The Other McCain

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

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.25.14

Posted on | September 25, 2014 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
US, Coalition Forces Hit Syrian Oil Refineries

French military video shows results of an airstrike on an Islamic State fuel & supply depot

Strategic warfare strikes against ISIS
F-22 fighter makes combat debut over Syria
Obama urges unity against ISIS network of death
Holder hints at US troops going into Syria




Will Modi’s Visit Boost US-India Ties?
Prime Minister Modi Calls Mars Mission Success “Historic”

Nigerian Military Claims Scalp Of Boko Haram Leader
Secret police had claimed Shekau was dead earlier; man killed in Konduga was leader’s body double



POLITICS
GOP Heavyweights Flock To Kansas In Support Of Pat Roberts

Crazy Cousin John, Jeb Bush among party stalwarts rushing to shore up Roberts

Race tightens drastically after Democrat’s withdrawal


Jim Webb In 2016?


Federal Appeals Court Allows Controversial Walker Probe To Resume

US To Pay Navajo Nation $554 Million To End Royalties Suit

Former Ohio Rep James Traficant Injured In Farm Accident

Price Tag For Fighting California Wildfires Tops $53 Million



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Up On US Stockpile Drop, Supply Glut Weighs On Market: WTI $92.65, Brent $96.76
Modi Asks Soda Makers To Blend In Juice To Help Farmers
Chicoms Set To Replace Central Bank Chief?
New Home Sales Surge To Six-Year High
Dollar Jumps In Asia On Upbeat Housing Data
Wall Street Advances As Consumer Companies Rally
Apple Apologizes For iOS 8 Update Bug
BlackBerry CEO Takes Jab At Apple: Try Bending Our Phone
Bash Bug Could Leave IT Systems Shellshocked
GoogleX To Circle The Earth With Internet-Linked Balloons
Forza Horizon 2: Massive Multiplayer Online, Massive Fun



SPORTS
Kershaw Leads Dodgers To NL West Title, Crushes Giants 9-1

Adrian Gonzalez and Juan Uribe celebrate after the Dodgers’ victory

Kershaw notches 21st victory; aiming to lead NL in ERA for fourth consecutive season


No Criminal Charges For Tony Stewart

Rangers Beat Astros 5-1 For Sweep


Phillies Edge Fish 2-1

ESPN Suspends Bill Simmons After He Rips Goodell

Braves Show Life, Top Pirates 6-2

Hughes Pitches Twins Past Snakes, 2-1

Brewers Stave Off Elimination With A Little Help From The Dodgers

Tribe Stays Alive With 6-4 Win Over Royals

Yankees Hit Three Homers, Still Lose 9-5 To O’s

Mets-Nationals Rained Out; Doubleheaders Today And Tomorrow



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
“It Helps With The Perception That I’m Just A Psycho”

Not a flake any more?

The TimeOut interview

More Rappers Divorcing Each Other

Jeremy Renner Admits He Secretly Married Baby Mama


Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino Indicted For Tax Fraud

Gwyneth Paltrow Still Running Chris Martin’s Life

College Football Dominates Saturday Night Cable Ratings

Britney Spears Is Sending Kate Middleton Her Entire New Lingerie Collection

Keanu Reeves’ Second Home Intruder In Two Days Showers & Skinny-Dips In Pool



FOREIGNERS
Algerian Jihadis Behead Kidnapped French Tourist
Ukraine Prepares To Close Border With Russia
American Begins Six Years Of Farm Work, Isolation In Nork Prison
Activists Making Plans For Hong Kong Democracy Sit-in
PM Cameron To Apologize To Her Majesty Over “Purring” Comment
Australian Government To Reintroduce Temporary Protection Visas
Nine Arrested In London As Part Of Investigation Into Islamic Terrorism

BLOGS & STUFF
First Street Journal: PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane – Blaming The Rape Victim
Michelle Malkin: Hicken-Weasel – Why Colorado’s Gutless Guv Is In Trouble
Twitchy: Was This Vox’s Worst Screwup Yet?
American Power: AmSpec Caves To Vexatious Litigant Brett Kimberlin
American Thinker: Twenty Years Ago, Americans Learned How To Win
BLACKFIVE: World Report – Obama Starts His Own War
Conservatives4Palin: Senator Pat Roberts And Picking Our Battles Wisely
Don Surber: Charleston Gazette – Free Speech For Me, Not Thee
Jammie Wearing Fools: Australian Police Gun Down Jihadi, Lefties React Predictably
Joe For America: Colorado Students March Out To Protest Patriotism
JustOneMinute: This Is A College Campus, Not A Place For Common Sense!
Protein Wisdom: The Poor – Jonathan Swift Engaged In Satire, Ruth Ginsburg Not So Much
Shot In The Dark: Minneapolis’ Real Scandal
STUMP: The Seven Deadly Sins Of NJ Pensions Are Really Only One Sin
The Gateway Pundit: More Lies From Susan Rice
The Jawa Report: Moderate Arab Muslims Help ISIS Recapture Yazidi Slaves
The Lonely Conservative: NY Democrat Used Taxpayer Subsidies While Delinquent On His Own Taxes
This Ain’t Hell: Army Division HQ Deploying To Iraq
Weasel Zippers: FLOTUS Bashes US During UN Event
Megan McArdle: Now Your Kitchen Can Match The Food You Burned


Category: Live at Five

Historian Erupts: ‘I Will Not Be Lectured to by a Public School Girl Like You!’

Posted on | September 24, 2014 | 38 Comments

Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) was the subject of an item here yesterday because of her quarrel with lesbian feminist Cathy Brennan, an argument that highlights the profound schism between radicals like Brennan (who are and always have been the core of the feminist movement) and trendy opportunists like Ms. Penny. The American reader may ask, “Who the hell is Laurie Penny, and why the hell are you writing about her?”

Briefly, then: An ambitious young British journalist who attended exclusive private schools (which are for peculiar reasons called “public schools” in England), Ms. Penny graduated from Oxford and then went to New York. There, she was rescued from death by actor Ryan Gosling, an incident that became the subject of an embarrassingly narcissistic article at Gawker. Ms. Penny is a certain type — a “posh bird,” as the Brits would say, whose ostentatious leftism is a fashionable pose among many upper-class youth — and as such is well on her way to becoming the Most Despised Woman in England. She came to my attention here in the States only because, in researching my “Sex Trouble” series on radical feminism, I was browsing Amazon for recent feminist books and came across Ms. Penny’s new volume, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution. Ranked #6 by Amazon in the “Gender Studies” category, and #11 in “Feminist Theory,” this seemed relevant to my project.

With our American reader’s questions asked and answered, then, we proceed to explain what no English reader needs to be told, namely that Laurie Penny is an impudent young fool with a penchant for making an utter spectacle of herself. As soon as I blogged about her yesterday, comments on the blog and feedback on Twitter began to fill up with notices of Ms. Penny’s previous self-inflicted embarrassments, including this public implosion in June 2012:

More details have emerged of the heavyweight clash of the commentariat this weekend between radical blogger and journalist Laurie Penny and the outspoken TV historian David Starkey at the Sunday Times Festival of Education.
The newspaper released video clips today of the contretemps, which occurred after the historian had talked about the values of the Asian men from Rochdale who were convicted of grooming young white girls for sex as being “entrenched in the foothills of the Punjab or wherever it is”, and how the men needed to be “inculcated in the British ways of doing things”.
Penny accused Starkey of “playing xenophobia and national prejudice for laughs” and asked him in a leading question whether he had a home in America, implying that Starkey might have tax questions to answer, a strong innuendo in the current climate of zero-tolerance.
The video shows Starkey bouncing out of his seat in response to this perceived smear, taking to the lectern to “share a little story” about how he and Penny had both been invited to debate by the Thomas Paine Society, but that while he had agreed to waive his fee the younger polemicist had asked for “such a large fee that the event had to be cancelled”.
“I think that is as mean and grasping as some runt comedian and I will not be lectured to by a public school girl like you!” a visibly angry Starkey spits, advancing on the diminutive Penny until he is standiung directly in front of her, while stabbing the air with his finger to punctuate his points.
“I came from the bottom and I will not have it!” he signs off with a flourish to considerable applause from a crowd quite evidently relishing the ruckus.

You can see the whole thing with video. It’s worth pointing out that David Starkey is no manner of right-winger, but a gay atheist. When he says that he “came from the bottom,” you have to understand that Starkey is from a true working-class background, in a nation where socioeconomic class is much more rigid than in America. His ascent in academia required him to overcome many disadvantages, including being born with two club feet, being stricken with polio, and suffering a nervous breakdown at 13. Starkey has many bad ideas and bad tendencies, but he is a man who has earned by his own merit and labor whatever privileges he has. For him to be lectured in public by such a person as Laurie Penny, accusing him of xenophobia and tax-dodging, was certainly more than anyone like David Starkey could be expected to endure.

“The organisation of human love has little to do with how children are raised and everything to do with the maintenance of the bourgeois state . . .”
— Laurie Penny, “Lesbian mums and the end of patriarchy,” 2008

She insists that lesbian motherhood is part of the Marxist revolutionary project to overthrow “the bourgeois state,” even as she insists she is not a lesbian. It’s the same old story, isn’t it? The revolutionary vanguard of an intellectual elite, claiming to speak for the proletariat, thus deputizing themselves with authority. Except instead of Lenin and Trotsky speaking for the peasants and workers, Comrade Penny is a heterosexual intellectual wielding power on behalf of the lesbian proletariat. We who know history expect in a few years a terror-famine against the lesbian kulaks and “show trials” for feminists accused of treason and sabotage — conspiring with the patriarchy!

No, the “runt comedian” Ms. Penny has no respect for anyone or anything worth respecting, and has never been able to understand why adults resent her presumptuous attitude. Here she is, from 2009 when she was 23, engaged in a blogfight:

And when I had my breakdown at 17 and was carted off to the loony bin for a year, I had my parents’ private healthcare insurance making sure that I wouldn’t be kicked out of hospital when the NHS cover ran out, as it did for many of the young people I shared the ward with. There’s every chance that private health insurance saved my life.
It’s not that I haven’t fought, struggled and worked extremely fucking hard every day for the past five years just to survive. It’s not that the struggle to stay well and stay productive and work for a secure future doesn’t take everything I have, every day.

Yadda yadda yadda. Don’t we all know the Laurie Penny type?

Top of the heap within their juvenile millieu — extraordinarily bright and on the academic fast-track — they conceive themselves too good for any humdrum work. You wouldn’t find this type of person getting a job as a city-beat news reporter and working hard to learn her craft. Nor can a Laurie Penny type ever be content to hire on as an assistant editor at a magazine, doing layout work, proofreading copy, happy occasionally to see her byline on a back-of-the-book item, a film review or something. No, she’s Veruca Salt: She wants the whole world, and she wants it now. If she is not recognized as a celebrity — if others don’t praise her and pet her and applaud her every petulant phrase — then the Laurie Penny type believes she has been deprived of what is rightfully hers.

She deserves recognition as one of Our Moral Superiors, you see, and our failure to recognize her as such is a social injustice.

Anyone who ever worked for anything, everyone who literally sweated to collect a wage to pay their bills, must bristle at the insult implied by Laurie Penny’s attitude of entitlement. If it weren’t for TV bookers who decided to make her England’s New Fresh Face of Feminism™, nobody would ever pay attention to her. When her career finally comes crashing down, people will wonder why anyone ever cared. We await Ms. Penny’s post-celebrity memoir, It Was the Patriarchy What Done Me In.

Meanwhile, an actual feminist — the radical lesbian Cathy Brennan — continues to say things so crazy as to be actually true:

The alternative to defining things is not defining things. That is, words mean whatever you say they mean, and God forbid if you try to define words. Defining words is bigotry. This neat Jedi Mind Trick was used very effectively in the run up to the marriage equality movement, where GLBTWTF activists succeeded beyond all imagination in convincing everyone that people who define marriage as “One Man, One Women” are bigots. Never mind that that is what marriage meant — for better or for worse (ha, see what I did there) — for centuries. Using words as defined makes you a bigot — and we all know what happens to bigots.
For what it’s worth, I think people who oppose marriage equality may or may not be bigots. It does not necessarily matter to me to demonize these people. They lost a political battle. Part of the reason they lost this political battle is because of propaganda that changed the definition of marriage.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy propaganda, I’ve deployed it, it is useful. But it’s propaganda. It’s not reflective of reality; it creates a new one.
This same propaganda is now used against Lesbians, to tell us that we are bigots for understanding that Lesbians are female homosexuals. This is transphobia. This is wrong. This is “cissexism.”
Indeed, USING WORDS CORRECTLY IS A FORM OF BIGOTRY.

Brilliant — and so politically incorrect as to be quite useful for my purposes. What Brennan has realized, and has had the courage to admit, is that in their quest for “marriage equality” the GLBTWTF activists engaged in a sort of rhetorical prestidigitation, playing word-games to exploit sympathy. In the process, however, these GLBTWTF activists established the premises of a syllogism that now threatens what radical feminists like Brennan had hoped to gain for their Lesbian Nation: Sanctuary from the menace of males and heterosexuality.

Brennan sees the old threat recrudescent in a strange new form, i.e., men who not only claim to be women, but say they are lesbians. In this disguise, they seek not only sexual access to females, but also assert authority as feminists to speak for women’s interests!

Cathy Brennan may be crazy, but she’s nobody’s fool. When a man who calls himself “Colleen” exposes his penis to little girls, do you actually expect Cathy Brennan to agree that this is “progress”?

Progress, as General Bullmoose said, is the root of all evil.




 

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Now That Is A Subtle Lie

Posted on | September 24, 2014 | 40 Comments

by Smitty

Isn’t this rich?

An article on the “Focus on the Family” website written by evangelical author Chip Ingram says, “The Bible’s word on discipline clearly demands that parents be responsible and diligent in spanking.”

I grew up in the evangelical South in a pro-spanking family. When my fellow Christians talked about protecting parents’ “rights to discipline their children,” they would often quote Proverbs 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them.”

That settles it, right?

Wrong.

The key to interpreting this verse is the word “rod.” As Michael Eric Dyson, an ordained Baptist minister and professor of sociology at Georgetown University, noted in The New York Times recently, the Hebrew word translated “rod” refers to a shepherd’s rod, which “was used to guide the sheep, not to beat them.” The author of this Proverbs 13:24 (and the other “rod” verses) is saying that parents who love their children will guide, lead, and discipline them — not beat them.

Dyson here seems about as far afield as Robert Boyd Munger claiming that shepherds would break a leg of a wayward sheep and carry it around until healed. Or maybe Michael Eric Dyson is to theology what Neil DeGrasse Tyson is to science: an unreliable tale-spinner.

The logical extension of Dyson’s error would be to say that the shepherd never uses the rod as a weapon against predators, either. That rod should merely be used to “guide” the wolf along more mindful, aware, tolerant lines of behavior.

The operative phrase here is “an ordained Baptist minister and professor of sociology at Georgetown University”. Per Wikipedia, there isn’t any evidence that MED ever, actually, you know, ministered anywhere. Thus it seems we have another specimen of guy with a lot of degrees that’s as wise as a thermometer.

Category: Culture

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.24.14

Posted on | September 24, 2014 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
WaPo: Obama Bending His Own Counterterrorism Rules In Syria

“So now we’re bombing the crap out of the people we were kind of supporting against the guy we’re now kind of supporting but not really. Clear?”

Stretching his own legal and policy limits
US told Iran it would strike in Syria, vowed not to hit Assad forces
America’s air strikes on ISIS may help Bashar Assad keep his regime alive
Islamic State blows away Gulf states’ qualms about taking action

CDC: Ebola Cases Could Hit 1.4 Million In Four Months
CDC Director calls for surge in aid to prevent worst-case scenario

Labour’s Miliband Insists Deficit Is A Priority Despite Forgetting To Mention It In Speech
Ed Miliband’s 10-Year Plan



POLITICS
Rocky Mountain Upset? Polls Show Once-Popular Hickenlooper In Trouble

No longer a safe bet

Quinnipiac poll shows Democrat incumbent trailing GOP challenger Beauprez by 10 points

Scott Brown Hits Shaheen, Obama On ISIS In New Ad


DOJ: Federal Prison Population Drops For First Time In Three Decades

Philanthropist Launches Non-Profit Bid For San Diego’s Biggest Newspaper

Judge Strikes Down Hawaii Law Barring Legal Immigrants From Gun Ownership

Will Illinois Be 17th State To Decriminalize Pot?



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Mixed As Libyan Production Returns: WTI $91.55, Brent $96.53
Wall Street Ends Lower, S&P Falls For Third Straight Day
Dollar Falls Vs. Yen On PM Abe’s Remarks
GM Says China Sales This Year To Top 3 Million
Starbucks To Buy Out Japan Joint Venture Partners
California Energy Plan Calls For Big Renewables Projects In State’s Deserts
Breaking Fad: New iPhone 6 Bends In Owners’ Pants Pockets
ARM Looks To Rev Up Internet Of Things With New Embedded-Chip Design
Samsung To Release Galaxy Note 4 In China Before Apple Launches iPhone 6
AT&T Rolls Out New $39/Month U-Verse Bundle
Microsoft Cuts XBox One Price In UK



SPORTS
Cole Shines As Pirates Lock In Playoff Berth

Pirates coach Rick Sofield celebrates in the locker room as the Pirates make the playoffs

Cole sets down 17 straight batters as Pirates edge sagging Braves 3-2

Angels Blank A’s, Drop Oakland Into Wildcard Tie

Royals Win Third Straight, Thrash Tribe 7-1


White Sox Rally Late And Insufficient; Fall To Tigers 4-3

Rangers Hang On To Edge Astros 2-1

Mighty Jeter Has Struck Out: O’s Win 5-4

Blue Jackets Coming On Hard, Shut Out Penguins In Preseason Match

Fish Blank Phillies 2-0

Roark Pitches Nationals Past Mets, 4-2



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Emma Watson Threatened By 4Chan After Feminist Speech At UN

Hackers threaten to release nude pix

Exactly the kind of behavior she was complaining about

“Modern Family” Star Sarah Hyland Gets Restraining Order Against Ex-BF, Alleges Abuse


Kris Jenner Files For Divorce From Bruce 11 Months After Announcing Split

Woman With Three Breasts Outed As Fake

Liam Neeson Brings His Particular Skills To “Taken 3”

HBO Confirms Colin Ferrell, Vince Vaughn To Star In “True Detective” Season 2

Bette Midler Announces First Album Since 2006: “It’s The Girls”

Charlie Sheen Pursuing A Return To “Two And A Half Men”

Portland Police Protect And Serve Pizza After Crash



FOREIGNERS
Britain Close To Joining Strikes Against ISIS
India Puts Satellite Into Mars Orbit
Australian Terror Suspect Shot Dead After Knifing Two Police Officers
Israel Shoots Down Syrian Jet Over Golan Heights
Radical Imam Abu Qutada Cleared Of Terrorism Charges In Jordan
French Police Lose Three Jihadis After Waiting At Wrong Airport
Ibope Poll Shows Brazilian Presidential Election Headed For Runoff
Former Papal Nuncio Placed Under House Arrest At The Vatican
Former Chicom Deputy Planning Minister Confesses To Graft



BLOGS & STUFF
The Camp of the Saints: The Leftist Mind Explained By Stacy McCain And Glenn Reynolds
Doug Powers: Obama Fires Up Air Force One, Marine One, And Huge Motorcade To Deliver Climate Change Warning At UN
Twitchy: Pathetic Libs Compare Obama’s Disgraceful Cup Salute To Marines With THIS
American Power: Mark Zuckerberg’s $10 Million San Francisco “Fixer-Upper” Has Neighbors Pissed Off
American Thinker: The Plot To Create A Permanent Democratic Majority
BLACKFIVE: US Military Rescues ISIS Sex Slaves
Conservatives4Palin: CNN – Palins Deserved The Benefit Of The Doubt
Don Surber: Telling The Customer Off
Jammie Wearing Fools: PETA’s Call To Muslims To Observe Vegetarian Eid Backfires, Violence Ensues
Joe For America: Old, Rich White Liberals – Running California Into The Ditch And Getting Richer
JustOneMinute: Coalition Of The Shilling
Protein Wisdom: Mother Of Second Grader Berates Teacher For Not Accepting Vagina Cookies
Shot In The Dark: Trulbert! Part XII – The Klieg Lights Of Freedom
STUMP: Wonkblog Asks, “Can Insurance Companies Save Public Pensions?”
The Gateway Pundit: Breaking – Pictures Of Saqlawiyah Massacre – 300 Iraqi Soldiers Killed By Chlorine Gas
The Jawa Report: The Blessed Release Of The FBI Investigation Of Samir Khan a/k/a Inshallahshaheed
The Lonely Conservative: John Kerry – Climate Change A Bigger Threat Than Terrorism
This Ain’t Hell: A-10s To Iraq
Weasel Zippers: Moonbat Waitress Uses $2000 Rush Limbaugh Tip To Fund Abortions
Megan McArdle: Don’t Ever Appear On “The Daily Show”


Category: Live at Five

Brooks Threatens Gore’s Grip On “The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Read”

Posted on | September 23, 2014 | 22 Comments

by Smitty

Saint Albert of Gore, Lord have mercy on him and his non-grasp of weather, has never recanted from his 2010 utterance:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

And really, thinking that we can legislate redemption has got to be the Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Read.
But let’s give Brooks discredit. He does know him some fail, from the same venue as Gore above, emphasis mine:

It’s important in times like these to step back and get clarity. The truest thing to say is this: We are living in an amazingly fortunate time. But we also happen to be living during a leadership crisis, and a time when few people have faith in elites to govern from the top. We live in a vibrant society that is not being led.

We don’t suffer from an abuse of power as much as a nonuse of power. It’s been years since a major piece of legislation was passed, and there’s little prospect that one will get passed in the next two.

This leadership crisis is eminently solvable. First, we need to get over the childish notion that we don’t need a responsible leadership class, that power can be wielded directly by the people. America was governed best when it was governed by a porous, self-conscious and responsible elite — during the American revolution, for example, or during and after World War II. Karl Marx and Ted Cruz may believe that power can be wielded directly by the masses, but this has almost never happened historically.

We offer our elites every bit of the faith and respect they’ve earned, Brooks. Our self-appointed quasi-aristocracy, and the throne-sniffing sycophants that support them (e.g. you) could all be replaced by a button marked “Crap” at significantly reduced savings.

“elites. . .govern from the top” What. Elites. Brooks? If George Washington and his troops could see the utter shambles the 1787 Constitution has been reduced to in the last century of Progressive elite deconstruction, I daresay he’d order the Colonials to fix bayonets. Technology happened. We grasp that our “elites” are a pack of self-serving louts. If you want to argue something useful, Brooks, tell me about term limits. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as Acton noted, and lesser amounts of power produce Reids and Boehners, Pelosis and McConnells over time. Like any compost heap, Capitol Hill needs frequent turning. Am I being irreverent? Of course I am, Brooks: it’s a wholly American thing. Fear God; sneer at Caesar. It’s when these two objects become confused that we can arrive at the drivel you’re pushing, Brooks.

Karl Marx and Ted Cruz. . .did you really juxtapose those two, you little passive-aggressive twerp? Cruz pulled an all-nighter for liberty in the Senate, and this is all you’ve got? Really? Are you saying that Ted Cruz argued for Athenian democracy? You’re going with that? Well, I guess you’re located in the same dirty diaper of a newspaper that thought George W. Bush had no coalition to support the Iraq invasion.

You really are a discredit to your country, Brooks.

Category: New York Times

The Incoherence of Liberal Feminism

Posted on | September 23, 2014 | 36 Comments

Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) is a trendy young female British writer who, like trendy young women everywhere, calls herself a “feminist,” a habit that annoys the hell out of actual feminists:

From: “Catherine Brennan” <[email protected]>
Date: October 20, 2013 7:05:21 PM
To: Jason Cowley, [email protected]
Subject: Fwd: Internet bullying
Mr. Cowley –
I am writing because your contributing writer, Laurie Penny, has spent much of her time today defaming me on her Twitter feed. See attached. I am astonished that this is considered responsible conduct for a journalist, especially as she has stated that she plans on writing a “news article” about something related to my alleged conduct (relying, apparently, on a Rational Wiki entry created by Men’s Rights Activists. How credible). I am forwarding this exchange to my lawyer in the UK for further action. Please be advised that New Statesman will be liable for any defamation Ms. Penny prints.
Kind regards,
Cathy Brennan

What did Laurie Penny do that elicited that response? It involved the ongoing radical feminist quarrel with transgender activists over “woman-only space” and, Brennan says, Penny “regularly tweets abusive misinformation about lesbians and radical feminism.”

So there you go.

As always in such arguments, I agree with Cathy Brennan: Real feminism is about radical dykes destroying the patriarchy, which has nothing to do with the incoherent and contradictory noises emitted by silly girls who want to strike a fashionable pose.

Laurie Penny is a “feminist” like David Brooks is a “conservative.”

This is the kind of idiocy “feminist” Laurie Penny writes:

“If you’ve a ladyboner for sexist schmuckweasels,
short hair isn’t going to help, although they might let you
administer a disappointing hand-job.”

Does anybody know what she’s trying to say there? She meant to say that “short hair [for women] is a political statement,” but this blew up into a lot of Twitter squabbling over . . . . well, whatever.

Of course, she’s a victim — that is always the moral of the story for these Trendy Young Feminists: “Waaahh! People hate me!“

Feminist author Laurie Penny has been subjected to “a stream of vile sexist and anti-Semitic abuse” as part of a campaign against her book Unspeakable Things, she says. . . .
However in a blog post Ms Penny said she had had “quite a weekend” as she experienced a “predictable sexist troll backlash”.
“In the past 24 hours, I have been subjected to a stream of vile sexist and anti-semitic abuse on Twitter and elsewhere,” she wrote.
“This has become a normal part of my life as a person who dares to write in public whilst being both female and left-wing, but this weekend it’s been particularly full on.”

Let me remind you of McCain’s Law of Feminism:

There are three kinds of feminism:

  1. Feminism that is wrong.
  2. Feminism that is crazy.
  3. Feminism that is both wrong and crazy.

(When in doubt, it’s usually Number Three.)

It would seem that Laurie Penny’s variety of feminism boils down to telling British women, “Vote Labour, because . . . vagina!”

Never mind whether Labour does anything that actually helps women. All that matters is how women can help Labour.

There is no reason why anyone should bother sending hate-mail to Laurie Penny, because she’s nothing but another clever young girl trying to get rich selling books to slightly-less-clever girls who need someone to tell them why they should be left-wingers:

According to her publishers, Unspeakable Things is a “ruthless” dissection of modern feminism and class politics.
“This is a book about poverty and prejudice, online dating and eating disorders, riots in the streets and lies on the television,” it says. “The backlash is on against sexual freedom for men and women and social justice — and feminism needs to get braver. Penny speaks for a new feminism that takes no prisoners, a feminism that is about justice and equality, but also about freedom for all.”

How many “new feminism” books must these clever young girls write before their intended readership wises up to the fact that “new feminism” is nothing more than a marketing hustle? Laurie Penny couldn’t possibly say anything truly new about feminism, because it’s all been said before by women who, like Laurie Penny, hoped to ride the movement to fame and fortune. Their failures are legendary. Shulamith Firestone, for example, published The Dialectic of Sex in 1970, rapidly descended into a maelstrom of paranoid psychosis, and died alone at age 67.

Yeah, baby — “ruthless.”

Of course, as anyone who has ever read The Dialectic of Sex understands, Shulamith Firestone was crazy long before she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I’ve got a copy of her book on my desk, where it’s sitting atop the volume of feminist essays in which Sally Miller Gearhart outlines her lesbian plan to reduce males to 10 percent of the human population. You can say Professor Gearhart is crazy, but you can’t say she is necessarily wrong. If you accept the feminist premise that heterosexuality is both the cause and effect of women’s oppression, then if you advocate a genocidal campaign to eliminate males and convert all females to lesbianism . . . Well, you see, Professor Gearhart’s conclusion follows logically from her premises.

They may be crazy, but lesbian feminists at least have integrity.

“Political Lesbianism is the radical feminist idea that Women can ‘choose’ to be Lesbians, and that such ‘choice’ is a way for Women to escape the shackles of Compulsory Heterosexuality. It enables Women to politically and personally ally with other Women. In effect, Political Lesbianism allows Women a framework to reorder our priorities — it gives Women space and room to maneuver as we navigate the Heterosexual grooming all Women experience. As Feminists, many of us, in exploring our ideas about Woman-hating culture, realize that Lesbianism can bring us to experience deeper connection to and intimacy with other Women, an experience many of us want, need and crave. . . .
“The process of deconstructing the Woman you were groomed to be from girlhood is lifelong and never ending – even for Real Lesbians.
“Thus, we are Political Lesbians and choose to be a Lesbian in a Woman-Hating culture. We choose to love Women and put them at the center of our lives. All Women can do this.”
— Cathy Brennan, 2012

“Male sexual violence against women and ‘normal’ heterosexual intercourse are essential to patriarchy because they establish the dominance of the penis over the vagina, and thus the power relations between the sexes.”
— Professor Dee Graham, University of Cincinnati, 1993

“Fucking is a large part of how females are kept subordinated to males. It is a ritual enactment of that subordination which constantly reaffirms the fact of subordination and habituates both men and women to it, both in body and in imagination.”
— Professor Marilyn Frye, Michigan State University, 1983

“The lesbian is the woman obviously who unites the personal and the political in the struggle to free ourselves from the oppressive institution. . . .
“Proceeding from the premise that women are oppressed by the heterosexual institution, that women are an oppressed class, that from the point of view the man has become (if he was not always) the natural enemy of women, it follows that the continued collusion of any woman with any man is an event that retards the progress of woman supremacy.”
— Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation, 1973

It’s only logical, you see? If “women are an oppressed class,” then heterosexual intercourse “reaffirms the fact of subordination” for women, which is “essential to patriarchy,” and lesbianism is the only way females can “escape the shackles” of male supremacy.

Once you accept the premise that every misfortune or unhappiness any woman experiences is a result of male oppression, if you believe that anything in the world which seems “unfair” is also social injustice, then the feminist syllogism can have but one conclusion.

Radical lesbians like Cathy Brennan are women who have followed the feminist argument to its only logical conclusion. Of course, if you study feminism’s history, many movement leaders were lesbians first and feminists later, but does that distinction really matter? What finally matters is that radical lesbians are at least consistent in their interpretation of feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology. And, occasionally, their radical logic leads them to conclusions that are actually true: Pornography and prostitution are not “empowering” or “liberating” for women, and a man in a wig and a dress does not become a “woman” by injecting himself with estrogen.

Whereas, by contrast, the next time Laurie Penny tells the truth, it will also be the first time she tells the truth.

Cathy Brennan must certainly be glad that Laurie Penny is not a lesbian. If Laurie Penny became a lesbian, homophobia would flourish, because everybody hates Laurie Penny. Or everybody should hate Laurie Penny, and I’m sure everybody eventually will.




 

 

Category: Sex Trouble

‘My Sister Is Pregnant and We Don’t Know Which of My Brothers is the Father’

Posted on | September 23, 2014 | 146 Comments

The quoted sentence was spoken by a child on a school playground. Overheard by a teacher, this triggered an investigation that exposed a multigenerational horror story in rural Australia:

Police raided the Colt family home in rural south-western New South Wales in July 2012 after a teacher alerted authorities to a conversation overheard in the playground that detailed the incest. . . .
The raids found 38 adults and children living in filthy caravans and tin sheds without electricity, town water or any plumbing. They were the result of four generations from grandparents who were brother and sister. . . .
When the raid occurred Betty Colt was found sharing a marital bed with her brother Charlie and her children, same only as young as 10, were the result of sex between Ms Colt and her brother, father or another close male relative.
The five family groups comprised of sisters, Rhonda, 47, Martha, 33, and Betty Colt, 46, who slept every night with her brother, Charlie, and two of Betty’s daughters who each had children who proved to be from unions of related parents. . . .
Eight of the Colt children have parents who were either brother and sister, mother and son or father and daughter.
A further six have parents who were either aunt and nephew, uncle and niece, half siblings or grandparents and grandchild.
Interviews with the Colts revealed the family saga began back in New Zealand, in the first half of last century when June Colt was born to parents who were brother and sister.
June married Tim and in the 1970s the couple emigrated to Australia. . . .
Tim and June gave birth to four daughters and two sons.
Three of the daughters — Rhonda, 47, Betty, 46, and Martha, 33 — and at least one of the sons, Charlie, form the elder members of the family group in the NSW bush camp.
Betty had 13 children. . . .
Betty’s eldest child, Raylene, now aged 30, has a 13-year-old daughter, Kimberly. . . .
Testing identifies Kimberly’s father as either her half brother, an uncle or a grandfather.
Betty’s second oldest child, Tammy, now aged 27, has given birth to three daughters, one of whom died from a rare genetic disorder, and all of whom, she eventually admitted, were fathered by her closest brother, Derek, 25.
Betty’s younger sister, Martha Colt, 33, has five children, four of whom were fathered by her own father, Tim, or by her brother, and another who is the product of a union with a close relation.
It was the 10 youngest of Betty and Martha’s children, and Raylene’s daughter, Kimberly, 13, who ran wild in a sexual spree about the property. . . .
The children were sexually involved with each other and only one, the youngest, a five-year-old girl, had parents who weren’t related.

In case that’s not enough to give you nightmares, here’s a report detailing the squalid conditions in which this family lived.

When my brother Kirby (follow him on Twitter) called to tell me about this story, I was a bit impatient because his call interrupted my research for the “Sex Trouble” series on radical feminism.

At the time Kirby called, however, my work was somewhat stalled because of another odd story from Australia: In 2008, a 19-year-old Irish girl named Rosemary Nolan traveled to Brisbane, where she became the lesbian lover of 24-year-old Melissa Keevers. In 2009, via artificial insemination, Keevers became pregnant and gave birth to a girl named Lilly. In 2010, while being treated with a drug to stimulate ovulation, Keevers was inseminated again with sperm from the same donor and this time conceived quintuplets. In 2011, Keevers gave birth to two boys and three girls. In 2012, Nolan and Keevers split up.

Here’s what struck me about that story: It was celebrated with a worldwide publicity campaign by journalists who did not seem the least bit skeptical — or even curious — about glaring omissions of basic biographical information on Nolan and Keevers. Evidently, the Australian publication Woman’s Day had purchased exclusive rights to the story of this “miracle” — the first quintuplets ever born to a lesbian couple. The coverage by Woman’s Day (which seemed to be the only source for direct information in news accounts by other media outlets) emphasized that the odds against conceiving quintuplets without in vitro ferilization (IVF) were 60,000,000-to-1. However, the fact that Keevers was being treated with a drug to cause hyperovulation was omitted from the glowing stories about the lesbian couple’s “miracle” babies; so far as I could discover, it was only in a TV interview with Karl Stefanovic that this highly relevant detail was even mentioned.

As a journalist, the omission of this detail about Keevers being treated with an ovulation drug — a treatment that obviously was the secular cause of this alleged “miracle” — was striking, as was the apparent lack of journalistic curiosity about other details. If you are writing a human-interest feature about two lesbians, for example, wouldn’t you want to include their personal accounts of when and how they became aware of their same-sex orientation? You know, did they always feel “different” from other girls (as one sometimes hears in such narratives) or was this a surprising adult revelation, in which a woman  just happened to meet and fall in love with another woman (another standard lesbian narrative)?

If any reporter asked those questions about Nolan and Keevers, the answers never showed up in any of the coverage I could find online. And a lot of other stuff you’d expect to find in human-interest features was missing, too. Where did they go to school? What do their friends and siblings have to say about the lesbian couple and their “miracle”? Most of all, I wondered, how could the Irish teenager Nolan afford to travel to Australia for a backpacking excursion during which she reportedly met her lesbian lover Keevers by sheer coincidence?

Answer: We don’t know. There’s a hell of a lot we don’t know about that story, including how much Woman’s Day paid for the exclusive rights to the story, and I am dumbfounded by the credulity of journalists in Australia and Ireland who did not seem the least bit curious about the missing details. The Nolan-Keevers Miracle Quintuplet story was reported in much the same way an Orlando Chamber of Commerce spokesman might “report” about Disney World.

And after the lesbian miracle moms split up in 2012 — Nolan cited stress from her job as a police trainee — when the quintuplets were 2 years old, a Cone of Silence descended on the story. For more than a year, it seems, no journalist followed up on this story that once made worldwide headlines until, in August, Keevers gave an update to a TV station:

Ms Keevers met her current partner Nicole, a full-time student studying nutrition, 18 months ago through an online dating site.
With Nicole’s seven-year-old son now living with them, Ms Keevers now has seven children living under her roof.
Nicole has “as much responsibility for my children as I do” and loves them “like her own son”, Ms Keevers said.
“She feels like a mother to them.”

All this struck me as strange, but it’s one of those dead ends you sometimes encounter: You find a story that seems vaguely suspicious, but there is no way to check it out yourself. I have no contacts in Ireland or Australia, so unless other reporters share my skepticism, the mysterious gaps in the Nolan-Keevers Miracle Quintuplet story may never be filled in.

Such was the impasse I found myself in Monday, after hours spent trying to figure it out and write it up for the “Sex Trouble” series, when Kirby called to tell me about this horrifying tale of multigeneration incest in New South Wales, Australia.

“Depravity,” Kirby said. “That’s the only word I can think of.”

Yeah. We talked about it, how it was that this Colt family (“Colt” is a pseudonym the authorities are using to protect the identities of the children involved) could have descended into such total depravity. Once people lose sight of basic moral principles — when people start acting like all that “Thou shalt not” stuff from the Bible doesn’t really mean anything — you never know how far down the slippery slope they may eventually slide. Then one day an Australian school teacher overhears a kid say a sentence like, “My sister is pregnant and we don’t know which of my brothers is the father.”

Depravity is the only word that can describe what Australian officials uncovered in the Colt family. Their decades-long descent into total depravity began, we are told, when the incest taboo was ignored by a brother and sister who married and gave birth to June Colt, who then married her own brother Tim, and somehow this depravity continued generation after generation until 2012.

Anyway, I was kind of peeved when Kirby called me Monday, because his call interrupted me while I was trying to find the answers to questions about the Australian lesbian miracle moms, questions that other journalists apparently never bothered to ask. It’s always annoying to encounter a dead-end story like that, where you can’t get the answers you want, and I was already frustrated when Kirby interrupted to tell me about the Colt family — a distraction that has nothing to do with radical feminism and lesbian motherhood.

Nothing to do with it, I tell you. There is no relevance, no analogy, no correlation between these two stories — none at all.

What are you, some kind of hater?




 

 

Category: Australia, Crime, Sex, Sex Trouble

Dilbert Panel Or U.S. Foreign Policy Summary? You Make The Call

Posted on | September 23, 2014 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Category: Uncategorized
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