The Other McCain

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

The Stupid Goes All the Way to Eleven

Posted on | June 15, 2014 | 54 Comments

@LynnParramore has a Ph.D. in English and cultural theory from New York University. Last week, Parramore made a complete fool of herself by writing a column about a grocery store playing the Rolling Stones 1966 song “Under My Thumb”:

As I listened, I thought about how the song plays in the wake of Elliot Rodger’s killing spree, fueled, as the killer explained in a lengthy manifesto, by his rage against women and desire to control them.
We’ve been wringing our hands, asking how young men can become so hostile and eager to dominate to women. Well, isn’t it because our culture feeds them the message at every turn, even in the most mundane settings? What does it mean that degradation of half the population is considered appropriate background noise to everyday life?
In “Under My Thumb,” the singer boasts about how he’s gained control of his girl, comparing her to, among other things, a squirming dog.

The obvious objection to Dr. Parramore’s complaint is that it is a non sequitur. There is zero evidence that Elliot Rodger was motivated by song lyrics of any kind and we have no reason to believe that Rodger ever heard “Under My Thumb.” By contrast, I’ve heard the song many times and I never went on a killing spree.

Heck, I’m not even “hostile and eager to dominate to women,” despite years of exposure to the Rolling Stones and other rock-and-roll groups that specialized in that sort of strutting macho posture. Here is the opening line of of a favorite song by Bad Company:

Well, I take whatever I want
And baby, I want you.

Pretty doggone misogynistic, really, but it was just rock-and-roll. Here’s another classic favorite by Led Zeppelin:

Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move,
Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.

Definitely some kind of sexism there, but it’s still just rock-and-roll. Contrary to Dr. Parramore’s diagnosis, listening to rock-and-roll didn’t inspire me to a “rage against women,” nor do we have any evidence that Elliot Rodger was into rock-and-roll.

Matt Welch wrote a column at Reason magazine pointing out the absurdity of Dr. Parramore’s complaint, and some people responded by saying rude things about Dr. Parramore.

She wrote an entire column about the reaction:

A great many of the commenters degraded me as a woman, hurling insults and violent language. . . .
I suspect the rage has several sources: the impotence felt by men in a stagnant economy, the collective guilt of men and women who feel complicit in not speaking up themselves, and the old, primal fear of women having too much power, too much say. Many expressed outrage that I’m a woman with advanced academic degrees, a person who gets paid to write, a person confident enough to speak up.
The insults are a demand for silence, a return to the status quo, a warning.

You see that Dr. Parramore, having misdiagnosed Elliot Roger as a victim of rock-and-roll, now presumes to diagnose her critics as suffering from “impotence . . . collective guilt . . . primal fear.”

The alternate theory — that her stupid arguments are offensive to rock-and-roll fans — is one Dr. Parramore never even considers.

 

Category: Feminism, Intellectuals, Music

Rule 5 Sunday: Floating

Posted on | June 15, 2014 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

[Insert usual disclaimer here]

Grumpy patriot kicks off this week’s festivities with Rachel Hunter, followed by Rotten to the Core with Dolly Parton, Christina Hendricks and Katy Perry all in one post. Fishersville Mike goes country with Cassadee Price, Goodstuff returns with Jane Russell, and 90 Miles from Tyranny contributes Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns – In Underwear And Shooting Bazookas. Animal Magnetism has Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon with a hi-res bonus. Blackmailers Don’t Shoot has Kelly Clarkson giving birth to a baby girl, and First Street Journal goes back to the IDF.

EBL’s thundering herd this week includes Miss Pennsylvania, Valerie Gatto; also, not so annoying American soccer fans, the women of ISIS, and Iraqi and Kurdish women, for contrast.

Soylent Refuge has your morning coffee creamer, Overnighty pearls, Monday Motivationer Juliana, Evening Awesome Nancy, Tuesday Titillation Tart, The Joys of Summer, Humpday Hawtness, Overnighty Adrienne, Fursday Forecastle, Window Dressing Laura, Corset Friday Latent Lingerie, T-GIF Friday, School’s Out Weekender, and Bath Night Awesome.

At A View From The Beach, it’s Nina Agdal, Warp Nine and Ready the Transporters, Scotty!, Morning Desperation, Do Gingers Descend from Cavemen?, A Shot of Japanese Weirdness, Just for Wombat-socho: “Ooh, Las Vegas”, Junior Skynet Passed the Turing Test (robots), No, No! Tell Me it Ain’t So!, and Excuse Found for Blondes.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Lisa Tanker-Potts, his Vintage Babe is Merle Oberon, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Charlize Theron. Dustbury offers Princess Theodora of Greece and Denmark, and Meredith Vieira.

The DaleyGator returns with DaleyBabes Dominique Dawes, Saki Yamaguchi, Andrea Anders, Kym Valentine, Rui En, Janine Siu,  Julia Jones, Heather Rae, Carrie Minter, Brooke Banx, Karen Brizuena, Rose Rollins,  Michelle Lewin, Mishael Morgan (and more Mishael Morgan), and Viviana Castrillon. Also,  Beautiful Faces, Random Beauty Friday, and Rihannas Breasts and Feminists.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!
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Category: Rule 5

Dateline: Fort Leavenworth

Posted on | June 15, 2014 | 33 Comments

If you believe that federal prisoners serving time for multiple felonies are fit to deliver moralistic sermons to law-abiding American citizens, you should apply for a job as an editor at the New York Times, where the traitor Bradley “Chelsea” Manning is considered deserving of status as an op-ed columnist about “media freedom.”

Al-Qaeda doesn’t hate America as much as the New York Times does. Most of their columnists should probably be in Fort Leavenworth.

 

Category: New York Times

‘Statistical Voodoo and Elastic Definitions’

Posted on | June 15, 2014 | 35 Comments

Such is the substance of the campus rape “epidemic,” as I explained Wednesday (“Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But George Will’s Column Raped Me”) in rejecting the claim that skepticism toward feminist rhetoric is morally equivalent to rape.

Feminism’s hegemonic dominance within elite academia has been achieved because cowards are easily intimidated by intellectual bullying, but George Will refused to play along with that charade. His reply to a group of Democratic senators is a masterpiece of concision:

Dear Senators Blumenthal, Feinstein, Baldwin and Casey:
I have received your letter of June 12, and I am puzzled. You say my statistics “fly in the face of everything we know about this issue.” You do not mention which statistics, but those I used come from the Obama administration, and from simple arithmetic involving publicly available reports on campus sexual assaults.
The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.
I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed . . . So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”

What Will wrote in his original column was this:

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12 percent of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12 percent reporting rate is correct, the 20 percent assault rate is preposterous. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute notes, for example, that in the four years 2009 to 2012 there were 98 reported sexual assaults at Ohio State. That would be 12 percent of 817 total out of a female student population of approximately 28,000, for a sexual assault rate of approximately 2.9 percent — too high but nowhere near 20?percent.

The arithmetic is indeed “simple,” and the administration’s claims about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus don’t add up. Even if we accept the claim that only 12% of sexual assaults are reported, multiplying the number of reported sexual assaults eight-fold still does not yield a number equal to 20% of female students.

Where did this ginned-up phony rape “epidemic” originate? What is the source of the “one in five women” number? A 2007 Justice Department survey that has been helpfully analyzed by Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post. Anyone familiar with social science methodology can examine the questions asked in that survey and see that the fundamental problem is how the questions were phrased: Respondents were asked about “unwanted sexual contact” and even attempted “unwanted sexual contact.” In other words, if your boyfriend even tries to do something “unwanted,” you’re a victim.

Perhaps the people who designed that survey did not deliberately bias the results in a way that exaggerated the incidence of “sexual assault.” Perhaps the researchers did not even think about how their survey might be hijacked for political purposes. Perhaps it is, in some sense, ultimately impossible for researchers to quantify in any definitive way the content of people’s sexual experience.

On the other hand, however, feminists have spent the past four decades trying to convince women that male sexuality is inherently violent and oppressive. (How many times must I recommend Daphne Patai’s valuable 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism as an analysis of this troubling phenomenon?) It’s not just deranged radicals — “PIV is always rape, OK?” — who embrace feminism’s demonized view of male sexuality and, when I encounter social science research which appears designed to confirm that view, I am not inclined to accept claims that the methodological flaws of the survey are entirely coincidental. Glenn Kessler comments:

On its Web site, the National Institute of Justice notes . . . that “researchers have been unable to determine the precise incidence of sexual assault on American campuses because the incidence found depends on how the questions are worded and the context of the survey.” It said that two parallel surveys of American college women were conducted in 1997 and came up with very different results, with one survey showing rapes were 11 times higher than the percentage in the other survey. The reason appears to be because of how the questions were worded.

If it is a known fact that the wording of survey questions can affect results in this way — multiplying by a factor of 11 the reports of rape — the reliance on such surveys to generate statistics that are clearly inflated cannot be accepted as a mere coincidence. The conclusion of George Will’s reply to the Democrat senators:

I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.

This is the real crux of the problem: University officials have insisted on treating accusations of sexual assault as disciplinary infractions rather than as matters of criminal justice. Why? Because the vast majority of such accusations involve “he said/she said” situations where a felony conviction would almost certainly be impossible.

The Brown University case of Dan Kopin and Lena Sclove may not be typical, but it demonstrates the fundamental problem. No one wishes to minimize the seriousness of sexual assault, but when such an incident is cited as evidence of universities tolerating “brutal rape” on campus, we’ve gone through the looking glass into an alternative reality where words have no fixed meaning.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”





 

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism, Sex

The Value of Fathers

Posted on | June 15, 2014 | 6 Comments

Joy Pullman offers a refreshing antidote to feminism’s anti-male agenda:

My father gave me what too many girls nowadays ruin themselves for lacking: A strong, loving, steady masculine presence. It’s inconceivable what I would be like without him. So, before I explain why my dad’s story is bigger than us, let me brag on him a little. It’s Father’s Day weekend, after all.
Dad’s presence in my life kept me safe from many things my girlfriends put themselves through in frantic search of a man’s love. And my dad’s love was tangible, more acted out than spoken. He didn’t just say he loved us. His life repeatedly proved it. I never worried where my next meal would come from, because my father woke in the wee hours of many mornings to toil in sandy Wisconsin fields and breathe asthma-inducing corn dust as he fixed and re-fixed the grain bins. I’ve been lucky enough to marry the first man I’ve ever kissed (although not the first I dated). I didn’t feel much pressure to let guys touch me, or even date around before I was ready, because my dad not only gave boys those guard-dog looks and those looks let me know he considered me too precious to give out easily. He didn’t have to say it. He just had to look it. . . .

Read the whole thing.

 

Category: Feminism

FMJRA 2.0: Steam

Posted on | June 14, 2014 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Rule 5 Sunday: The Fremont Street Experience

‘This Feminist Community That I’d Like to Consider Myself a Part Of’

Virginia Shocker: Cantor Canned

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.13.14

#RapeCulture Update

Terrorism and Euphemism

Priorities!

FMJRA 2.0: A Day Late And A (Silver) Dollar Short

Feminists Protest Against Equality

Demi Lovato Is Gay?

#RapeCulture Liberal Logic?

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.09.14

Virginia GOP Pulls a Fast One

Like Margaret Thatcher Said

Craigslist Rapist Arrested

FBI + IRS = S-C-A-N-D-A-L

The Politics of Blame

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.10.14

Lesbian Charged With Statutory Rape

Al-Qaeda on the Offensive in Iraq

‘The Child Within Me Is Truly Gone … I Hate You, But I Loved You’

Facts Are the New Hate

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.11.14

‘Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But George Will’s Column Raped Me’

Libertarians Are Hitler or Something

Al-Qaeda Takes Tikrit?

Police Arrest Teacher, Accused of Four-Year Lesbian Affair With Teen Student

Kimberlin Hearing Today

#EndFathersDay: Is This #YesAllWomen Feminism or Another 4Chan Hoax?

If Hillary Can’t Even Handle NPR …

In Which @TuckerCarlson Encounters the Feminist Meaning of Equality

Does the GOP Establishment Endorse Thad Cochran’s Bestiality Nostalgia?

‘A Troubling Echo of Misogynistic Stereotypes of the Spiteful Ex-Wife’

Our Moral Superiors


Top linkers this week:

  1. Batshit Crazy News (31)
  2. Regular Right Guy (18)

The usual crop of near-misses…thanks to everyone for their linkagery, especially the folks who helped make Rule 5 Sunday #1 again this week! 🙂


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Category: FMJRA Award

Happy Lesbian Father’s Day!

Posted on | June 14, 2014 | 37 Comments

@SunnyBjerk is tired of the stigma, you guys:

This year, as Alli and I await the birth of our first child, due this fall, we began receiving our first Mother’s Day congratulations from friends and family. . . .
I’m most often asked whether I’m worried about bonding with the baby as the non-biological parent.
I’ve got to tell you, this question infuriates me.
Despite what are certainly best intentions and a tacit show of empathy, the question irks me because it puts a premium on biological links, as though the strength of a parent-child relationship is only correlated to bloodlines: the more biologically-related, the stronger the bond. As an adoptee myself, with a partner raised by lesbian moms, I know that there are many ties beyond biology that bind families and drive the parent/child bond. Though it’s less surprising that this sentiment is common among heterosexual couples who usually reproduce biological children, I am struck by the force of this sentiment within the LGBT community . . .

In case you missed any of that: Bjerk was adopted and her lesbian partner Allison Auldrige (now pregnant with “our first child”) was “raised by lesbian moms.” Bjerk continues:

Even as we battle the myths surrounding race, gender, gender roles, sexuality, class, domesticity and the nuclear family, we haven’t adequately addressed the myths or stigma around non-biological family structures, particularly when it comes to parent-child relationships and adoption. And though I don’t want to discourage any couple from having biological children, I do want to suggest that it’s high time we address the stigma of non-biologically related family members.
As an adoptee, I’ve witnessed this stigma first-hand. . . .

(In the span of three sentences, she used “stigma” three times. Perhaps we should stigmatize repetitiveness?)

The fact of the matter is that families come in all shapes, sizes and formations. More gay parents and straight parents alike are raising stepchildren and/or adopted children, bringing much-needed awareness about the growth of blended families in the country. Indeed, more than three million LGBT Americans have children, and more than 125,000 same-sex couples are currently raising one or more children under the age of 18, including biological, step, or adopted children. What’s more, six million Americans report having a parent who self-identifies as LGBT.
I think this growing family diversity is something to celebrate. . . .

Well, of course, you do! Forty percent of children are born to unmarried women and half of marriages with children end in divorce and isn’t “this growing family diversity” totally awesome? Really, normal parents who stay married should be ashamed of themselves for cheating their children out of “family diversity.”

Father’s Day is a perfect occasion for lectures about the meaning of “family” from lesbians whose sperm-donor motherhood deliberately deprives their children of having a father. Hallmark has finally issued LGBT Father’s Day cards, and I’m sure everybody celebrated “Blogging for LGBTQ Families Day,” right?

A big thanks to everyone who participated in Blogging for LGBTQ Families Day this year, submitting a total of over 120 posts! . . .
Shoshana, “the mid-twenties, mixed race, Jewish, pansexual daughter of two lesbians and an Indian sperm donor,” shares her take on”Questions not to ask the mixed race daughter of two Jewish lesbians” and explains what it was like for her “Coming out as a member of an LGBT+ family.” . . .
Sonya, at the COLAGE KidSafe blog, writes of “Two Separate Identities,” hers and her moms’. She’s the queer child of lesbian moms, but explains that she is not queer because of them.
Hannah Moch, who has two moms, writes at the GLAAD blog about why she publicly thanked her moms at her college graduation — including the fact that the two of them remained friends even after they broke up.

And they all lived insanely ever after!

 

Category: Family, Gays

Judas Priest Shout-Out To Princess Chelsea Clinton

Posted on | June 14, 2014 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

E! reports:

The expectant 34-year-old stepped out wearing leather leggings and sky-high Christian Louboutin heels during an appearance at the 2014 Wildlife Conservation Society Gala at the Central Park Zoo in New York City last night.

We’ll let Dustbury review the footwear, but how about the trou?As Obama’s fundamental transformation of our country continues to move us off that pesky Constitution and pave the way for Rule By Overlords, it’s important that the peasantry be afforded at least the hope of distraction by fashion.

As Her Majesty uncoils from her torpor and prepares for residence in the Oval Throneroom, the peasants can be pleased at the style on display by the underpaid, pauper princess. So let’s reach back to the realm of another queen for a wee salute:

Category: Democrats, Hillary Clinton
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