The Other McCain

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

‘Islamophobia … Baseless Hatred’?

Posted on | April 2, 2015 | 28 Comments

An astonishing phenomenon of the 21st century is the perversely ironic way in which the Information Age has actually increased ignorance. With all the knowledge in the world just a quick Google search away, many people have somehow managed to seal themselves off inside cocoons of confirmation bias, where they only encounter narratives that fit their preconceived personal prejudices. It is not simply a matter of people avoiding opposing opinions, but of filtering out facts in such a way that their worldview becomes wholly unrealistic. Paranoid hostility flourishes inside these online bubbles where kooks cluster, affirming their shared delusions and piling up “evidence” to “prove” their false beliefs to each other. It was while making my rounds in the online lunatic asylum that is Feminist Tumblr that I encountered this 157-word rant:

Islam, like all other religions/ideologies, should remain an open ground for criticism, but to say that Islamophobia is absolutely not related to racial persecution and racism in any way is an oversimplification.
Anyone on this earth could be a Muslim, but it’s the brown and black ones that being attacked and killed for being associated with Islam. Anyone could have some kind of tie to Islam, the ideologies presented in Islam, but it’s the brown men and women, the kids with “Middle Eastern” names, the Sikhs wearing turbans, Hindus wearing traditional attire that are being called “terrorists” at the highest frequency.
Ask an Islamophobic assailant why he hit a Sikh man with his car and he’ll tell you he did it because he hates Islam, he hates terrorists.
Islamophobia has criminalized the brown body, to say that it has nothing to do with racism would be to overlook the suffering of countless victims of such baseless hatred.

Stipulate that concerns about radical Islam do create a certain level of suspicion that is ethnic in nature, and that people may wrongly suspect a Hindu or a Sikh — or a Christian, for that matter — of being Muslim.

Anyone can ask Ali Akbar (a half-Arab/half-black Southern Baptist from Texas) about this kind of confusion. For that matter, you can ask Raheem Kassam, the spokesman for the U.K. Independence Party, who is the child of Pakistani Muslim immigrants, but who is himself a thoroughly secular young Englishman.

This raises the question of whether “Islamophobia” actually exists. The term “phobia” denotes an irrational fear, yet the history of recent decades offers enough rational basis for concern to make the word “Islamophobia” inherently problematic. One may perhaps distinguish between two phenomena — a vigilant concern about dangerous radicalism, on the one hand, and a simple-minded bigotry on the other — but making that distinction does nothing more than to say, “Ignorant people are ignorant.” To say that fair-minded and educated people should condemn ignorant prejudice isn’t controversial. What is controversial is to assert that “Islamophobia” is a more important problem than the actual dangers posed by radical Islam.

The flat statement that “Islamophobia has criminalized the brown body” is a falsehood, and to then throw in “the suffering of countless victims of . . . baseless hatred” as the emotional freight of an argument requires us to ask, “Are the ‘victims’ truly ‘countless’? Where is the evidence of this ‘suffering’?” In order to sustain such claims, it will not do to cite a list of incidents or anecdotes. No one disputes the fact that ignorant hateful people do ignorant hateful things.

What is in dispute is whether “Islamophobia” — specifically, the concern about Islamic terrorism — has generated such a spree of anti-Muslim violence and harassment as to produce “countless victims.”

FACT: Anti-Jewish hate crimes are four times more common than anti-Muslim crimes in the United States.

According to the FBI, Jews were the targets in about 60% of religious-bias incidents in 2013, the most recent year for which complete data is available. By comparison to the 625 anti-Jewish crimes, Muslims were targeted in 135 incidents (13.7%), and Catholics were the third-most commonly targeted group, accounting for 6.1% of such incidents.

Facts matter. We cannot let ourselves to be misled by propaganda, whatever the source or nature of that propaganda may be. When we know the facts, our skeptical curiosity ought to be aroused whenever we encounter tendentious claims. Who is it, we must ask, that deries the “countless victims” of “Islamophobia”?

Here is the profile of the Tumblr blogger who wrote that 157-word rant: Zanab, Nineteen, Female, Ontario, Canada. No rational person desiring information on hate crimes would deliberately seek out the expertise of a Canadian teenager, yet inside the online ideological bubbles of the Information Age, no one bothers to contradict this girl’s claims. If not for my habit of patrolling the weird universe of Feminist Tumblr, you might have no idea how these poisonous seeds of dangerous disinformation are being sown.





 

Category: Islam, Terrorism

BREAKING: Lefties Flock At Poultry Farm, Say Chickens Refusing Event Support ‘A Bigoted Bunch Of Peckers’

Posted on | April 1, 2015 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

Old McDonald had a farm, but it turned out that “E – I – E – I – O” was just so much anti-consonant dog whistle. The trouble began last summer, when Old McDonald brought in some new hens from Amish country, but only hatched recently, when local pagans demanded support for their “Flying Freak Flag Farm” event.
Suddenly, it fell to Mac to explain that these hens had a more traditional notion of getting laid than that.
“Bring them out unto us, that we may know them,” demanded the protesters.
But Mac noted that these pious hens were not scheduled to be plucked for some time to come, and suggested that the protesters go pluck themselves. The protesters, torn between fauxtrage and arousal, finally broke into song:

BONUS: No one seemed to get this gag at the time =>

pic via @hoosierclinger

Category: humor

TV Reporter’s Cheap ‘Gotcha’ Story Incites Hate Mob Against Indiana Pizza Shop

Posted on | April 1, 2015 | 51 Comments

“RFRA: Michiana business wouldn’t cater a gay wedding.”
“Restaurant denies some services to same-sex couples.”

That’s how Alyssa Marino “reported” a story Tuesday on ABC affiliate WBND-TV in South Bend, Indiana, with the result that a firestorm of hatred came raining down on a pizza shop:

There were no complaints nor denials of service to anyone ever, but because of their religious beliefs, Memories Pizza stands in ruin and the family who owns it has had their lives threatened countless times. How did the O’Connor family, owners of Memories, find themselves in this situation? They were honest with a reporter in search of a story to fit the media’s narrative.
Alyssa Marino is a reporter with ABC 57 News in South Bend, Indiana. With her state in the center of a hurricane over religious freedom, Marino must’ve thought she’d had a coup – a devout Christian business owner willing to speak on camera about their religious beliefs and how it impacts the operations of that business.
The issue of gay marriage is not one that generally comes up when talking about a pizzeria. Neither is straight marriage, for that matter. Local pizza joints aren’t generally hotbeds of wedding receptions. Yet, Marino found herself wandering into Memories Pizza to get the unsuspecting owners to weigh in on an emotional issue which has never come up in the course of the business’s nearly 10 year existence.
When owner Crystal O’Connor told Marino, “If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” she had to know she’d struck gold.

(Hat-tip: Moe Lane on Twitter.) The pizza shop was forced to close Wednesday and the owner told Dana Loesch they might not re-open because of all the death threats. Ace of Spades:

Death threats are only publicized to the extent they can portray the left as sympathetic victims.
When the left threatens to murder political opponents, the media covers it up.

The Democrat-Media Complex has hyped this Indiana RFRA controversy into an LGBT lynch-mob scenario that compares to nothing I’ve seen since the L.A. riots in 1992. Some people seem to have lost their minds over this:

A Concord High School coach has been suspended after she tweeted about arson in relation to a Walkerton pizzeria whose owners told the media they agree with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Jess Dooley, who is the head coach of the girls golf program and also an assistant coach with the softball and girls basketball programs, took to Twitter Wednesday, April 1, to voice her opinion about the RFRA.
She was adding to the conversation about Memories Pizza, a Walkerton restaurant whose owners announced in a television news segment that they would not cater gay weddings.
Her tweet read: “Who’s going to Walkerton, IN to burn down #memoriespizza w me?”

Hey, arson advocacy, public education, to-MAY-to, to-MAH-to, right?

People: Calm down. If your TV is making you crazy, turn off the TV. If the Internet is making you crazy, get off the Internet.

Except this blog, of course.

This blog will continue providing all the high-intensity craziness anybody could ever need. Because we know you need it.





 

Category: Gays, Indiana, Media Bias, Religion

Rick Santorum on Tolerance

Posted on | April 1, 2015 | 37 Comments

He spoke Monday at George Washington University:

“The only sensitivity training we need is to respect every person. . . . Tolerance is the most misused word in the English language. . . . Should a gay or lesbian-owned printshop have to print signs for the Westboro Baptists that say ‘God hates fags’? . . . Should a Jewish printshop have to make signs for the KKK? Should a kosher deli have to serve non-kosher food? It’s a two-way street. Tolerance is a two-way street. If you’re saying that ‘your religious liberties are not as important as my fill in the blank,’ then I’ve got a problem with that.”

During CPAC, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Rick’s supporters. He’s spent the past three years turning his group Patriot Voices into a solid grassroots organization. He has a dedicated base of small donors — thousands of folks he can count on for $25 or $50 contributions when he needs it — and has committed activists on the ground in all the key early primary and caucus states.

Even after his strong showing in 2012, when he finished second to Mitt Romney in the final delegate count, a lot of people still underestimate Santorum, but he works hard and doesn’t quit. He has experience and an awful lot of sincere Christians praying for his campaign. He could win it all, and don’t let the pundits, the media spinners or the early polls deceive you into thinking otherwise.

The Islamic terrorist group ISIS named Santorum as an enemy, citing his warning about the group’s growing menace. Asked about this on Fox News today, Santorum quipped:

“Well the difference is ISIS actually quoted me accurately compared to the New York Times, which is sort of a remarkable comment on the state of the media today.”

ZING!

 

Category: Election, Rick Santorum, Vanuatu

The Tyranny of ‘Equality’

Posted on | April 1, 2015 | 62 Comments

When people claim to be oppressed and demand equality, what happens after they get it? Tim Carney explains the post-Windsor world:

On one side is the CEO of the world’s largest company, the president of the United States and a growing chunk of the Fortune 500. On the other side is a solo wedding photographer in New Mexico, a 70-year-old grandma florist in Washington and a few bakers.
One side wants the state to conscript the religious businesswomen and men into participating in ceremonies that violate their beliefs. The other side wants to make it possible for religious people to live their own lives according to their consciences. . . .
Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple, the largest corporation in the world. He opposes religious freedom laws, and paints them as a growing scourge. “There’s something very dangerous happening in states across the country,” his Washington Post op-ed darkly began, warning of “A wave of legislation” to protect religious liberty.
This is hokum. Religious Freedom Restoration Acts have existed on the state and federal level for decades. What’s new here — the “wave” that’s actually sweeping over the country — is an emboldened and litigious cultural Left, unsated by its recent culture war victories, trying now to conscript the defeated soldiers at gunpoint. . . .
After millennia of marriage being uncontroversially a union between one man and one woman, and after a decade of electorates in most states (and President Obama in 2008) upholding that traditional definition, the Left has used the courts to redefine the institution. People are fired for having taken the losing side. On college campuses, the current fights are about banning even the articulation of traditional views.

Read the whole thing. What has happened is that people forgot history — or, to be more precise, they never learned history, because our education system doesn’t teach history. In the 1950s and early ’60s, the civil-rights movement, led by Christian ministers like the Rev. Martin Luther King, built a broad biracial coalition that gained widespread support by appealing to America’s basic sense of fairness. However, after the great triumph of 1964 — “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi and the passage of the Civil Rights Act — the movement quickly fractured. In early 1965, radicals asserted their control of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC had led sit-in protests across the South) and whites were purged from the organization’s leadership. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael became SNCC chairman and, declaring that non-violence had been a tactic rather than a principle, raised the slogan “Black Power.” Allying themselves with anti-war radicals, SNCC protesters disrupted draft boards and in July 1967, Carmichael’s successor as SNCC chairman, H. Rap Brown, was arrested for inciting a riot in Cambridge, Maryland. By that time, radicals in Oakland, California, inspired by SNCC’s militancy, had formed the Black Panthers, openly espousing a Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of armed revolution.

Thus, in a span of about five years, the civil rights movement had gone from the idealism of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech to the explicit advocacy of violent black nationalism. What began as a broad-based democratic movement for racial equality became instead a totalitarian cult of black supremacy, and this was surprising to everyone except a handful of conservatives who had studied history and could point to the example of the French Revolution as having followed a quite similar path of radicalism. Less than four years elapsed between the formation of the National Assembly in June 1789 to the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793, and by June 1793, the bloody Reign of Terror had begun. By 1799, Napoleon was dictator of France.

“The modern Cult of Progress . . . has repeatedly afflicted humanity with enthusiastic schemes for political, social and economic change. Always these innovations require us first to destroy ‘hitherto existing society’ (to quote the Communist Manifesto), and to entrust our future to the control of elites. Always the result is the same. From the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France to the Bolshevik Terror in revolutionary Russia, from Kristallnacht in Germany to the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in China to the ‘Killing Fields’ in Cambodia, the path of ‘progress’ is a trail painted in blood, littered with the corpses of those murdered or starved to death for the sake of political theories.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Jan. 11

“Equality” is arguably the most dangerous word in the world. The deadly tyranny of Communism — which killed between 75 million and 100 million people in the 20th century — ought to have cured us of any illusions about this. Alas, people cannot learn lessons from a history they do not know, and the American public education system has deliberately fostered ignorance while promoting liberal mythology as “history,” and thus we are now Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption.




 

Category: Gays, History

Gender Insanity for $45,078 a Year

Posted on | March 31, 2015 | 63 Comments

Caroline Narby is “five feet tall and pudgy,” she tells us at the beginning of her article “My Butchness,” a rather solipsistic 2,000-word discussion of her sexual identity. Of course, I graduated from a third-tier state university in Alabama, where using a fancy word like “solipsistic” would be considered kind of a show-off move, but Caroline Narby is an alumna of Wellesley College, ranked No. 4 among liberal arts colleges by U.S. News & World Report. Annual tuition at Wellesley is $45,078, so when Carolina Narby (Class of 2011) gets solipsistic, buddy, she goes whole-hog. Among other things, she informs us that Wellesley has “a vibrant and visible LGBT community on campus,” and her first semester she took a course entitled “Gay Writing from Sappho to Stonewall.”

This is some high-class intellectual navel-gazing, y’all:

After agonizing over the matter and consulting and commiserating with other butch women, I’ve come to realize that butchness doesn’t need to be understood as “masculinity” at all. Its form and substance don’t have to be defined by its opposition to femininity.
Sometimes I like to think of butchness as a kind of satire. Not as a parody — not as a clownish imitation of manhood–but as part of a purposeful endeavor to dismantle the popular conception of masculinity and the hegemony that it represents. . . . [B]utchness works to deconstruct maleness and masculinity by co-opting behaviors and aesthetics that men have tried to monopolize. Butch is a trickster gender — and so, in a similar way, is femme. Lesbian gender expressions do not emulate heteropatriarchy, they subvert it. Femme removes femininity from the discursive shadow of masculinity and thereby strips from it any connotation of subordination or inferiority. Butch takes markers of “masculinity” and divests them of their association with maleness or manhood. Butchness works against the gender binary — the masculine/feminine paradigm — and reclaims for women the full breadth of possibilities when it comes to gender expression.
Other times, honestly, I just don’t like to think about my gender as a conscious political undertaking at all. I know that “the personal is political.” I know that no action or belief can possibly be apolitical because every social institution on every scale is steeped in ideology. But sometimes I just get so tired. Sometimes I want to just be.

You probably want to read the whole thing, complete with her description of Girl Scout Camp “where it seemed as though 99% of the staff were lesbians.” But you knew that, right?

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Caroline Narby is the blogger we met earlier, complaining of the “dehumanizing” nature of “sexuality under heteropatriarchy.” She now has a master’s degree in Gender and Cultural Studies and is “currently finishing up a second master’s in public policy,” because I guess after paying $45,078 a year to get your bachelor’s degree at Wellesley, you need two master’s degrees before you can be bothered to get an actual job. Meanwhile, she’s a blogger, and you might want to read her contributions at Bitch magazine:

The aim of this blog is to explore and interrogate popular representations of autistic sexuality and gender performance from a queer, autistic perspective.

Let’s don’t and say we did.

Nevertheless, there’s “Erasure and Asexuality”:

In my previous post, I remarked that an examination of cultural representations of queer autistic sexuality will inevitably end up as a discussion about lack and absence, because so few representations exist. . . . This reflects and reinforces the presumption that autistic people are too “childlike” or socially stunted to comprehend the idea of sexuality, let alone to actually have sex. The result of prevailing cultural attitudes is that autistic people are perceived as inherently non-sexual. . . .
What popular culture tends to do is to deny that autistic people possess the agency and self-awareness to think about and establish sexual identities. Ableism combines with the general erasure of asexuality, and the assumption that a lack of interest in sex equates to naïveté, to produce the idea that asexual-identified autists must be asexual because they are autistic. They are asexual not because they are self-aware individuals who happen to express a particular sexuality, but because somehow their autism renders them too naïve, “innocent,” or socially inept for sex. They are not asexual because that’s what they happen to be, they are non-sexual because they have no choice.
This assumption robs asexual autists of all romantic dispositions of agency and recognition.

To repeat: $45,078 a year it costs to learn how to write that stuff.

 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

When Tony Scambilloni Brings The Chin Music, It Is Not Just “Mere Cash”

Posted on | March 31, 2015 | 8 Comments

by Sissypuss the Blog Kitty

The Cosmos Club wasn’t packed. The power elite of Washington gather rarely, and the guest list for this little party was the sort who value space and privacy almost as much as power. Getting into a joint this posh had meant infiltrating at a truly unreasonable hour, and staying well hidden.

The room had a stage at one end, an eating area in the middle, and seating at the other end. Real plants in large urns, along with the subdued lighting, made staying concealed fairly easy. The party was a raucous Bacchanalia, the kind that requires a Cone Of No Paparazzi. My sharp eyes took in Tony Scambilloni in his tux with the rest of Chin Music on the stage, playing world-class chamber music, while the crowd and the conversation steadily got wilder.

Unable to keep up with the heavy partying, Joe and Jill Biden sat down on the couch in front of me. In between the Bidens and Scambilloni was a who’s who of Progressive elites. Jon Corzine, so mysteriously incapable of showing up on film, had a flute of champaign. Tom Steyer, of course, held a scotch as he held forth on the weather. Jonathan Gruber must have been trolling for customers–I’d have thought him too small-potatoes for this crowd. Was that a Budwiser?

In the opposite corner of the seating end of the room, under a pile of nubile flesh, was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, clinging bitterly to his clothes and the club’s rules of decorum. More bitter than Strauss-Kahn was Bill Clinton standing nearby, threatening to leak from his eyes, mouth, and elsewhere at the sight of so many young women. Bitterest of all was Hillary, standing next to Bill in a pantsuit. Who had done her hair in a Nurse Ratched? There was no need for my Egyptian charm to read any of these minds, even if it had this sort of range. Conspicuous in their absence were the Obamas, but no one seemed to care a whit.

Harry and Landra Reid made the scene, and there was a subtle shift in the party, an expectation. Harry looked as comfortable as a Haisidic Rabbi at a Madrassa. Grey suit, blue tie. Even if the guy wasn’t Mormon, he’d still be the antithesis of a party animal, regardless of age. The room was all: “Why’s HE here?” as the music paused.

And then SHE entered. Monica Lewinsky. No: a jet black cocktail dress. Afar off, Tony nodded, and Chin Music leaned into “Kashmir”

Monica looked at Harry, standing there with a diet ginger ale, and lifted a microphone:

Weren’t my son put beatdown on my face, stars filled my head,
I’m a legislator of both crime and farce, to say what I have said.
To sit with elders of the Progressive race, this world has seldom seen.
They talk of debt for which they sit and wait, when Cthulhu’ll be revealed. . .

First of all, the lady had taken some singing lessons since the Clinton administration–my ears can detect any soundboard trick. Second of all, Reid had all the popularity of a Y chromosome at a feminist conference, even amongst his ilk. The tipsy room threatened to roll over laughing at Reid’s embarrassment.

Reid’s face went very dark, but what was he to say? The people who owned his dented little peach pit of a soul, who had paid Tony to afford him such personal attention, were in this very room. He bowed his head and sulked. There was no humanity left in the room, as one who had ruthlessly built power so many decades was rejected without hope of redemption by his peers.

The band continued expertly through the rest of the tune, oblivious to the human wreckage that was Harry Reid. Lewinsky sang on, but not a word I heard could I relate–the story was quite clear. Until Monica started slinking toward her old boss. It didn’t sound like she was doing a parody anymore, exactly:

Ooh, yeah-yeah, ooh, yeah-yeah, when I’m down…
Ooh, yeah-yeah, ooh, yeah-yeah, well I’m down, so down
Ooh, my baby, oooh, my baby, let me take you there

Let me take you there. Let me take you there

It almost seemed as though Lewinsky had some sub-textual meaning going on, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it might be. Whatever it was, both Bill and Hillary were both fire engine red, though I think for different reasons.

The song ended, and the spell was broken in a crescendo of applause. A dust mote that may have once been Harry Reid blew toward the exit. He warbled over his shoulder: “Romney didn’t win, did he?“.

And then I heard Joe Biden say to Jill: “Wow. I never new Bruce Jenner had fronted Black Sabbath. But at least the transition seems to be going nicely.”

Category: Democrats, humor

Feminism Requires a Theory of the Moral and Intellectual Inferiority of Males

Posted on | March 31, 2015 | 33 Comments

If women are systematically oppressed by males, as feminist theory insists, the perpetrators and beneficiaries of this oppression — i.e., males — must be selfish and cruel. Quod erat demonstrandum.

After my previously described encounter with a Wellesley graduate, I continued my tour of the online lunatic asylum that is Feminist Tumblr, and came across this 171-word anti-male rant:

Ladies, here is a tip from me to you, some information that is going to set you free: men are never going to take you seriously. Men are conditioned from day one to see you as less than, to think you’re a joke, you’re weak, you’re stupid, you’re irrational, and you’re deficient. Most men never even attempt to unlearn that conditioning, let alone actually manage to do it. The second you stop shaping your life and your choices and your wants and yourself around how best to make men take you seriously is the second you can start actually living. Don’t play their shell-game. Don’t waste your energy or your brain space trying to figure out how to calibrate your actions to get the best reaction out of them. Stop doing everything you can to make your back as flat as possible so they have a smooth trip walking all over you. Demand your space, stop apologizing and accommodating, and let them figure out how the f–k to deal with it.

You might want to bookmark that one. It could come in handy the next time someone tells you that feminism isn’t about hating men.

 

Category: Sex Trouble
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