The Other McCain

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

Internet Douchebag Patrol

Posted on | April 2, 2014 | 113 Comments

Look, it’s not as if there were a shortage of actual news for me to blog about today. For example, my friend Shaun McCutcheon won a landmark Supreme Court decision today, and there’s all kinds of commentary about McCutcheon v. FEC.

Here is a guy from Alabama who has bought me beers whose name is forever destined to be cited as a legal precedent and yet, I feel myself constrained merely to make brief notice of the decision, because the Internet is swarming with douchebags today.

I’m talking about you, Gregory Bernstein of Vanderbilt University.

Do I need some overprivileged college freshman to lecture me about “rape culture”? No, I most certainly do not. I’ll quote your ridiculous Huffington Post sermonette only briefly:

Rape culture is a culture in which we allow responsibility for sexual violence to be shifted from the rapist to the victim. Rape culture is a culture in which our first reaction upon learning about an alleged assault is to doubt victims, to ask what they were wearing, or what they were drinking. Rape culture is a culture in which myths and misconceptions about rape are allowed to be taught as truth.

Two words for you, Greg: Individual responsibility.

Cultures don’t rape people. Rapists rape people. What is objectionable about these endless “rape culture” lectures is that they represent an effort to demonize all men, to create a collective responsibility for crimes committed by individuals. Or, allegedly committed, as the circumstances in some cases are strongly disputed.

“Reasonable doubt” was all the rage after O.J. Simpson’s wife and her boyfriend got their throats cut, but let two drunk college kids get into an argument about whether she was sober enough to consent to sex last night, and anyone who mentions “reasonable doubt” is condemned as a slut-shaming, victim-blaming misogynist.

Stop preaching, Greg, as if we were ignorant fools in need of your enlightenment. Everybody is against rape, except rapists.

The problem, which is rampant on university campuses, is that there is a Hook-Up Culture, a Friends With Benefits Culture, and a Let’s Chug Vodka Until We’re Nearly Comatose Culture, all of which lead to situations in which “consent” is a he-said/she-said dispute, where evidence is ambiguous or non-existent, and where some people want us to disregard all due process protections for the accused.

But here, Greg, let me quote you briefly once more:

It’s time for individuals as well as colleges and universities to re-teach what it means to have consent. Consent is active, continuous, and given freely. Consent requires sobriety. Consent can be withdrawn. Consent to one sexual act is not consent to all sexual acts. “No” doesn’t mean “convince me.”

Restraining my urge to offer a sarcastic reply I’m sure I would regret, let me say this: You’re attempting to repeal human nature.

Such is the feminist “rape culture” project in its pure essence. As I’ve said before, the argument boils down to, “Shut up, because rape.”

All men must submit to feminist re-education, so angry lesbians can teach them to be as meek and harmless as geriatric eunuchs.

“Do I have your permission to get an erection, Amanda?”

Here’s some advice for college girls: If you are reasonably attractive and in the proximity of vigorous, manly, robust young fellows, be aware that such fellows are all savage sex-crazed animals who dream of passionately thrusting their rigid manhood deep inside you.

On the other hand, if the guys around you are pathetic Vanderbilt wimps like Greg Bernstein, you’re safe from all that.

Now, run along like a nice boy, Greg. We certainly wouldn’t want you to miss your next Women and Gender Studies class.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex

‘She Keeps Score’

Posted on | April 2, 2014 | 68 Comments

“Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining,” Colonel Fletcher says in The Outlaw Josey Wales. For the benefit of those readers not fluent in Redneck, permit me to translate: “Don’t screw me over and pretend like you’re not screwing me over.”

Washington, D.C., is a town crawling with thousands of selfish, cowardly, dishonest, backstabbing piss-ants and — reflecting on my decision in hindsight — I often wish I’d never left Georgia in 1997. Where I come from, a man who does good work is respected for his abilities. In D.C., the only abilities that matters are skillful deceit and treachery.

“The Red Wedding” in Game of Thrones is a daily ritual in D.C.

When you’re in a fight — and I’ve survived a few — you find out pretty quick who your friends are, because they will rush in to defend you and won’t stop punching until the fight is over.

Every man is custodian of his own honor. If an honest man says he has been injured, who will tell him that he is mistaken? Nothing infuriates me more than when someone directly insults me, and then pretends that I am wrong to take notice of their insult.

“Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.”

Being a peaceful man by nature, there are many insults I choose to ignore, but when I deign to take notice of an insult, I don’t expect my friends to question my judgment. If I am wrong — if the person who dissed me is not a lowdown worthless polecat — time will tell, and the responsibility for the dispute is mine alone. Selah.

“Honor culture” is not something you need an anthropology class to learn if you’re from the South. The first warning you’ll get if you insult a man — or his girlfriend — is likely to be a punch in the nose, and it’s rather difficult to protest that you intended no offense while the man is kicking you in the head. (Being a natural-born smart-ass, I share this useful wisdom learned from direct experience.) The reasons for this redneck tendency to fight over perceived insults are deeply rooted in culture, and often lamented by critics of the South, but the alternative to an “honor culture” is the kind of dishonorable backstabbing that typifies life among the cosmopolitan elite, such as the cowardly scum of Washington, D.C.

If you volunteer to be a doormat, you can’t complaint about the footprints on your back. Ignore too many snubs and insults, and pretty soon you’ll be snubbed and insulted routinely. You will notice, then, that Michelle Malkin calls attention to how Frank Luntz and Kellyann Conway sucked up to Stephen Colbert after his stupidly insulting “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong” episode.

Really? I mean, really? In a fight between Malkin and Colbert, you’re gonna side with Colbert? Unfortunately, Luntz and Conway weren’t the only conservative to make that foolish mistake:

Last week, American Spectator contributor Bill Zeiser wrote a blog item with the unfortunate headline, “Michelle Malkin Is Wrong.” The topic of the dispute — Stephen Colbert’s tasteless use of anti-Asian slurs — is interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to the point I wish to make, for the sake of Mr. Zeiser and anyone else who may read this now or in the future: Michelle Malkin keeps score.
On your short list of “People You Never Want to Go to War Against,” be sure to include her name at or near the top, because Michelle Malkin will win that war.
Bill Zeiser is a young fellow, and perhaps did not consider the foolish impropriety of his gesture when he decided to draw attention to himself with such a headline as “Michelle Malkin Is Wrong.” It would be most unfortunate if The American Spectator were to become collateral damage as a result.
The topic of the dispute is, as I say, ultimately irrelevant to the nature of the insult. One may disagree without being disrespectful, and if Mr. Zeiser does not think Michelle Malkin deserves respect, then (a) he needs to do some research, and (b) he needs to consult a psychiatrist, because he’s crazy. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator. Zeiser expressed remorse on Twitter this morning, and perhaps The Boss will consent to let him live, but I hope the lesson is clear.

 

Category: Michelle Malkin

In The Mailbox: 04.02.14

Posted on | April 2, 2014 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Trigger Warning – Is That You, Liz Warren?
Michelle Malkin: Dear Mr. Colbert – Me So Stupid. You So Funny!
Twitchy: Thousands Of Gun Rights Supporters Rally In Albany Against SAFE Act


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: The Big Picture On Obamacare’s Politics
American Thinker: Democrats’ Sixty-Year War Against Conservative Voices
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin’s Own Final Four Bracket For America’s Future
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, April 1
Jammie Wearing Fools: LA Times Pulitzer Prize Winner – Leland Yee Might Be A Bad Guy, But KOCH BROTHERS!
Joe For America: Reverend Graham – Obama And Holder “Have Turned Their Backs On God”
JustOneMinute: We Shoulda Hired The Smart Regulators
Pat Dollard: Group Tied To Democrat Senator Attacks Triple Amputee Vet – “You Should Have Lost More Than Your Limbs”
Protein Wisdom: DNC Chair Can’t Think Of A Single Obamacare Fix
Shot In The Dark: An Idea Whose Time Is At Least Three Years Away
STUMP: Obamacare Watch – Obamacare’s Fools
The Jawa Report: One Shot, Six Kills
The Lonely Conservative: GOP Candidate For NY Governor Has Kids Opt Out Of Common Core Testing
This Ain’t Hell: Marines Take Flag From Hippie
Megan McArdle: Venezuela Wants To Spread The Suffering


In The Mailbox will be on hiatus until April 9 while I am Minnesota with family and friends and the animes and the mangas.
The FMJRA will also be delayed until then, and Rule 5 Sunday will get a double helping on April 13.
Y’all behave yourselves, now.


Category: Linkagery

‘Unintentionally Heteronormative’!

Posted on | April 1, 2014 | 110 Comments

Readers will please pardon my long silence this evening, but I was doing deep research on (yet another) long post about feminism, the completion of which will have to wait because . . . this:

Emily Nagoski is a Ph.D. “college health educator in Massachusetts.” Both an atheist and a progressive, Nagoski has “worked for well over a decade in the field of sexuality education and has grown into an impassioned advocate for social justice through sexual fulfillment.”

All of which is to say, no one could accuse Professor Nagoski of being a homophobic right-wing Christofascist. (Like us.)

So, in the fall semester of 2010, Professor Nagoski was eight weeks into teaching an entry-level course in Women’s Sexuality when she gave her lecture on the subject of “gender”:

After it, I received an email that, among a great deal else, described my curriculum — the entire curriculum, mark you — as “unintentionally heteronormative.”
Which made me stare, with one eyelid twitching, at my computer, because it means that for the last 8 weeks I have been failing, for two hours each week, over and over again, to make the most fundamental point of the class.
Because my class is neither unintentional nor heteronormative.

What’s the problem? In a word, science:

I’m, like, SO active in not assuming that anyone has any particular sexual orientation or gender identity and in teaching students not to make assumptions, to think critically about the science and the politics that live in the science. And of course I have an entire lecture on gender variation and another entire lecture on sexual orientation and identity (that’s next week).
But I AM teaching that humans are a sexually reproducing species wherein some have sperm (males) and some have eggs (females).

(Oops. Is it still legal to say that in Massachusetts?)

I suppose I’ve been relying on students to find their own way to embracing biology as a valuable way to think about sex. But this point of view is so foreign to many of them, many of them Sociology or Women’s Studies majors who have never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction, many politically active around these issues without ever having studied them academically. And I suppose it was too much to ask that they get there on their own.
I wanted them to find their way to the notion that it’s not “heteronormative” to recognize that sex is an evolutionarily adaptive reproduction strategy that, in humans, involves males and females; it’s just our biology, and there’s a complex, mutually interacting relationship between the biological and the social. I’ve been working toward that all semester. But they have not gotten there.

You see where the advocates of Progress and Equality have led us: The basic biology of sex is now politically incorrect, so that even an avowed progressive cannot escape condemnation for the unforgivable Thought Crime of preferring facts to theory.

Professor Nagoski might want to invite me up as a Women’s Sexuality guest lecturer. My daughters have been instructed in the subjects of “Boys Have Cooties” and “Keep Your Britches On,” which I would argue are the most valuable lessons of all.

“Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”
— Matthew 19:4-6 (KJV)

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Gays, Science, Sex

Voodoo and Welfare: $2 Million Methamphetamine Bust in Florida

Posted on | April 1, 2014 | 20 Comments

Florida: The Crazy State!™

LAKELAND — Nearly $2 million worth of methamphetamine was seized and 13 people arrested in what Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd is calling one of the biggest meth busts they’ve had in recent years.
In a press conference Wednesday, Judd laid out the details of the bust, known as Operation Hoodoo Voodoo, which involved 25 suspects distributing drugs across county and state lines, a stockpile of military-grade weaponry and a Voodoo priest. . . .
“We seized about 44 pounds,” said Judd. “That’s 20 kilos of pure methamphetamine.”
Investigators said drug lord Javier Flores, also known as “El Don,” managed large scale methamphetamine shipments to Lakeland, Florida, Atlanta, Georgia, and Las Vegas, Nevada through southern California from Mexico. The organization included a network of couriers, managers and distributors.
Flores would consult a Voodoo priest who would provide predictions, prophecies and readings regarding the organization’s decisions and welfare, officials said.
“This is Polk County vernacular, how we hoodoo the Voodoo man,” said Judd. “The day we served all the search warrants and made all the arrests, he told them, ‘Don’t worry about it, everything is fine.’
“Well, I agree with the Voodoo man, everything is fine. Polk County is safe and there’s a lot of drugs not in central Florida.”

Tucked down at the very end of the story:

Officials said that of the 25 suspects involved in the organization, 11 of them are currently receiving federal/public assistance.

 

Category: Crime, Florida

Yes, ObamaCare Kills Jobs

Posted on | April 1, 2014 | 39 Comments

File this under “Not Exactly News.” Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of basic economics understood that the complex and burdensome system of mandates in ObamaCare would impede job creation. But nothing is true until the “experts” say so, I guess:

The Republicans just got a big gift from the Congressional Budget Office: It’s going to be a lot easier for them to call Obamacare a “job killer.”
That’s because the budget office’s new economic report, released Tuesday, says the health care law will cause Americans to work fewer hours — enough to be the equivalent of 2 million fewer jobs in 2017.
The latest number is nearly three times as high as the budget office’s previous prediction, and it’s supposed to rise in later years to the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs in 2024. . . .
The projection will put the White House, and especially red-state Democrats, in an even more awkward position heading into November. Until now, they’ve mostly had to worry about stories of canceled health plans and, of course, the botched website rollout. Now they’ll need to figure out how to counter, or at least explain, the new CBO job figures.

There are two Americas. In one America, people understand economics. In the other America, people vote for Democrats.

It might help to read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. Just sayin’ . . .

 

Category: Barack Obama, Economics, Health Care

Sir Dana @Milbank, White Knight

Posted on | April 1, 2014 | 51 Comments

Being a liberal means you have license to speak for the oppressed, as the enlightened and beneficent custodian of their interests. White male Dana Milbank goes “mansplaining” a Women’s History Month Event because ladies don’t understand this stuff:

The conservative minds of the Heritage Foundation have found a way for Republicans to shrink the gender gap: They need to persuade more women to get their MRS degrees.
The advocacy group held a gathering of women of the right Monday afternoon to mark the final day of Women’s History Month — and the consensus was that women ought to go back in history. If Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s mantra is “lean in,” these women were proposing that women lean back: get married, take care of kids and let men earn the wages.

See? Mona Charen, Mollie Hemingway and Karin Agness shouldn’t worry their pretty little heads. They should just outsource their thinking to the gallant Sir Dana Milbank, and let him speak on their behalf. He’s got an Honorary Vagina, you know.

And hey, it’s not like there are any facts involved:

An unmarried woman with children is much more likely to be poor than her married counterpart. According to the National Poverty Center, “Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2010, 31.6 percent of households headed by single women were poor, while 15.8 percent of households headed by single men and 6.2 percent of married-couple households lived in poverty.” Those aren’t numbers made up to scare women into voting Republican; they’re facts.
According to a 2013 Gallup poll, a whopping 56 percent of 18 to 34 years olds are unmarried men and women who want to get married. In contrast, only 9 percent are unmarried and not interested in getting married. . . . The desire to be married isn’t something conservative scam artists made up; it’s something that most young adults want.
Nor is it only conservatives who are pushing for women with kids to work part-time or not at all. In 2012, a whopping 67 percent of mothers of minor children surveyed by the Pew Research Center wanted to either work part-time or not work. That’s what women say they want, not what conservatives say women want.

That’s from Katrina Trinko, who is merely a woman, and not a feminist like Sir Dana Milbank, Knight of the Honorary Vagina.

 

Category: Feminism

Why Damon Linker Is Wrong To Say That Christianity Demands Pacifism

Posted on | April 1, 2014 | 39 Comments

by Smitty

Now, as a retired veteran, I’ll come under accusation of rationalizing my actions. Fair enough. But there is a simple explanation for why, according to Linker’s subtitle, “In the teachings of Christ, there is no endorsement of a just war”: Christianity is about the individual; war is about nations.

Thus, what we have here is a fallacy of composition. To claim that, because Christians should subdue their own flesh, and therefore should not go around kicking other’s flesh translates into pacifism is simply wrongheaded. It also ignores the whole Word of God. Read the Book of Judges, for example. (There was once a day when judges walked the earth who didn’t need their flesh kicked, John Roberts.)

Pacifism is a luxury. Forgive those who wrong you. Pray for them. But just because Christ was crucified, and the disciples (traditionally) tended toward horrid demises is does not make it a requirement for you to seek to be a doormat. The Holy Spirit may call you in some special way to take one for the team, as when a soldier lays it down for the comrades.

Nor am I tacitly endorsing Team America: World Police here. Like it or not, the U.S. is coming to a critical point in our post-WWII maintenance of a pax Americana. We can only “borrow it forward” so much more. If Damon Linker could articulate a consistent foreign policy with lower costs, that would be great. But basing military policy on pacifism is neither Christian nor wise.

Category: Culture, Religion
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