The Other McCain

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

Lies, Errors, and Tendentious Mischaracterizations of Facts

Posted on | April 27, 2014 | 37 Comments

“Vile Lie-Peddler @Karoli Kuns,” as I have sometimes called her, is one of the members of Team Kimberlin whose harassment of the perjuring bomber’s Enemies List is intermittent, rather than habitual and constant. It has been months since I paid any attention at all to her and, honestly, the whole Kimberlin drama has begun to bore me. The $1 million Maryland lawsuit Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., continues shuffling along in zombie fashion, while the $2 million federal lawsuit (Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al., as John Hoge calls it) seems to be approaching the point at which, as the lawyers say, it will be “ripe” for dismissal.

The fundamental dishonesty of Kimberlin’s litigation, however, is a self-evident fact with which my readers are so abundantly familiar by now that I don’t see much point in updating regularly — “Oh, look, another lie from the Pro Se Pipsqueak!” — and I’ve resolved personally to pay as little attention to it as a defendant must necessarily pay.

Maybe I should have included a “Trigger Alert” for those who have traumatic reactions to Bill Schamfeldt’s face. With a truly amazing persistence, Schmalfeldt has continued his obsessive fixation on John Hoge, who many months ago seems to have decided that stoic indifference was an insufficient response to Schmalfeldt’s sadistic harassment. Hoge has been quite active in seeking to hold Schmalfeldt legally accountable. Predictably, Schmalfeldt has turned this around in his demented mind, absurdly claiming that Hoge is harassing him, whereas the truth of the matter is, of course, the exact opposite of what Schmalfeldt says. It is now 10 months since a Carroll County judge granted Hoge’s peace order against Schmalfeldt. All that is required of Schmalfeldt is to cease his harassment of Hoge, but Schmalfeldt is like that old Led Zeppelin tune, “I Can’t Quit You Baby”: He’s hooked. He’s addicted. He’s got a monkey on his back. He’s got a harassment jones.

“He’s banned on Daily Kos. He’s banned at the Examiner. He gets angry about being ignored, and erupts in frothing rage. So then people pay Bill the only kind of attention he deserves — pointing out that he’s a brain-damaged troll — at which point he claims victimhood. Then the cycle begins again, and Bill makes new threats . . .”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 6, 2013

So the endless provocations continue — “How Many More Times,” another early Zeppelin classic — and when Hoge responds to Schmalfeldt’s provocations, this gives Schmalfeldt a new occasion to claim helpless victimhood. Bill’s existence has become a Mobius Loop of self-inflicted humiliation.

Schmalfeldt has a penchant for “monkey see, monkey do” mimicry, and anyone who has ever been in conflict with Bill quickly learns to recognize how he habitually imitates whatever rhetorical method his antagonist employs against him. Call attention to Schmalfeldt’s characteristic remorseless sadism, then start the clock to count the moments until he accuses you of sadism. And as often as we have remarked the obsessive nature of Schmalfeldt’s harassment of Hoge — this is an indisputable truth — yet we have now become accustomed to Bill claiming that he is the victim of harassment and that Hoge is obsessed with him. There’s an alternative universe inside Schmalfeldt’s mind, you see, where everything is the mirror reverse of reality, and his delusions would only be of interest as a clinical study in dementia, were it not for the fact that Schmalfeldt continues publicizing his perverse fantasies on the Internet.

Enter, now, Karoli Kuns . . .

What inspired the Vile Lie-Peddler to take an interest in Bill Schmalfeldt’s imaginary victimhood? I have no idea, but she evidently decided to recycle Schmalfeldt’s intentionally dishonest (or, perhaps, delusionally paranoid) version of events at Crooks & Liars:

How Maryland’s Domestic Violence
Laws Became A Right Wing Weapon
Of Personal Destruction

You can click the headline and read it — it’s nearly 3,000 words — but permit me to excerpt just a few choice selections:

Right-wingers have discovered that it is a relatively simple trick to turn a legal process intended to protect those at risk of domestic abuse into a weapon of personal destruction. All that’s needed is a friendly judge, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, a deep mean streak, and time. On one level, this is the story of one man’s experience with vicious right-wing online operatives. On another, it’s representative of the overall right-wing strategy of using scorched-earth tactics to discredit and destroy their opponents. . . .

(In her opening paragraph, Karoli uses “right-wing” three times, which functions to prejudice progressive readers who are willing to believe any evil thing anyone says about right-wingers.)

In 2012, a group of right-wing bloggers decided to go after Brett Kimberlin — a guy with a past ripe for exploitation. . . .

(Which is not what happened, actually. There was no “group” decision, despite the conspiracy theory Kimberlin offers in his federal lawsuit. What happened was that Aaron Walker published a lengthy account of his legal battles with Kimberlin, mentioning also the role of Kimberlin’s “associate” Neal Rauhauser. My previous familiarity with Rauhauser, a disgraced Democrat political operative, caused me to take an interest in the story. Four days after I began writing about this, Kimberlin contacted my wife’s employer, ranting feverishly and accusing me of “harassing” him. This resulted in a security alert at my wife’s place of employment, which led me to depart to the “Undisclosed Location” so that I could continue covering the story without endangering my family or my wife’s employer. This action drew widespread attention, and Lee Stranahan decided to declare the next Friday — May 25, 2012 — “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day,” a declaration that resulted in the story gaining national attention. We now return to Karoli’s version of events . . .)

Schmalfeldt wrote stories in Kimberlin’s defense which took dead aim at the Breitbart cabal. In the process, Schmalfeldt became an easy proxy for their real target. Disabled and housebound, Schmalfeldt’s ability to write and speak was his outlet for activism, which he used liberally.
Schmalfeldt wasn’t gentle. In some cases, he stepped outside the boundaries of normal journalistic standards and climbed down in his opponents’ gutter. At other times, he hit them just a little too close to home for their comfort, exposing lies, funding sources and possible motives for their anti-Kimberlin campaign. . . .

OK, I’ll stop with the back-and-forth now. Anyone familiar with the trajectory of Schmalfeldt’s antics clearly recognizes that Karoli Kuns’ telling of the tale is a cloud cuckooland fantasy.

After July 5, 2012 — when a Maryland court lifted a previously imposed gag order on Aaron Walker — the Kimberlin story faded away and would have ceased to be a story at all, were it not for the fact that a discernible Enemies List (including Walker, Patterico, Ali Akbar, Lee Stranahan, Brandon Darby and others) continued to be targeted for a steady stream of harassing tactics. Mostly, this took the form of Twitter stalking, and most of it I suspected was incited or orchestrated by Neal Rauhauser. The question of Rauhauser’s motives, especially whether he was being paid by Kimberlin to mastermind this troll operation, has been much disputed. Nevertheless, Neal’s distinctive fingerprints were visible often enough (mainly because Rauhauser is such an inveterate braggart) that I inferred that the visible incidents were evidence of a vast iceberg of behind-the-scenes activity by Neal.

Such was the case when Barrett Brown began harassing me right before I left to cover the 2012 Democratic convention — provably the result of Rauhauser’s incitement — and, after Brown melted down and was arrested by the FBI, I noticed a steady escalation of harassment directed at me by Bill Schmalfeldt.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Well, I’ve never claimed that this was the case. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that after Rauhauser tried (and spectacularly failed) to use Barrett Brown as a weapon against me in September 2012, Bill Schmalfeldt became increasingly obsessed with me in October 2012. For a couple of weeks, I simply ignored Schmalfeldt’s trademark tactics — making lurid accusations and demanding that I respond — because I was busy covering the presidential campaign. But that last weekend before Election Day in Ohio, when Bill was sending me dozens of hostile messages daily, I finally took notice: “Monsters on the Internet: Sociopathic Sadism and Bill Schmalfeldt’s Madness.”

Implicit message: “Don’t mistake my silence for cowardice and don’t imagine that you are deceiving anyone about your motives.”

If Bill wanted to play games with me, he wasn’t going to be able to dictate the rules of the game and, predictably, my refusal to cooperate with his agenda enraged him to the point that, over Thanksgiving weekend 2012, Schmalfeldt sent me more than 200 hostile Twitter messages in the span of 48 hours. His motives were no secret.

Everybody saw what Bill Schmalfeldt was doing, and everybody knew why he was doing it, yet he continued escalating the harassment until, in February 2013, Lee Stranahan got fed up with it. Stranahan flew from Texas to Baltimore to swear out a peace order complaint against Schmalfeldt. John Hoge gave Stranahan a ride from the airport to the courthouse for the purpose, which is how “Destroy John Hoge” became Schmalfeldt’s Prime Directive. Hoge then decided to seek his own peace order against Schmalfeldt, which was granted in June 2013. This court order — in effect, a judicial declaration that Schmalfeldt is guilty of harassment — has been upheld on appeal, and in December 2013 the order was extended another six months.

So now, evidently hoping to generate sympathy for Schmalfeldt, Karoli Kuns has volunteered her, uh, creative abilities on his behalf. John Hoge refutes a few of her falsehoods here, and I noticed a commenter on the Crooks & Liars post employ the phrase “Hoge and McCain and ilk.” Being lumped into an “ilk” pissed me off, so I replied in a comment that I suspect C&L will delete, and which I therefore repeat here:

It is perhaps of no interest to you, but nonetheless relevant, that during this long ordeal that began (for me) nearly two years ago, I have never sued anyone, never sought a peace order against anyone, and never filed criminal charges against anyone.
The facts of this can be ascertained by anyone who cares to investigate. Likewise, any curious person can easily learn that the person who initiated this entire chain of extraordinary events — lawsuits, peace orders, criminal charges, et cetera — was Brett Kimberlin.
People can believe what they want to believe, but this does not change the facts which are, as John Adams said, stubborn things.

Their attempt to re-write history so as to transfer agency — to blame the consequences of their own actions on the innocent people they have wronged — is destined to fail. Nothing enrages the dishonest and evil so much as when honest people refuse to be intimidated. And they shriek as if they had suffered a fatal injury every time readers hit my tip jar.

Fuck you, Bill Schmalfeldt. And fuck you, Karoli Kuns.




 

 


Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, The Kimberlin Files

It’s 2014: Why Aren’t You Racist Yet?

Posted on | April 27, 2014 | 51 Comments

So, apparently, this was The Week When Everybody Became Officially Racist. First it was Cliven Bundy, and now L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling has been caught on audio saying racist — RAAAAACIST! — stuff to his hot young girlfriend, who just happens to be half-black and half-Mexican. Rich elderly white guy is OK with dating this exotic young hybrid, but he seems to perceive some kind of image issue with his girlfriend hanging out with black people.

Can this be explained? Maybe. But if you find yourself forced to explain a remark about race, face it — you’re Officially Racist.

Ditto Avril Lavigne. She made a weird music video about Hello Kitty and was denounced by Zack Beauchamp of Vox.com as having “hit some kind of Orientalist Japanese Stereotype trifecta.” Ann Althouse looked closely and saw nothing racist. Moe Lane looked closely and saw nothing racist. Ann Althouse looked again and still saw nothing racist.

And this proves what, boys and girls?

Exactly: Ann Althouse and Moe Lane are both racists — RAAAAACIST! — because they are not as sensitive and keen-eyed as Zack Beauchamp in detecting Orientalist Japanese Stereotypes.

Of course, Avril Lavigne is Canadian. And you know how those people are.

 

 

Category: Racism

Goldberg Misses His Own Punchline

Posted on | April 26, 2014 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Goldberg goes for a fairly straightforward South Park play in discussing Obama’s foreign policy, “Obama’s foreign-policy plan B”, but misses the obvious gag: the whole thing is an extended Plan B Abortion pill.

Keith Koffler enumerates, by country, most of #OccupyResoluteDesk’s non-triumphs. He’s missing my personal favorite, and Obama’s first cock-up, which was Honduras.

David Haig, as Inspector Grim, speaks to Obama for all of us:

No, Barack’s foreign policy has never been other than a phoned-in, hashtagged abortion. In his defense, it’s just never easy. As tempting as an isolationism sounds, that’s not going to work. However, Obama’s superficial non-interventionism, backed by Spec Ops guys and drones in the night, is proving an expensive lesson in how not to do it, either.

While falling short of jumping on the neo-con bandwagon, I hope the GOP can craft a foreign policy featuring principle, simplicity and strength. Such would counterbalance Obama’s chaotic, Byzantine weakness.

If we can’t have John Bolton for POTUS, let’s at least have him for Secretary of State. After the last two buffoons, we need somebody to pick up the pieces.

Category: Barack Obama, Foreigners

Reading ‘Heterophobia’: Adrienne Rich and ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’

Posted on | April 26, 2014 | 16 Comments

“[T]he failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness. . . .
“Lesbians have historically been deprived of a political existence through ‘inclusion’ as female versions of male homosexuality. To equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to deny and erase female reality once again. To separate those women stigmatized as ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’ from the complex continuum of female resistance to enslavement, and attach them to a male pattern, is to falsify our history.”
— Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980)

In recent weeks, I have been re-reading Daphne Patai’s 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, because it offers valuable insights into the ideology many readers first encountered in the ridiculous expression, “PIV is always rape, OK?”

Demonizing male sexuality, feminists have made hostility to heterosexual intercourse (PIV = penis in vagina) a persistent theme of their rhetoric for many years. When conservatives took notice of Radical Wind’s anti-PIV rant in January, many may have assumed that this was a new idea from the kook fringe of feminism, but it’s not. As I pointed out last year (“Taking Feminism Seriously”), Marxism and lesbianism are the twin pillars of feminist ideology, and have been since the 1960s. Most people don’t realize this, because feminism operates by a sort of duality: It has an exoteric rhetoric — a public discourse about “rights” and “equality” offered in mainstream venues — and an esoteric ideology, taught in advanced Women’s Studies classes and discussed in academic journals, where committed feminists are speaking to each other.

Daphne Patai, originally a literature professor, spent 10 years teaching Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts in the 1980s and ’90s, an experience that led to her 1994 book Professing Feminism (co-authored with Noretta Koertge). Her direct experience with academic feminism and extensive familiarity with feminist ideology informs Heterophobia, in which Professor Patai addresses the arguments and tactics of what she calls the Sexual Harassment Industry. Professor Patai’s experience enabled her to perceive how courts, legislators and academic theorists had incorporated into their discourse about sexual harassment many radical ideas that originated with feminist ideologues like Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly and Catharine McKinnon.

Professor Patai  begins Chapter 6 of Heterophobia thus:

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 over the past thirty years [i.e., since the late 1960s, as Professor Patai wrote this in 1998], a current that has been “theorized” explicitly by feminist scholars and agitators alike as they attack men and heterosexuality.

Here, then, Professor Patai begins to deconstruct feminism’s esoteric ideology, exposing it in plain sight for critical examination.

‘Classes Taught by Doctrinaire Feminists’

It is remarkable that feminism’s fundamental hostility toward heterosexuality was never really a secret, at least among those who bothered to pay attention to its development from the late 1960s onward as a phenomenon of the radical New Left (see “Re-Reading Susan Brownmiller”) into a coherent ideology propagated in university Women’s Studies programs. But just as no one paid much attention to latter-day New Left disciple Barack Obama until he emerged as the Democrat nominee for president in 2008, few have bothered to examine the core beliefs of feminism’s esoteric ideology, which have gained further influence since Professor Patai examined them in 1998.

Continuing in Chapter 6 of Heterophobia (pp. 133-134 of the hardback edition), Professor Patai discusses how “the antiheterosexual tenor of much feminist discourse” plays a role “in alienating ‘ordinary’ women from feminism.” She talks about the explicitly anti-male message “being conveyed in women’s studies classes taught by doctrinaire feminists eager to teach their students all about ‘compulsory heterosexuality,’ as Adrienne Rich famously put it.”

Those who are not students of feminism may be puzzled by Professor Patai’s description of Adrienne Rich’s phrase as “famous.” And this reaction — “Who the hell is Adrienne Rich?” — serves to demonstrate the yawning gulf between public awareness of feminism and the esoteric doctrine taught in Women’s Studies programs.

Anticipating this puzzled reaction, Professor Patai includes a lengthy endnote, which we find on pp. 234-235 of Heterophobia:

Adrience Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 631-60. Rich’s essay is a key document that has had an enormous impact over the past two decades. It has been widely anthologized and is regularly taught in women’s studies courses. In her recent work, [University of California Berkeley Professor] Judith Butler refers to the presumably indisputable reality of compulsory heterosexuality without even citing Rich, so well known has the phrase become. . . .

Thus, in less than 20 years, the anti-heterosexual theme of Rich’s radical essay had become so deeply embedded in the feminist theory taught at universities that its “indisputable reality” was simply taken for granted by a leading Women’s Studies scholar.

Left: Adrienne Rich in 1980. Right: Judith Butler in 2013.

“If you consider sexual desire and romantic love between men and women to be natural and healthy, you are not a feminist. . . . There is nothing natural about sex, according to feminist ideology, no biological urge that causes women to be attracted to men.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, April 10

‘Suppressed Lesbian … Since Adolescence’

You can read Rich’s influential 1980 essay online, where University of Georgia Law Professor Dawn Bennett-Alexander calls it “a major intellectual force in the general feminist reorientation to sexual matters in recent years.” A brief excerpt:

The bias of compulsory heterosexuality, through which lesbian experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible, could be illustrated from many other texts than the two just preceding. The assumption made by [Alice] Rossi, that women are “innately sexually oriented” toward men, or by [Doris] Lessing, that the lesbian choice is simply an acting-out of bitterness toward men, are by no means theirs alone; they are widely current in literature and in the social sciences.
I am concerned here with two other matters as well: first, how and why women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise; and second, the virtual or total neglect of lesbian existence in a wide range of writings, including feminist scholarship. . . .
Any theory or cultural/political creation that treats lesbian existence as a marginal or less “natural” phenomenon, as mere “sexual preference,” or as the mirror image of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations is profoundly weakened thereby, whatever its other contributions. Feminist theory can no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of “lesbianism” as an “alternative life-style,” or make token allusion to lesbians. A feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women is long overdue. . . .

Readers may wish to examine Adrienne Rich’s biography, because she was by no means a marginal “fringe” figure in feminist history. The daughter of a renowned Johns Hopkins University medical professor, Rich graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and two years later married a Harvard economics professor with whom she had three sons. Rich gained acclaim for her poetry and in the 1960s taught at Swarthmore College, Columbia University and City College of New York. She became involved in radical politics and in 1970 separated from her husband, who then committed suicide at age 46. By the mid-1970s, Rich was living openly as a lesbian, subsequently explaining: “The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.” She later taught at Brandeis University, Bryn Mawr College, Rutgers University, Scripps College, San Jose State University, Stanford University and Cornell University.

If Rich’s “feminist critique of compulsory heterosexual orientation for women” was, as Professor Patai says, “widely anthologized and . . . regularly taught in women’s studies courses” in the 1990s, how much further has acceptance of this doctrine progressed since then?

Far enough that a state university in Spartanburg, South Carolina, hosted a performance of  Leigh Hendrix’s one-woman show, “How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less,” as part of a campus feminist conference. Far enough that celebrity feminist Lena Dunham feels obligated to publicly lament her heterosexuality as a “huge disappointment.” Far enough that a progressive sex educator finds her university Women’s Sexuality course denounced as “heteronormative,” and realizes that many of her students “have never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction.”

Readers who have followed developments in the Culture War in recent decades must ask themselves: “What’s next?”





 

 


Category: Feminism

Remember When @RaniaKhalek Played ‘Count the Jews at the Nation’?

Posted on | April 26, 2014 | 33 Comments

New York University student Laura Adkins exposed the intimidation tactics of the radical campus group Students for Justice in Palestine and, as you might expect, Adkins has been relentlessly harassed online the past two days by the usual suspects, including self-proclaimed “independent journalist” Rania Khalek.

The fact that SJP is linked to Hamas? The fact that SJP was kicked off campus at Northeastern University? The fact that SJP’s faculty adviser at Northeastern bragged “that anti-Israel activism on campus has made pro-Israel students afraid to speak out”? Khalek can’t be bothered with these facts, which expose the truth that SJP is a terrorist-supporting group that uses brownshirt tactics.

Khalek supports the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, the goal of which is the elimination of the state of Israel. Last month, a blogger at the Jerusalem Post called attention to Khalek’s peculiar ethnic obsessions:

[A]n excellent article by Russell A. Berman in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which recently hosted a forum debating the BDS movement against Israel. Berman’s piece is one of several contributions opposing BDS, and towards the end of his extremely knowledgeable and well-argued critique, he points out that there is reason for concern that the antisemitism that “is part of the international context in which the debate about Israel rages on” is also affecting the debate in the US. As an example Berman cites an article by Khalek published in the The Electronic Intifada in late 2013, where she “criticized an allegedly pro-Israeli perspective at The Nation through the tried and true anti-Semitic tactic of counting the Jews among the staff writers and, not surprisingly, determining that there were too many to her taste.” According to Berman, the reaction to Khalek’s piece “from the progressive camp was closer to silence than outrage, indicating a willingness to give anti-Semitism a pass, as long as it has the correct political credentials.”
Khalek’s Electronic Intifada piece is entitled “Does The Nation have a problem with Palestinians?” She argues there — if this is what it can be called — that the Nation’s coverage of the BDS movement was dominated by the voices of Jewish writers. Dismissing the fact that “the majority of pieces in the latest debate were in favor of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS),” Khalek goes on to complain that “when it comes to Israel and Palestine, The Nation habitually reinforces Israeli apartheid by privileging Jewish voices over Palestinian ones.” According to Khalek, it is also ridiculous to believe that “four Jews and one Palestinian” could provide a “diversity of views,” as the Nation’s editor and publisher had claimed.

There are too many Jews at The Nation, according to Rania Khalek. There are also too many Jews in Israel, according to Rania Khalek.

This raises the question: What is the appropriate number of Jews anywhere, according to Rania Khalek?

Perhaps . . . zero?

 

Category: Israel

‘The Prom Was Postponed’

Posted on | April 26, 2014 | 28 Comments

Horrible news in Connecticut:

MILFORD, Conn. — A 16-year-old student was stabbed to death in the hallway of a high school here on Friday morning, the day of the school’s junior prom.
The authorities arrested a 16-year-old male student and charged him as a juvenile with murder, and the police said they were looking into reports that a dispute about the prom might have prompted the attack.
The killing occurred around 7:15 a.m., just as the school day was about to begin. Students crammed the halls of Jonathan Law High School, some giddily anticipating donning gowns and tuxedos later that day.
A scream cut the air, and there was momentary confusion as students were hustled into classrooms and told to stay. In one of the halls beneath a stairwell, Maren Sanchez, a well-liked member of the drama club known for her singing voice, lay dying.
Chief Keith Mello of the Milford Police Department said that officials had not made any rulings on possible motives, but that investigators were looking into reports that the victim had declined an invitation to the prom from the suspect, whose name the authorities did not release because he is a minor. The prom was postponed.

We have a tendency as adults to look back at high school with amusement and forget how serious some things seemed at the time. Being unhappy at 16 is a very common experience, and it’s important for kids to be reminded, “This may seem like the end of the world, but it’s not. It’s just high school. You’ll survive this disappointment and probably not even remember it 10 years from now.”

 

Category: Crime

Guess Which Clip Is The U.S. State Dept.

Posted on | April 25, 2014 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

I know that it was Stacy’s understanding there would be no quiz tonight, but unfortunate social media exigencies dictate that this blog ask the following:

Which one of these clips features the U.S. State Department?
A:

B:

C:

You can be forgiven for choosing the most professional option, A. After that, junk gets real: which of B. and C. is most likely to give a lap dance to a high school student in a classroom?

This blog will fearlessly follow the facts wherever they lead, and report back with a resolution Real Soon Now.

More at HotAir.

Update: there may be a need for a hint.

Category: Politics, Russia

‘Lynn Beisner’ Is a Pseudonym

Posted on | April 25, 2014 | 81 Comments

The first thing you need to know about Lynn Beisner — it’s right there on her profile at The Guardian — is that her name is not Lynn Beisner and thus, whenever she offers personal anecdotes as arguments (as is her habit), the skeptical reader must reply, “Oh, really?”

Why this matters, as I’ve explained before, is that feminists frequently make personal anecdotes the basis of their arguments and, as is the case with “Lynn Beisner,” these anecdotes are often offered by persons writing under pseudonyms, thus making it impossible to verify the accuracy of their stories. Grant that there are legitimate reasons why authors may wish to conceal their identities. Grant that “whistleblowers” may need to hide their identities in order to be able to tell the hidden truth. Grant all of this, and one must nevertheless maintain skepticism toward the anonymous authors who rely upon personal anecdote to justify extraordinary arguments. After Texas Democrat Wendy Davis was caught fudging her biography in January, I explained how this related to a pattern I’d first noticed when reading feminist memoirs in the 1990s:

After reading about a half-dozen of these books, I noticed . . . that many elements of their narratives were “just so” stories, i.e., unverifiable anecdotes that — coincidentally! magically! — just happened to prove whatever political point they were trying to make.

As Daphne Patai pointed out in her 1998 book Heterophobia, feminists arguments rely heavily upon “the authority of experience.” Only women can say what it feels like to suffer sexist discrimination and harassment, etc., and so first-person narratives of experience — and women’s subjective feelings about those experiences — enjoy a privileged position within feminist culture.

The problem with this tendency is that it denies the possibility of objective truth. Facts are made less important than feelings and, indeed, feelings become “facts” in their own right: So-called “hostile environment” harassment cases depend on the claim that women suffered discrimination because of how the workplace climate made them feel. How can any defendant disprove such a claim?

Feminism’s reliance on storytelling and subjective emotion reflects what Thomas Sowell has called “The Irrelevance of Evidence,” a notable phenomenon of contemporary liberal discourse.  Facts, statistics and logic never seem to make a dent in liberals’ policy preferences. Abundant evidence exists, for example, that “homelessness” is a problem directly resulting from decades of liberal policies (inter alia, deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill), and yet liberals from the 1980s onward have blamed the problem on Republican “greed” and offered only more liberal policies to “solve” the problem that previous liberal policies clearly caused!

Every public policy argument becomes warped by this preference for emotional anecdotes (“Look at this family thrown into the street after the father lost his job at the steel plant”) over objective fact — in this case, the fact that a majority of the homeless have problems of mental illness, substance abuse and, quite often, criminality.

Nowhere is the irrelevance of evidence more obvious than when encountering feminists in debate. We saw this, for example, in the way the “War on Women” narrative was built around Sandra Fluke’s claim that she and other women at Georgetown Law were horribly disadvantaged by the university’s failure to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives. It didn’t take much research to discover that contraceptives were both readily available and cheap ($33 per month at a CVS two blocks from the Georgetown campus) even without insurance, but the facts had no impact on Fluke’s appeal to “women’s rights.”

Even granted license by media sympathizers to make tendentious arguments short on facts and long on emotion, however, sometimes feminists still feel a need to tell outright lies. This was the case, for example, with University of Wyoming student Meg Lanker-Simons, who fabricated Facebook rape threats against herself, then staged a campus rally to call attention to her alleged victimhood.

This documented background of feminist dishonesty, therefore, caused me to raise a skeptical eyebrow when I encountered Lynn Beisner — or, I should say, “Lynn Beisner” — making a bizarre argument at the progressive blog AlterNet: “How Christian Purity Culture Enabled My Step Dad to Sexually Abuse Me.”

Perhaps every Christian who saw that headline had the same instantaneous reaction as I did: “How can she possibly claim that Christianity enables what it quite clearly condemns?”

We shall examine this weird argument in a moment, but first things first: It is my habit, whenever encountering a weird argument by an author unknown to me, to find out all I can about the person making the argument. Often, the biographical background yields some clue as to why they hold such unusual opinions. And what I found when I researched “Lynn Beisner,” starting with the fact that her byline is a pseudonym, only intensified my skepticism.

You may remember the character Joe Btfsplk from the old Li’l Abner comic strip: Joe was cursed with bad luck, so that a dark cloud followed him wherever he went. Lynn Beinsner is a female Joe Btfsplk, so perpetually victimized that the headline of her August 2012 Guardian column was, “I wish my mother had aborted me”:

If we want to keep our reproductive rights, we must be willing to tell our stories, to be willing and able to say, “I love my life, but I wish my mother had aborted me.”
An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. An abortion would have made it more likely that she would finish high school and get a college education. At college in the late 1960s, it seems likely she would have found feminism or psychology or something that would have helped her overcome her childhood trauma and pick better partners. She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. . . .
Abortion would have been a better option for me. . . . I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured. . . .
[My mother] was in no position to raise a child. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, witnessed and experienced severe domestic violence, and while she was in grade school she was raped by a stranger and her mother committed suicide. She was severely depressed and suicidal, had an extremely poor support system, was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy that resulted from coercive sex, and she was so young that her brain was still undeveloped. . . .
She abused me, beating me viciously and often. We lived in bone-crushing poverty, and our little family became a magnet for predatory men and organisations. My mother found minimal support in a small church, and became involved with the pastor who was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic. The abuse I endured was compounded by deprivation. Before the age of 14, I had never been to a sleepover, been allowed to talk to a friend on the phone, eaten in a restaurant, watched a television show, listened to the radio, read a non-Christian book, or even worn a pair of jeans.

Wow. Three generations of disaster: Her grandmother committed suicide, her mother’s life sucked and her life sucked, too. With such a background, what could she expect from life but pain and disappointment? Next, read her December 2013 column:

“This has never been a real marriage because I never really loved you. I married you because I thought that was what I was supposed to do.”
Those were the words that Todd, my first husband, used to end our marriage. They hit me like a physical blow, shattered me into a million little pieces of jagged pain. After the first raw wave of grief passed, I was hit by shame so intense that it felt like burning ink in my veins. How horrible must I be if my own husband, the father of my children had never been able to love me?
I begged Todd to stay with me. I tried to convince him — and myself — that I could become a person he would love. He responded as if I were crazy to have believed our marriage and his love were ever genuine, and he made it clear that me thinking so was simply an indicator of how out of touch I was with reality. He insisted that any sane person would have recognized our marriage as a sham from the start.

She doesn’t go further into the details of her divorce in that column, but she described it in a column last month at another site:

I know how much self-loathing most welfare mothers endure because, on a dark fall day in 1995, I became a single mother on welfare. . . .
Two days before, I had woken up in overwhelming pain, stuck in the rubble of what had once been my car, but was now a scene thick with chaos and emergency responders. Sparks flew from cutting equipment, the rainy night air was filled with the sound of splashing feet, metal groaning, sirens blaring, and someone screaming in sustained agony. I had no idea where or who I was.
Over the next two days, I remembered who I was and then learned that woman was now gone. In her place was a woman who had broken nearly every bone on the right side of her body, had sustained a serious head injury, and was still in grave danger of having one of her legs amputated. She was also newly single. Next to my bed in the Intensive Care Unit was a sheaf of divorce papers that a process server had delivered during one of my brief periods of wakefulness.
The papers hadn’t been a complete shock, but they were a blow. My husband and I had been having some serious differences. I believed that our marriage should continue as it had started — an agreement between two individuals. I was open to polyamory, under the right circumstances. But my husband had fallen in love with a woman named Caroline, and he wanted her to be his primary partner for life.
My husband had plunged deeply into the alternative and poly community, coming out to our families with aplomb. We would have a new family, one of choice. It might have worked out, but Caroline felt compelled to destroy every woman that she saw as competition. . . .
By the time of my accident, my reputation was ruined. My family had me pegged as a godless sexual reprobate. I lost all support from family and friends when they heard that my first husband and I were trying a polyamorous relationship.

In case you didn’t know, “polyamory” means she and her first husband were what are commonly called “swingers.”

Predictably, this lifestyle led to divorce — the same divorce where her husband told her their marriage had been a sham from the start — and just before her husband was ready to file the papers, “Lynn Beisner” nearly died in a serious automobile accident.

OK, let’s stipulate that everything “Lynn Beisner” has told us about her life in these three columns is true. Not only has her life been a constant series of disasters, beginning with the misfortune of her birth, but each of these disasters has been extraordinarily dramatic. She was not merely a poor child, but grew up in “bone-crushing poverty.” The pastor with whom her mother became involved wasn’t just a bad man, he “was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic.” Her first marriage ended because her swinger husband brought into their “polyamorous relationship” a rival who “felt compelled to destroy every woman that she saw as competition.” Her heartless husband told her he never loved her at all, and served her with divorce papers in the intensive care unit.

All of this, as I say, we will stipulate as true, if only to make the point that “Lynn Beisner” has lived a life so extraordinarily catastrophic, it is impossible to generalize from her experience and find any life lessons that would be useful to most people.

Except maybe, “Don’t be Joe Btfsplk.”

This dispiriting tale of woe and doom, however, is the biography of “Lynn Beisner,” so far as we know. There’s no way to verify it, of course, but let’s just assume all this misery actually happened to her. Now, after reading that lengthy preamble, maybe you’re ready for Lynn Beisner to tell you why “Christian purity culture” is bad:

My step-father began having problems getting erections when I was a senior in high school. How did I find out about this? He told me that he was using me to get an erection so that he could have sex with my mother.
We were very religious people. We attended a Fundamentalist Baptist Church so sexually conservative I was not even allowed to wear jeans. But still, he would sit me down and discuss what he had been thinking on those nights when he pressed my body against his and stroked my hair, the curve of my hip and the area between my collar bone and breasts until his penis was hard against my thigh. . . .

“Dear Penthouse Forum . . .”

Excuse my entirely inappropriate sarcasm, but the way “Lynn Beisner” tells this story invites ridicule. Taking her previous biographical revelations at face-value — the endless bad luck of Joe Btfsplk — now we encounter this weird story of her being molested by her step-father. Well, guess what? Elsewhere, on her own blog, she tells us a lot more about her mother and step-father:

She had married a man when I was a junior in high school who was the head of the deacon board, leader of a bus ministry and generally considered “on fire for God.” . . .
Part of my step-father being the spiritual leader of their marriage, and of me when I was a part of their family, was enforcing church attendance for no fewer than six two hour services per week and at least eight hours of additional volunteer work.

WHOA! First as Lynn Beisner previously told us, her mother “became involved with the pastor who was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic.” Next — when Lynn was a junior in high school — her mother married “the head of the deacon board,” who subsequently molested her, using her “to get an erection so that he could have sex with my mother.” And her mother is still married to that same creepy stepfather, who is still active in church.

All kinds of alarm bells are going off here. Based on her lifelong experience of disaster, however, “Lynn Beisner” doesn’t come up with a story about the danger of creepy stepfathers who maybe should be in prison. Instead, she decides to turn this into a story about the harms she attributes to “Christian purity culture.”

Complete Rebuttal in 26 Words: Next time I see a story about a public school teacher molesting a student, I’ll turn that into an argument for the abolition of public education.

From any bad experience, we can learn lessons. But when disaster follows disaster and someone gets that Joe Btfsplk attitude of hopeless doom, their embrace of resentful victimhood can make it impossible for them to learn anything useful from their experience.

Lynn Beisner wrote a blog post, “How God’s Opinion of My Pussy Unravelled Me,” which tells us more about her than it tells us about God.

Also, she says, “I too suffer from clinical depression.” No surprise.

Finally, “Lynn Beisner’s husband . . . helps her daughter shop for prom dresses.” Maybe Joe Btfsplk would see that as an ominous cloud, but Lynn Beisner seems to perceive no possibility the pattern of disaster could extend to a fourth generation.

ADDENDUM: Lynn Beisner tells us about “The Moment I Became a Feminist.” It involves an extraordinarily dramatic story.

You’re surprised, right?

 

Category: Feminism
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