The Other McCain

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

SHOCKING: Doctor in Liberia Explains MILLIONS Wasted in Ebola Fight

Posted on | October 11, 2014 | 45 Comments

Dr. James Appel is a young Christian medical missionary working at a hospital in Monrovia, Liberia. What he wrote last month about the situation there deserves to be read by everyone:

Liberia is losing the fight against Ebola because they are depending on NGOs and an influx of Western money instead of traditional ways of dealing with epidemics. The first few Ebola epidemics were in remote villages where the villages touched by Ebola were self-quarantined according to ancient traditions of dealing with plagues. No one went in and out, and the surrounding communities brought them food. The caregivers washed themselves and their clothes rapidly and frequently after each contact with the patient, just using simple soap and water. Very few ever got sick, and the disease was controlled in a few months.
Here in Liberia, everyone is excited about the millions of US dollars being poured in to “fight Ebola,” and everyone wants a piece of the pie. A certain NGO out in rural Liberia quarantined a village, claiming they’d tested and found three cases. They applied for and received US $250,000 to fight Ebola in this village. They brought in a few sacks of rice and some chlorine. The villagers mobbed the trucks and carried off the plunder. And, miracle of miracles, not a single person died in the village.
Great effort at treating and controlling Ebola? Or pretending there’s Ebola in order to pocket some easy cash? I’ve never heard of a 0% fatality rate for Ebola, but you make the call.
NGO’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to level earth with heavy equipment over a month in order to build tent cities capable of isolating and treating Ebola, but then not even giving them IV fluids or food, so that the Ebola patients sneak out of the tents and cross the street looking for food.
Dozens if not hundreds of US $70,000 Land Cruisers are taking foreigners around town to hotels, bars, clubs, and fancy guest houses so they can feel comfortable while they fight Ebola, and yet they can’t even collect the dead bodies that could expose so many more!
We’ve had bodies left for up to three days. Others have stayed in the open for up to five days before being collected. Patients are often turned away from the Ebola centers, and some have even refused to take anyone who doesn’t come in an ambulance. How many of the poor in West Point slum can afford an ambulance, even if there were enough available to take them? . . .

You need to read the whole thing, and send it to everyone you know, so they can read it, too. And please pray for Dr. Appel’s safety.

 

Category: Liberia

In Summary, It’s About Control

Posted on | October 11, 2014 | 28 Comments

by Smitty

Jonah Goldberg:

I’m coming to the position that every issue is a cultural issue. According to the Thomas Frank view, there are two kinds of issues: real issues and cultural (or social) issues. And, if he had his way, all elections would hinge on “real issues.” He writes in What’s the Matter with Kansas: “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests.”

This is of course, warmed-over Marxist twaddle. Frank thinks his view of economic interests is the only defensible view and everything else is boob bait for bubbas (Pat Moynihan’s orthodox liberal ad hominem for Clinton’s push for welfare reform) or what the Marxists call “false consciousness.” Much like Lena Dunham’s sex scenes, the list of things that are wrong with this is very long. People vote on the kind of community or country they want to live in, period. That means that taxes are a legitimate issue, but it also means that guns and abortion and free speech are just as legitimate. Liberals implicitly understand this, even if they lie about it routinely in their rhetoric. They are the first to invoke the language of values and right-and-wrong on the issues they care about, whether it is gay marriage or immigration or civil rights. And they are entirely right to do so. Where they are wrong is when they employ the language of “real issues” to dismiss any value-laden arguments that help conservatives win elections.

My derived understanding of the Lefty worldview is:

(a) You are stupid meat.
(b) You can be controlled by hormonal appeal.
(c) If not (a) or (b), you must be silenced.
(d) Because #Power.

Every baking of a definition, every brutally controlled conversation, every refusal to admit clear fault, every outright lie, is all about (d).

Category: Culture

Three Totally Unrelated News Items

Posted on | October 10, 2014 | 17 Comments

ITEM ONE:

Samra Kesinovic, 17, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, left their families in Vienna, Austria, earlier this year. “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah — and we will die for him,” the girls wrote in a note to their parents in April. The Austrian teenagers are now “believed to be married, pregnant and living in the Islamic State-controlled city of Raqqa in northern Syria.” Happily ever after? Not quite. The girls recently “have contacted their loved ones and told them they are sick of living with the Islamic State jihadis, but they also said they don’t feel they can flee from their unwanted new life.”

ITEM TWO:

Cylvia Hayes, 47, who is now engaged to Oregon’s Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber, was revealed this week as having married a teenage Ethiopian immigrant in 1997. The so-called “green card wedding” was a sham that enabled the 18-year-old college student to get permanent U.S. residency. After this shabby secret was reported by the local press, Kitzhaber “admitted to being paid $5,000 for the marriage,” which was dissolved in 2002. In a statement, Kitzhaber said, “It was wrong then and it is wrong now and I am here today to accept the consequences, some of which will be life changing.”

ITEM THREE:

At a $15,000-per-plate Hollywood fund-raising dinner Thursday, movie star Gwyneth Paltrow enthusiastically praised President Obama: “You’re so handsome that I can’t speak properly. . . . I am one of your biggest fans, if not the biggest, and have been since the inception of your campaign. . . . It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass.”

As I say, these news items are totally unrelated. Readers who detect a pattern — oikophobia, perhaps? — are probably just haters.

 

Category: Foreigners, Immigration, Racism

Obama’s Failed Presidency

Posted on | October 10, 2014 | 30 Comments

“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

A disaster, a catastrophe, a cataclysm:

“I want to make government cool again,” he said.
Obama believed in government, and he was confident that his election would signal that the American people were ready to believe again, too.
As we approach the sixth anniversary of his election, the Obama presidency is in tatters. Obama’s policies, foreign and domestic, are widely seen as failed or failing. His approval rating is near its lowest point. Obama’s base of support is loyal and fierce and shrinking. Much of the country sees him as incompetent or untrustworthy, and government, far from being “cool,” is a joke on good days and a threat on bad ones.

Read the rest by Stephen F. Hayes. The problem is not unique to Obama. He’s just Jimmy Carter with more charisma.

The seldom-recognized fact is, liberalism is a wholly destructive force. People who speak of liberalism’s “successes” generally refuse to acknowledge that liberalism only “succeeds” in destroying things, or by cannibalizing pre-existing assets and spending borrowed money. Take for example, Social Security. It began with a 1% employee “contribution” and a 1% payroll tax. Now the Social Security tax is seven times as much, yet the program is hurtling toward bankruptcy, an endless fiscal nightmare. “Success!”

To what shall we compare liberalism? It’s like the ne’er-do-well son who has become addicted to heroin, and America is the prosperous family home which the liberal junkie is steadily robbing blind. Dad comes home from the office and the junkie son says, “Here, Dad, I bought you some Social Security.” Dad thanks him and then says, “Hey, what happened to my big screen TV?”

The junkie shrugs. Dad’s power tools go missing, then Mom’s jewelry, but the indulgent parents don’t want to admit the problem.

Neither does America want to admit its liberalism problem. Go back and look at the LBJ administration. LBJ promised us a “Great Society,” but all he did was destroy a Pretty Good Society. Whatever was wrong with America in 1963, it certainly wasn’t as bad as the hopeless mess LBJ left it in when Richard Nixon took office in 1969.

Yet even as liberalism destroys America, it creates constituencies dependent on a continuation of this destructive process. Entire states have been bought off by the Democrats: “Outside of a handful of states–California (49/48), New York (50/47), Massachusetts (50/47), Maryland, which benefits from the D.C. boom (56/43) — the numbers are brutal. Even blue states like Minnesota (40/57) and Oregon (44/54) have had it with Obama. And in his last redoubts, California et al., Obama is not much more than breaking even.”

College kids think Obama is awesome, but they’re prone to weird beliefs.

Race riots in St. Louis? There’s your “Hope and Change”!

How do you like it now?

 

Category: Barack Obama

Jesse Matthew: Serial Killer?

Posted on | October 10, 2014 | 9 Comments

Left to right: Hannah Graham, Jesse Matthew, Morgan Harrington

Evidence is beginning to indicate that the suspect in Hannah Graham’s disappearance was a one-man crime wave:

The prime suspect in the September 2014 disappearance of U.Va. student Hannah Graham had been interviewed by police five years ago in connection with another missing young woman, NBC29 in Charlottesville, Virginia, reported Thursday.
Jesse Matthew, 32, who was arrested in connection with Graham’s disappearance last month, has been linked to the 2009 unsolved murder of Morgan Harrington. Harrington, a 20-year-old Virginia Tech student, was last seen at a rock concert in Charlottesville. Her body was found several months later.
Matthew had worked as a cab driver in the Charlottesville area the night Harrington vanished, according to NBC29’s Henry Graff. Two weeks ago, as the search for Graham intensified to areas outside Charlottesville, police found Matthew’s abandoned cab on a farm.
Following Harrington’s disappearance in 2009, police had interviewed dozens of cab drivers, including Matthew. . .
Graham, 18, was last seen during the early morning hours of Sept. 13 with Matthew on Charlottesville’s downtown mall. Matthew was arrested in Texas Sept. 21 and charged with abduction with intent to defile in Graham’s disappearance.
Two years ago, the FBI said DNA evidence showed that Harrington’s killer also was responsible for a 2005 rape in Northern Virginia, so Matthew could be linked to that assault as well.

More from the New York Daily News:

Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington, 20, was last seen getting into a cab after attending a Metallica concert at John Paul Jones Arena on Oct. 17, 2009, the same night Matthew was on duty for Access, a now-defunct yellow cab company. . . .
Harrington went to the restroom during the concert and was never seen by friends again. Security guards barred her from re-entering the campus arena at the University of Virginia. Police believe she hailed a taxi instead. She was found brutally murdered, her body discovered at a farm 10 miles from the arena on Jan. 26, 2010.
“Everything is starting to add up,” Melvin Carter, a local cab driver who knew Matthew, told WTVR.

In the two weeks since Matthew was arrested last month, police have looked at him in connection with other unsolved crimes:

It is the latest in a series of mysteries involving young people who have disappeared or been killed in the area, which includes the Route 29 corridor and its frightening reputation for vanishing young women.
In August 2009, Heidi Childs and her boyfriend of four years, David Metzler, were shot dead with a rifle in a national park about 10 miles from the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg. . . .
Sheriff’s Capt. Robert New confirmed . . . that “they are following this case (of Jesse Matthew) closely” to see whether it is connected to the killing of Childs, 18, and Metzler, 19.
The area is two hours from Charlottesville and 90 minutes from Liberty University in Lynchburg, where Matthew once attended college more than dozen years ago. . . .
Cassandra Morton, 23, was reported missing in October 2009 in Lynchburg. About seven weeks later, her body was found off a hiking trail at the bottom of Candlers Mountain. . . .
A spokesman for the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office said Morton was found under brush as if someone tried to hide the body.
Officials believe she was killed elsewhere, the station reported.
Her body was discovered by a hiker.
Campbell County Sheriff Steve Hutcherson said . . . his office never closes homicide cases. “We follow up on any leads, we have to do due diligence, and we have to leave no stone unturned,” he said, while telling CNN they will investigate to see whether there is a connection to Graham’s disappearance.
The sheriff noted that Morton was reported missing by her parents the same day as Morgan Harrington, a Virginia Tech student whose body was found in January 2010.

Matthew has not been convicted of any of these crimes yet. Real life is not like TV dramas where murders are solved in an hour.

UPDATE: Also, unlike TV crime dramas, where the suspect is always an evil genius mastermind, Jesse Matthew isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. A Lynchburg TV station interviewed a woman who knew Matthew when he attended Liberty University:

“I would help him with his school work, we’d eat breakfast in the mornings before going to our first class, I knew then that he, I was honestly shocked that he was able to attend college.” . . .
During their years together at LU, she says she helped him with his class work and it was then she realized his intelligence level was not up to par.
“When I was looking over his work, it was truly at the age of Grammar school. It was see spot run, with handwriting to match.”
That’s one of the reasons this woman says she’d be shocked if he committed these crimes. She says she doesn’t want people to jump to judgment.
“It was almost as if you were going to school with a little kid, but he was a sweet kid, and he was fun to be around, but maybe that was only one side I saw.” . . .
“My basic concern is that he doesn’t understand the boundaries when it comes to women or other people.”

He “doesn’t understand boundaries”? How hard is it to understand, “Thou shalt not kill”? Stupid people can be evil, too, you know.

 

Category: Crime, Virginia

LIVE AT FIVE: 10.10.14

Posted on | October 10, 2014 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Ebola No Laughing Matter Now

Not so funny now, is it, you idiot?

Passenger shouting “I’ve been to Africa!” escorted off flight to the Dominican by emergency responders in hazmat suits, tested for deadly virus
Dallas deputy tests negative for Ebola

Great Leap Forward: Red China Overtakes US As World’s Largest Economy
IMF estimates China’s GDP at $17.7 trillion

UKIP Wins First Seat In Commons With Tory Defector Carswell
Carries Clacton with landslide 60% of the vote



POLITICS
“Woefully Inadequate”: Congressional Republicans Rip White House Review Of Prostitution Scandal

Rep. Jason Chaffetz sounds off

White House insists Dach was a volunteer, not employee


Federal Judge Strikes Down Texas Voter ID Law As “Poll Tax”


Is The SD Senate Race Turning Sour For The GOP?

Oregon Governor’s Fiance Admits To Sham Marriage

Supremes Block Wisconsin From Implementing Voter ID Law

Oklahoma Unveils New Death Chamber

Voters Tune In, Turn Off Democrats

Anchorage Police Release Report On Brawl Involving Palin Family



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Slumps To Lowest Since 2010 As Rout Extends: WTI $83.74, Brent $88.30
Asian Shares, Oil Prices Plunge On Growth Worries
Dow Drops 334 In Worst Day Of 2014
Pepsi Earnings Hit The Spot; Market Holds Stock Back
Dollar Steady Against Euro, Yen Amid Lower US Yields
Dairy Queen Latest To Get Hacked
Icahn Demands Apple Stock Buyback
Microsoft’s Nadella Walks Back Comment On Womens’ Pay Raises
Sony Smartwatch 3 Lands With Verizon This Month
HTC Debuts Selfie Phone, GoPro-Like Camera
iRobot’s New App Lets You Control Your Robot Army With An Android Tablet
Google Now Beats Both Siri And Cortana
Zynga Launches Revamped “Words With Friends”



SPORTS
Luck On Fire As Colts Beat Texans

370 yards and three TDs

Indianapolis hangs on to win, 33-28

Blue Jackets Score Two In Third, Beat Sabres 3-1

O’s Sign J.J. Hardy To Three-Year Extension

Habs Top Caps In Shootout, 2-1

Crosby Sparks Pens To 6-4 Victory Against Ducks

Lightning Edges Panthers In OT

Wheeler, Jets Rout Coyotes 6-2

Wild Shut Out Avs 5-0

Predators Edge Sens 3-2

Nash Scores Twice As Rangers Beat Blues

Blackhawks Top Stars In Shootout

Flames Pound Oilers 5-2

Dodgers Assess Their Roster After Early Exit From Pennant Race

Kyle Busch Wins Pole At Charlotte, Denny Hamlin Third

Strauss: English Cricket Is The Real Victim Of Pietersen’s Autobiography

Will Denard Span Be Back With The Nats In 2015?



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Katy Perry To Perform At Super Bowl’s Halftime Show

“A more family-friendly act,” they said.

Or so insiders say; Perry publicly blasted the No Fun League’s “pay to play” trial balloon on ESPN

SNL Veteran Jan Hooks Dies At 57
From the long-ago days when it was actually funny

George Clooney Crashes NYCC, Jokes His Wife Has No Idea What It Is

Meet Elle’s 2014 Women In Hollywood

Scarlett Johansson Looking Hot Just Five Weeks After Daughter’s Birth

Selena Gomez Surprises Cancer Patients

Creepy: Gwyneth Paltrow Wants To Spend Time With Her Ex’s GF, Jennifer Lawrence

Kiss And Make Up With Anne Hathaway, We Dare You



FOREIGNERS
Labour Barely Holds Heywood & Middleton – Margin Of Victory Over UKIP Only 617 Votes
Kim Jong Un Absent From Major Anniversary Celebrations
More Mass Graves Found In Iguala
Islamic State Takes Over One-Third Of Kobane Despite Air Strikes
Mexican Police Nab Alleged Head Of Juarez Cartel
Chinese Fisherman Killed In ROK Coast Guard Raid
Hong Kong Students Undaunted By Authorities’ Rejection Of Talks
Iran Refuses To Admit US Member Of US Inspection Team
Japan Braces For Another Typhoon
Brazil Presidential Election: Silva’s Socialists Throw Support Behind Neves To Bring Down Rousseff
Suicide Attacks Kill 70 In Yemen



BLOGS & STUFF
Doug Powers: Hillary Clinton Reveals Her Weakness Heading Into 2016
Twitchy: Boy, Does This Gwyneth Paltrow Photo Capture Creepy Obama Cultism
American Power: Obama Ebola Bumper Stickers Appear Around LA
American Thinker: The Rise Of The Professional Slut
Conservatives4Palin: Karl Rove Is Ruining The GOP
Don Surber: LEGOs To Be Made From Unicorn Farts
Jammie Wearing Fools: Great News – Over A Dozen States To Cancel Non-Compliant Health Insurance Policies In Coming Weeks
Joe For America: Rep. Marcia Fudge Tells Her Black Constituents To Stop Complaining
JustOneMinute: The Defeat Of The Coalition Will Be Televised
Pamela Geller: Michigan Mom Outraged Over School Assignment Requiring Students To Proselytize For Islam
Protein Wisdom: Not Only Is Gender Irrelevant, It’s Now Thoughtcrime To Say Boys And Girls
Shot In The Dark: Trulbert! Part XV – Gone South
The Gateway Pundit: Deadly Enterovirus D68 First Indentified In Cities With Large Numbers Of Relocated Illegals
The Jawa Report: Another UK Terror Raid Nets Al-Muhajiroon Member Mizanur Rahman
The Lonely Conservative: HHS Secretary Says There May Be More Ebola Cases In The US
This Ain’t Hell: Pentagon – More ISIS Victories In Our Future
Weasel Zippers: CAIR Going After Woman Who Banned Muslims From Her Shooting Range
Megan McArdle: Feminists, You Can’t Pick Your Battles


The Last Falangist – 99 Cents Through Monday!

Category: Live at Five

Bad Ideas and Bad Prose at Cornell

Posted on | October 9, 2014 | 53 Comments

Cornell University may be the only Ivy League school with a “diversity” quota for the mentally ill. Or maybe the students were sane until they got to Ithaca and started studying under the tutelage of radical professors. At any rate, the Cornell campus is swarming with lunatics:

A student-sponsored event at Cornell University (CU) claimed capitalism and white supremacy are “institutions that promote rape culture” and “must be destroyed.”
The event, which recognized a “National Day of Protest Against Rape Culture” late last month, took place in CU’s William Straight Hall. Bailey Dineen, one of the sponsors of the event, reprimanded Cornell and the justice system and accused “white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist, [and] cisheteropatriarchy,” for promoting rape culture, according to the Cornell Review.
According to the event’s Facebook page, End Rape Culture, where 323 students confirmed their attendance, “[v]iolence and fear are a constant feature of our society.”
“We cannot pretend that ours is a progressive culture when sexual violence remains a daily fact of existence for minoritized identities,” the page says. “Advances toward ‘equality’ cannot purport to signify much when the reality of rape burdens women and queer bodies at every moment and remains a fixed part of the history and present of people of color, people of lower income, and other groups rendered powerless in our society.”
The page goes on to declare that “[s]o long as sexual violence exists, it will be used as a tool to ensure subordination in the interest of maintaining a white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchy.” . . .

If you are ever tempted to use the phrases “minoritized identities” or “cisheteropatriarchy,” you should seek professional psychiatric help — or apply for a scholarship to Cornell University. Apparently, they have a Department of Bad Prose that teaches students to write this kind of impenetrable jargon. Their incomprehensible rhetoric is perfect for expressing their incoherent beliefs:

[O]ne of the event’s three organizers, Bailey Dineen, read an approximately 9-minute speech/poem (it had qualities of both) concerning her personal experiences and attacking rape culture . . .
At several points in the speech, Dineen began to cry, and in the audience several students were seen crying, too.

Are you having a protest, or are you having a nervous breakdown? At Cornell, it doesn’t matter. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

By enrolling mentally ill students, Cornell ensures that there will always be a few dozen undergraduates in attendance for any protest rally against imaginary oppressions. The deranged victims will begin weeping uncontrollably during their speeches, overwhelmed by the existential angst of their “minoritized identities” and “queer bodies.”

You may be wondering, “Who is this Bailey Dineen person?” What a coincidence — she’s been wondering the same thing!

Bailey prefers the pronouns “They, Their, Them,” so it’s probably a cisheteropatriarchal hate crime to call her “she.” Next, you may ask: “What is Bailey Dineen’s sexual orientation?” None of the above.

Bailey describes herself (or maybe “themself”) as asexual. Someone explained to her (them) that “there is this thing called sexual attraction,” but the idea of having sex “scares and repulses” Bailey. Here is a video interview with the asexual Bailey:

Some readers may be frightened by this. “Holy crap! This kook is a senior at Cornell University? An elite Ivy League institution where annual tuition is $47,286? Aren’t students at these schools supposed to be the best and brightest, the future leaders of America?”

Yep. We’re doomed. Hopelessly and irretrievably doomed.

 

Category: Education

‘Destroying Her Husband’s Life … Taking Back Power for Women Everywhere’

Posted on | October 9, 2014 | 26 Comments

Ben Affleck stars as Nick Dunne in Gone Girl.

“On the occasion of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne reports that his beautiful wife, Amy, has gone missing. Under pressure from the police and a growing media frenzy, Nick’s portrait of a blissful union begins to crumble. Soon his lies, deceits and strange behavior have everyone asking the same dark question: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?”
— plot summary of Gone Girl

Feminism as revenge is a concept that many people understand instinctively. Whereas 50 years ago, the unhappy woman might have sought psychiatric therapy to help her cope with feelings of disappointment, regret and inadequacy, feminism encourages women to turn their feelings into political empowerment, to view themselves as victims of systemic male-supremacist oppression, so that whatever makes them unhappy can be denounced as social injustice.

Our common-sense understanding of feminism as revenge explains why most people reject feminism, per se. We don’t buy into the “personal is political” rationale, whereby unhappy women seek to transform their discontents into a radical cause. At the very least, common sense suggests that Women’s Studies majors — “raging lesbian feminists” who condemn Disney movies as “heteronormative” and make “Smash Patriarchy” their slogan — do not really speak for all women.

If nothing else, the new thriller Gone Girl signals that Hollywood at long last has figured out how to exploit an undeniable fact about Ben Affleck: Movie audiences don’t like him. Every cinematic attempt to make Affleck a heroic protagonist is doomed, because there is something about him people simply don’t trust. The 2013 movie Runner Runner was the first time I’ve seen Affleck cast appropriately, as a selfish, cynical offshore casino owner — the villain in a 21st-century film noir. And judging from the critical debate about Gone Girl, Affleck is set up as the fall guy in a complex feminist revenge fantasy.

Nick Dunne is a victim, but he’s not an innocent victim, nor is his missing ex-wife Amy a sympathetic character. Feminists are debating Gone Girl‘s ambiguities, Emine Sanders explains at the Guardian:

It wasn’t as if the last week’s think-pieces, roughly summed up as “Is Gone Girl a feminist masterpiece or supremely damaging to all women, everywhere?”, sprung out of nowhere. When Gillian Flynn’s novel was published in 2012, and became a bestseller, the US writer found herself accused of a “deep animosity towards women”. Her gripping, if ludicrous story — be warned that the whole plot is coming — of Amy Dunne, a wealthy and beautiful psychopath whose revenge on her cheating husband involves framing him for her “murder”, making up rape allegations against men (one of whom she murders during her demented spree) before trapping her broken husband by stealing his sperm, raised hackles. One blogger neatly summarised the objections to the character, saying she “is the crystallisation of a thousand misogynist myths and fears about female behaviour. If we strapped a bunch of men’s rights advocates to beds and downloaded their nightmares, I don’t think we’d come up with stuff half as ridiculous as this plot.” . . .
In an otherwise positive piece on the film for the feminist website Jezebel, the writer Jessica Coen admits: “Movie Amy pales in comparison to the vivid character we meet in the book. Strip away Book Amy’s complexities and you’re left with little more than ‘crazy fucking bitch’. That makes her no less captivating, but it does make the film feel a lot more misogynistic than the novel.”

You can read the whole thing and see how feminism can never accept a novel as a novel or a movie as a movie. Everything in culture and society must ultimately be refracted through the warped ideological lens of feminist theory, interpreted as political symbolism rather than enjoyed as entertainment. The classic example of this was Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash, where just one glance at the index reveals the intensity of her weird obsessions:

Fatal Attraction, 4, 25, 125-136, 141-142, 144, 157, 159, 208-210, 351

You see how this one movie, in Faludi’s mind, deserved its own 12-page treatment (pp.125-136), as well as multiple other mentions in her book. Why? Because the murderous psychopathic stalker played by Glenn Close was, in the minds of Faludi and other feminists, a symbol of a misogynistic hostility toward “liberated” women.

Personally, I’ve always viewed Fatal Attraction as a morality tale about the dangers of adultery, but many feminists seemed to take it as a personal insult, a condemnation of their own lifestyles.

Well, a hit dog will holler, as folks say down home.

If there is a stereotype of feminists as lonely, bitter, desperate, and dangerously crazy, where did that stereotype come from? Is it really just anti-feminist propaganda? Or does this stereotype contain within it some kernel of ugly truth? Returning to Gone Girl, here is Vox critic Todd Vander Werff’s take on the controversial film:

This is perhaps the most feminist mainstream movie in years, a forthright depiction of the ways that society controls women and forces them into certain roles, then lets men basically do whatever they want. Amy Dunne might be a monster, but she’s no sui generis psychopath. No, she’s Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together by a husband, parents, and a social order that demanded she be certain things, rather than who she really was.
And in destroying her husband’s life, she’s symbolically taking back power for women everywhere.

Vander Werff got scalded on Twitter for this claim, but I think he’s got a point. What he means is that Amy Dunne’s monstrous character is, as feminists would say, “socially constructed.” Or to put it in simpler terms: The patriarchy made her do it.

Amy Dunne tried to follow the script society provided her, and when that script did not bring her happiness  — when Nick cheated on her — she decided she was entitled to revenge. Basically, she’s like Charles Bronson in Death Wish. Amy Dunne has been betrayed, and the abrogation of an implied contract (“Follow the script and your life will be happy”) turns her into a vigilante. Feminists are offended by Gone Girl only because they insist on viewing it through an ideological prism, perceiving the psycho killer as reflecting a negative interpretation of themselves. Here is Slate’s David Haglund’s take on the movie:

Time will tell what it is about David Fincher’s Gone Girl that people remember, but when it comes to the Gillian Flynn novel that the movie is based on, we already know: It’s the “Cool Girl” speech. That riff by the book’s titular missing woman, Amy Dunne, has been cited and debated and referenced over and over in the two years since the best-seller was published. It is, almost indisputably, the cultural legacy of the book.
The passage in question goes on for a couple of pages, but the part most frequently quoted begins like this:

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

“Men,” the next paragraph says, “actually think this girl exists.” And that line is key: The essential targets of Amy’s critique are men who think of women as extensions of themselves, as creatures who are meant to fulfill their own desires and not to have independent wants or needs that might occasionally come into conflict with them.

 You can read the rest of that. The point here is that Gone Girl‘s actual message is about how women drive themselves crazy by attempting to live their lives according to formulas and scripts. And I would argue that it doesn’t matter whether it’s the “Cool Girl” script (threesomes and anal sex? really?) or whatever “empowered” script the movie’s feminist critics would prefer Amy Dunne to follow. Ultimately, you have to live your own life, and finding happiness in life requires that our expectations be rooted in a realistic understanding of ourselves, and of human nature. Everyone must learn to live with disappointments. Everyone must understand that they are flawed human beings, and that the other people in their lives are all flawed and human, as well. We cannot  be something we are not, and we cannot solve our problems by wishing them away.

The famed sociologist Steven Goldberg wrote an entire book about this, When Wish Replaces Thought: Why So Much of What You Believe Is False. Wishful thinking is neither a good political philosophy nor a useful life strategy, and yet time after time we see people get tripped up over the “is/ought” distinction, stumbling into failure and becoming enraged because reality (life as it is) does not conform to their egalitarian ideals of “fairness” (life as it ought to be).

Good movies help us understand life. Good movies tell us the truth about our problems as human beings. One of my favorite movie scenes is from the 1984 film Repo Man. That apocalyptic Reagan-era cult classic is too weird to explain here, but basically, Otto leaves behind his life as a worthless punk slacker by taking a job repossessing cars. Toward the end of the movie, Otto is in a convenience store when one of his punk buddies, Duke, bursts through the door and tries to rob the place.

The store clerk pulls a pistol and fatally shoots Duke. As Duke is bleeding out, Otto goes to comfort him, and hears Duke speak his last words: “I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am.”

That, my friends, is a worthless punk way of thinking: “I blame society.”

If your response to failure is to look around for someone else to blame, you’re a punk. “Society” didn’t make Duke a criminal. He made his own choices. We all make our own choices in life.

Some people have advantages we don’t have. Sometimes the circumstances of our lives are unfortunate and arguably unfair. Sometimes other people hurt us and harm us, and there isn’t a whole lot we can do about it. However, the one thing we can always control is our own actions. We can choose between doing what is right and doing what is wrong. We can be wise or we can be foolish. We can do good or we can do evil. We can speak the truth or we can tell lies.

If we don’t believe that “society” makes a punk rob a convenience store, do we believe “patriarchy” causes all women’s problems? Isn’t feminism ultimately just a way of exempting women from responsibility by providing them with a scapegoat they can always blame?

If many feminists don’t like Gone Girl, it’s probably because Gone Girl tells an important truth. Feminists hate the truth.

 

 

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What You Can Do
Did you find this article informative and useful? Why don’t you copy it in an e-mail and send it to your friends, family or church members? You can also e-mail it to your favorite local or national talk radio host. Also, you can help spread the word by sharing it via Twitter or posting it to Facebook. Thanks in advance for your help, and I am always deeply grateful for contributions through PayPal ($5, $10, whatever) as support and encouragement. — RSM

 





 

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble
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