The Other McCain

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

In Which @PatKasprik Teaches Us That Rape ‘Satire’ Is Acceptable on Twitter

Posted on | July 6, 2014 | 82 Comments

So, @HollyRFisher did this and it went viral on Facebook:

In case you didn’t notice, that’s a Chick-fil-A cup in her hand. We are now in Day Six of the Hobby Lobby hysteria, and the Democrat Party propaganda claim that this Supreme Court decision is a theocratic right-wing assault on women’s rights is so firmly embedded in liberals’ minds that responding to them with facts and logic is a waste of time. Deliberate provocation is more fun, and the liberal reaction to Holly Fisher’s provocation was memorable. A young Floridian named Patrick Ryan Kasprik sent Fisher these Twitter messages:

“Idgaf how patriotic you think you are – you’re
a sham of an American who would strip
rights from others in the name of God.“

“Hey @HollyRFisher so I was hoping you could fly on
down to Florida so we could stone you to death?
You know, religious fundamentalism…”

“But seriously @HollyRFisher come on down.
I would love to let a jackass rape you beforehand,
you know, religious fundamentalism.”

As might be imagined, Kasprik’s rhetoric inspired a lot of blowback, to which Kasprik responded: “Like most satire, the people on the receiving end really don’t get it.” This is the familiar Liberal Satire Defense: “Hahaha! Stupid wingnuts are too ignorant to comprehend the enlightened nuance of my progressive humor.”

Except (a) we understand it perfectly and (b) it’s not funny.

Of course, what Kasprik’s “jokes” were intended to invoke was another favorite liberal trope, the “American Taliban” Analogy, wherein Christian conservatives are smeared as having the same agenda as violent Islamic fundamentalists. The problem is that the two phenomena are not analogous, no matter how often or in what way liberals repeat this smear. Honor killings and other manifestations of Islamic backwardness (polygamy, child brides, burqas, etc.) have no parallel among Christian conservatives. Opposition to abortion and homosexuality, expressed through the ordinary processes of representative politics, is simply not the same thing as what the mullahs in Iran or other Islamic fanatics seek to impose through sharia law. Lumping both together under the rhetorical umbrella of “religious fundamentalism” is just dishonest.

But where would liberals be without dishonest rhetoric? And why do I have a suspicion that Patrick Ryan Kasprik will soon regret calling attention to himself and his clever “satire”?

 

Category: Supreme Court

FMJRA 2.0: Hey, Baby, It’s The 4th Of July

Posted on | July 6, 2014 | 10 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Tranarchy: Gender Theory = Insanity

Sex, Science, Nature and ‘Choice’

#Socialism2014 Marxist Gender Theory: Sexual Minorities of the World Unite!

Inmates Run the Facebook Asylum

Boom! IRS Admits Guilt

FMJRA 2.0: Stuff Like That

The Battle for Iraq

Lesbian Celebrated #LGBTPride Month by Murdering Her Wife, Police Say

Demi Lovato Keeps Dropping Hints

A Poultry Attempt At Rule 5

Crisis or Opportunity

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.30.14

Men’s Conference Succeeds

Three Scary Words

Joe Biden E-Mails Me

Gender Theory Madness: Gay Man Gets ‘Doxed’ Because of His ‘Transphobia’

The #HobbyLobby Hysteria

Virginia Democrat Indicted on Pornography, Underage Sex Charges

Taco Shout-Out To Harry ‘The Cadaver’

The Mississippi Scandal

Rule 5 Monday: Air-Cooled

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.01.14

Celebrities in the Culture War

Ace, Hayek, Hoffer, Sowell

What @AdamRichman Learned

PSA: Words Can Hurt You

Department of Useless Advice

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 07.02.14

Fertilizer Hitting Air Circulator In Mississippi Senate Runoff Controversy

If You Want Blood…

Their Agenda, and Hers

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.03.14

Max Blumenthal Claims That Netanyahu ‘Stage-Managed’ Kidnapped Teens Crisis

Progressivism Won’t Be Our Death

Robert Redford Uses Independence Day To Ride Climate Hobby-Horse

Gender Theory: Beyond Parody

Top linkers this week:

  1. Batshit Crazy News (33)
  2. Regular Right Guy (14)

…and the usual assortment of near-misses. Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


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Category: FMJRA Award

Feminist Attacked by Feminists After Telling the Truth About Birth Control

Posted on | July 6, 2014 | 59 Comments

Holly Grigg-Spall (@hollygriggspall) is a British feminist who last year published a book called Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control. The term “hormonal birth control” includes not only The Pill, but also Depo-Provera and Yasmin/Yaz, the latter of which is the target of lawsuits that blame side effects of the drug for causing nearly two dozen deaths.

It would seem to be just common sense that the long-term use of artificial hormones — for birth control or for anything else — could have harmful side effects. When I was in college, a guy who was into weight-lifting called me over to his dorm room one afternoon and asked me to read the very detailed warning included with the steroids (Dynabol, as I recall) he had somehow obtained on the black market.

These warnings were written in a lot of scientific jargon that my buddy didn’t understand, and he asked me to translate them into plain English. So I was reading along through this lengthy list of potential side effects and reached the phrase “testicular atrophy.”

Oh, hell, no.

Do you see what I mean about common sense? You don’t have to be a research scientist to figure out that if “testicular atrophy” is a potential side effect of a guy injecting himself with synthetic male hormones, maybe it’s not such a good idea for women to be gobbling down a daily dose of synthetic female hormones. Even if it weren’t for my other concerns about the Contraceptive Culture (see “Sex, Science, Nature and ‘Choice’“), I would still be dubious about hormonal contraceptives on the basis of common-sense health issues.

But don’t take my word for it. Let a radical feminist explain:

My own experiences with HBC began in my teens when I began taking it for acne. I remember that once I started taking it, it took me about a month for my over-the-top emotional hormone swings to lessen. . . .
Once my emotions leveled out, I was very good at taking the pill once per day at the same time every day. . . .
I stayed on the pill for a decade at least.
I discovered radical feminism in 2011 and, like so many of us, it changed my life. . . . About that same time I decided to go off the pill. The last straw came when doctors thought I had had a pulmonary embolism, which is a condition made more likely by HBC. A CT scan indicated that it was actually pneumonia, but that was a very scary experience for me. I decided to finish my pack and be done with the pill.
Over the next year as my body detoxed from the pill I developed acne all along my jaw/chinline that hadn’t been there before. Large bumps protruded on my face, which was embarrassing as I was well past adolescence. I also experienced weight gain, which I was told wasn’t a *real* side effect of going off the pill. It was frustrating not to [be] believed when I reported my symptoms.

Think about it: If the Pill is powerful enough to prevent pregnancy and relieve adolescent acne — i.e., to make a woman’s body stop doing what it normally does — what kind of less noticeable changes does it also cause? What are the potentially harmful side effects of using these synthetic hormones on a daily basis for 10 years or more? Holly Grigg-Spall started asking questions about this and guess what the reaction was from the feminist establishment?

Liberal feminists have called her book “dangerous” and use name-calling techniques in attempts to push Griggs-Spall to the margins of feminist discourse. As many of us know, being insulted and told to keep quiet are tools used to keep us away from discovering truths and maintain the status quo. Grigg-Spall is referred to as a “crank” (how feminist!), and potential readers of her book are warned that discussing female biology and women’s experiences is inherently “essentialist”. . . . There are several critiques of this book that have similar tones and I found the pro-pill apologism quite transparent.

Why is this?

My belief is that the pharmaceutical industry is threatened by Griggs-Spall’s book and that discrediting her is a way to maintain the status quo. I also contend that rejecting the pill goes against sex-positive/mainstream feminism, which is why there’s push-back as well from its representatives.

Hmmm. So the radical feminist believes that the arguments of “sex-positive/mainstream feminism” are just coincidentally aligned with the interests of the pharmaceutical industry that promotes hormonal birth control. I’d bet that if a diligent researcher looked closely at the financing behind institutional feminism, they would discover that this alignment is not entirely coincidental, like how “mainstream feminism” sold out to the porn industry in the 1980s. People need to be more skeptical. Not everybody who says they’re your friend is actually your friend.

 

Category: Contraceptive Culture, Feminism

The Dorchester Doofus

Posted on | July 6, 2014 | 65 Comments

The Boston Globe last week published an op-ed column about “rape culture” by libertarian author Cathy Young. Her column prompted several letters to the editor, including this piece of spectacular idiocy:

As a man in my 20s, I find absurd Cathy Young’s assertion that “the overwhelming majority of men need no teaching that rape is a repugnant crime” (“Rape in the real world,” Op-ed, June 29). The flurry of catcalls that women encounter as they walk to work or school and the constant objectification of the female body should be evidence enough that our culture of harm exists apart from the most extreme acts of violation by a small set of psychologically sick offenders.
How many males have heard and truly understood stories of terror from women who have been followed blocks from the subway, waitresses who have been forced to accept harassment to make tips, and girls who have been complimented in ways that make them feel sick?
The status quo is derogatory not only to women but to men who are cued to choose power over love, stoic silence over honesty.
We should hold individual perpetrators accountable for their actions, but we cannot expect to solve a crisis of rape culture until we shift from the stigmatization of the mentally ill to the stigmatization of patriarchy and our complicity in it.
I am willing to risk anxiety to see that change come about.
Joel Wool
Dorchester

What you see here is the deliberate conflation of offensive behaviors — catcalls on the street, “harassment” of waitresses, unwelcome compliments — with the felony crime of rape.

There are many things which are widely recognized as offensive which are not crimes, yet the aggregation of feminist pet peeves into a collective category called “rape culture” permits a sort of rhetorical abracadabra where everything leads to a discussion of rape. Why? So that feminists can expand the Victimhood Zone. The woman targeted by wolf-whistling construction workers and the waitress dealing with a lecherous customer are thus included as victims of sexism (“the constant objectification of the female body”) and everyday hassles — offensive, but not criminal — are made analogous to rape.

So “rape culture” (a large and amorphous cluster of feminist grievances) is a “crisis,” and the solution offered is a “shift . . . to the stigmatization of patriarchy and our complicity in it.”

Would this proposed “shift” actually reduce the incidence of rape? I doubt it. Rapists probably don’t spend much time reading op-ed columns — or letters to the editors, either. As a matter of fact, I doubt that men who hassle waitresses or shout crudities at women on the street are habitual readers of op-ed columns.

It is within the cohort of Men Who Don’t Read the Boston Globe that one will find not only a vast majority of rapists, but also most men who engage in Offensive Non-Criminal Sexist Behavior. So the discussion of “rape culture” among the intelligentsia is just a lot of empty rhetorical posturing that won’t do anything to improve women’s lives.

Speaking of The Constant Objectification of Women’s Bodies . . .

On this Sunday’s episode of Botched we meet Renee, who after six months of silicone butt injections began to have health issues.
She explains, “I wanted the volume and the fullness back at the top of my butt.”
However, the silicone spread throughout her body which caused major health problems.
Although her doctor wanted to go a different route, Renee got butt implants to replace the fullness that the injections were providing.

There’s video at the link. I, for one, denounce this abhorrent practice.

 

Category: Feminism

Good-Bye, Employer Mandate?

Posted on | July 6, 2014 | 27 Comments

An interesting article at Politico:

Robert Gibbs’ prediction that Obamacare’s employer mandate would — and perhaps should — be jettisoned shocked Democrats back in April.
By July, the former aide and longtime confidant of President Barack Obama had a lot more company. More and more liberal activists and policy experts who help shape Democratic thinking on health care have concluded that penalizing businesses if they don’t offer health insurance is an unnecessary element of the Affordable Care Act that may do more harm than good. Among them are experts at the Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund and prominent academics like legal scholar Tim Jost. . . .
Leading Democrats in Congress aren’t bolting from the employer mandate, at least not before the November election. But the White House has delayed it twice in the past year, dubbed it “not critical” and said it will be phased in more slowly when its begins next year.
The rule that businesses with more than 50 full-time workers offer them affordable health insurance has been a political headache from the start. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Describing the mandate as a “political headache” is a way to avoid calling it a policy disaster. And without the employer mandate, exactly what would remain of ObamaCare, except Medicare expansion and state “exchanges”?

Zombie ObamaCare: It’s Dead, but It Can Never Be Killed.

 

Category: Health Care

Gender Theory: Beyond Parody

Posted on | July 4, 2014 | 75 Comments

Breanna Fahs is a feminist, but you probably already guessed that, right?

Breanne Fahs is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, where she specializes in studying women’s sexuality, critical embodiment studies, radical feminism, and political activism. She has a B.A. in women’s studies/gender studies and psychology from Occidental College and a Ph.D. in women’s studies and clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. . . . She is the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, a group that engages students and faculty to fuse activism and rabble-rousing scholarship . . .

Professor Fahs is the author of a new biography of Valerie Solanas, the radical lesbian feminist and paranoid schizophrenic who shot Andy Warhol in 1968. But it is her teaching at Arizona State that has now landed Professor Fahs in the headlines:

Female students at an Arizona university have been offered the chance to earn extra credit by not shaving their armpit hair for a whole semester.
The unconventional offer was made by women and gender studies professor Breanne Fahs as a way to get her students to challenge social norms.
Male students on the Arizona State University course are also able to apply for extra credit, but to qualify they have to shave all their hair from the neck down.
Fahs . . . encourages her students to document their experiences in a journal for the 10-week semester.
She said the social experiment helps students analyze society’s attitude to genders, with female students facing ridicule for having hairy armpits, and the men gaining insight into how much pressure is put on women to stay hair free.
‘There’s no better way to learn about societal norms than to violate them and see how people react,’ Fahs told ASU News.
‘There’s really no reason why the choice to shave, or not, should be a big deal. But it is, as the students tend to find out quickly.’

You want to see pictures of this “social experiment,” just to prove I’m not making this up? Maybe I should go back to school, get a Ph.D., and become a Women’s Studies professor. The girls in my classes would get extra credit for making sandwiches, and the boys would get extra credit for eating them — the sandwiches, I mean.

 

Category: Education, Feminism

Robert Redford Uses Independence Day To Ride Climate Hobby-Horse

Posted on | July 4, 2014 | 28 Comments

by Smitty

I guess plutocratic People Who Matter feel an esteem boost from agreeing with the elder quasi-Kennedy:

Liberal
Blowhard		 Smitty
Heading into the July 4th celebration of America’s independence got me thinking about when it comes to huge challenges we’ve faced as a nation, we have a rich and storied history of aspirational spirit and belief in what we, together, can accomplish. I mean, yeah, but didn’t this country get the correct start by emphasizing the individual, not the collective? Granted, it took a while and some war for the ideas to get from theoretical to practical, but that doesn’t alter the theoretical basis, does it?
Are we losing this quintessentially American drive for excellence? Have we stopped believing in ourselves? Sometimes it feels that way when one tries to parse the political rhetoric barreling at us day in and day out. Interesting you should bring this up. After seeing the electorate send a no-talent rodeo clown not once, but twice, to DC, there is at least cause for concern, if not a cancellation of confidence in ourselves. I don’t use the word ‘belief’ in non-religious contexts. If I was going to wax idolatrous, I’d pick something better than ‘ourselves’, I hope.
“No we can’t” scenarios come fast and furious from so many in power, no matter what challenge is at hand. As people openly carry assault weapons down the toy aisles at Target, we watch a stunning lack of courage to stand up to the NRA and to change America’s gun laws, in even the most logical ways. Well, we can’t seem to balance a budget, much less do anything about our Progressively worsening debt. Not sure why you’re namedropping a department store. Perhaps you’re a shareholder? What is the concern, precisely? Hasn’t #OccupyResoluteDesk driven ordnance sales through the roof, without anything like the proportional effects your alluding to? I mean, if the 2A were even slightly the menace
you Commies wish it were, shouldn’t we have long since depopulated the country, its lifesblood run out to sea for some real Red Tide? The real Red Tide, of course, is the Democrat Party.
As student loans are crippling several generations somehow nobody can come to agreement on how to significantly lessen the burden on families and those starting out in life. Immigration? Education? And then there’s climate change, which, if we don’t figure it out, none of the others will matter. There is plenty of agreement among the non-statists. See Glenn Reynolds for some ideas that Do Not Suck. For immigration, we may need to consider just mounting up the posse for a trip down South like we last did 168 years back. Clean a little house. Certainly one approach, but which would require some sort of leadership, in contrast to Obama’s “blamership”.
You would think by listening to some on Capitol Hill that doing anything about climate change, will end life, as we know it. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite. They want us to believe that they know best, but I don’t buy it. All of this has become a big fat political football where self-preservation is the priority over the national good. Ah, global non-constant anthropogenic disruption warming. The Hottest Hoax Around as the Media Research Center likes to poke it. You seem more angry at Congress than, you know, PANICKED! about this crisis. Maybe if your body language, Redford, reflected more personal concern than simple anti-Congressional animus, you’d seem
less a preening liberal jackwagon. Worth a try, if you actually harbor emotion on the topic there in your liberal torso-stone.
When President Obama recently announced his Climate Action Plan, the opposition rallied behind continuing to burn, as much coal as we can get our hands on, saying anything short of that will surely cripple the economy. It’s kind of like when the seat belt laws were being discussed back in the ’70s and ’80s and the naysayers said it would ruin the auto industry. America figured it out. Nothing was
ruined. Lives were saved.		 I’m sorry: one typically notices Obama’s “actions” falling into one of three bins: blaming, golfing and fundraising. Into which of these bins did this “Climate Action Plan” thingy go? Now you’re saying that his plan was more or less a seat belt? That would make it among the more useful of his outings, then.
A predominance of scientific evidence links climate change directly to fossil fuel pollution. Impacts such as extreme weather abound–oceans rise, food sources are at risk and all around the world it contributes to instability. And then there’s that economic hit of more than $100 billion and counting. Additionally, public health implications associated with climate change carry an enormous human and financial consequence. I ask myself, what specifically isn’t clear? See, when the purportedly unbiased scientist get caught cooking the books they really have to spend some time rebuilding credibility. Too many people think the scientists are lying. They need to start at first principles and rebuild the case, not send a bunch of blow-dried airheads out carrying their water.
Could it be, as they chest-thump their patriotic credentials, that some of those leaders in Washington have given up on American’s
ability to rise to the occasion? I’ve come to believe that they’re
simply out of touch with the ingenuity of average Americans and
innovative leaders all across the country — who thankfully decided
years ago not to wait for DC.		 Could it also be that Nobody Believes You? That you’re viewed as a lackey of false prophets? A tool?
Citizens have advocated for years now–and states, cities and businesses have set energy efficiency targets, increased renewable energy and made agreements to cut carbon pollution. They’ve figured out how to address and benefit from the biggest challenge of our times, how to cut public health impacts, create good jobs and feed their local economies in a whole new way. Can you remind me what country you were talking about, again? You don’t seem to mean the United States of Progress, where the regulatory noose keeps getting tighter, and the numbers on the economic reports bear a startling resemblance to toast, they’ve been cooked so much.
So as we move toward the July 4th holiday, if you really look beyond DC, you’ll see that all across this great country, people have risen to the challenge at hand, showing us that America has definitely still got it. Oh, we’ve got “it”, all right, for “totally fed up with you smarmy plutocrat jerks” values of “it”, all right.
Category: Celebrities, Global Warming

Max Blumenthal Claims That Netanyahu ‘Stage-Managed’ Kidnapped Teens Crisis

Posted on | July 4, 2014 | 29 Comments

The Israeli government “stage-managed” the crisis sparked by the kidnapping of three Jewish teenagers, Left-wing writer Max Blumenthal said in an interview on the Russia Today network. Blumenthal said a “gag order” that kept information about the Israeli investigation of the kidnapping was part of a conspiracy by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to foment war against Palestinians. Blumenthal accused the New York Times of cooperating in a “whitewash” of this Israeli plot.

“It’s my view that the Israeli government knew from the beginning that the three kidnapped and murdered Israeli teens were dead. They knew who the alleged perpetrators were, who the chief suspects were and they may have even had an idea of where the bodies were from the beginning, two weeks ago, and that they concealed this information through a gag order from the Israeli public, in order to bring us to the crisis where we are today, which has only benefited Netanyahu and his extremely right-wing coalition at the expense of everyone else living under their control. …
“Netanyahu has carefuly stage-managed this crisis … It’s clear to me that the Israeli government has manipulated this situation to avoid a police action to justify a military action directed at Hamas and the Palestinian unity government.”

Accusations about Netanyahu’s role in the kidnapping crisis were made earlier by Alex Kane at the anti-Israel web site Mondoweiss, based in part on reporting by BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel.

The crisis has continued to escalate. Israeli jets on Thursday struck sites in Gaza in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks:

Israel mobilized troops to border areas near the Gaza Strip on Thursday after Palestinian militants in the enclave stepped up rocket attacks on southern Israel, heightening tensions following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli students and the suspected revenge killing of an Arab teenager in East Jerusalem.
Israel said the deployments were ordered as a defensive measure after dozens of rockets were fired into its territory from Gaza, which is ruled by the Islamist militant group Hamas. The Israeli military said that it responded Wednesday and Thursday with airstrikes on 16 Hamas targets in the strip, including rocket-launching sites and weapons warehouses. . . .
An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, said the troop mobilization did not signal an intent by Israel to prepare for a military operation against Hamas, which Israel has blamed for the recent kidnapping and killings of three Israeli teenagers in the occupied West Bank. But he said any de-escalation in violence would need to start with Hamas, which reached a cease-fire agreement with Israel after an eight-day war in November 2012.

Blumenthal is author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, a book condemned by many critics for its anti-Israel bias, including progressive journalist Eric Alterman, who said Blumenthal’s argument was “so carelessly constructed, it will likely alienate anyone but the most fanatical anti-Zionist extremists.”

 

Category: Israel
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