Congress with her endorsed candidates in a cost-effective manner, and in such numbers that the likes of Karl Rove with his 1% success rate can surely view only with hidden admiration, if not downright envy.

She seems an acknowledged ambassador to the conservative base:

If former Alaska Gov. and 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin enters the 2016 presidential election, she will face stiff competition from a wide field of qualified Republican candidates. However, she may face greater challenges from her numerous detractors, especially those in the liberal media whose vitriol towards Palin knows no bounds.

Many believe that Palin is most powerful as a conservative spokesperson who has a remarkable ability to motivate and inspire her base. In fact, she has been confirmed as a speaker at the Iowa Freedom Summit in January 2015. She will be joined by at least nine GOP presidential hopefuls and whether her purpose at the event is to motivate or throw her hat in the election ring is uncertain.

It remains to be seen if the base’s contempt for the Vichy GOP can be overcome by dread of Her Majesty, the way the dread of the Goreacle led to (barely) enough support for a Republican “triumph” in 2000. All I can say is that I’m not voting for another Bush. Should Sarah Palin opt to run (and, in all candor, I’m more of a Scott Walker fan) she could well play the Ross Perot role in a Bush/Clinton ’92 re-run.

And I don’t care, Rove. You and any other Progressive jackwagons on the False Choice Express can tell me that failure to vote for candidate B is really a vote for candidate C. Screw you, to the wall, with a large diameter drill. IF the Vichy GOP foist Jeb on the base, AND we suffer eight years  of Her Majesty, it’s YOUR flipping fault for  nominating the chap.

I don’t actually bear any personal animus toward Jeb. I’m just not playing along with this anti-American dynastic noise. The argument that the Commies are cheerfully doing so via Her Majesty is strangely non-compelling. If Jeb wants to earn some respect, how about calmly announcing that he’s declining a run in a few months, and offering his talents in service of his country a la the Koch brothers, and funding outfits like Heritage and AFP? Such a move would do more to advance the needed  reforms in this country than actually running for the sake of polishing his ego.

I cannot support Jeb at all. I could support Sarah, in the same vein I supported Romney in 2012. I’d sooner support a third attempt at POTUS from Ward Cleaver than I would seeing Jeb on the ticket. No, no, a thousand nos, and again: get lost with the dynastic politics => “CNN/ORC Poll: Bush surges to 2016 GOP frontrunner”

via Hot Air and Instapundit

Update: Memeorandum thread

Category: Hot Air, Instapundit, Republicans, Sarah Palin

True Love Is Always an Exception

Posted on | December 28, 2014 | 11 Comments

“She was 15 and he was 28 and her teacher at the Ferrer Modern School in New York, when they met, and married, in 1913.”

That sentence, from the 1981 obituary of Ariel Durant, is an important historic note to keep in mind when considering prohibitions against professors dating their students. Kelly Anders, an administrator at the University of California-Davis, writes at Prawfs Blog:

In several law schools where I have worked, there are professors or employees who are happily married to former students, whom they began to date while they were students. Perhaps schools turn a blind eye because law students are adults — in contrast to undergraduate students — and, in theory, they are thus freer to make decisions about whom to date, much like people who date co-workers. But what about unwanted attention or a perceived inability to say no?

The reference to “unwanted attention,” of course, brings us onto the legal battleground of sexual harassment. It has always struck me as absurd that anyone could be expected to know their attention was “unwanted” prior to actually expressing that attention. It is one thing if Employee A continues to make overtures toward Employee B after the latter has made clear that the interest is not reciprocated, but it is not rarely the case — and one hears horror stories about these cases — that the very first attempt at flirtation lights the fuse on a powder keg of resentment that leads to a sexual harassment complaint.

One typical scenario is that you have a male and female who are friendly co-workers until the moment when the male says or does something to indicate that he would be interested in being more than friends. This suggestion — and it may be conveyed indirectly, by a joke or a gesture — suffices to poison the friendship, at least from the female’s perspective. She had believed her workplace friendship with this man to be a strictly platonic and professional relationship. The moment he hints at a romantic interest, however, she suspects that the whole “friendship” was just an angle, a scam, a Trojan Horse ploy to get close to her so he could make his move. She feels deceived and betrayed, and perhaps rightly so. But if you are familiar with how sexual harassment complaints are handled, you see how what is basically a personal misunderstanding can turn into a Kafkaesque nightmare, where a guy finds himself accused of a civil rights violation for what seems to him entirely innocuous behavior.

In some cases with which I am familiar, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the complainant is just an opportunist looking for an easy payday, because it has become standard practice in corporate policy — and everybody knows this — to pay “go-away money” to sexual harassment complainants. Basically, if a woman can make a remotely plausible claim of discrimination or harassment, and she has any evidence at all (e.g., a rudely worded e-mail) to support her claim, the lawyers will always advise clients to settle the case. It doesn’t matter if the woman suffered no actual harm, or if the person accused of harassment insists his innocent actions have been unfairly interpreted. The cost of defending against a discrimination suit is simply an expense no company wants to pay, and so standard practice: Pay the complainant a lump sum (usually a year’s salary) in exchange for her leaving the company and signing an agreement not to pursue further litigation.

Everybody in business knows this kind of stuff happens and, because everybody knows it, the potential threat of a sexual harassment complaint casts a large shadow over the 21st-century workplace. It is not merely that male-female interactions tend to become almost ritualistic in their androgynous formality — for no male with half a brain would dare even acknowledge a female co-worker is female — but that every managerial decision has to be second-guessed as to whether it might inadvertently suggest discrimination against females. A sort of tokenism creeps into personnel decisions. If the last two employees you hired or promoted were male, the next time you have an opening there will be a certain amount of pressure to hire or promote a female in the name of “diversity.” And there are innumerable ripple effects of that mentality.

We return, then, to what Kelly Anders says about law professors dating their students. One reason for my low opinion of academia in general is my knowledge of ulterior motives of the “permanent student.”

Well do I remember from my own college days those graduate students who had apparently realized that staying in school forever — which seemed to involve a lot of time hanging out at the off-campus pub — provided them with sexual access to a continually renewed supply of undergraduate females. The graduate teaching assistant, or the newly-minted Ph.D. striving to attain tenure, was quite often involved in furtive affairs with students. These affairs were seldom entirely secret; friends of the students involved would at least suspect what was happening, even if the student did not tell them; and rumors about such affairs fostered widespread suspicion of favoritism. Any reasonably attractive female student who seemed friendly with a male instructor was presumed to be either having an affair with him, or else dangling the bait in front of him with the hope of getting a better grade.

When “male feminist” Professor Hugo Schwyzer was revealed to be a womanizing psychopath, I was not really surprised, and I suspect similar (but not so egregious) behavior is far more common among university faculty than is generally acknowledged. As far as I know, for example, I’m the only journalist who noticed that Professor Lisa Johnson apparently married a “butch” lesbian who was formerly her student.

Anyway, Professor Glenn Reynolds says about the student-professor dating question: “The interesting discussion is in the comments,” and I will quote some of those comments here:

Professors should not date students. Schools, including law schools, should forbid this behavior, full stop. . . .

My official stance is that faculty and students should not date — period. . . . Regardless of age, students are students, and the teacher-student relationship should be held in the highest esteem, without being diluted or prejudiced by non-professional (and unprofessional) feelings. . . .

No one should think he/she has a right to use the workplace for romantic pursuits, and in a situation of older adults having authority over younger ones, there are lots of potential issues that could arise which would complicate consent issues. . . .

I agree with those comments, and view with profound suspicion anyone who is arguing to the contrary. A policy that generally forbids romantic involvement between faculty and students makes sense in so many ways that you have to wonder why anyone would be trying to carve out loopholes and exceptions in such a wise policy. However . . .

There are cases which seem genuinely exceptional, and the amazing love story between Will and Ariel Durant is one of those. Where these truly exceptional cases occur, there is no need to create a loophole in a policy that generally forbids faculty-student romance, because even if the faculty member were immediately fired under such circumstances, this would seem a small price to pay to have obtained true love. And I think that’s really the appropriate standard: If you really love somebody in that happily-ever-after way, you’d quit your job to be with them if the rules of your job stood in the way.

 

Category: Education

‘Operation Stalk My Girlfriend’

Posted on | December 28, 2014 | 10 Comments

Kevin D. Williamson has a column about NSA employees who were caught using the agency’s surveillance technology for personal purposes:

Thanks to a Christmas Eve document dump, we learn that agents of the National Security Agency, the spookiest spooks in all our vast spookocracy, are a bunch of stalkers, using the effectively boundless surveillance powers of their organization to spy on husbands and wives, overseas girlfriends, and sundry romantic partners. . . .
In a free and open society, there is a generally unspoken understanding between the citizens and the intelligence forces: We the people understand that they’re going to necessarily conduct themselves in a nefarious fashion from time to time, bending or breaking some laws along the way. We know this: That’s what spies do, being a necessary evil that is no less evil for being so acutely necessary. The spooks’ end of the bargain is: being good at what they do, not comporting themselves like a bunch of jackasses, and getting really bendy with the situational ethics only when doing so advances some legitimate national-security interest. Operation Mincemeat we can live with; Operation Stalk My Girlfriend we cannot. . . .

Read the whole thing. Kevin’s a brilliant writer.

 

Category: Corruption, Crime

Your Future (or Lack Thereof)

Posted on | December 27, 2014 | 60 Comments

“Male and female created he them” (Genesis 5:2) seems obvious enough. “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) is not a difficult commandment to understand or obey. However, in the modern world, so many people actually think they’re smarter than God that they manage to persuade themselves that extinction is “progress”:

A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged 16–24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.” For women, it was 45 percent…
Forty-nine percent of women under 34 are not in any kind of romantic relationship, and nor are 61 percent of single men. A third of Japanese adults under 30 have never dated. Anyone. Ever. It’s not that they’ve stopped “having sex”… It’s bigger than that: It’s a flight from human intimacy. . . .
The Japan Times . . . quotes the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research as saying that the country’s population is expected to decline between 26% and 38% by 2060.

That information comes from Mark Steyn, whose ancestors were on a first-name basis with the author of the commandments previously cited, and here’s more of the same:

“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)

It’s really simple, but some folks think they’re smarter than God.

 

 

Category: Abortion, Contraceptive Culture, Japan, Planned Parenthood, Religion

Are You Certain You Don’t Want to Consider Homeschooling Your Kids?

Posted on | December 27, 2014 | 26 Comments

If you think it’s a good idea to send your children to public schools, you probably aren’t really paying attention to what’s happening in public schools and who is in charge of public schools. Saturday, I searched Google News for the words “teacher + arrest” and — in addition to the usual stories about teachers raping and molesting their students — found an interesting variety of criminal mayhem:

Just a small sample of what you’re getting for your public education tax dollars — and what excellent role models for your kids!

 

Category: Education
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