The Other McCain

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

Mr. Podhoretz, You’ve Got The Pieces

Posted on | October 8, 2014 | 31 Comments

by Smitty

Let me help you re-arrange them.

So why aren’t Republicans sitting pretty?
The answer, I think, is far more technical than ideological. Democrats are vastly superior when it comes to the mechanics of American politics, and have been for nearly a decade, while the GOP’s technical skills have withered since 2004.

Allow me to drag you up to your second paragraph:

c) more Americans say it’s time to replace their own representatives than ever before in modern history.

You’d think that ‘replace’ might imply ‘something else’. The base really, really needs a kiss after the primary shenanigans this year. And the feeling that the IRS Tea Party targeting really didn’t raise much actual ire with the GOP elite. And the expected 88 miles of rectal sunshine in 2016 that Absolutely No Conservative Whose Name Does Not Rhyme with ‘Tush’ Can Possibly Stop Her Majesty.

So if you’re wondering why conservatives can’t muster enthusiasm to phone it in for statism, try and experiment and run some non-statist tools on an actual reform agenda. All those enthusiast crowds in 2009 who kinda tidied the joint? They’ll return in a jiffy. For an actual reform party.

This tired pack of Progressive degenerates would seem more honest if they just admitted they’re ideologically closer to Democrat than conservative.

via Hot Air headlines

Category: Republicans

What’s Up at Bryn Mawr?

Posted on | October 8, 2014 | 45 Comments

Brenna Levitin (@brennalevitin) is a junior at Bryn Mawr College (annual tuition $45,540), an elite women’s college in Philadelphia with an undergraduate enrollment of fewer than 1,500 students. Ms. Levitin describes herself as a “radical feminist” and has been working on a very special project at Bryn Mawr:

Since May, Brenna Levitin, the Greenfield Digital Center’s TriCo DH summer intern, has been hard at work tracking down the histories of LGBT individuals and communities at Bryn Mawr between 1970-2000. . . .
Although much of the past four months has been spent sighing over a lack of LGBT archival material, I recently had a great realization which partially solved the mystery of the disappearance of Bryn Mawr’s BGALA Center Library. I first heard about this mystery from Robin Bernstein, Class of 1991, the creator of the library and its first keeper. She told me about how she painstakingly shaped it over three years, only to have it disappear a few years after she graduated. She mourned the multi-hundred-volume library for years, until, to our excitement, I physically ran into the collection in Canaday Library a few weeks ago! . . .
In her sophomore year, Robin Bernstein asked the Bryn Mawr Women’s Center to use their empty back room as a physical space for BGALA (The Bryn Mawr-Haverford Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance). After the students in charge agreed, Bernstein began to create a physical space for the club within the Women’s Center, located on the upper floor of the Campus Center. . . .
Bernstein lovingly curated the library for the next three years, watching as it grew with each year’s funds. By the end of her senior year, the library contained over 1,000 books, audiotapes, and magazines. The summer after Bernstein’s graduation in 1991, the books were removed from the BGALA Center and relocated to a room in the Denbigh dormitory. . . .
After approximately 1993, institutional memory fails to recall where the books lived. In fact, Bernstein and I believed the books to still be missing when I found them, by chance, living in Canaday Library as an official collection. . . .
The next time that anyone saw the BGALA books was in 2003, when members of the Rainbow Alliance came to then-Coordinator for Information Acquisition and Delivery, Berry Chamness, in Canaday to ask for help. The Rainbow Alliance (the new name for BGALA) was losing the space where they stored the library, and wondered what to do to save the books and keep them accessible. Since Fall 2004, what is now known as the Rainbow Alliance/Women’s Center Collection has lived as a discreet collection in Canaday Library . . .

You can read the whole thing. This story came to my attention as part of my research into radical feminism for the “Sex Trouble” series, when I decided to do a search on Twitter:

Which led me to Bryn Mawr alumna Monica Mercado:

It turns out that Ms. Mercado, having completed her Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago (dissertation, “Women and the Word: Gender, Print, and Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century America”), has obtained a postdoctoral fellowship and become Director of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education at Bryn Mawr. Ms. Mercado’s blogging at their “Educating Women” site in turn led me to the radical feminist student Brenna Levitin, who is researching the archives for “histories of LGBT individuals and communities at Bryn Mawr.”

Among these “individuals” is the alumna Robin Bernstein, who created the gay club’s library collection at Bryn Mawr. She’s now Doctor Bernstein, having gotten her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University in 2004, and hired on at Harvard:

Assistant Director of Studies/Lecturer, Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University, September 2004-June 2006
Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of History and Literature, Harvard University, July 2006-December 2010
Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University, January 2011-June 2013
Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University, July 2013-present

Of course, this began because I was curious to see how Twitter reflected the influence of Adrienne Rich, whose landmark 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” fostered the now-commonplace feminist theory that heterosexuality, far from being women’s natural attraction to men, is actually a form of oppression imposed on women by the patriarchy.

“If you consider sexual desire and romantic love between men and women to be natural and healthy, you are not a feminist. . . . There is nothing natural about sex, according to feminist ideology, no biological urge that causes women to be attracted to men.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 10

The male-supremacist oppression of “compulsory heterosexuality” evidently has no effect at elite schools like Bryn Mawr, where lesbianism is certainly en vogue if not yet de rigueur.

The college was founded by a Quaker physician, Dr. Joseph Taylor, who in 1879 spent more than $50,000 of his own money (a huge sum at the time) to purchase the land that became Bryn Mawr’s campus. The first president of Bryn Mawr college was also male, James Rhodes. Whatever debt Bryn Mawr owes to the patriarchy is apparently forgotten in the school’s current radical feminist incarnation. However, it seems, some students are staging a rebellion:

Concerns about tolerance, diversity and respect for differing viewpoints led an angry mob of students at Bryn Mawr College to protest the display of a Confederate flag and demand that the students who displayed it be forcibly evicted from their dorm room. . . .
It started in early September when two seniors hung a Confederate flag in their residence hall — apparently in a common area. They also bound some tape to the floor and labeled the tape a “Mason-Dixon line.”
The students . . . said they chose the imagery to express their Southern pride.

Uh-oh. Who knows where this could lead? Of course, as every feminist knows, heteronormative patriarchy is the ultimate slavery, which means that 97% of women are its helpless victims.





 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 10.08.14

Posted on | October 8, 2014 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


The Nationals lost and my internet at home has apparently been washed out by the rain.
F*ck the news.


Doug Powers: White House Finally Delivers Apologetic Statement After Oklahoma Beheading
Twitchy: “I Miss Standards” – Can Lena Dunham Please Keep Her Clothes On?
American Power: The Left’s Religion Of Unhappiness
American Thinker: Jane Austen In The White House
Conservatives4Palin: Sarah Palin Endorses Four Attorney General Candidates
Don Surber: Loyalty To Obama Thrown Under The Bus
Jammie Wearing Fools: Awesome Video – Jason Mattera Tries To Interview Lois Lerner, Hilarity Ensues
Joe For America: Cosby Kid Says “Don’t Call Me Gay Or African American,” Oprah Almost Faints
JustOneMinute: Moving To Phase II Of The Enterovirus “Coverage”
Pamela Geller: Boko Haram Beheads Seven Prominent Nigerian Businessmen
Protein Wisdom: Popping In To Remind You – How You Get There Matters
Shot In The Dark: It Isn’t Pretty What A Town Full Of NIMBYs Can Do
STUMP: Public Pensions Followup – Public Employees And Medicare
The Gateway Pundit: Rep. Duncan Hunter – Ten ISIS Fighters Have Been Apprehended Coming Across Southern Border
The Jawa Report: Turkey’s Endgame On Kobane
The Lonely Conservative: Anti-Obamacare Filmmaker Audited By The IRS
This Ain’t Hell: AF Son Targeted By ISIS On Social Media
Weasel Zippers: Denver Census Bureau Supervisor Says Unemployment Numbers Being Faked
Megan McArdle: Is Wall Street More Corrupt Than Anywhere Else?


Shop Amazon – Halloween Effects to Haunt Your House

Category: Linkagery

Headlines on the Road to Hell

Posted on | October 8, 2014 | 35 Comments

Brian Hawkins, 44, was a teacher and coach at Scecina High School in Indiana. Last month, police began investigating him. On Sept. 23, shortly after police searched his home, Hawkins died when his car rammed head-on into a bridge abutment:

Indiana State Police detectives are still sorting through evidence recovered from the home of a deceased Scecina High School teacher and coach.
ISP executed a search warrant at Brian Hawkins’ home shortly before his death on Sept. 23. . . .
Despite his death, detectives said they will continue their investigation into allegations of voyeurism.
Police found more than 70 DVDs and nearly 50 VHS tapes inside Hawkins’ home. They recovered a black Sony Handycam, digital camera and DVD recorder, along with various digital storage media. They found micro SD cards, X-D picture cards and mini DV cassettes. Other items seized by police included handwritten notes and five cell phones.
Records show the State Police investigation began on Sept. 10. According to court documents, Hawkins’ girlfriend found a DVD with recorded sex acts. Police believe the women on that DVD did not know they were being recorded.
The girlfriend said they met on Match.com and dated for three to four months. She told police she decided to borrow some DVDs and found recordings of Hawkins engaged in sex acts with three women.
During the course of the investigation, police contacted one of the women in the recordings. The woman told police she never consented to being recorded, leading detectives to believe any other recordings of unknown women were done without their knowledge. Court documents go on to say both women expressed concern because Hawkins worked as a teacher and volleyball coach.

Meanwhile, in Columbus, Ohio:

A former Westerville youth coach is charged in federal court with secretly filming a young family member while she was nude and downloading child pornography online.
Bryan W. Lehman, 50, is being held in the Franklin County jail while he awaits a decision next week from federal Magistrate Judge Terrence P. Kemp on whether Lehman should remain incarcerated while awaiting trial.
On Sept. 25, [Lehman’s] home was searched after a warrant was filed. . . .
Authorities found a computer hard drive with dozens of explicit videos and images of a young girl whom Lehman had apparently filmed, [Franklin County Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Officer Steven] Grubbs said. Hundreds of other child-porn and erotic images downloaded from the Internet also were found.
Lehman eventually told Grubbs that he had filmed the young relative by attaching a smartphone to his belt and shooting video of her without her knowledge, the officer testified. He made the recordings between November 2010 and May 2012, investigators found.
In at least one video, filmed in a bathroom, Lehman can be seen in the mirror as he films the nude girl, who is about 6 or 7 years old at that time, Grubbs said. The camera focuses on the girl’s genitals.

Little Rock, Arkansas:

Zachary Thomas Nehus, 42, of Hot Springs was arrested [Sept. 25] on 30 counts of distributing, possessing or viewing matter depicting sexually explicit conduct involving a child, a Class C felony. Nehus bonded out of the Garland County Detention Center on a $75,000 bond [Sept. 26].
According to Aaron Sadler of the Attorney General’s office, Nehus was employed by St. John’s middle school at the time of his arrest.
Dennis Lee with the Catholic Diocese of Little Rock stated that Nehus was placed on administrative leave . . .

Stoughton, Massachusetts:

A Stoughton attorney was ordered held on bail after he was arraigned on child pornography charges Tuesday.
Richard Comenzo was charged with one count of possession of child porn and one count of dissemination of child porn, Norfolk District Attorney spokesman David Traub said.
The prosecution claimed Comenzo solicited sex from minors on Tumblr and Craigslist and posted child porn from those accounts. . . .
On his website, Comenzo says he specializes in Internet and medical marijuana law.

Wilmington, Delaware:

As he moved through the ranks of tony prep schools, Christopher Wheeler seemed right at home. An accomplished musician and composer who flew his own airplane, he seemed adept at raising money and catering to wealthy families who entrusted him with their children.
But court records suggest Wheeler for years may have hidden a darker side of his personality that surfaced after he became headmaster at Tower Hill School, an elite Delaware prep school founded by members of the du Pont family.
“I did those things. I am the one responsible,” Wheeler wrote last year, according to court documents, in a letter to a Pennsylvania man who asked Wheeler about making amends for the alleged child sexual abuse he perpetrated. . . .
Delaware investigators searched Wheeler’s home and office at Tower Hill last fall for evidence of witness tampering or intimidation. They instead found some 2,000 images of child pornography, according to police.
Wheeler was paid more than $300,000 a year at Tower Hill, where tuition exceeds $25,000 a year. . . .
Wheeler has remained in custody since his arrest last fall, unable to post $1.5 million cash bail. He appeared gaunt and pale at his trial Tuesday, his face covered in a gray beard.
Wheeler is charged with 25 counts of dealing in child pornography and faces at least 50 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

Dover, Delaware:

A Smyrna man was arrested Monday after it was discovered he had been having sexual encounters with a 14-year-old Dover girl, police said Tuesday.
Harold Philhower, 33, was charged with third-degree rape, three counts of possession of child pornography and one count of endangering the welfare of a child, Cpl. Mark Hoffman of Dover police said. . . .
Philhower met the girl outside the Kaizen Karate Academy at 155 Commerce Way in Dover, where she is a student, and several times they had inappropriate contact, Hoffman said.
Philhower’s wife is an instructor at the academy.
Hoffman said Philhower received several nude photos of the victim through social media.

Davenport, Iowa:

A California man, who convinced Iowa teens and at least one school into believing he was a movie star, now faces charges at the federal level.
Investigators said David Lavera, 33, of San Diego, posed as Kiowa Gordon, who starred as Embry Call in the popular “Twilight” saga movies. Lavera reportedly convinced one Iowa girl to get into his car, and had allegedly asked another girl to sneak out of her home after her parents were asleep.
Lavera was so convincing, he was invited to appear and perform some stunts at a school assembly at Berg Elementary and Middle School. One of his alleged victims said Lavera attended a school-sponsored pool party for eighth graders. . . .
Lavera was taken into federal custody by U.S. Marshals on Monday, October 6, 2014, after a grand jury indicted him on charges of knowingly producing child pornography or sexual exploitation of a minor, and knowingly possessing child pornography.

Kansas City, Missouri:

A child pornography investigation that started outside the United States and involved Homeland Security has led to charges against a Kansas City man.
Charles R. Burge, 35, was charged with statutory rape, sexual exploitation of a minor, enticement of a child and endangering the welfare of a child. He is being held on $500,000 bail. . . .
Investigators said Homeland Security was contacted by a police agency in another country in March about a series of images that chronicled four years of abuse of an 11-year-old girl. . . .
The series of images contained more than 140 images of the girl who was 7 when the alleged incidents began.
When police executed a search warrant, they found Burge and the girl, along with evidence linking him to the crimes.
Prosecutor Eric Zahnd said that Burge was convicted of rape in Arkansas in 1996. He is on probation for failing to register as a sex offender.
If convicted, Burge would face life in prison.

Norfolk, Virginia:

A Virginia Beach man faces additional charges that he forced nine young girls to send him nude photos and videos, but he now seeks to suppress his confession, saying police coerced him.
Daniel Chase Harris, 31, a Navy pilot, was charged in a new indictment with 32 counts of enticing minors to engage in sexual activity and related child pornography counts. . . .
Harris, a Naval Academy graduate, is a lieutenant and was a flight instructor at Oceana Naval Air Station at the time of his arrest.
Authorities in Bedford County were alerted to the case when a 14-year-old and her parents reported that someone had tried to extort money from the girl after she sent a nude photo of herself on Facebook to someone using the aliases Will Williams and Steve Crofton, according to court records.
The other girls reported similar extortion attempts, the indictment says.

This is just a small sample of recent news articles. What prompted this snapshot of the swirling vortex of evil in our world? A radical feminist in Australia reacted to Emma Watson’s U.N. speech:

Several feminists have already addressed some of the problematic aspects of her speech. Like many, I am critical of the strategies employed by transnational organizations like the UN. I am also critical of liberal feminism.

You got that? Laura McNally is a radical feminist who is critical of liberal feminism. It’s important that you understand where she’s coming from when you read this part of her column:

The liberal feminist movement argues sexist objectification and violent pornography can be feminist . . .
Liberal feminism frames sexual violence in porn as an empowered choice for women. . . .
While we are in the midst of a child porn and pedophilia epidemic, liberal feminism argues we should sell sexy lingerie to seven year old girls because children need “sexual choices.”

Do you see what I mean when I say radical feminists, while certainly crazy, are also often right about certain issues? Liberals want us to believe that sexual “repression” is our problem, so that what we need is more sexual “liberation.” Radical feminists may be crazy, but they’re not stupid enough to believe that. Laura McNally again:

If the sex trade were a choice that supposedly liberates women, wouldn’t we all be liberated by now? What with pornography making up over a third of the whole Internet, and with the global sex industry estimated at being worth over $7000 billion (nearly ten years ago by the EU). . . .
Girls are increasingly surrounded by sex trade influences, with much of the visual culture saturated with pornography. . . . Thai reports show 40 per cent of the sex industry is made up of underage girls. . . .
Australian writers have told me that girls in Asia have to “choose” between the garment industry and the sex industry, otherwise beg. Why is this first-world “choice” narrative homogenizing feminist discourse? . . .
Liberal feminist rhetoric is dominated by first-world accounts of “I think this is empowering so it is.” This apolitical approach evades the statistics and realities of millions of girls and women whose stories we will likely never read about in a feminist bestseller. Feminism has come to mean whatever wealthy consumers want it to mean — “feeling good,” rather than actual change or justice.

You can read the rest of that, with the caveat that Laura McNally is a crazy radical feminist, so that she blames “patriarchy” and “male supremacy” for these monstrous evils when, in fact, it’s the liberal “if it feels good, do it” attitude toward sex that makes perverts think they are entitled to whatever wicked thrills they crave. Evil has no gender, however, as this story from Argentina should make clear:

Julia Alvarez, 15, from the town of Juan Domingo Peron, in the northern Argentinian province of Formosa was set upon by her attackers who thought she was too pretty . . .
Julia had been to visit friends and was walking home when she says she was approached by her attackers, two sisters aged 16 and 18, who started hitting her and punched her to the ground.
According to her statement the girls pulled out knives and said, “Everyone says you are pretty. You won’t look pretty when we have finished with you. People will call you Chucky,” reports the Mirror.
The girl was slashed with the knives several times on her face and back.
After the attack the two sisters ran away and left Julia lying in a pool of blood . . .
Julia needed dozens of stitches on her face and back to put the flaps of skin back together.

But did I mention radical feminists are crazy?

Sometimes, when I highlight crimes committed by women and homosexuals, people accuse me of fomenting bigotry. So here in a single post I have highlighted nine sick crimes committed by men, crimes in which girls and women were victimized, to say nothing of my reports earlier this morning about actor Stephen Collins and school teacher Sean Shaynak. Do you think, however, that just once feminists could acknowledge Simone de Beauvoir’s perversion?

When in doubt, it’s usually Number Three.





 

 

Category: Crime, Feminism, Sex, Sex Trouble

‘Magnet School,’ IYKWIMAITYD

Posted on | October 8, 2014 | 6 Comments

Brooklyn Technical High School is a “magnet school” where the students include New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s son Dante. Sean Shaynak, 44, was a popular math and physics teacher at Brooklyn Tech. Shaynak was very, very popular. Not in a good way:

A New York City public school math teacher accused of having sex with six students also allegedly sent a picture of his genitals to another 16-year-old girl in his class.
On the day after school ended in June, instructor Sean Shaynak allegedly sent the girl a picture of his privates to her cell phone via Snapchat, the girl’s angered father told The New York Daily News . . .
Brooklyn Technical High School teacher Sean Shaynak remained in custody . . .  he pleaded not guilty to the new charges. Bail was set at $750,000 bond and was at $250,000 for the previous charge. . . .
The charges in the new indictment include kidnapping, forcible touching, sexual abuse and criminal sexual act. . . .
Authorities said . . . that computers and phones taken after his arrest found text messages, photos and videos detailing sexual interactions with six teens, from ages 13 to 19, between 2011 and 2014.
Those interactions included taking a 15-year-old girl to a nude beach and giving alcohol and cigarettes to minors, officials said. . . .
During the investigation . . . authorities searched his home, computers and phones and allegedly unearthed thousands of inappropriate text messages, photographs and videos. . . .
They allegedly learned that he had had relations with six students, who ranged in age from 13 to 19, between 2011 and 2014, NBC New York reported.
‘The defendant, clearly from his actions, looked to groom these students,’ assistant district attorney Joseph Mancino said in Brooklyn Supreme Court, the New York Daily News reported.
He took one 15-year-old girl to a nude beach in New Jersey without her parents’ permission and he also took her to his home, where he plied her with alcohol until she passed out, Mancino said.
Shaynak also asked the girl to take part in lesbian sex with another student, prosecutors claim.
During a relationship with another girl, he allegedly watched her have sex with other people at a sex club.
He also had sex with another girl but she put up resistance when the sex went too far — but he forced himself on her anyway, prosecutors said, the Daily News reported.

New York Public Schools: They’re magnets. For perverts.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex

Stephen Collins Is Still Alive

Posted on | October 8, 2014 | 22 Comments

There was a rumor last night that actor Stephen Collins committed suicide. The rumor proved to be false, but you can understand why there were rumors. His estranged wife secretly recorded Collins confessing to having molested at least three young girls:

Collins — who is in the middle of a nasty, prolonged divorce with actress Faye Grant — revealed to her in 2012 he had molested and/or exposed himself to several underage girls years before. Collins and Grant went to a therapist where she peppered him with questions about the incidents . . .
Grant taped the therapy session. . . .
You hear Collins flatly confess to molesting an 11-year-old New York girl — a relative of his first wife — saying, “There was one moment of touching where her hand, I put her hand on my penis.” He also acknowledges exposing himself to the girl “a couple of times” . . . he says when she was 11, 12 and 13.
Grant asks, “When you exposed yourself . . . did you have an erection?” He responds, “No, I mean, no. Partial, maybe I think.”
Grant then inquires about other girls. Collins mentions an L.A. girl who lived in their neighborhood, but says he tried righting the wrong by apologizing to her years later.
And then they talk about yet another girl. . . . We’re told this girl was also from New York and was between 12 and 13 at the time.

TMZ notes that some of Collins’ roles look creepy in retrospect. He starred in “the fantastically awful 1996 Lifetime movie ‘The Babysitter’s Seduction,’ Collins sleeps with his teenage babysitter (played by a 19-year-old Keri Russell).” CBS News reports this:

[Entertainment Tonight] has obtained the declaration from Stephen Collins’ wife of 27 years, Faye Grant. . . .
“I believe that Stephen used his celebrity status to engender the trust of the families of the children he molested,” Grant’s declaration claims. “I further believe that there have been other victims, but he has thus far only confessed to those three girls.” . . .
“The two victims in New York were apparently molested over the course of several years, from the ages of 10-14 years old,” Grant claims in the document. “My understanding is that all three of these victims are now over the age of 26.” Grant says that she believes one of the victims filed a sexual assault complaint in New York. . . .
The documents also claims that the 67-year-old actor’s mental state, “Stephen’s therapist subsequently disclosed to me that Stephen has narcissistic personality disorder with sociopathic tendencies.”

Estranged wife? Narcissistic sociopath? Hmmm.

Will Stephen Collins sue me for quoting court documents?

 

Category: Celebrities, Crime

The Election Thing

Posted on | October 7, 2014 | 106 Comments

Let me say, to begin with, that elections matter. From 2009 (the Doug Hoffman campaign in NY-23) through 2012, nobody argued more strenuously than I did about the importance of winning elections, and nobody covered campaigns with the kind of gonzo fanaticism that I brought to the gig. In the past couple of years, however, it has been very difficult to ignore the evidence that Republicans don’t want my support, and that the GOP Establishment in general is profoundly embarrassed to be associated with conservatives in any way.

What was done during the dishonest and brutal Mississippi primary was definitive in that regard. If ever conservatives needed an argument why they should stay home on Election Day, “Re-Elect Thad Cochran” was it.

The Republican Party reminds me of a Bible verse, which is to say it is “without form and void” (Genesis 1:2).

If the Republican Party were listed on the periodic table of elements, it would be in the right column, among the inert gases.

From the foregoing discussion, you can perhaps understand that I’m just quivering in anticipation at the prospect that Republicans might — just barely, maybe — capture a majority in the Senate on Nov. 4.

John Ekdahl at AOSHQ has a state-by-state breakdown, for those of you who experience spontaneous erection just thinking about the idea of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

See, here’s my problem: It’s not just that I remember all the recent backstabbing and sellouts by Mitch McConnell and his GOP Senate cronies, but I also remember the history of Republican Senate majorities under such paragons of conservative leadership as Bob Dole and Trent Lott. I remember how GOP leaders begged and groveled in their vain attempts to retain the “party loyalty” of such stalwarts of Republican principle as Jim Jeffords and Arlen Specter. And then I think one more time about that Mississippi primary, you see, and the way all these things keep adding up in my mind . . .

Well, maybe Mitch McConnell will be Senate Majority Leader next year. Maybe that gives you a raging boner, just thinking about it.

But speaking for myself, “Meh.”

They haven’t done a damned thing to suggest they even care whether I care or not. And I’m pretty sure I don’t care. Do you? Why?

 

Category: Election

Why California’s ‘Affirmative Consent’ Law Violates Basic Constitutional Rights

Posted on | October 7, 2014 | 38 Comments

Sexual assault is a crime.

Rape is not a school disciplinary infraction, and the attempt by universities to set up a pseudo-judicial system to deal with accusations of sexual assault was always a dubious endeavor. What college administrators have done, in their effort to appease feminists, is to establish phony “courts” where people can be “convicted” of very serious crimes without the due process rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

Notice that California’s new law pertains to a specific category of crime (sexual assault) committed by a specific category of offenders (college students) in a specific place (the college campus). There was apparently no need, in the eyes of California legislators, for new laws changing the standards of proof required to convict someone of theft, robbery or drug possession. Nor does the new California law affect high school students. And a college student accused of rape retains all his constitutional rights, so long as the accusation relates to sex that takes place somewhere outside the campus setting. That is to say, if a student at Cal-Berkeley goes to a Shattuck Avenue bar, where he picks up the waitress who takes him back to her apartment, their intimacies are not regulated by the regime of “affimative consent” so long as (a) the waitress is not also a Cal-Berkeley student and (b) her apartment is not on campus.

To put it as bluntly as possible, the new California law treats college students like an inferior caste. It’s the New Jim Crow, and this law will eventually be challenged in court as a violation of students’ basic constitutional rights. Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg observes the dishonest rhetoric of the new law’s feminist advocates:

Some defenders of the law say it doesn’t really matter because it will only have an effect when women accuse men of sexual assault. “The law has no bearing on the vast majority of sexual encounters,” feminist writer Amanda Marcotte reassures us. “It only applies when a student files a sexual assault complaint.”
Never mind that it will also likely change the standard of proof in such situations, making it much easier to charge — and administratively convict — students of rape based solely on an allegation. Don’t worry about false accusations, says Think Progress’ Tara Culp-Ressler, they amount to only “about 2% to 8% of cases.” Tell that to people who fall into the 2% to 8%.
Other defenders insist that such concerns miss the point. Ann Friedman of New York magazine rhapsodizes about the law’s positive cultural impact. It will help in “deprogramming the idea that nice girls don’t admit they like sex, let alone talk about how they like it.” She notes that the “law will force universities to talk to all students, female and male, about how enthusiastic consent is mandatory.” And that is great because “Confirming consent leads to much hotter sex.”

You can read the whole thing. The question we need to be asking, however, is how did we get here? What has happened — other than orchestrated activism by campus feminists — that has led to this point? When and why did university administrators begin to treat claims of sexual assault as something distinct from any other crime that might occur on campus? If somebody steals a student’s laptop, call the police. If somebody breaks out the window of a student’s car, call the police. However, if a student says she has been sexually assaulted by a fellow student, we can’t call the police. No, say the administrators, in such cases we must convene a university disciplinary proceeding where the accused rapist does not have the due-process rights normally accorded to criminal defendants. And when this unusual extra-judicial treatment of sexual assault cases fails to produce results that satisfy feminists, evidently, the legislature must then enact laws regulating the specifics of “consent” in campus environments.

The Bottom Line of ‘Affirmative Consent’

What’s really happening here? When you see something happening that seems so inexplicable from a common-sense perspective, you need to ask yourself what is being omitted from the discussion. This “extraordinarily intrusive” effort to “micromanage sex,” as the Los Angeles Times described the California law, must be a reaction to something that nobody wants to talk about.

The new law requires a verbal “yes” at every stage of intimacy, right? Now, let us imagine the situation in which a student says “yes” to X, then says “yes” to Y, but says “no” to Z. In the matter of X and Y, she was enthusiastically consenting. However, when her partner wanted to do Z, she said “no” — and her partner did Z anyway, so that he is now accused of sexual assault. Question: What is Z?

Must we pretend ignorance about what is going on among young people nowadays? Are adults supposed to pretend that they don’t know how a porn-saturated hyper-sexualized culture has influenced the appetites, habits and attitudes of hedonistic youth?

Do you think we’re stupid? Do you mean to insult our intelligence?

Surprise! Teen girls are having anal sex
because they’re being pressured into it

That column by feminist Meghan Murphy deserves careful scrutiny by anyone who really wants to understand how damaged and grotesque sexual culture has become in the 21st century. And we can perceive how it relates to the “affirmative consent” regime that California’s new law has established for college students.

Really, did anyone ever believe that all this noise about “consent” was a result of normal sex between college boys and girls? Were we expected to believe that horny teenage college girls who got drunk at parties and hooked up with teenage college boys were making accusations of sexual assault because of normal sex? Because she only wanted to go to third base and he “stole home”? No, I don’t think that’s it at all.

She’s drunk, he’s drunk, they go back to his place, and a “home run” is the intended outcome. However, the guy’s appetites have been influenced by his porn habits, so that normal intercourse isn’t enough for him. No, he’s seen enough sick videos to believe that the Ultimate Sex Act involves imposing a particularly traumatic degradation on a woman.

She’s drunk enough to agree to a random hook-up, you see, but she doesn’t realize that he is drunk enough to think he can act out the wildest scenes he’s been watching on Internet porn videos. And, furthermore, he has been conditioned to believe this — the Ultimate Sex Act, painful as it may be for her — is what she really want.

Here, let Meghan Murphy explain this problem in a real-life context:

My first boyfriend was [angry] that I wouldn’t have anal sex with him. Not just because he, you know, wanted to try out all the super sexy things he’d learned watching porn, but because I’d done it before — with other guys who weren’t him. No fair, amirite?
The fact that the whole, entire reason I wouldn’t have anal sex with him was because I’d tried it already with a couple of other guys and the experience ranged from completely boring and unpleasurable to extremely painful eluded him. My pleasure wasn’t the point. The point was 1) No fair, wah! (i.e. why did other men “get” something he didn’t), 2) The thought of emulating something he masturbated to in porn turned him on, 3) Possible pleasure for him — the idea that it’s “tighter” or some sh*t. (HA. Anal sex puns, you guys!)
No matter how you do the math, all points add up to barf.

You can read the whole thing, and we should be grateful to Ms. Murphy for her frank (if personally embarrassing) explanation of what’s really happening among our sexually adventurous youth. There is a “monkey see, monkey do” emulation factor involved in the way pornographic videos have invaded the erotic imagination of many young people (and not-so-young people), especially in the 20 years since Al Gore invented the Internet. Whereas 40 or 50 years ago, magazines like Playboy merely offered images of females as “sex objects” — satisfying curiosity as to what the naked female body looked like, celebrating a certain ideal of what women should look like, and encouraging the attitude that females were sexual commodities in a marketplace for male consumption — the widespread availability of porn video provides a sexual script of what men should do with these female objects.

Scripting the Erotic Imagination

The Feminist Confessional Narrative form employed by Ms. Murphy cannot be used by men, and any man is a fool to think he can try it. Nobody is interested in the male perspective on sex, and any man who thinks he can co-opt the True Confessions style used by feminists is merely providing the rope with which his executioners will hang him. However, I will waive my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to a limited extent, to say that I never suffered from a lack of imagination. That is to say, when beholding the female body — clothed or naked, in real life or in a media image — I never needed anyone to provide me with a script. A basic biological understanding was all I ever needed to write my own scripts. Thus, the first time anybody showed me a porn video (a VHS tape, circa 1985, when I was in my mid-20s), my reaction was, “Meh.” Nothing on that videotape really interested me because (a) my imagination was far more creative, and (b) my real-life flesh-and-blood sexual experiences were far more enjoyable than being a spectator to phony scenes performed by strangers.

Porn freaks just don’t have enough imagination; they have developed a mental habit of being sexual spectators; their erotic imaginations are warped by their porn habits; and all attempts to replicate porn scripts in real life are inherently problematic.

During the “Sex Wars” between rival feminist factions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the issue of pornography was central to the dispute. Radical feminists contended that pornography was inherently degrading to women, and specifically contended that pornography was implicated in rape and child molestation. The opposition — so-called “pro-sex feminists” — insisted that pornography was harmless and, indeed, it was claimed that pornography is empowering to women, and that we could not condemn porn without impeding women’s liberation. In that particular dispute, conservatives actually supported the radical feminists. For a brief moment in the 1980s, Andrea Dworkin and Jerry Falwell were de facto allies, and Attorney General Ed Meese was on the same side as Catharine MacKinnon.

The radical feminists who were defeated in the “Sex Wars” have told their side of the story in various places (see, e.g., the collection of essays The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism edited by Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice Raymond), but neither the radicals nor their “pro-sex” antagonists (nor most conservative critics of feminism) have explained what happened in the 1980s and why it happened. Simply put, the majority of feminists have always viewed the traditional family — the married mom and dad with children — as their primary enemy, and are willing to fight that enemy By Any Means Necessary. When the “Sex Wars” erupted in the late 1970s, many feminists were willing to defend pornography because they understood how pornographic culture subverts the basic moral values associated with the traditional family. Feminists must view porn as “liberating” (i.e., hostile to marriage and motherhood) and if porn results in harm to women? They don’t care.

Furthermore, and this has been insufficiently appreciated, many feminist leaders during the “Sex Wars” were (as many feminist leaders still are and always have been) lesbians. This meant that there was an alliance between feminists and the gay-rights movement that ultimately trumped whatever concerns feminists might have had about the impact of pornography on women.

The compulsive promiscuity and extreme perversion typical of gay male culture could not be robustly defended if the radical feminist arguments about the degradation of pornography were taken seriously. By an accident of history (which was perhaps less accidental than it seems) the feminist “Sex Wars” overlapped the AIDS crisis, during which homosexual activists fought against public-health measures to shut down the gay bathhouses that provided the commercial venues within which the AIDS epidemic had been incubated. (See, e.g., Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On, as well as “A Radical Holocaust” in Destructive Generation by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.) You see that feminists could not logically argue for shutting down pornographic peep shows while at the same time supporting the arguments in favor of keeping open the bathhouses that facilitated anonymous gay promiscuity.

The anti-porn radicals were defeated in the “Sex Wars,” because normalizing homosexuality was ultimately more important to the feminist cause than protecting the health and safety of women.

The Real Trouble and the Phony ‘Epidemic’

Once you understand what happened in the 1980s — and not just what happened, but why it happened, and how the “Sex Wars” were rooted in the inherent contradictions of the Left’s 1960s rhetoric about sexual liberation and sexual equality — you gain a new perspective on what has happened in the past 30 years, and what is happening now.

Are we really surprised that the proliferation of online pornography has inspired a vogue of anal sex among heterosexuals? Are we really surprised that teenage girls report that they are being pressured into this painful, unsanitary and abnormal activity? And are we really surprised that, in reaction to phony claims of a “rape epidemic” on campus, that California has enacted a law that requires “affirmative consent” to each sexual act between two student partners?

Do you need me to draw you a diagram?

The connection between pornography and sex trouble on college campuses is quite real, even if the “rape epidemic” is not.

However, because people are afraid to have an honest conversation about all the factors involved — pornography, promiscuity, underage alcohol abuse, and especially feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology — we cannot address the problem in a common-sense way that would actually make things better. We cannot speak the truth, because feminism is committed to a war against human nature.

Truth is silenced, constitutional rights are infringed, and we are now hurrying toward the gates of Hell by the most direct route.

Oh, look: The Tenth Amendment has been voided by court decree.




 

 

 

Category: California, Crime, Education, Feminism, Sex, Sex Trouble
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