Last Call For Alcohol And Other Fun Times

Posted on | September 11, 2014 | 7 Comments

Okay, as far as I can tell by various e-mails and comments aimed in my direction over the last couple of weeks, I’m expecting about a dozen folks to show up at Jimmy’s Old Town Tavern in Herndon tomorrow; festivities will start around 4 PM, concomitant with Happy Hour, though I plan on being early as usual, showing up at 3 to stake out tables. Directions are here, the menu is here, and I’ll be monitoring Twitter and e-mail until enough people arrive for me to be uncomfortable being SanFranSocial. Fallback plan in case the DJ gets to be too obnoxious is the Amphora Diner Deluxe, an outstanding Greek diner a few blocks down Elden Street.

Hope to see y’all there.

Category: smittypalooza

Feminist Theory, Human Nature and the Punch Seen ‘Round the World

Posted on | September 11, 2014 | 44 Comments

It’s all so calculated.
She’s got a calculator.
She’s my soft touch typewriter
And I’m the great dictator.
Two little Hitlers
Will fight it out until
One little Hitler
Does the other one’s will.
— Elvis Costello, 1979

Watching the video in which Ray Rice knocked out his fiancée (now wife) Janay, the thought occurs: What was she so angry about?

Everybody has focused on the obvious horror of Rice’s punch — the brute force of a 200-pound professional athlete used against a woman — and nobody seems interested in what Janay did immediately before the punch. The couple were in a confined space, inside an elevator, when Janay “got in his face,” screaming and lunging toward Rice. Of course, Janay’s behavior does not justify Rice hitting her, but one wonders why she acted that way, just as one wonders whether the circumstance of being trapped in an elevator with this enraged woman in some way explains Rice’s reaction. That is to say, if her angry rage triggered Rice’s fight-or-flight instinct, he couldn’t flee from her while they were on the elevator, and his adrenalin surge produced an autonomic reflex: BOOM.

That’s one possible reading of the scene, at least, but I’m sure that any attempt to explain what Ray Rice did will be condemned as an attempt to defend or justify what Ray Rice did, so that political correctness erects a wall obstructing access to a knowledge of the motives involved.

There is exactly one acceptable interpretation, a feminist interpretation that construes Ray Rice as an agent of male supremacy and Janay Rice as a victim of oppression. This interpretation prohibits any effort to view Ray Rice and Janay Rice as individuals responsible for their own behavior. Having spent the past few months up to my eyeballs in radical feminist theory, including lesbian psychologist Dee Graham’s claim that female heterosexuality is a PTSD-type response to male “sexual terror,” I am aware that every woman who has ever taken a Women’s Studies class in college views the Ray Rice incident through a prism of theory. There are no individuals in feminist theory; everything is a social construction and everything must be interpreted in a context of male supremacy and female oppression:

The prosecutor offered Rice the ability to participate in New Jersey’s pretrial intervention program (PTI). Supposedly this decision was reached “after careful consideration of the information contained in Mr. Rice’s application in light of all of the facts gathered during the investigation.” What facts? What information? Is it the same sort of information that has anchored a culture that seemingly normalizes and accepts domestic violence? Is it more of “domestic violence is a private matter?” — which is very nineteenth century. Tell us what sort of facts, and while you are at, how might you clarify whether or not the NFL was given the tape. Because right now, it is hard not to see this case as yet another moment where the power structure goes to every length to protect and serve patriarchy.
In a nation where 24 people experience intimate partner violence every minute, most of them women, Ray Rice is a mere microcosm of a larger systemic injustice.

See? From the feminist perspective, this isn’t about one man hitting one woman. This is about a “culture.” This is about “the power structure” of “patriarchy.” Individual responsibility disappears and the conversation is about “a larger systemic injustice.”

The world is full of “systemic injustice,” if you want to look at it that way, and almost everyone can somehow claim victimhood.

Does anybody remember O.J. Simpson? I just re-read Tammy Bruce’s account (in The New Thought Police) of her experiences as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) during the O.J. murder trial. Bruce organized protest marches and rallies focused on Simpson as a perpetrator of domestic violence against his slain wife Nicole. Astonishingly, NOW’s national leaders denounced Tammy Bruce by name, falsely accusing her of making “public statements that clearly violate NOW’s commitment to stopping racism.”

Nicole Brown Simpson could not be reached for comment.

Readers may be curious as to what “public statements” by Tammy Bruce led to this false accusation of racism. Here you go:

“What we need to teach our children,” Ms. Bruce said on ABC’s “Nightline” the day after the verdicts, is “not about racism,” but “about violence against women.” She added that her domestic violence message provided “a needed break from all that talk of racism.”

Exactly right. As everyone can now see, looking back with 20/20 hindsight, (a) O.J. was guilty as hell, and (b) O.J.’s defense attorneys cleverly manipulated the case to make it appear that O.J. was an innocent victim of white racism, with the result that (c) O.J. was acquitted and (d) public opinion was unnecessarily inflamed by what Tammy Bruce characterized as “all that talk about racism.”

What we can also see with hindsight was that Patricia Ireland was fearfully envious of Tammy Bruce’s success. Ireland was the perfect stereotype of feminist leaders as rigid humorless ideologues (and/or mindless stooges for the Democrat Party), while Tammy Bruce was the feisty young host of a popular radio talk show.

Furthermore, while Ireland and national NOW leaders were throwing Nicole Simpson’s body under the bus of a cynical “alliance” with the NAACP and other black liberal groups, Tammy Bruce had the wisdom to see what was really happening in the O.J. case and the courage to call it what it actually was: A cruel perversion of “civil rights” that treated the murderer as a victim, and treated O.J.’s two victims (including Ron Goldman) as if they had no rights whatsoever.

Tammy Bruce was getting booked on Nightline, not Patricia Ireland. Tammy Bruce told the truth, and Patricia Ireland lied.

Darkness and lies always hate the light and truth.

What does this have to do with Ray Rice? Everything.

Collective Victimhood and Conspiracy Theories

Feminists were willing to defend the murderer O.J. Simpson because their “allies” (e.g., Jesse Jackson) insisted that the case was about racism: All white people (as a collective group) oppressing all black people (as a collective group). Viewed through the prism of collectivist thinking, what mattered about O.J. was not whether, as an individual, he had murdered his wife, as an individual. All that mattered was that O.J. was a member of an Official Victim Group whose support the Democrat Party needed. Nothing so proved the sold-out phoniness of national feminist leadership as their refusal to condemn O.J. Simpson as a perpetrator of domestic violence, after recordings of 911 calls and photos of Nicole’s battered face exposed the truth of the ex-football hero as a wife-beater. The reality of Democrat Party coalition politics required feminists to ignore this truth — and to denounce Tammy Bruce as “racist” because she had the courage to tell the truth.

Fast-forward two decades: The elevator surveillance camera images make it impossible to deny that Ray Rice punched Janay and, because both of them are black, it is also impossible to claim that Ray Rice is a victim of racist oppression. His guilt is clear, and there is no white cop like Mark Fuhrman to serve as the racist scapegoat in a conspiracy theory about how Ray Rice was framed.

Because progressives view humans in collective groups, the problems of Ray Rice and his wife Janay are not personal, but political. The fact that Janay’s husband has lost his lucrative employment, and that an African-American family has thus suffered economic harm — an outcome that seemingly contradicts progressive “social justice” goals — is ignored because, as the feminists say, these two people are “a mere microcosm of a larger systemic injustice.” Whereas the O.J. Simpson trial was viewed through the prism of race-based “injustice,” the case of Ray Rice is viewed through the feminist prism. Read more

Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Question For An Office Holder

Posted on | September 11, 2014 | 25 Comments

Dear @BarackObama: If it's OK for you to say ISIL is not Islamic, does that justify those who say you're not Christian? R, C @instapundit

— 'Teahadist' h/t@DMat (@smitty_one_each) September 11, 2014

Spake Bobo:

I think a president should always be saluted when they go against their natural inclinations. His inclination is not to use military force. It’s certainly not to insert American power and American bombs into another Arab country and that’s what we’re going to be doing. But I thought they laid out a four-point strategy that was reasonably clear and it’s pretty ambitious. I guess the question I would ask is he said our goal’s clear — to destroy ISIS. What happens if air strikes don’t do it? What happens if the Iraqi army can’t do it? What if the Free Syrian army can’t take some ground in Syria? If that stuff doesn’t happen and our goal is clear to destroy ISIS, what’s the next step? But I think so far you have to salute him for a pretty clear, pretty straightforward strategy.

By the time the ink dries in the history books, Brooks, looks like Obama shall have destroyed precious little else other than the American health care system.

Category: Barack Obama

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.11.14

Posted on | September 11, 2014 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

TOP NEWS
Obama Promises No Long War Against ISIS; Some Legislators Skeptical

“Effort will not involve American troops fighting on Iraqi soil.”

Dem Senators Begich, Udall skeptical that president can keep that promise
Saudi Arabia to host “train-and-equip” program against Islamic State
Obama orders airstrikes in Syria against Islamic State
Plan poses test for Democrats, Republicans alike

EU Delays Sanctions As Russians Withdraw From Ukraine
Poroshenko: greater autonomy for Russian-speaking East but no territorial concessions

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Diagnosed With Abdominal Tumor
Diagnosis comes after months of pain

POLITICS
Rough Debut For Former Baghdad Bob Clone Jay Carney On CNN

How does it feel to get pwned by a crippled guy old enough to be your daddy, Jay?

Stacy’s Crazy Cousin John calls Carney a liar to his face on national TV

Dems Struggle To Escape Specter Of Obamacare In Senate Races

Ferguson Protesters Arrested During Attempt To Shut Down Interstate

DHS Confirms ISIS Planning Infiltration Of Southern Border

Missouri Lawmakers Override Dozens Of Governor’s Vetoes

House Democrats Question Goodell’s Actions On Rice Video

Federal Agents Seize $65 Million In Money Laundering Bust

FEMA Tells Flood-Ravaged Colorado Town It Wants Its Money Back

Supremes Add Gay Marriage To September 29 Agenda

THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Brent Stays Barely Over $98 As Ample Supply, Weak Demand Override Mideaat Concerns: WTI $91.79, Brent $98.06
PRC Inflation Cools To Four-Month Low
US Wholesale Stockpiles Barely Budge
Alibaba: Biggest IPO Of All Time?
Twitter To Raise $1.3 Billion Through Note Sale
Two More LNG Projects Approved For Export
Minecraft Fans Spooked By Talk Of Microsoft Acquisition
Dense Server Battle To Heat Up With Intel’s Xeon D Next Year
Five Million GMail Accounts, Passwords Dumped Online
Intel Nabs 1400 Powerwave Patents Amid Wire-Free Push
Rock Band OK Go Accuses Apple Of Ripping Off Their Video

SPORTS
Shields Shuts Down Tigers, Royals Win 3-0

Only two hits allowed in seven innings

Royals take one-game lead atop AL Central

Former FBI Director To Lead Probe Of NFL In Ray Rice Case

Happy 85th Birthday Wishes To Arnold Palmer!

McCutcheon Hits Inside-The-Park Homer, Pirates Beat Phillies 6-3

Mets Blank Rockies 2-0

Clark, Peralta Lift Brewers Past Fish, 4-1

Orioles Sweep Red Sox; Magic Number Now 8

Nats Stumped By Harang Again As Braves Avoid Sweep

FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Actor Richard Kiel Dies At 74

Played “Jaws” in “The Spy Who Loved Me” and “Moonraker”

Younger fans knew him from “Happy Gilmore”

Liv Tyler Pregnant With Second Child

Taylor Swift’s Feud With Katy Perry Started Over John Mayer

Shia LaBeouf Pleads Guilty To Disorderly Conduct

Justin Bieber Strips To His Underwear After Being Booed During NYFW’s Fashion Rocks

Former WWE Star Sean O’Haire Hangs Himself

Morgan Freeman Lands Juicy Role In “Ted 2”

Lena Dunham Keeps Confessing Stuff, And She Won’t Shut Up

FOREIGNERS
Australian Hiring Surges, Unemployment Drops To 6.1%
Kerry Calls New Iraqi Government “Heart” Of Fight Against ISIS
EU Envoy Tells Israel Gaza Fighting Will Resume Unless Talks Progress
Thousands Flee Flooding In Kashmir
Brussels Bureaucrats On $400K Salaries Spark New Calls To Leave EU
Two Australians Face Charges Of Aiding Terrorist Groups In Syria
Rights Group Calls On Thai Junta To End Repression
Battle For Benghazi Could Break Up Libya
Trial Of Chinese Human Rights Activist “Political Persecution”
Philippines Plans To Give Muslims Autonomous Zone
Washington, Seoul Closely Watching Norks’ Charm Offensive

BLOGS & STUFF
Louder With Crowder: “Guns At Kroger’s? Oh My!”
Doug Powers: Misdial “M” For Lerner – Is The DOJ Conspiring With Dems To Bury The IRS Scandal?
Twitchy: See Katie Pavlich Flog Obama Post-Speech With One Simple Question
American Power: The Obama Depression – Long-Term Job Losses Still At Record Levels
BLACKFIVE: Former VP Dick Cheney At The American Enterprise Institute
Conservatives4Palin: The New American Aristocracy
Don Surber: Rothenburg – Republicans Poised For Biggest Senate Wave In 20 Years
Jammie Wearing Fools: Sandinista Fan Bill De Blasio Doesn’t Have Security Clearance To Received Classified Info
Joe For America: Ray Rice’s Wife Pins Blame Where It Belongs – On The Media
JustOneMinute: Sidling Toward The Biden Partition Plan In Iraq
Protein Wisdom: Never Forget, Never Forgive
Shot In The Dark: In Today’s Literary And Marketing News…
STUMP: Public Pensions Watch – Alternative Asset Classes, Part VII – North Carolina
The Gateway Pundit: LTC Ralph Peters On Obama’s ISIS Address – “It’s Pathetic…It’s Idiotic Nonsense”
The Jawa Report: Ahhhh Snackbar! Canadian Terror Supporter Bilal Phillips Arrested In Philippines
The Lonely Conservative: The IRS Audited Breitbart News. Hmmm, I Wonder Why.
This Ain’t Hell: GMAFB. Really? That’s Our Strategy?
Weasel Zippers: Obama – “Let’s Make One Thing Clear. ISIS Is Not Islamic.”
Megan McArdle: Sell Birth Control Over The Counter

The September 12 Smittypalooza is tomorrow! Be at Jimmy’s Old Town Tavern in Herndon starting at 4 PM!

Category: Election 2012

GamerGate And Why It Matters To Conservatives

Posted on | September 10, 2014 | 103 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

“Politics is downstream from culture.”
-Andrew Breitbart

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that with regard to entertainment, conservatives and libertarians find science fiction and videogaming to be the most attractive options offered by pop culture these days, mainly because there’s a lot of SF that doesn’t try and stuff political correctness and half-baked socialist egalitarianism up our snouts. The same goes for videogames, which are mostly about killing bad guys and/or solving puzzles.

This is, of course, intolerable to the Social Justice Warriors who insist that everything has to have a “teachable moment” or six about how horrible straight white males are and how heroic GLBTWTFBBQ persons are and what a utopia we could have if those wreckers and kulaks would quit trying to undermine kindly old Uncle Joe…oh wait, that was the 1930s pravda. Well, it hasn’t changed much over the last eighty years, as we can see in the pages of DKos and other online asylums for those afflicted with Hopeychangium overdoses. So it’s not too surprising that the SJWs have wound up running most of the legacy publishing houses and turning thumbs down on authors who don’t toe the line of correct thought and correct characterizations; as I have previously remarked in various book columns, the main holdout against this sort of tripe is Baen Books, whose interest has always been in telling a good story and only incidentally in whether the protagonist is gay, straight, or involved in a long-standing passionate affair with her slide rule, IYKWIMAITYD.

Unfortunately for gamers, there is no publisher comparable to Baen, but for the most part companies like EA, Bungie and Ubisoft are still more interested in the bottom line: what are gamers buying, and how can we sell them more of it? Questions of binary gender and other nonessential BS just don’t have much of an impact on the bottom line, and so while the publishers may pay lip service to the SJWs in the industry press, they don’t actually DO anything. Which just stokes the anger of the SJWs, who have been increasingly filling the pages of the gaming press with rants about what a misogynistic bunch of violent bigots the gaming community is made up of. Unfortunately, they’re messing with the wrong guys. For the most part, these are people who don’t take smack talk and harassment lying down – they’ll serve it right back with a side order of butthurt and rage, and they will move mountains to stick it to people who are getting up their noses. Which is how we arrive at GamerGate, the sad tale of how hypocritical “feminist” game developer Zoe Quinn literally slept her way into getting a crappy game nobody wanted to play featured on Steam, and further, got lots of positive reviews and supportive essays from game site reviewers who she also happened to be boning. Which is unfortunately a matter of public record, since her now ex-boyfriend went public with her faithlessness and hypocrisy; even more unfortunately, the game sites which should have been covering this doubled down and censored all discussion of the flap.

Much of this is going to sound familiar to conservatives and libertarians; discussion of political topics hostile to the liberal narrative has been verboten on places like Digg, Reddit, and other supposedly “neutral” online fora for quite some time, which is why there’s a thriving blog culture on the Right even without the bucks poured into the lefty blogs by people like George Soros and various foundations.I suspect that part of the fallout from GamerGate is going to be a bunch of new game review sites that have nothing to do with Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, and all the other sites that have taken to telling gamers what horrible people they are instead of telling them about games and mods and related topics of interest. Gamers may even start casting a jaundiced eye on the rest of the media; as culture critic Maddox remarked, game media are now suffering a high-speed version of the credibility collapse that the mainstream media took decades to suffer through. Or, as the eponymous boss of TheMittani.com said in a recent column, people will blow this off since the idea of “objective” game journalism is nonsense anyway.

I don’t agree; the rage of gamers at being called a bunch of racist sexist bigots for being upset with this is precisely why Ed Morrissey and Breitbart ran pieces on GamerGate. (Ace linked to Cranky T-Rex.) One of the worst features about the contemporary left is their conviction that the personal is political, and everything is personal with them. Everything, be it football, basketball, science fiction, videogames, movies or whatever, has to be relentlessly politicized and examples made of people who say Bad Things. Offensive Things That Make Somebody Feel Bad. Most conservatives don’t give a damn about any of that, and we resent the hell out of some dipshit like Bob Costas giving us a lecture on gun control when we’re trying to watch a damn football game. Conservatives and libertarians may not agree on a lot, but we can all agree that obnoxious leftist actors, authors and singers need to shut up and sing, and quit trying to force their half-baked political notions up our snouts, because that’s not what we’re paying them for.

This is also why Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Vox Day and John C. Wright (to name but a few) have been up in arms against John Scalzi and the wretched Stockholm Syndrome crew at the SFWA. Scalzi, the academic leftists who have come to dominate SFWA, and their SJW allies on Tumblr are quick to take offense at any SF or fantasy that doesn’t meet their politically correct templates, and have not scrupled to lie or misquote authors who don’t toe the line. So far the Glittery Hoo-Has are “winning” in the sense that they and their allies still dominate Hugo voting – but in a time when DragonCon and GenCon attendance exceeds Worldcon’s by an order of magnitude, what worth does a Hugo actually have? In times past, when geek culture and science fiction fandom were the same thing, the Hugo was worth serious money, but that was decades ago. Geek culture now includes anime fans, gamers, podcasters, webcomic creators, bloggers, cosplayers, comic book fans, and endless combinations of the preceding, and I’d bet money that if you went to DragonCon and asked people if they knew anything about Worldcon or the Hugos, most of the people would have (at best) a vague idea of what you were talking about.

This is not the tempest in a teapot some Hot Air commenters think it is. This is a battle for the last pieces of pop culture still friendly to conservatives and libertarians, a battle to keep some parts of society free of the Social Justice Warriors and their craziness. It’s a battle we can win. All we have to do is pitch in with a little mockery, some pointing and laughing, and buying the occasional book or videogame to support the authors and creators we like and respect. Capitalism, what a concept!

Shop Amazon – Hot New Releases in Video Games

Category: Culture, Ed Morrissey, Journalism, Progressivism, Scandal

In The Photo Finish, Huxley Beats Orwell By A Joint

Posted on | September 10, 2014 | 54 Comments

by Smitty

People have been looking a Fort Meade and trembling in Orwellian fear, but it looks like civilization may be more likely to end up drowned in a bong than sent to Room 101:

Welfare recipients can’t use their EBT cards at liquor stores but they can at marijuana dispensaries in states such as Colorado that have legalized pot, Sen. Jeff Sessions revealed Tuesday.
The Alabama Republican announced that he was drafting legislation to close the welfare-for-weed loophole after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed to him that marijuana shops were not off limits to EBT cards, which replaced food stamps, or other federal benefits.

Thought experiment: you can be on the dole, or you can vote, but not both. The quote usually focuses on the government bribing people with their own money. However, there seems to be a reciprocal problem of the deadbeat people offering votes in exchange for handouts. There has to be a way to diminish that threat.

Category: Culture

Violence, Foreign and Domestic

Posted on | September 10, 2014 | 9 Comments

Americans demand that action be taken to deal with two grave threats, radical Islamic terrorism and NFL running backs:

The N.F.L. remained on the defensive Tuesday as questions mounted over its handling of the domestic abuse case involving one of its star running backs, Ray Rice.
Commissioner Roger Goodell went on national television to address what the N.F.L. knew about a graphic video that showed Rice punching and knocking out his then-fiancée in an elevator. The video was released Monday by TMZ, a celebrity gossip website, prompting the Baltimore Ravens to terminate Rice’s contract and the N.F.L. to suspend him indefinitely.
Goodell said he had not seen the video of Rice knocking out his fiancée.
“We assumed there was a video, we asked for a video, but we were never granted that opportunity,” Goodell told CBS News on Tuesday. “No one in the N.F.L. to my knowledge” had seen the video.
In a statement earlier Tuesday, the league said it had asked law enforcement officials for “any and all information about the incident, including any video that may exist” and “that video was not made available to us, and no one in our office saw it until yesterday.” . . .
Goodell said the N.F.L. had seen the less graphic video published by TMZ soon after the assault in February, video that was taken from a camera in a hallway and showed Rice dragging his fiancée from the elevator.
According to advocates for victims of domestic violence, that video should have been enough to prompt Goodell to suspend Rice for more than two games.
“It didn’t leave a lot to the imagination,” said Kim Gandy, the president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
Gandy, who spoke with Goodell at length before he strengthened the league’s domestic violence policy last month, said she applauded the commissioner’s tougher stance and blamed prosecutors in New Jersey for reducing the charges against Rice.
“It’s a sad commentary on the criminal justice system that there wasn’t stronger action taken,” she said. “I guess celebrity has its privileges.”

Speaking of celebrities with privileges, President Obama is reportedly ready to order U.S. air strikes against the ISIS terrorists in Syria, and then he’ll go back to golfing, we presume. A teenage girl captured by the Islamic thugs described her captivity, which is even worse than being married to an NFL running back:

“They treat us like slaves. We are always ‘given’ to different men. Some arrive straight from Syria,” she says.
Isis has made huge territorial gains across northern Iraq and parts of Syria, capturing thousands of women and children according to an Amnesty International report last month.
“They threaten us and beat us if we try to resist. Often I wish they would beat me so hard I will die. But they are cowards even in this. None of them have the courage to end our suffering.”
Mayat says some of the youngest girls have stopped talking because of the abuse and were taken away by their captors. Many of the women have attempted to end their lives.
“Sometimes I feel as though it will never end. And if it did, my life would remain forever scarred by the torture I have suffered the past few weeks,” Mayat says. “Even if I survive, I don’t think I’ll be able to remove this horror from my mind.”

Kim Gandy could not be reached for comment.