The Other McCain

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

No, Sir, You Cannot Be a Feminist

Posted on | March 7, 2015 | 33 Comments

Feminists gather in their covens on Tumblr.com:

raddefemme:
convincing an anti-feminist man that he’s actually a feminist because he believes in “the equality of the sexes” may seem like a victory, but in the end all you’ve done is convince a woman-hater that he’s a feminist.

celtyradfem:
This is actually very dangerous. If a man is anti-feminist it’s because he hates women not because of some misunderstanding. Don’t waste your time and energy on convincing a woman hater he’s really a nice guy deep down. All you’ll do is give him a bigger victim complex when things don’t go his way.
Anti-feminism is the political defense of woman hating — Andrea Dworkin

One of the most amazing things is to see how feminists, whose movement is not only anti-male but also anti-heterosexual, become angry when confronted with their own words. This eminent professor or that popular feminist author you’ve quoted does not actually speak for the movement, the feminist will insist, and how dare you suggest that all feminists agree with Andrew Dworkin . . . or Charlotte Bunch, Mary Daly, Marilyn Frye, Monique Wittig, Audre Lorde, Catharine MacKinnon, Joyce Trebilcot, Janice Raymond, Shulamith Firestone, Susan Brownmiller, Sally Miller Gearhart, Judith Butler, Sheila Jeffreys, Gayle Rubin . . .

Feminists have spent decades erecting a wall that divides their esoteric doctrine — the core beliefs which form the theoretical basis of their ideology, the language feminists use when speaking among themselves — from their movement’s exoteric discourse, the “mainstream” rhetoric feminists use in speaking to the public. This separation, which conceals from public view the nature of radical feminist theory as it is taught in university Women’s Studies programs, is essential to preserving the credibility of feminism as a respectable movement concerned only with “equality” and “fairness” for women.

Just before launching the Sex Trouble project last June, I wrote a post called “You Magnificent Lesbians — I Read Your Books!” (An allusion to a line from the movie Patton, in case you didn’t know.) For months, I had explored the canon of radical feminist literature, publishing commentaries based on that literature, and resisting the urging from readers to write a book about it. Anyone who has ever gone through the ordeal of Publishing Hell knows that a book deadline is a soul-destroying nightmare, and I’d been through that human meat-grinder more than once. But this feminist stuff kept piling up and it was apparent that no one else was crazy enough to try to make sense of it all, so I decided to risk it. What I aimed to do was to tear down the wall separating feminism’s esoteric doctrine from its exoteric discourse, to make readers understand how the day-to-day eruptions of feminist insanity we see in the headlines are connected to this core theory of the movement.

What we see, if we study carefully and pay close attention, is a movement of Having Cake and Eating It, Too. That is to say, feminists claim unlimited license to vilify men as violent oppressors, to denounce marriage and motherhood as slavery, to impugn religion, to call for the destruction of society in order to “smash patriarchy” and yet — here is the catch — they expect to be taken seriously when they denounce as a hateful misogynist anyone who objects to their radical agenda.

“If a man is anti-feminist it’s because he hates women,” says the feminist on Tumblr, assuming that only feminists are reading her words, and thus expecting that the Dworkin quote — “Anti-feminism is the political defense of woman hating” — will be accepted as the final word on the matter. But wait just a minute: Who is “raddefemme,” whose quote generated more than 5,000 notes on Tumlbr in less than three day?

“florence … 19 … lesbian … white … very neuroatypical.”

Search for definition of “neuroatypical”:

Neuroatypical is used to describe people who have bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia, circadian rhythm disorders, developmental speech disorders, Parkinson’s disease, dyslexia, and dyspraxia.

In other words, it’s a fancy synonym for “crazy.”

Here then, we have a crazy teenage lesbian acting as self-appointed arbiter of feminism, warning her fellow radicals not to persuade males that feminism means “the equality of the sexes” because doing so would merely “convince a woman-hater that he’s a feminist.” Perfect!

“All that is necessary to discredit feminism is to tell the truth about feminism.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature

They make my work so easy sometimes.

What is feminism? If “the equality of the sexes” is not the goal of this movement, what is their goal? Feminism as we now know it began with the radical New Left of the 1960s. Consider an example: Charlotte Bunch became part of an “anti-imperialist” (which is to say, pro-communist) faction of the Women’s Liberation movement, and participated in such key events as the 1968 protest against the Miss America pageant. In 1970, Bunch traveled to Hanoi as part of an “antiwar” (which is to say, pro-communist) delegation, then returned to Washington, D.C., where in the summer of 1970 she and her husband, antiwar activist Jim Weeks, moved into a communal house with Bunch’s best friend, Sharon Deevey, Deevey’s husband, and a lesbian named Joan Biren. Deevey and Biren were lovers, and soon departed to live in an all-lesbian house, leaving Bunch with the two men. Eventually, Bunch was seduced by lesbian radical Rita Mae Brown and left her husband to form a lesbian separatist collective known as The Furies.

All of this is recounted on pages 174-176 of Susan Brownmiller’s 1999 book In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. We have elsewhere cited Bunch’s 1972 manifesto “Lesbians in Revolt,” and here we will quote one of Bunch’s radical comrades in The Furies collective, Ginny Berson:

We are angry because we are oppressed by male supremacy. We have been f–ked over all our lives by a system which is based on the domination of men over women. . . . It is a system in which heterosexuality is rigidly enforced and Lesbianism rigidly suppressed. . . .
Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.

Well, there you have it in so many words. It was 1972 and, despite Ginny Berson’s demand that “every woman must make” the choice of lesbianism to “end male supremacy,” most women rejected her demand. Most women still reject her demand, and so this “system . . . based on the domination of men over women” continues to operate.

The patriarchy is still open for business.

Ginny Berson? Oh, she went on to become co-founder of Olivia Records, worked for 16 years for Pacifica Radio and eventually became vice president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB). Berson’s comrade Charlotte Bunch, of course, became an esteemed Women’s Studies professor at Rutgers University. Isn’t it weird how, despite being “f–ked over” and “oppressed” by this system of male domination, these women nevertheless enjoy prestigious careers within the Feminist-Industrial Complex? Yet here were are, more than four decades after Bunch and Berson declared war on heterosexuality and “male supremacy,” and crazy teenage lesbians are on Tumblr warning about the dangers of letting men think they can become feminists by endorsing “the equality of the sexes.”

There is something wrong with this picture, don’t you agree? Feminism is a movement that always succeeds but never declares victory. That is to say, there is never any end to feminist demands, no final objective which, once attained, will cause them to proclaim, “That’s it. We won.” So long as anyone is still free to oppose their movement — until feminists have achieved total power — they will continue discovering grievances to protest and keep demanding more! more! more!

Feminism is not a democratic movement about “equality,” it’s a totalitarian movement about power, and there is no limit, no feasible stopping point on their march to power. So long as any man has liberty or property, so long as Christians are free to preach the gospel and practice their faith, so long as young women dream of marrying men and having babies rather than becoming lesbian cat ladies — so long as anyone still resists feminism’s imperious demands for gynocratic supremacy, the movement will continue its militant aggression.

Feminism has declared war on human nature, a war it can never win. Yet the Feminist-Industrial Complex, based in academia and non-profit organizations funded with millions of dollars in tax-exempt contributions, continues to gain political power and wield cultural influence, so that this war can never end. Come back in another 10 or 20 years and, no matter how much more “progress” toward “equality” feminism has achieved by that time, the lesbian cat ladies will still be screaming as loudly as ever about how oppressed and victimized they are by misogyny and patriarchy.

What kind of man would listen while a feminist tried to “convince” him to believe in “the equality of the sexes”? 

Even if she’s attractive, what is to be gained by listening to her angry feminist lecture? She’s either crazy or a lesbian or both.

“Nah, baby,” he says. “I don’t believe in equality. I believe in love.”

And then just walk away.

 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Space Battleship Yamato
And Other Disasters

Posted on | March 7, 2015 | 14 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


It’s been a couple months since the last book post, I think, and with tax season being the usual pain in the butt that it is, I haven’t had time to do much reading – at least not of anything new. Let’s start at the beginning and work forward, shall we?

I apologize if the post title gives the impression that Space Battleship Yamato, which I saw on Amazon Instant Video, is a horrible movie. It’s not. It’s extremely faithful to the 1977 movie edited from the first season of Star Blazers. For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, Earth is being slowly destroyed by a radioactive bombardment conducted by the Gamilons, against whom Earth’s most advanced weapons are useless. Bitter ex-pilot Kodai finds a message capsule while prospecting for scrap on the surface, and the capsule contains designs for powerful new engines, a new weapon called the Wave Motion Gun, and the promise of technology to reverse the damage done by the Gamilons – if Earth can reach the faraway planet of Iskander. Earth’s High Command uses this technology to rebuild the legendary battleship Yamato into an interstellar dreadnought to break through the Gamilon forces, and Kodai volunteers for duty aboard her – which puts him in immediate conflict with Captain Okita, who Kodai holds responsible for his brother’s death, and Yuki, a fellow pilot who despises Kodai for resigning and (she feels) abandoning his fellow pilots. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a very good one, and well worth the $4 rental.

John Ringo’s Strands of Sorrow is the concluding novel to his Black Tide Rising series about the outbreak of a highly infectious zombie plague and how the survivors manage to fight back and re-establish some semblance of civilization. Much of the plot revolves around the problems caused by the rescue of senior civilian and military personnel who aren’t well-equipped (emotionally or mentally) to deal with the zombie hordes, which eventually forces the Smith sisters (better known to their compatriots as Shewolf and Seawolf) into a desperate act to keep things from sliding back into Hell. Recommended.

Not quite on the same topic, but still decent reading, is Sam Schall’s Duty from Ashes, the sequel to Vengeance from Ashes. In this second book, Major Ashlyn Shaw and her Marines get to take the fight to the enemy…but there are forces behind the scenes that Major Shaw and her superiors don’t even suspect are there. Good brain candy at a decent price.

On a completely unrelated subject, there’s Mike Williamson’s Wisdom From My Internet, a collection of jokes, quips and occasionally serious material that much like South Park has something to offend everyone. if you follow Mike on Facebook, you’ve probably seen a lot of this before, but it is handy to have it all in one place.

Also in the non-fiction category is Stanley G. Payne’s Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Professor Payne has a reputation as the foremost American scholar of Fascism and its derivative philosophies, and if this book is any example of his other works, it’s a well-deserved reputation. He spends much of the book pointing out the differences in origin, philosophy, and effects of Italian Fascism, German Naziism, and Spanish Falangism, to say nothing of dozens of other movements often called fascist, whether they were or not. Worth reading, if only to gather ammunition against leftards abusing a term which has a very specific meaning.

Finally, one of the nominees on the Sad Puppies list is John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them, and it’s true: this tale begins long after most other fairy tales end, with its hero a middle-aged man whose childhood adventures are a faded memory. I found Wright’s tale wrenching and touching by turns, and wish he’d spent more words showing us what happened instead of having Tommy relate some of the events as he’s talking to the friends he’s trying to recruit into another adventure; at times, the writing style verges on the Lovecraftian. Still, it’s a grand little tale, and I can’t recommend it enough.


Category: Books

Ferguson To Holder: “Bring It. Yourself. Buzz Aldrin Could Calibrate You.”

Posted on | March 7, 2015 | 40 Comments

by Smitty

Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday the Department of Justice is ready to take any and all steps that are needed to reform the Ferguson, Mo., police department, including the potential dismantling of the force.

But was it really racism?

The complex question of the relationship between wealth and race comes into play here, but it might reasonably be said that this practice — of police and prosecutors and courts together — disproportionately affects black communities not because they are black, but because they are poor. They do not have the means to escape the justice apparatus, unlike the comparatively wealthy, who can pay a fine and be done with the matter — or hire an attorney, and inconvenience courts that prefer the ease of collecting fees to the challenge of arbitrating cases. To this effect, Balko quotes Thomas Harvey, an attorney for ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis–based legal-aid group: “These are people who make the same mistakes you or I do — speeding, not wearing a seatbelt, forgetting to get your car inspected on time. The difference is that they don’t have the money to pay the fines. . . . When you can’t pay the fines, you get fined for that, too. And when you can’t get to court, you get an arrest warrant.”

It’s not a bad thing to have somebody watching the watchmen. However, after six years of Creep Show Holder wanting to have a conversation about race with every blade of grass in the land, I simply would trust him to tell me the time of day.

And what about the Governor of Missouri? It looks like Nixon is operating slightly above a vegetative state. Is he anxious to avoid the Menendez treatment? It seems yet another example of federalism gone off the rails that there is this abject tool of an Attorney General running around like some kind of authority figure.

It’s time to show the federal bully some resolve. In some pre-Obama America, they’d provide Snidely Whiplash a bit of needful attitude adjustment.

Category: Democrats, Eric Holder

The United Hates of America

Posted on | March 7, 2015 | 39 Comments

We’re more than six years into the Obama Age — “Hope! Change!” — and everybody hates everybody now:

The Associated Students of University of California, Irvine (ASUCI) voted Tuesday to remove all flags, including American flags, from an inclusive space on campus because of their offensive nature.
The bill, R50-70, was authored by Social Ecology Representative Matthew Guevara, and accuses all flags, especially, the American flag, of being “symbols of patriotism or weapons for nationalism.”
“[F]lags construct paradigms of conformity and sets [sic] homogenized standards for others to obtain which in this country typically are idolized as freedom, equality, and democracy,” the bill reads.
The legislation argues that flags may be interpreted differently; the American flag, for example, can represent “American exceptionalism and superiority,” as well as oppression.
“[T]he American flag has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism,” the bill continues, arguing that “symbolism has negative and positive aspects that are interpreted differently by individuals.”
The anti-flag hanging bill adds that free speech, such as flags in inclusive spaces, can be interpreted as hate speech.
“[F]reedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible[,] can be interpreted as hate speech,” the bill reads.

Meanwhile, in Albuquerque:

They’re calling it “prom-munism.” Seniors at an Albuquerque school want their prom to have a Communism theme. Seniors at Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School near I-25 and Paseo del Norte voted online this week for the theme of their prom this year.
“They wanted prom-munism, so that’s what got voted for the most,” said senior Sarah Zachary. . . .
“We have a lot of jokesters in our grade, so they wanted it to be funny and a lot of them are really intense with politics,” Zachary said.
However, students who asked to remain anonymous don’t believe Communism is a joking matter.
“I would hope Cottonwood would realize the seriousness of having a very powerful and destructive idea as the theme for a prom,” one student wrote.
Another said, “While the seniors meant no harm in their choice of theme, it is not appropriate.”
“Our students are in the International Baccalaureate program, so they are very academically focused,” said Sam Obenshain, executive director at Cottonwood. “One of the classes they enjoy the most is a world history class.”

Meanwhile, in Detroit:

The same week President Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder are stirring the pot over alleged systemic racism in the criminal justice system in Ferguson, Missouri, a white federal judge was shot in Detroit as he fought off two Black men trying to rob him outside his home Thursday night.
Judge Terrence G. Berg, who was nominated by Obama to be a United States District Judge for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 2012, was accosted outside the home he has lived in with his family for decades as he took out the trash around 9 p.m.
According to police and Berg’s wife Ann Sevier, two Black men between eighteen and twenty years old confronted Berg, telling him they were robbing him and to let them in his house. Berg resisted the robbers to prevent them from gaining entry.

The American flag is hate speech. Communism is a prom theme. A federal judge is shot. Republicans demand gay marriage. What?

“A disaster of biblical proportions. . . . Old Testament, real wrath-of-God type stuff. . . . Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!”

 

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.





 

Category: Barack Obama, Crime, Culture, Education, Racism

‘There Is No Spoon’: Radical Feminism and the Paranoid Matrix of Patriarchy

Posted on | March 6, 2015 | 78 Comments

“Given that woman cannot ‘fit’ into the cartography of male thought, she cannot be expected to communicate in ways that are understandable to those caught within a patriarchal mindset. Thus the typically male disparagement of women’s thinking as confused, irrational or superstitious is simply a lack of imagination: women’s thinking is only irrational if understood within a rigid paradigm of linear (phallocentric) thought.”
— Jennifer Rich, Modern Feminist Theory (2014)

“While feminists believe that the patriarchy makes women crazy, the rest of us suspect that crazy women made the patriarchy — inventing this imaginary conspiracy of ‘male supremacy’ as the phantom menace of their paranoid minds, a fantasy bogeyman, a rationalization of their own unhappiness and misfortunes.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature

My friends Nice Deb and the Lonely Conservative express amazement at my ability to maintain sanity after spending so many months wading deep into the feminist madness. Really, it’s a miracle, and your continued prayers are most earnestly requested as I continue this research. As I remark in the book, you can’t understand feminism without studying abnormal psychology, especially the etiology of paranoia.

Paranoia and narcissism are related phenomena, because the paranoid person’s delusions of persecution require him to believe that he is so important that powerful people and institutions are conspiring against him. Unable to cope with his own inadequacy, overwhelmed by feelings of shame about his failures, the narcissist’s psychological defense mechanisms inflate his damaged ego to grandiose proportions.

He did not fail; they conspired to thwart him. Stipulate that, in reality, people often do suffer unjustly through no fault of their own. Stipulate also that sane people actually do have enemies. The narcissist, however, is unable to accept his misfortunes as simple bad luck. Confronted by failure, the narcissist can’t say, “Well, that’s just the way life is,” and move on to seek success elsewhere. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the idea that he is a victim of injustice, and rationalizes his suffering by attributing malign motives to scapegoated enemies. This characteristic trait of externalizing blame is necessary to protect the damaged ego of the narcissist and, however much damage he inflicts by lashing out at scapegoats, the narcissist may still be able to maintain a neurotic semblance of normality. The descent into madness begins when his failures multiply beyond his ability to rationalize them, so that his enemies — “they” who conspire against him — become fantastic in size and power. He imagines himself pursued and persecuted by demons and monsters, by Jews or Freemasons, by the CIA or by aliens from Mars.

All of this madness begins, you see, with an inability to accept responsibility for one’s own failures and shortcomings. Strong, healthy minds can withstand not only the routine annoyances of daily life, but can even overcome extraordinary hardship without resorting to the kind of scapegoating attitude that characterizes the narcissistic personality. Because we are living in what Christopher Lasch famously called The Culture of Narcissism, however, we have seen a proliferation of movements that offer ready-made theories of victimhood that enable personal irresponsibility, rationalizing the fears of unhealthy minds.

Feminism is an ideology of madness, denying the fundamental reality of human nature. Feminists enable (“empower”) the irresponsible woman by offering her the convenient scapegoat of patriarchy — “male supremacy,” “misogyny,” etc. — as the all-purpose explanation for every misfortune she may suffer. The fact that other women are going about their daily lives, happy and successful, is never acceptable to a feminist as evidence that disproves her ideology. The overwhelming majority of female college students manage to make it through their undergraduate years without being gang-raped by fraternity brothers and yet we find feminists promoting claims that “rape culture” is out of control on university campuses. Feminists produce big-budget documentaries that portray college life as The Hunting Ground where women are constantly menaced by their male classmates. “Rape culture” propaganda is a way of promoting Fear and Loathing of the Penis, as I have described the typical anti-male/anti-heterosexual worldview of radical feminism.

 

In August 2013, I wrote a post called “Taking Feminism Seriously,” and one of the consequences of my in-depth study of this subject is that when I look at the description of Jennifer Rich’s book Modern Feminist Theory, I recognize nearly all the authors she names. Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Gayle Rubin, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler — this radical roster of lunatics and lesbians is very familiar to me. The question is whether students at Hofstra University recognize this ideology as a sort of navigational chart that guides unhappy women on a metaphorical voyage across the Mytilini Strait to a legendary island off the coast of Asia Minor.

The recent surge of radical madness is so strangely paranoid that even a feminist like Meghan Daum is offended by it:

[T]he idea that all sexual assaults are created equal — and deserve equal treatment in the court of public opinion — has become an article of faith in the liberal gospel.
But at the risk (the guarantee) of being branded a rape apologist or worse, I’m going to say what many reasonable people have been thinking for a while: Violent rape is not the same as psychologically coercive sex, which in turn is not the same as regrettable sex, which is not the same as fielding an unwanted touch or kiss at a party.
None of these things are good; many of them are quite bad. But insofar as they do fall along a spectrum ranging from truly horrific to merely annoying, some demand legal or punitive action, and some simply do not. Some are crimes and some are the inevitable fallout of social obtuseness. Some desperately require more attention, and some — I’ll just say it– are getting too much attention.

Read the whole thing and notice how Ms. Daum cushions her criticism in caveats, aware that anyone who dares express skepticism about feminism’s propaganda claims is subject to becoming a demonized scapegoat, a “rape apologist.” What is happening here?

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead … only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

That famous scene from The Matrix expresses the problem of confronting an imaginary “reality” like the feminist worldview. Once you understand feminism as a theory of radical egalitarianism akin to Marxism (and, indeed, directly inspired by Marxist-Leninist ideology), the illusion of the spoon becomes apparent. Beginning with the premise that men and women are naturally “equal” in the sense that they are essentially identical — that there are no innate differences between male and female — feminists then theorize all observable inequalities between men (collectively) and women (collectively) as the result of oppression. This concept of women as victims of universal oppression requires feminists to further theorize the existence of patriarchy as the social system of male supremacy. All of this depends on the belief that androgyny (a condition of sameness as the basis of “sexual equality”) is natural, and that any apparent differences between men and women are artificial, “socially constructs” imposed by patriarchy.

“[W]oman’s social inequality is not an inevitable attribute of her biology but biologically inherent in the heterosexual sex act. . . . Woman’s biology oppresses her only when she relates to men. The basis of the inequality of the sexes here is seen as the inequality inherent in heterosexual intercourse as a result of sex-specific anatomy. To transcend or avoid this in personal life by having sexual relations only with women — lesbianism — eliminates the gender-based underpin­nings of sexual inequality in this view. . . . Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.”
— Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)

“I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.”
— Marilyn Frye, “A Lesbian’s Perspective on Women’s Studies” (1980)

“These people are crazy!” proclaims every sane person after learning what feminist Gender Theory teaches. Our natural instinct, as common-sense people living in the real world, is to dismiss feminism as a joke, to insist that their ideas cannot be taken seriously. Unfortunately, we must take them seriously:

  • Feminism is propagated daily on campus — As of 2009, some 90,000 students at 700 colleges and universities were enrolled in Women’s Studies courses, including 31 Master’s programs and 13 Ph.D. programs. Thousands of professors are employed in teaching Women’s Studies which, because of its “interdisciplinary” nature, influences many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
  • Feminism exercises hegemonic power within academia — Because federal Title IX legislation prohibits discrimination against women, and because criticism of feminism has often been interpreted as indicative of discriminatory intent, almost no one within academia will dare speak out in direct opposition to feminism. The classic example of how feminism wields uncontested authority on campus was the purge of Larry Summers as President of Harvard University. At a 2005 conference on women in science, Summers suggested that “innate differences” between men and women might explain the relative small number of top female scientific researchers. Within a year, Summers was forced to resign.
  • Feminism has become a decisive force in American politics — The so-called “gender gap” of women favoring Democrat candidates has become a basic organizing principle of liberalism in the 21st century. In 2012, President Obama was re-elected with the largest “gender gap” since Gallup began measuring the difference between male and female voters. This result followed a campaign in which Democrats accused Republicans of waging a “War on Women,” and in which Obama’s election team carefully targeted TV ads at women voters in key swing states.

“Politics is downstream from culture,” as Andrew Breitbart insisted, and feminism’s influence in culture — in academia, in the publishing industry, in the news media and in popular entertainment — is so pervasive and powerful that we can neither ignore it nor treat it as a joke.

Sure we can laugh at their radical insanity, but we need to understand that this insanity defines reality for millions of women who subscribe to the feminist worldview. When Professor Rich claims that logic is “a patriarchal mindset . . . a rigid paradigm of linear (phallocentric) thought,” she dismisses the possibility that men and women experience the same reality. There are no objective facts, according to feminist theory, only subjective interpretations. Anyone who claims that objective reality exists is trapped in “a rigid paradigm” of “male thought.” This insistence on subjectivity is what inspired Irish law student Anja Eriud to invoke the spoon metaphor from The Matrix:

Feminism is like that force, and the spoon represents the object, the thing that this force is wishing into existence, that thing or object being the sum of all evil, the fount of all badness — the big bad patriarchy.
Just like in the film, the only object that actually exists is the boy – the thing he has created is the illusion of a spoon — the trick is not that he can bend this imaginary spoon — the trick, if you will, it is that he can make you believe in that spoons existence.
So. Feminism is — the ability to make you see something that is not there — and to manipulate and bend that thing into any shape. . . .
In effect — the loons of feminism not only created the spoon, they poured all their malice, all their bitterness, all their rage and hatred for men into that creation.
Feminism is that malice, that bitterness, that rage and hatred, polished and moulded, layered and then re-layered with “credibility” with “academic cachet” with “plausibility” . . .

You can read the whole thing. What she is saying is that feminists have invented a jargon — “patriarchy,” “misogyny,” “heternormativity,” “gender,” etc. — to describe intellectual abstractions which have become a reality over which they exercise complete control. Because feminists control the existence of this “spoon” they have created, they are able to bend it however they wish, and we find ourselves in the position of Alice on the other side of the looking glass, arguing with Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

This is where feminist “rape culture” discourse takes us, to a bizarre alternative reality where normal definitions do not apply, where the burden of proof is shifted from the accuser to the accused, who is expected to prove a negative, that he did not rape his girlfriend. Really: Auburn University student Joshua Strange’s ex-girlfriend accused him of assault and he was expelled even after being exonerated by a grand jury. (Watch a video about the case that is deeply disturbing.) In England, this shifting of the burden of proof is now a matter of law:

Men accused of date rape will need to convince police that a woman consented to sex as part of a major change in the way sex offences are investigated.
The Director of Public Prosecutions said it was time for the legal system to move beyond the concept of “no means no” to recognise situations where women may have been unable to give consent.
Alison Saunders said rape victims should no longer be “blamed” by society if they are too drunk to consent to sex, or if they simply freeze and say nothing because they are terrified of their attacker.
Instead, police and prosecutors must now put a greater onus on rape suspects to demonstrate how the complainant had consented “with full capacity and freedom to do so”.
Campaigners described the move as “a huge step forward” in ensuring fewer rapists escape justice. . . .
“We want police and prosecutors to make sure they ask in every case where consent is the issue — how did the suspect know the complainant was saying yes and doing so freely and knowingly?”

Read the whole thing. You risk being called a “rape apologist” if you see how this “step forward” jeopardizes the freedom of every heterosexual male. Any woman’s post-coital regret — or her desire for revenge against a man who in some way aroused her wrath — could become a pretext for a rape accusation under this “full capacity” standard. One can easily imagine the bloke in a pub who thinks he’s gotten lucky with a bird. She goes home with him for a shag, everything seems fine, but the next day (or the next week) she regrets their tryst. She goes to the police saying she was raped because she’d had a few pints and thus did not possess the “full capacity” to consent. For that matter, if his wife or girlfriend ever decided to spite him, she could claim she did not “freely” consent because she was “terrified” of him.

“Women never lie about rape!” the feminists shriek, no matter how many rape accusations are exposed as hoaxes.

Just as they have created the “spoon” of patriarchal oppression, however, “rape culture” is also a feminist creation that no amount of factual argument can disprove. Department of Justice statistics showing that rape has declined significantly in the U.S. during the past 15 years, and that female college students are actually at less risk of rape than other women the same age — well, never mind your so-called “evidence,” you misogynist! Facts and logic are tools of the patriarchy! Any evidence contradicting feminist arguments can be dismissed by their rhetorical arm-waving. Once their pet “1-in-5” statistic had been exposed as a lie, feminists launched a hashtag campaign #NotJustAStat to promote the claim that statistics don’t matter.

In other words, feminism is a non-falsifiable theory. It’s a religious cult, and this feminist theology can never be disproven.




 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Her Majesty’s Petard Getting Kinda Hoist-y Over This EmailGate Scandal

Posted on | March 6, 2015 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Hot Air and Rick Wilson need to talk to some security professionals (not that I’m claiming to be such) emphasis mine:

This isn’t how it is supposed to be. The public’s interest in the scandal involving revelations that Hillary Clinton eschewed the use of a secure email address while serving as secretary of state, preferring instead a “homebrew” email server of her design against Obama administration and State Department guidelines, should be dissipating by now. None of the old tricks are working.

Clinton’s surrogates are failing to distract the press or explain her behavior away by noting that Republicans in high office had often done the same thing. Those Clinton allies who used to effectively scare reporters away from stories by growling at them and threatening their future access have failed to properly intimidate the media. Instead of dying down, this controversy has only grown more damaging as new revelations slowly leak out.

Setting up your own service on the internet is kind of a big deal. Witness all of the break-ins at, by now, a significant number of vendors in the last few years. Was any Republican as overtly stupid as Clinton? Petraeus may have used a private email account to line up some trim. That’s not the same thing as setting up a server, however.

it is a safe bet that some Republican soon will “pounce” and provide the press with ample opportunity to engage in a circular, wishful, pearl-clutching session over the fraught course ahead for the GOP should they “overreach” by daring to notice Clinton’s ethical lapses.

Now, as a political matter, Wilson may be correct. But there is still a point to be made from an Information Systems standpoint: Her Majesty was pretty much a bimbo about making sure she was staffed to go solo on IT infrastructure. And that’s just what’s publicly known. If one were to be so. . .cavalier as to blow off common sense, statute, and regulations and set up one’s own services, one had better staff that system with some 800lb brains. You’re only one zero-day vulnerability away from someone doing something naughty. Installing a spare admin account, for example. Then, later, say, making a  backup of the data.

Basically, you have to assume that every email she herself sent as SecState was compromised. Not just  the ones  to Blumenthal. Could it be that something she said, directly or indirectly, led to four deaths in Benghazi? Really, really hard to disprove that, especially when dealing with an ethical wasteland like Her Majesty. Likelihood that Vladimir is laughing himself silly at how trivial it was to make our foreign policy look like Vladimir and Estragon caught in an extended hangfire? You don’t know how likely. So you have to assume 100%.

There are reasons for the various security rules and regulations. FOIA is certainly important. But when you’re in a high profile, critical billet like SecState, you want that .gov address so that, should the fertilizer hit the air circulator, you know that there is a staff somewhere that will either stop the bleeding, or at least provide a throat to choke.

And we’re talking about a Clinton here. The family seemingly gifted with a “get out of laws free” card. The only way there could potentially be a prosecution would be if the Obama administration thought it expedient. However, Her Majesty, one presumes, has enough dirt on #OccupyResoluteDesk to nullify that threat.

So it boils down to the court of public opinion. If the American people are going to continue to tolerate the kind of third-world thuggery evidenced by these Democrats, then Doom. On. Us. If the GOP wants to go dark on the issue, then fine. But blogs and social media need to keep reminding people that this is how Her Majesty rolls. If eight years of the no-talent rodeo clown have been a creep show, I shudder to consider the rubble Her Majesty will make of Obama’s wreckage.

Category: Barack Obama, Democrats, Hillary Clinton

The #Pluggernaut Must Run

Posted on | March 5, 2015 | 34 Comments

by Smitty

(Picture source)

Then we got into a discussion of appropriate music for the campaign.

Category: Democrats, humor, Joe Biden

Muslim Men Who Join ISIS ‘Attracted by the Entire Sexual Slaves Fantasy’

Posted on | March 5, 2015 | 41 Comments

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is an academic elitist and therefore spews a lot of “gender roles” jargon before getting to the good part:

I know from reliable journalist sources in Turkey that many foreign fighters are joining ISIS attracted by the entire sexual slaves fantasy. In fact, a lawyer friend of mine who up until 2010 represented over 50% defendants in anti-terrorism cases confirmed to me that those arrested in the UK in anti-terrorism raids had over 90% of their hard drives filled with pornography. These are social misfits who are sexually frustrated.
But deeper than that is a lack of empathy and understanding: for these men, “females” are an enigma, a strange animal, which they fail to understand and thus must control and subjugate brutally. Which is why they engage in deviant sexual practices whilst at the same time forcing women to cover their faces and even hands in public.

Feminists . . .? Hello? No, not a peep.

Feminists never criticize America’s enemies. Feminism shares with ISIS a profound hatred of Western civilization. Today’s headline at EverydayFeminism.com: “5 Things You Should Know About Being Genderqueer.” That’s an issue feminists care about. Porn-crazed Muslims joining ISIS to make their sex slave fantasies come true? Feminists don’t care about that. Meanwhile, CNN reports:

A 17-year-old Virginia student has been charged with helping recruit for ISIS, federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
The teen, whose name was not disclosed, was taken into custody last week, the officials said.
Prosecutors are seeking to charge him as an adult but currently have charged him as a juvenile, one of the law enforcement officials said.
The case remains under seal. It was first reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday.
The Post, citing officials and neighbors, reported that investigators spent more than a month watching the teen and his home before he was arrested.
The teen, who lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, is accused of helping a slightly older adult travel to Syria. The adult is believed to have joined ISIS there, a separate law enforcement official said.
The teen is also accused of distributing ISIS messages to a network of contacts, one of the officials said. . . .
More than 20,000 foreigners have gone to fight for ISIS, the radical Islamist group that controls portions of Iraq and Syria, experts have told Congress.
National Intelligence Director James Clapper said 180 Americans have tried to go to fight in Syria. . . .
In February, three men from New York — Abdurasul Juraboev, 24; Akhror Saidakhmetov, 19; and Abror Habibov, 30 — were arrested and charged with conspiring to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization. An unsealed criminal complaint accused one of the men of discussing a potential attempt to assassinate President Barack Obama. One had discussed hijacking a flight and handing it over to ISIS, the complaint said.

Authorities warn this is a “growing trend”:

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security sent a joint warning to law enforcement across the country about the concern over a growing trend of girls and boys wanting to fight with ISIS in the wake of the detention of a 17-year-old Northern Virginia teen last week, according to a law enforcement official who has read the report.
The source says law enforcement is tracking “lots of cases” like that around the country and they’re growing increasingly concerned about the issue. The warning was sent out over the weekend.
The warning lays out motivations for boys and girls. For boys: they tend to be older going over to fight and be a part of foreign fighters, or they want to attack in the U.S. (like the Brooklyn case). For girls: they tend to be younger and have a fanciful notion of what life is like in Syria. They often want to go over and be Islamic brides.

Should parents be concerned? I’ve got two teenage sons. Somehow, though, I don’t think they’re interested in joining ISIS.

Maybe there is some other “motivation” involved here . . .

 

Category: Islam, Terrorism
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