The Other McCain

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

Boom! IRS Admits Guilt

Posted on | June 28, 2014 | 9 Comments

This news is relatively huge:

Two years after activists for same-sex marriage obtained the confidential tax return and donor list of a national group opposed to redefining marriage, the Internal Revenue Service has admitted wrongdoing and agreed to settle the resulting lawsuit.
The Daily Signal has learned that, under a consent judgment [Tuesday], the IRS agreed to pay $50,000 in damages to the National Organization for Marriage as a result of the unlawful release of the confidential information to a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, that is NOM’s chief political rival.
“Congress made the disclosure of confidential tax return information a serious matter for a reason,” NOM Chairman John D. Eastman told The Daily Signal. “We’re delighted that the IRS has now been held accountable for the illegal disclosure of our list of major donors from our tax return.” . . . .
Eastman said an investigation in the civil lawsuit determined that someone gave NOM’s tax return and list of major donors to Boston-based gay rights activist Matthew Meisel.

Bruce Carroll at Legal Insurrection points out that there was so much news in the IRS scandal this past week that news of the NOM settlement got very little coverage. He also points out that this was related to the bitter 2008 battle over Prop 8 in California, which I wrote about at the time: “Gay Rights, Gay Rage.” Also, remember when it was disclosed that Barbara Bosserman, the Justice Department attorney investigating the IRS scandal, had donated money to the Obama campaign?

Did you ever wonder why Bosserman was chosen for that job? “Civil rights,” IYKWIMAITYD.

And why wouldn’t the DOJ let Bosserman testify?

 

Category: Scandal, Taxes

Franz Ferdinand “I’m Your Villain”

Posted on | June 28, 2014 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Celebrating a century since the band’s namesake was snuffed by Gavrilo Princip, touching off the significant unpleasantness known as WWI, here is a Scottish quartet:

Category: Video

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

Posted on | June 28, 2014 | 54 Comments

Sherry Wolf (@SherryTalksBack) has described herself as a “a lesbian Marxist who came of age in the neo-Cold War, AIDS-ravaged 1980s,” and has been praised by a fan as a “fire-breathing, Marxist dyke.” The real mystery is why she doesn’t have a Cabinet position in the Obama administration. We don’t have video or a transcript of the speech she gave Friday at the Socialism 2014 conference in Chicago, but we can quote Sherry Wolf at length, from her 2009 book, Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of LGBT Liberation:

Obviously, there are some physical differences between men and women, but it is our culture and not biology that gives them their meaning. . . .
It is society, not biology, that imposes the capacity for nuturing uniquely on women as a result of child-bearing, however. Even differences in female and male muscularity have been shaped over thousands of years by our gender roles, diet, and shifting cultural preferences. . . . Contemporary American men and women are more likely to be muscular if they have either manual labor jobs or leisure time to enjoy physical activity, both of which are shaped by class, not biology. . . .
Even when it comes to hormones we have been misled. Scientific investigation into the hormonal secretions of testes and ovaries, beginning in the nineteenth century, presumed inherent differences and female inferiority. . . . Despite the fact that these hormones affect bones, blood, liver, kidneys, and heart, testosterone and estrogen took on properties that were entirely social, not biological. . . . There is a correlation between amounts of testosterone and estrogen and one’s physical sex. . . . But the popular concept that they are exclusively sex hormones does not correspond to science. . . .
The fact that conventional gender roles today prevail throughout much of the world is not proof of their biological link but a testament to the globalization of capitalism and its social prerogatives. Class society’s need for the nuclear family and its attendant gender roles have allowed gender to acquire the status of human nature — as have greed, competition and militarism.
Under capitalism, the ongoing oppression of sexual minorities serves the interests of the ruling class — those who own and control production, the dissemination of ideas through media and education, and other resources. The ruling class needs the nuclear family and divisions among workers to continue making profits and to maintain its control over the majority. . . . If any and every sexual and gender arrangement were permissible, the wage gap between men and women and the privatized burdens of family life would be placed into question.

It is not necessary to argue with any particular detail of Ms. Wolf’s analysis to see the point I wish to make: She insists that everything most people consider normal and natural differences between the sexes are basically an illusion created by society and culture. Ms. Wolf further insists that the influences of our society and culture reflect the interests of a parasitical “ruling class” under capitalism.

Once you decide that capitalism must be destroyed, viewing “society” as an oppressive system of artificial control imposed upon the downtrodden masses, every aspect of normal human life becomes a target for this kind of critical analysis. And the logic of the Marxist worldview has no stopping point short of revolution — or insanity.

We may imagine what could happen if you gave Ms. Wolf’s book to a suburban soccer mom who started reading it out of idle curiosity and, taking it seriously, suddenly developed a revolutionary consciousness: “Why are these children calling me ‘mother’? Maternity is a social construct, a concept imposed on women by the ruling class in order to maintain control of the means of production!”

Of course, revolutionary consciousness seldom arrives in adulthood. Young people with intellectual aspirations are attracted to radical ideas and, having no experience of the practical responsibilities of adulthood, become so enamored of “critical theory” that they are permanently prejudiced to view the world from that perspective. No factual reality they encounter in their adult life can dissuade them of their radical beliefs. Where facts seem to contradict the leftist dogmas they learned at college, the facts will be ignored or interpreted (“theorized”) to mean something other than what common sense suggests.

These people become intellectuals, and they wouldn’t be harmful to anyone but themselves, except for the fact that they are in charge of academia, the major news media, the entertainment industry and, whenever Democrats are in office, they run the government, too.

Yet all the Hope and Change in the world can never satisfy the totalitarian vision of the radical intellectual, which explains why Sherry Wolf isn’t in the Obama administration: She hates them, for not doing enough to destroy America’s capitalist society.

Patience, ma’am — they’re wrecking the country as fast as they can.

 

Category: Feminism, Gays, Intellectuals

Death by Stupidity

Posted on | June 28, 2014 | 12 Comments

This is horrible:

Attorney Mark Mayfield was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound Friday at his Ridgeland home.
Mayfield, vice chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party, and is one of the three men charged with conspiring with Clayton Kelly to photograph U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran’s bedridden wife in her nursing home and create a political video against Cochran. . . .
Mayfield of Ridgeland, an attorney and state and local tea party leader, was arrested last month along with Richard Sager, a Laurel elementary school P.E. teacher and high school soccer coach. Police said they also charged John Beachman Mary of Hattiesburg, but he was not taken into custody because of “extensive medical conditions.” All face felony conspiracy charges. Sager also was charged with felony tampering with evidence, and Mary faces two conspiracy counts.
The arrest of Mayfield, well-known in political, business and legal circles, caused shock in Mississippi, in a criminal case and election that already had Mississippi in the national spotlight.

Without further knowledge of the case, we may surmise that Mayfield feared that the criminal charges could destroy his law career. Trying to blame this tragedy on Republicans — as did a staffer for Chris McDaniel’s campaign — is crazy. Anybody who got involved with Clayton Kelly’s hare-brained scheme was responsible for their own stupidity.

 

Category: Mississippi, Scandal

Edge Of Tomorrow

Posted on | June 27, 2014 | 24 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


I may be one of the few people in America who hasn’t seen Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but I feel fairly comfortable in asserting that at no point in that movie does Andie McDowell shoot Bill in the head. This happens a LOT in Edge of Tomorrow, where Tom Cruise’s character, Marine PR major William Cage, finds himself condemned to participate in the invasion of Europe as a buck private after turning down an assignment to serve as an embed in the invasion force. Unfortunately for Cage and his squadmates, the aliens occupying Europe know they’re coming, and the invasion is a spectaularly bloody debacle in which Cage and war heroine Sgt. Rita Vrataski (the “Full Metal Bitch”) both die – but not before she tells him “Look for me when you wake up!”. Cage does wake up, repeating the day over and over again in a hideous real-life rendition of first-person shooter videogames. The reason why this is happening, and how Cage and Vrataski use the loopback to sharpen Cage’s combat skills and eventually figure a way out of the no-win situation they’re in, make for a fascinating if frequently horrible movie. I am given to understand that the movie has a different ending from the original Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill, which I guess isn’t too surprising; the manga version in turn differs from both on various plot points. It was a very good movie, and I may go see it again before it disappears from the theaters.


Aside from that, I’ve been working my way through Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel, which together contain the four novels that make up Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I’d passed this up when it first came out, being allergic to things that were popular, and I have to say I’m sorry I waited. The tale of Severian the torturer is an interesting one; while set in the far future, it often feels like a mythic tale set in the distant past, perhaps in some era of Classical Greece. This is partly due to Wolfe’s choice of language: he deliberately chooses archaic and obscure words to describe people and things, and by doing so manages to evoke a sense of wonder while paradoxically precisely describing the people and things he is writing about, in much the same way the late William F. Buckley Jr. would often use one fifty-dollar word in place of a dozen cheaper words. I am enjoying them tremendously, and if you haven’t read them, I suggest you pick them up.


Since I got paid today, next week I’ll be talking about the International Lord of Hate’s Monster Hunter Nemesis, Tom Kratman’s The Rods and the Axe, and Andy Weir’s The Martian.


Category: Books, Movies

Fun With #RadFem: ‘You Magnificent Lesbians — I Read Your Books!’

Posted on | June 27, 2014 | 20 Comments

“Something very strange happened toward the end of the twentieth century. Heterosexuality went from being the norm to being on the defensive. By calling this phenomenon ‘heterophobia,’ I am not speaking abstractly. Rather, I am referring to a distinct current within feminism [since the late 1960s], a current that has been ‘theorized’ explicitly by feminist scholars and agitators alike as they attack men and heterosexuality. . . .
“But heterophobia is not merely the work of lesbian separatists, since they, vastly outnumbered by heterosexual women, could never have imposed such an agenda were it not acceptable to heterosexual feminists as well. . . .
“The British lesbian separatist Sheila Jeffreys, in her 1990 book Anticlimax, gives a clear account of the attitude I am calling ‘heterophobia.’ The ‘sexual revolution,’ Jeffreys argues, is positively detrimental to women. The aim of women’s liberation . . . is ‘the destruction of heterosexuality as a system.’ . . . Far from being grounded in biology, heterosexual desire ‘originates in the power relationship between men and women’ . . . What sort of sexuality, then, does Jeffreys approve of? ‘The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire.'”
— Daphne Patai, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (1998)

It is true, as Professor Patai makes clear, that the lesbian radicalism of Sheila Jeffreys was, in the 1990s, at or near the ultra fringe of feminist theory. However, it is also true that “mainstream” feminism, even 15 or 20 years ago, never condemned such radicalism but borrowed from the anti-male analyses written by women whose hostile attitude toward heterosexuality was as explicit as it was personal.

Understanding this phenomenon does not require us to engage the specific content of every theory propagated by radical feminists since the 1960s, although in the past few months I have excerpted the works of several of the most notable of them. It is not necessary that I refute their arguments or disprove their analyses for the very reason that it does not matter, for my purposes, whether they are right or wrong. As a matter of fact, there are certain passages of the most radical feminist treatises where I find myself nodding in agreement.

What conservative would disagree, for example, with Sheila Jeffreys’ assertion that the sexual revolution of the past half-century has in many ways been harmful to women? How many abortions, divorces and loveless hookups with selfish creeps does it take before a “liberated” young woman starts wondering if maybe her grandmother had a genuinely better deal back in the supposedly barbaric 1950s?

Yet a conservative critique of the sexual revolution based in myopic nostalgia for the Good Old Days is futile, and no more helpful to women living in the early 21st century than the obsolete rantings of radical feminists who inevitably view the past as the Bad Old Days.

A politics that promises a return to the past is guaranteed to fail because time moves in only one direction. We can learn from the past, but we cannot go back there. By studying the past, we seek an answer to an important question: How did we get here? And we can also, by plotting the trajectory points, get a good estimate of where we are heading in the future, if we continue going in the same direction.

To put it bluntly: We are going to Hell, by the most direct route.

Last summer, I wrote a post with the title, “Taking Feminism Seriously,” which in retrospect seems like the start of a series. A few people have suggested I compile my writing about feminism into a book, a proposal that gives me a headache.

Nevertheless, the point I wish to make now is that I do take feminism seriously, despite my habitual sarcasm. Just because Marxist lesbians seem ridiculous to sane people, doesn’t mean that feminists are not serious in their craziness. A phrase like “the destruction of heterosexuality as a system” may strike us as lunatic gibberish, but there are influential academics — tenured professors of Women’s Studies — who toil daily toward that goal. Even if their radical project is ultimately doomed, even if we believe that human nature must ultimately triumph over ideology, this doesn’t mean that the destructive work of feminism has no impact. To see self-described “queer feminist” Sara Alcid denounce Valentine’s Day as a celebration of “heteronormativity and gender roles . . . the very systems of domination that we work to critique and dismantle” is sad testimony to the fact that this insanity is contagious. And of course, “PIV is always rape, OK?”

Yes, it’s true: The anonymously crazy blogger at Radical Wind — “dropped on her head” — has returned to the feminist fray. After weeks of silence following her global-warming gloomfest, she took up a critique of radical lesbianism that is so nuanced only a Women’s Studies major could understand it. Her chief complaint is that some lesbian feminists condemn other women as benefitting from “heterosexual privilege,” a rhetoric Windy rejects because (a) there is nothing “privileged” about being raped and enslaved by men, (b) the category “heterosexual” is itself a male-imposed myth, and (c) women who criticize other women are misplacing blame, because everything that is wrong in the world can and should be blamed on men. She then followed up with a lengthy explainer:

Intercourse and hetero-captivity being the central building block of men’s oppression, it comes to no surprise that men do everything to erase our awareness of it. . . .
The essence of heterosexuality is sexual violation, and no woman has escaped this violation when in close and prolonged contact with men. . . .
Heterosexuality is compulsory, that is we are psychologically conditioned (through propaganda) and physically forced into it (through sexual harassment, rape, marriage and pimping). This is one of the very basic tenets of radical feminism. Compulsory means the opposite of choice. By definition women never choose to be owned by a man, and the only free choice we can make is to resist hetero-captivity by becoming separatist, lesbian or celibate.
Heterosexuality is the system which guarantees each man sexual access to a woman and exclusive ownership over her so he can rape, impregnate and use her as his personal breeder and domestic slave. . . .
The term “heterosexuality” is fairly recent in history, and appeared in the 19th century at the same time as the pathologisation and psychologisation of lesbians and gays. When women started to free themselves from the institution of marriage, men progressively replaced marriage with compulsory intercourse to all men, and this was sold as sexual liberation to women. However this was nothing other than the liberation of lefty men so they could fuck all the women they wanted outside of the constraints of bourgeois society . . .

Read the whole thing if you need more anti-male enlightenment. “The personal is political,” and if your personal experience — either as a woman or a man, heterosexual or not — fails to corroborate the radical feminist analysis, the question is, “Why?”

Windy’s answer is that you have been “psychologically conditioned” to enjoy your hetero-captivity and oppression: The patriarchy has brainwashed you, because women can “never choose to be owned by a man . . . as his personal breeder and domestic slave.”

All women are victims of the patriarchy, whether they know it or not, and if women don’t realize how oppressed they are, it is only because they haven’t been enlightened by feminist consciousness.

“Feminism Is a Journey to Lesbianism,” as I’ve previously explained, and it is not my purpose to prove feminists wrong about this.

If they say the penis is oppressing them, let ’em do without it.

Being bound by “the constraints of bourgeois society” myself — as a married father of six who recently became a grandfather — I am not at liberty to take a personal interest in women’s decisions to subtract themselves from oppressive hetero-captivity. Keeping my own “personal breeder and domestic slave” happy is difficult enough, without concerning myself with the discontents of other women.

What does concern me, however, is how feminism’s anti-male rhetoric insults every man — and every woman who loves men. Even if I don’t give a damn what feminists think of me, what about my four sons and my grandson? Why about my wife and daughters? Am I really supposed to remain silent when confronted by radicals who insist that my oldest daughter is being cruelly victimized by my son-in-law, and who further insist that my daughter (who graduated summa cum laude) is too stupid to know she’s oppressed?

Damn you, and damn your insulting ideology.

There is no use in being too angry about these insults, however. “The personal is political,” and feminists who feel a personal sense of grievance toward men do not think specifically about me, my wife or my children when they publish their anti-male screeds. And knowing that their grievances are personal — they are angry about how they have been treated by specific men, and have generalized their personal experience into an anti-male ideology — I don’t begrudge them their anger.

Feminists are so cute when they’re offended.

The politically correct sexuality advocated by Sheila Jeffries — based on “a sameness of power, equality and mutuality” — is rejected even by many lesbians. Do you really want me to quote the words of a hard-core butch lesbian who is tired of being told that she and other butches (and the women who love them) are doing lesbianism wrong? Or perhaps you’d like me to quote a femme lesbian describing how awkward and inauthentic she felt when a partner asked her to wear the strap-on?

News flash: Sameness is boring.

Intellectuals can sit around all day “theorizing” sexuality to fit their own rigid ideological categories, but real human beings are not androgynous interchangeable units. We are different and therefore unequal and you know something? We like it that way!

Being different is sexy. Even within the context of sameness, people find their differences sexy. Go to any Catholic parish in America and see how many Italian-Irish half-breeds you find. It’s almost a cliché nowadays: Every Catholic under 30 named Murphy has a mother whose maiden name was Castellano and vice-versa.

For that matter, I’m a blue-eyed Southerner who married a brown-eyed Yankee; our redheaded oldest daughter married an Argentine (whose nickname is “Che”); and our nearly six-foot-tall 15-year-old son is now dating a girl who is approximately 5-foot-2. Based on the general pattern, there must be a commie peacenik girl somewhere who will one day marry our Army paratrooper son.

A rigid egalitarianism that demands androgynous uniformity — the abolition of gender, as feminists phrase it — fails to take into consideration the voluntary nature of our preferences and how our orientation toward difference benefits both man and woman. We are able to admire and desire each other without envy or resentment. Is Sheila Jeffreys correct that heterosexual desire “originates in the power relationship between men and women”? Who cares?

We want what we want, and we get what we get, and somewhere in that process of wanting and getting, we hope to find happiness.

Feminists view happiness as a zero-sum game in which all happiness enjoyed by men is the product of subtraction from women’s happiness. This is absurd. Men expend enormous effort in their attempts to make women happy, and if we don’t do as much as we should — if, at the end of the day, the women in our lives still experience a happiness deficit — this failure makes us unhappy, too.

Feminism’s fetishistic obsession with power does not signify a concern for the well-being of women; rather, it signifies a totalitarian ambition, a sadistic appetite for revenge, a desire to obtain psychological validation by inflicting humiliation on men.

Unable to find happiness themselves, they insist on making us all equally unhappy. And the bad new is, they’re succeeding.





 

Category: Feminism

Homo Bureaucratus Is The Problem

Posted on | June 27, 2014 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.–Lord Acton

Over time, even petty amounts of power bring out the Nixon in all of us. Via Instapundit, Mark Fiztgibbons writes:

In America’s first 100 years, federal officials could be sued in state courts for acting beyond their authority. In his book Creating the Administrative Constitution, Yale law professor Jerry Mashaw chronicles how this helped temper bad behavior.

Law professor Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit is among those who believe that government officials need more civil and criminal liability for their bad acts. There are some private remedies on the books, but they are too weak to be effective.

Liability is not nothing, but I think it’s peripheral to the issue of concentrating power. Power makes cocaine look like talcum. Witness Cochran’s cheerful apparent flouting of the rules in the Mississippi GOP senatorial runoff. Likely not a surfeit of altruism in his case.

There still is no work-around for the need to have offices, and for officials to occupy them. However, in our Information Age, there isn’t any excuse for the rules being other than simple, understandable, and open to all. Furthermore, the kind of ball-hogging we see with career bureaucrats is clearly a 20th century holdover. Thus, other than the military, I submit that about a 10 year cap on all civil service positions would make sense. Keep the job simple, let people do the job, and let them get out of the way for someone else.

Let’s term-limit the corruption in our government down to an absolute minimum, say I. Homo bureaucratus is not the solution.

Category: Corruption, Instapundit

Think Of The U.S. As Walmart, And Nancy Pelosi As A Demented Greeter

Posted on | June 27, 2014 | 12 Comments

by Smitty

Botox Barbie puts a cosmetically crafted smile on matters:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will travel to the southern border of the U.S. on Saturday to be briefed by Customs and Border Protection on the flood of unaccompanied minors entering the country.

The California Democrat will also meet with a group of children held at the South Texas Detention Facility.

“The humanitarian crisis unfolding across our nation’s southern border demands Congress come together and find thoughtful, compassionate and bipartisan solutions,” Pelosi said. “We must ensure our laws are fully enforced, so that due process is provided to unaccompanied children and the safety and well-being of unaccompanied children is protected. We must also work to address the root causes of the problem.”

I guess there is probably some fool in Portland, Oregon who doesn’t think this so-called “humanitarian crisis” isn’t some kind of manufactured Cloward-Piven event. I sincerely hope that nothing bad happens to Princess Pelosi while she’s getting her photo op on. She’ll get her justice before the Almighty, and she certainly doesn’t deserve any martyrdom here under the sun.

Category: Democrats, Nancy Pelosi
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin