The Other McCain

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

Terrorism and Euphemism

Posted on | June 7, 2014 | 59 Comments

They’re “gunmen” or “extremists” or “militants,” but have you noticed that no one in the media wants to call them “terrorists”?

Gunmen have stormed a university in the restive Anbar province west of Baghdad and are holding dozens of students hostage, Iraqi officials said Saturday.
Police and army officials say the attack took place Saturday morning when gunmen stormed Anbar University near the provincial capital Ramadi, parts of which have been held by Islamic extremists and other anti-government militants for months. The gunmen have detained dozens of students inside the university dormitory, they said.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
An Al Qaeda splinter group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and other Sunni-led militants have controlled parts of Anbar province, including the city of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi, since late December.
Iraq is currently grappling with its worst surge in violence since the sectarian bloodletting of 2006 and 2007, when the country was pushed to the brink of civil war despite the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. troops.

In the Obama Age, terrorism has been defined out of existence.

 

Category: Iraq, Media Bias, Terrorism

Sioux Falls, S.D., Mother Allegedly Caught in Group Sex With Pre-Teen Boys

Posted on | June 7, 2014 | 44 Comments

Accusations of extreme perversion:

A 30-year old Sioux Falls woman has been charged with rape, sexual contact with a child, and sexual exploitation of a minor after her boyfriend discovered her naked in their apartment Wednesday night with at least three boys between age 7 and 10.
Sioux Falls police spokesman Sam Clemens said Anne Elizabeth Doubler’s boyfriend returned home with the couple’s 4-year-old son and caught her with the boys. The incident took place in their apartment in the 600 block of North Lewis Avenue.
“They walked in to the apartment and ended up seeing her completely naked,” Clemens said. . . .
Police later interviewed the boys, who confirmed that they had had sexual contact with Doubler, Clemens said.
The boys were not related to her and lived in the surrounding apartments, police said. Two of the three victims were brothers.
Police are still working to identify all potential victims and find out how long it may have been going on.
“This is something we don’t see very often,” Clemens said. “When we’re talking about multiple victims, especially at one time, that’s unusual.”

More at Huffington Post.

 

Category: Crime, Sex

New Ukraine President Condemns Insurgents as ‘Gangsters and Killers’

Posted on | June 7, 2014 | 13 Comments

Talking tough:

Petro Poroshenko took the oath of office as Ukraine’s president Saturday, calling on armed groups to lay down their weapons as he assumed leadership of a country mired in a violent uprising and economic troubles.
In his inaugural address to the Verkhovna Rada, the country’s parliament, Poroshenko promised amnesty “for those who do not have blood on their hands.” . . .
Poroshenko also promised dialogue with citizens in the eastern regions, but excluded the insurgents.
“Talking to gangsters and killers is not our avenue,” he said, according to a translator. . . .
Poroshenko said he will not accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“Crimea is, was and will be Ukrainian. There will be no trade-off,” Poroshenko said.

“Anti-American Sentiment Growing in Russia” — kind of like the “sentiment” on our university campuses, really.

 

Category: Ukraine

‘Feminist Lezzy Heaven’

Posted on | June 7, 2014 | 102 Comments

Lea DeLaria in the Netflix series ‘Orange Is the New Black’

“It’s like I’ve died and gone to feminist lezzy heaven. I’ve been a professional lesbian for over 30 years — before that I freelanced — but my entire career has been about that, putting a human face on what a butch is.”
— Lea DeLaria, star of Orange Is the New Black

A TV series about women’s prison is “feminist lezzy heaven,” and Orange Is the New Black is a cultural phenomenon — like HBO’s Girls — primarily because of critical praise for its feminist themes. Typical is Amanda Duberman’s gushy enthusiasm at Huffington Post:

Perfectly written, hilarious and culturally relevant, the series chronicling a diverse group of women behind bars proved to be a feminist triumph. . . .
The male characters are either punchlines or morally reprehensible gatekeepers of sexism. The first season’s plot lines recognized transgender identity, sexual fluidity, race relations and the triumphant potential of sisterhood.

A show that portrays men only as “morally reprehensible gatekeepers of sexism” must be praised, you see, because this is what feminism is all about: Demonizing men as the source of all evil in society.

Never mind, of course, that  Orange Is the New Black was adapted from the memoir of Piper Kerman, a born-rich woman who graduated from Smith College and was sent to prison for money laundering for a heroin smuggler who was Kerman’s lesbian lover.

You can read Kerman’s own self-pitying account, in which she portrays herself as a victim of federal mandatory-minimum sentencing laws: “Without mandatory minimums, Piper would almost certainly have been sentenced to probation and community service.”

Well, boo hoo hoo.

Other people have suffered far worse fates than doing 13 months in prison for money laundering, but those other people don’t have rich families and elite educations (Smith College annual tuition, $44,450) and so they don’t write memoirs that become TV shows.

Feminism’s victimhood narrative requires us to ignore contradictions and paradoxes. Instead we must pretend that a simple common-sense interpretation of facts — “Hey, maybe dating a heroin smuggler is a bad idea” — is too unsophisticated to be a valid judgment. Piper Kerman is a woman, and when bad things happen to a woman, there must be a feminist morality tale in there somewhere, right? God forbid that we should interpret “sexual equality” in such a way that women are viewed as responsible for their own choices.

Of course, no fan of Orange Is the New Black cares what I think, because I’m just a morally reprehensible gatekeeper of sexism.





 

 

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Category: Crime, Culture, Feminism

‘Hold Until Relieved’

Posted on | June 6, 2014 | 47 Comments

Today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and Americans rightly take pride in the heroic courage of our troops who saw that historic day’s bloodiest fighting on Omaha Beach. However, one of my favorite stories of D-Day — vividly told in Cornelius Ryan’s classic The Longest Day — is of the British glider troops who captured what became known as “Pegasus Bridge” across the Caen Canal near the village of Ouistreham.

Capturing and holding the bridge was essential to establishing the left flank of the Allied invasion, and this crucial mission was assigned to a mere 181 men, a company of the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry led by Major John Howard. The glider assault by the “Ox and Bucks” was the opening attack of the invasion and took place right after midnight. It took them just 10 minutes to capture the bridge from the surprised Germans, and Major Howard’s command lost only one soldier in the fight — Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, who thus became the first Allied soldier killed on D-Day.

The order given to Major Howard was to “hold until relieved,” to defend his position until his men were reinforced by troops moving south and east from Sword Beach. The 1962 film version of The Longest Day gave a “mystic portrayal” of the Ox and Bucks’ mission, which Major Howard laughed off as “sentimental rubbish.”

True heroes seldom acknowledge the glory of their accomplishments, considering it merely the performance of duty.

 

Category: History, Military

White (Liberal) Male Privilege

Posted on | June 6, 2014 | 72 Comments

The Left is willing to suspend judgment and waive all standards when it comes to their allies. Feminists nowadays are up in arms about “rape culture,” but 15 years ago they were defending accused rapist Bill Clinton in no uncertain terms: “I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”

Liberalism is simply a set of prejudices, a collection of syllogisms all of which end, “ergo, vote Democrat.” Their smug presumption of their own  moral and intellectual superiority makes liberals the most easily deceived people in the world. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is the latest example:

Now Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of The New York Times, is calling on Kristof to “give readers a full explanation” of his reporting on Somaly Mam, the celebrated Cambodian anti-sex-trafficking activist who, according to a recent Newsweek expose, fabricated parts of her story and those of some of the alleged victims she advocated for. The revelations have disillusioned many of Mam’s loyal supporters and left the press looking gullible. Just as importantly, they’ve highlighted the public’s seemingly insatiable desire for heroic narratives — and the willingness of many in the media to provide them.

As Instapundit remarks, Kristof was engaged in “white knighting” — posing as the courageous and enlightened rescuer — and was thus easily played for a chump by “the James Frey of anti–sex trafficking activism.” Liberals fall for this kind of hoax because (a) they overestimate the value of their own intelligence, (b) they naïvely underestimate the ability of cynical manipulators to wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood, and (c) they are themselves  utterly unscrupulous in exploiting any narrative that advances the liberal cause.

Nicholas Kristoff’s status as a privileged white male, with a six-figure paycheck from the world’s most prestigious newspaper, might make him a natural target of identity-politics activists. His crusading on behalf of impoverished and exploited Third World women could thus be seen as a noblesse oblige gesture. This led to him being scammed by a hoaxer, so that he was publishing lies, but hey: It’s the New York Times.

If liberals cared about facts, they wouldn’t be liberals, would they?

 

Category: Media Bias, New York Times

In Which @AmandaMarcotte Gets Crazy About High School Dress Codes

Posted on | June 6, 2014 | 94 Comments

Maybe you missed the story about a Utah high school that Photoshopped yearbook photos of girls to make them more “appropriate.” Most people who even noticed the story just shrugged: Whatever.

Yet this story inspired Everybody’s Favorite Feminist™ Amanda Marcotte to go off on a tangent about “modesty” as a weapon of patriarchal social control of women’s bodies:

It’s a belief that because women, especially young women, have bodies that represent “sex” in a straight male-dominated society, then those bodies are eligible for more social control than the bodies of men.
While this school is extreme, anyone who went to a high school with a dress code knows that girls get policed more than boys, often in ways that are sexually humiliating. . . . Hand-wringing articles bemoaning the supposed emergence of “hook-up culture” focus mostly, or exclusively, on scolding and feigning concern in the direction of girls, with boys being left to make their own choices without much concern or judgment.
Because of all this, young women are subject to way more punishment and control from legal and other authorities for their sexuality, starting with the popularity of laws requiring minor girls to notify parents if they want an abortion. . . .

This is a typical feminist non sequitur — from a discussion of school dress codes, suddenly Marcotte leaps to the topic of abortion and specifically parental notification laws. But these are minors, and as parental authorization is generally required for all medical treatment of minors, the onus must be on abortion advocates to demonstrate why abortion should be an exception to the general rule.

As for Marcotte’s rantings about “social control”: Shouldn’t we assume that the community supports the school’s attempt to enforce standards of appropriate clothing? Wouldn’t parents be upset if the school permitted girls to parade through the hallways wearing miniskirts, short-shorts, halter tops, et cetera? Isn’t it likely — doesn’t common sense suggest — that provocative clothing would be a distraction from the learning process? Common sense, however, is impermissible in feminist discourse, and logic is viewed with suspicion by feminists as a weapon of “straight male-dominated society.”

Logic: Children exist because of parents. Children are dependent and are under the supervisory authority of their parents. Therefore, if the parents in a community support the school system’s dress code, it’s not a problem. On the other hand, if parents don’t like the school system’s policies — about dress code or anything else — they are free to send their kids to private school or home-school them. And thus we return to Amanda Marcotte’s mystification about the Utah school:

The school appears to be so out of step with standard American social norms that it’s hard to escape wondering if there wasn’t an attempt to impose a fundamentalist standard of modesty on the girls, regardless of their own religious beliefs.

In a community where most parents are religious, if the school system doesn’t “impose a fundamentalist standard of modesty on the girls,” guess what happens? Religious parents will pull their kids out of public school. What kind of education does Amanda Marcotte think those kids would get if they were home-schooled or sent to private religious schools? Also, who is “out of step with standard American social norms”?

“I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . .
“This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 14

Is this fanatical hatred of babies what she means by “standard American social norms”? And how does the baby-killer Amanda Marcotte, who so deliberately substracts herself from the category of “parent,” presume to tell parents how to raise their kids?

Oh, there I go with logic again . . .

 

Category: Feminism

Gunman Targets Christian University

Posted on | June 6, 2014 | 19 Comments

Four shot, one dead, killer is in custody:

A lone gunman armed with a shotgun opened fire Thursday in a building at Seattle Pacific University, killing one person before a student subdued him with pepper spray as he tried to reload, police said.
The 26-year-old gunman, Aaron Ybarra, was obsessed with the Columbine High School shootings and had even traveled to the Colorado site where two student gunmen killed 15 and injured another 21 fellow students in April 1999, police sources told KIRO 7.
Ybarra was not a student at SPU where the shootings happened about 3:25 p.m. Thursday. . . .
The school canceled activities and classes for the remainder of Thursday and Friday. A prayer service started at 7 p.m.
“We’re a community that relies on Jesus Christ for strength and we’ll need that at this time,” said Dan Martin, president of Seattle Pacific University, which is located at the edge of a leafy Queen Anne neighborhood about 5 miles from downtown Seattle.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Crime
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