FMJRA 2.0: I Can See For Miles

A Pearl man who runs a political blog is accused of sneaking into a nursing home where U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran’s wife is bedridden and photographing her, then posting the image in a video political “hit piece” on the internet.
Madison Police arrested Clayton Thomas Kelly, 28, of Pearl on Friday night on a charge of exploitation of a vulnerable adult. He’s being held on a $100,000 bond. . . .
Kelly is accused of sneaking into St. Catherine’s Village in Madison, where Rose Cochran has resided since 2000, suffering from progressive dementia and now bedridden.
Cochran on Saturday issued a statement: “I have been fortunate to have a wonderful family, and like so many families, we are deeply affected by my wife’s serious, long-term illness, that we consider to be a very private family matter. We will continue doing everything we can to protect my wife’s safety and security.”
Donald Clark, attorney for Sen. and Rose Cochran, said the Cochrans’ “privacy and dignity have been violated.”

The blogger accused of this bizarre criminal stunt is a supporter of Cochran’s GOP primary challenger, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, who I’ve endorsed. Of course, I would never in a million years endorse this kind of weirdness, and I’m sure McDaniel wouldn’t either, but the Cochran campaign seems to be suggesting such complicity.

You know how bloggers have a reputation as being crazy and irresponsible? Yeah, this ain't helping. http://t.co/n9aQPGwJoB

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 18, 2014

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

Category: Crime, Mississippi, Senate

Feminism: Love as Oppression and Heterosexuality as Subordination

Posted on | May 17, 2014 | 47 Comments

Anyone who studies feminist theory quickly realizes a truth first expressed by Women’s Liberation pioneer Ti-Grace Atkinson in 1971: “Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.” That is to say, when feminists condemn “patriarchy,” they are not merely condemning all men, but also heterosexuality, viewing heterosexual women as victims of male oppression. Insofar as any woman actually desires love and sex with men, according to feminist theory, this is only because she has been brainwashed by the patriarchy to believe that this is what she wants.

In other words, feminists think all heterosexual women are stupid.

The average woman would likely be shocked and angered if she was aware of the insulting way in which feminists describe heterosexuality as an instrument of male domination, a description that insults normal women by portraying them as willing participants in their own humiliation as inferiors. We have discussed feminist psychologist Dee Graham here before. In her influential 1994 book, Loving to Survive, Graham depicted male sexuality as inherently violent — “sexual terror” — and portrayed women’s heterosexuality as a condition of the inferiority imposed upon them by this patriarchal terrorism.

“Male sexual violence against women and ‘normal’ heterosexual intercourse are essential to patriarchy because they establish the dominance of the penis over the vagina, and thus the power relations between the sexes. . . . When a male sexually violates a female, he is doing work for patriarchy. Men’s sexual violence against women is the primary vehicle through which the dominance of the penis over the vagina is established. . . .
“There are numerous examples of ways that heterosexual practice establishes male domination in women’s most private and personal spheres. . . . Sex is defined from men’s perspective and is what gives men pleasure. . . . Men blame women for male sexual arousal, saying men cannot control their sexual urges. Men see women as objects for their sexual gratification. Men tell women they should perform sexual acts women don’t want to perform because it makes men feel good.”
— Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives

Graham’s conflation of violence and male sexuality is deliberate, as is her implicit denial that heterosexuality is normal — thus, her use of scare-quotes around the word “normal” — and her denial that any woman could ever really want to have sex with a man or experience sexual pleasure with a man. There are no good men in Graham’s book, nor are there any happy heterosexual women. Loving to Survive discusses the alternative of lesbianism at great length in entirely positive terms, e.g.:

To the extent that women harbor negative attitudes toward lesbians and lesbianism, we demonstrate identification with men. To the extent that women express negative attitudes toward lesbians in our words and deeds, we strengthen patriarchy. The hesitation of women as a group to endorse feminism and to accept lesbianism and celibacy as valid sexual choices strongly suggests that women have taken on men’s perspective to such an extent that we see our oppressors as friends and our actual allies as enemies.

This is what feminism teaches: Men are women’s oppressors and lesbians are women’s allies, Graham says. The only reason women have sex with men, Graham says, is as a way to cope with male violence, and women who “harbor negative attitudes toward lesbians” only do so because they “have taken on men’s perspective.”

Derogation of heterosexual women, and the treatment of male sexuality as violent and pathological, are almost ubiquitous in feminist writing on sexuality. Readers will not be surprised to learn that the feminist blogger Radical Wind — “PIV is always rape, OK?” — is a huge fan of Dee Graham. Graham spent decades as a professor at the University of Cincinnati, and among the feminist sources she quotes in Loving to Survive is longtime Michigan State University professor Marilyn Frye.

“Fucking is a large part of how females are kept subordinated to males. It is a ritual enactment of that subordination which constantly reaffirms the fact of subordination and habituates both men and women to it, both in body and in imagination. . . . A great deal of fucking is also presumed to preserve and maintain women’s belief in their own essential heterosexuality, which in turn (for women as not for men) connects with and reinforces female hetero-eroticism, that is, man-loving in women. It is very important to the maintenance of male-supremacy that men fuck women, a lot. So it is required; it is compulsory. . . . A man who does not or will not fuck women is not pulling his share of the load. He is not a loyal and dependable member of the team.”
— Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory

Frye’s book has been hailed as a feminist “classic.” Her work, like Graham’s, is frequently cited and included in Women’s Studies curricula, so that many thousands of college and university students are annually taught this: Sexual intercourse with men “is a ritual enactment of [women’s] subordination,” and heterosexuality is never the authentic desire of women, but rather merely their “belief,” imposed on them by men — “required” of women, “compulsory” for women — because it is necessary “to the maintenance of male-supremacy.”

The vast majority of women are heterosexual, and they are not too stupid to know they are deliberately insulted by feminists.

As for me as a father of six, however, no one can say I have not been “pulling my share of the load,” IYKWIMAITYD.

Category: Feminism, Sex

Fret Not: The Clinton/Warren 2016 Ticket Will Fix The VA Health Care Problem

Posted on | May 17, 2014 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has long touted the VA system as the epitome of government-run healthcare. “Exhibit A for the advantages of government provision [of healthcare] is the veterans administration, which runs its own hospitals and clinics, and provides some of the best-quality healthcare in America at far lower cost than the private sector,” Krugman claims.

I don't understand all of the VA fuss. Hillary is totally going to fix the VA and #ObamaCare with Single Payer. Amiright?

— KnownDomesticTaroist (@smitty_one_each) May 18, 2014

It’s just kinda zany how all of these Socialized programs seem to effect the opposite of their stated intent, shifting from health care to the War on Poverty:

Between 1959 and 1966 — before the War on Poverty was implemented — the percentage of Americans living in poverty plunged by about one-third, from 22.4 to 14.7, slightly lower than in 2012. But, Eberstadt cautions, the poverty rate is “incorrigibly misleading” because government transfer payments have made income levels and consumption levels significantly different. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, disability payments, heating assistance and other entitlements have, Eberstadt says, made income “a poor predictor of spending power for lower-income groups.” Stark material deprivation is now rare:

“By 2011 .?.?. average per capita housing space for people in poverty was higher than the U.S. average for 1980. .?.?. [Many] appliances were more common in officially impoverished homes in 2011 than in the typical American home of 1980. .?.?. DVD players, personal computers, and home Internet access are now typical in them — amenities not even the richest U.S. households could avail themselves of at the start of the War on Poverty.”

But the institutionalization of anti-poverty policy has been, Eberstadt says carefully, “attended” by the dramatic spread of a “tangle of pathologies.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined that phrase in his 1965 report calling attention to family disintegration among African Americans. The tangle, which now ensnares all races and ethnicities, includes welfare dependency and “flight from work.”

So, clearly we need MOAR Programs, until the remaining conservative deadweight falls off and the sun can stagger the Progressive Dawn fully over the horizon.

via Hot Air headlines

Category: Democrats, Health Care, Hillary Clinton, New York Times

‘Superior Male Mathematical Ability’

Posted on | May 17, 2014 | 38 Comments

Does anyone else remember the “Teen Talk Barbie” controversy?

In July 1992, Mattel issued a talking Barbie doll which said various phrases that a teenager might say. One of these phrases was “math class is tough” and, to judge from the reaction by feminists, Barbie might as well have said, “All girls are stupid”:

A talking Barbie doll criticized by a national women’s group for saying “math class is tough” will no longer utter tve the offending lament, Mattel Inc. has decided. . . .
The American Association of University Women attacked the math comment in a report on how schools shortchange girls.

What was the problem? Math class is tough, after all, and for a kid’s toy to say so — well, who cares? Did anyone believe that girls were going to be brainwashed because of a four-word sentence they heard from a talking doll? It was absurd. But believing absurdities is what feminism is all about, so it became a huge controversy.

In fact, differences between males and females in terms of mathematical aptitude have been the subject of feminist protest for decades. In his 1999 book The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature, sociologist Morton Hunt recounted an earlier uproar over the same basic topic:

Neither [John Hopkins University] Professor Julian Stanley nor his co-author, Camilla Benbow, a graduate student, anticipated that they would be fiercely attacked by feminists or, indeed, by anyone when their brief report, “Sex Differences in Mathematical Ability: Fact or Artifact?” was accepted by the journal Science and published in its December 12, 1980, issue. . . .
Their final conclusion was that differences in innate ability accounted for the results, although they allowed that environmental factors might also have played a part:

We favor the hypothesis that sex differences in achievement in and attitude toward mathematics result from superior male mathematical ability, which may in turn be related to greater male ability in spatial tasks. This male superiority is probably an expression of both endogenous and exogenous variables. . . . It also seems likely that putting one’s faith in boy-versus-girl socialization processes as the only permissible explanation of the sex difference in mathematics is premature. . . .

Their report, only two pages long, was like a lighted match tossed into dry underbrush during a windstorm; it touched off a fast-spreading conflagration of articles and letters in the media throughout the country and in scientific journals. . . .
Articles and letters in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and many other magazines and newspapers, and many scientific journals, reported Benbow and Stanley’s finding, in most cases stressing its inflammatory nature. Some popular articles distorted the message in ways bound to enrage the public and scientists: Newsweek’s article was headlined “Do Males Have a Math Gene?” (Benbow and Stanley never mentioned the word “gene”). An Associated Press special was headlined , “Hopkins Study Called ‘Ridiculous’” and quoted the public statement of a feminist contingent at an annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society in San Francisco, “It is virtually impossible to undo the damage of the publicity surrounding the report” . . .

Think about that last phrase: “the damage of the publicity surrounding the report.” Who or what was “damaged” and how? All that Stanley and Benbow had done was to compile and analyze data and presented their conclusions which, although couched in qualifiers like “may” and “seems,” contradicted the feminist assumption that “socialization processes” explained the differences. If articles in the popular media misrepresented the Stanley-Benbow study, this was not their fault, but still: Who was “damaged”?

If your daughter excelled at math, would you stop encouraging her because a study found that, on average, boys scored higher on math? To say that Group A, on average, outperforms Group B in a skill is not to say that no members of Group B possess that skill.

Yet because feminists are very much obsessed with women as a group — and believe that any advantage exhibited by men (on average, as a group) must be a result of discrimination against women — the Stanley-Benbow study was a problem, in that it strongly suggested that anti-female discrimination did not explain everything.

We are, therefore, back at the kind of “is”/”ought” issue previously discussed, the feminist obsession with Equality, where every statistical disparity between men and women becomes a grievance.

Despite the fact that now women are 33% more likely than men to earn a college diploma, this disparity in favor of women hasn’t stopped feminists from whining about “discrimination.”

As for differences in math ability, a 2008 study found that most of that disparity had also disappeared, but this didn’t stop the study’s author from claiming that girls still suffer from prejudice:

Parents and teachers persist in thinking boys are simply better at math, said Janet Hyde, the University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who led the study. And girls who grow up believing it wind up avoiding harder math classes.
“It keeps girls and women out of a lot of careers, particularly high-prestige, lucrative careers in science and technology,” Hyde said.
For the class of 2007 . . . boys scored an average of 533 on the math section of the SAT, compared with 499 for girls.

Alas, women are being denied “high-prestige, lucrative careers” because of anti-female prejudice and talking Barbie dolls!

Perhaps, someday in the Feminist Future, women will receive 100% of college degrees and there won’t be any difference between boys and girls in SAT scores, because boys won’t be allowed to take the test, as boys will be prohibited from attending college.

And this result will be called Equality!

Category: Education, Feminism

Generally Speaking, @AmandaMarcotte Is Insane, and Feminism Is Always Wrong

Posted on | May 16, 2014 | 46 Comments

So now, reacting to the firing of Jill Abramson discussed previously, we encounter this commentary from Amanda Marcotte:

Women, particularly ambitious women, often feel like they’re in a no-win situation when it comes to climbing the career ladder. They’re told to “lean in” and stop being afraid to ask for what we want. They’re told they’re holding themselves back because of a “confidence gap”, and that all they need to do to get ahead in life is to start acting as bold and confident as men do. They’re told they don’t make as much as men because they don’t demand higher salaries. Or worse, that they’re “choosing” to make less than men by applying themselves less at the office.
But what happens when women follow all this advice to lean in, hold their heads high, make demands, and fake it ‘til they make it? Well, a lot of women rightfully fear that they’ll be considered bitchy shrews. Women know that the very qualities that cause so many to see men as “powerful” look like, well, pushiness when they manifest in women. In fact, research confirms this fear: Following all that advice to act like a man can backfire and cause your boss to apply misogynist stereotypes to you that you will never get past. So the lame advice women get is to be pushy and confident sometimes and demure and retreating at others. How to tell the difference? Sorry, no one can help you there. You just have to know. Good luck, ladies.

Do ambitious women “often feel like they’re in a no-win situation”? I’m certain they do, just as I am certain that the advice they receive on how to deal with this situation is confusing. I am likewise certain that in their career competition with men — having chosen this competition themselves — these women expose themselves to the known ferocity of men in situations where a man’s ambition puts him in a posture of rivalry toward others who seek to ascend the same career ladder.

Ambitious women, I’m sure, encounter the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that Marcotte describes. There is no argument here, you see, with what Marcotte says the reality is. Rather, the question is about what ought to be, and in that question, Marcotte expects her readers to choose sides. She expects women to believe that ambitious men should just step aside and restrain their own competitive instincts, and let themselves be eclipsed by female rivals, merely because these rivals are women, for the sake of an ideological abstraction, Equality.

OK — but why?

Please tell me why, in such a situation, any man should be expected to act this way? Why should a man be less competitive toward a female rival than toward a male? Why must a man accept that his own individual ambition must be thwarted for the sake of Equality?

You’re crazy if you expect men to “play nice” in that context.

Grant that, within organizations, all employees are rightly expected to cooperate for the well-being of the whole organization: Teamwork. But when it comes to the individual’s desire for advancement within the organization, the ethos of teamwork will give way, and people will fight for that which they think they deserve.

To tell women that they are entitled to be promoted, to tell them that they are victims of discrimination if they are not promoted — which is what feminism tells women — is to guarantee that the conflict between ambitious rivals within organizations will be even more damaging to a spirit of teamwork than it would otherwise be.

If women believe that a preponderance of males in top management necessarily indicates that women are being treated unfairly within the organization, demoralization will ensue. Qualified and effective managers are hard to find, and if the company can’t find enough women managers to make it seem “fair,” to meet some quota dictated by concerns about Equality, this does not mean that women on lower rungs of the ladder are doomed never to be able to advance. Yet the unfairness experienced by women is really no different than the unfairness experienced by men who, seeking to advance in their careers, are subject to envious backstabbing and sabotage by rivals, just as are women.

Feminism is thus exposed as a sort of special pleading, by which women claim entitlement to certain benefits, demanding that the world be rearranged for their benefit, simply because they are women.

And yet the question remains: Why?

In which @AmandaMarcotte generalizes about men, in ways that men are "sexist" if they generalize about women. pic.twitter.com/tfj6gqfZXD

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) May 16, 2014

@rsmccain @instapundit @AmandaMarcotte "All people who generalize are prejudiced". (sarcasm)

— I M Madd (@RaginCelt) May 16, 2014

@rsmccain @instapundit Not all men find @AmandaMarcotte completely annoying

— Pat Boldosser (@pboldosser) May 16, 2014

Never expect consistency from a feminist. And if you point out their blatant hypocrisies and paradoxes, you’re a hater.

(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas at American Power.)

<br />

Category: Feminism

The Science Is Settled?

Posted on | May 16, 2014 | 59 Comments

Definition of intellectual: Someone who presumes to judge, outside the field of their own expertise, who qualifies as an “expert”:

Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio came under attack this week for refusing to submit to scientific authority. “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” he said in an interview with Jonathan Karl.
Nonscientist Ruth Marcus, writing for the Washington Post, declared that Rubio’s words “undermine his other assertion,” namely “that he is prepared to be president.” Juliet Lapidos, also lacking in scientific expertise, went so far as to assert, in a New York Times blog post, that Rubio had “disqualified himself” from the presidency. . . .
[T]hey’re entirely typical of the genre of global-warmist opinion journalism, in which ignorant journalists taunt politicians for their ignorance but have no argument beyond an appeal to authority. . . .
Appeals to authority aren’t necessarily fallacious, except in the realm of formal deductive logic, where they entail adopting the unfounded premise that the authority is infallible. . . .

Read the whole thing. Conservatives are often accused of being “anti-intellectual” for the very reason that we are suspicious of the kind of “expertise” which demands that we accept tendentious claims without criticism, skepticism or dissent. But our skepticism toward climate-change doomsayers is not a reflection of conservative ignorance — quite the opposite. There is a well-established pattern, dating back to the 19th century (if not earlier) of erroneous “consensus” among self-appointed scientific “experts,” and it is our knowledge of this pattern — repeat, knowledge, not ignorance — that leads us to be skeptical of global-warming Chicken Little prophecies.

The sky is (probably) not falling. Earth’s atmosphere is (probably) large enough to absorb anthropogenic CO2 emissions without catastrophic damage. The result of global warming will (probably) not resemble any of the doomsayers’ predictions, and it is entirely possible that the global warming trend is not actually anthropogenic, but is instead mostly the result of normal variation in Earth’s temperatures. Inaccuracy in measurement, misguided computer modeling, flawed theories and other methodological errors (probably) explain most or all of the “science” that claims we are hurtling toward an impending man-made climate disaster.

Conservatives skeptical of climate-change doomsaying should not let themselves be bullied by arrogant “experts,” nor by the naive “intellectual” apostles of this Chicken Little cult.

Category: Global Warming, Science

Can the #Benghazi Spinners Win?

Posted on | May 16, 2014 | 13 Comments

If you’re going to win a spin war, you’re going to need some better answers than “I don’t know.” Lanny Davis, who spent years spinning for the Clinton administration, certainly knows this. I remember Davis’s role in helping shape the administration’s media message on the Lewinsky scandal, and so when Davis was brought in to help do damage control on Benghazi — to try to protect the Hillary Clinton “brand” going into 2016 — this was important: Davis is an experienced professional spinmaster.

Unfortunately for Hillary, when Davis went on the Larry O’Connor radio show, the only answers he seemed to have were, “I don’t know.”

They’re going to have to do better than that. And they will.

We can expect Team Hillary to try and make it seem un-American to ask questions that Democrats don’t want to answer.

Category: Hillary Clinton, Libya

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The Other McCain

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

FMJRA 2.0: I Can See For Miles

‘Forget It, Jake …’

Feminism: Love as Oppression and Heterosexuality as Subordination

Fret Not: The Clinton/Warren 2016 Ticket Will Fix The VA Health Care Problem

‘Superior Male Mathematical Ability’

Generally Speaking, @AmandaMarcotte Is Insane, and Feminism Is Always Wrong

The Science Is Settled?

Can the #Benghazi Spinners Win?

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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