In The Mailbox, 03.27.14

Posted on | March 27, 2014 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: The American Left Is Pro-Choice On Exactly One Thing
Proof Positive: Alas! We Knew Him!
Zero Hedge: What Happens When A U.S. President Stops Speaking And Nobody Claps?
Doug Powers: Contradict-A-Palooza – “Not My Boss’s Business” Goal To Make It Every Boss’s Business
Twitchy: Oops! Toure Accidentally Makes Conservative Argument Against Obamacare
Erick Erickson: Matthew Yglesias Is Juice Vox Media’s Village Idiot And Liar-In-Chief

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Professor Tyler Cowen Attacked While Teaching Class At George Mason U.
American Thinker: Smearing

Climate Skeptics
Blackfive: The Real Michael Bisping (Koala Boy)
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: CA Gun Grabber Arrested For Firearms Trafficking
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin Endorses Joni Ernst For Senate In Iowa, Lisbeth Benacquisto For House In Florida
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, March 26
Jammie Wearing Fools: FBI Dumps Hate Group Southern Poverty Law Center
Joe For America: Solar Industry Headed For Disaster
JustOneMinute: Failing To Man Up In The Other Blue Heaven
Pat Dollard: Us, European Security Agencies See Massive Russian Buildup On Ukraine Border
Protein Wisdom: Reid Defends Obamacare Delay – “People Are Not Educated About How To Use The Internet”
Shot In The Dark: Carrying On
STUMP: Obamacare Watch – Do Mandates (And Prohibitions) Work?
The Jawa Report: Hump Day War Pr0n
The Lonely Conservative: Harry Reid Doesn’t Like Reporters Poking Into His Family Affairs
This Ain’t Hell: The Economics Of Veteran Unemployment
Megan McArdle: College Football Players Get A Union. Will They Get Paid?

Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry still on sale for $1.99!

MSNBC and Obama Tanking Together

Posted on | March 27, 2014 | 34 Comments

Two headlines:

MSNBC is in serious trouble
— Politico

Poll: Obama’s disapproval
rating hits a new high
— Washington Post

Hating Republicans is a poor substitute for sound policy, and it’s also not an adequate rationale for a news organization:

In a world where liberals wanted to be outraged by George Bush every night, or celebrate the rise of Barack Obama, MSNBC had a theory of the case. But now Obama’s presidency has turned into a slog, and MSNBC isn’t compelling. Prime time is just hours of what often seems like feigned outrage. And the daytime strategy — giving shows to kids in their 20s and 30s, in an apparent bid to reach the youths — is comically bad, and rendered absurd at every commercial break when the catheter ads come on.

Everybody’s chortling at MSNBC’s misfortune — Instapundit jokes that both of MSNBC’s viewers will “age out of the demographic next year” — but it’s important that conservatives not miss the real lesson here. Fox News has succeeded by offering an alternative to biased liberal news coverage, but despite being No. 1 in cable news, the market demand seems to have peaked:

In 2013, the cable news audience, by nearly all measures, declined. The combined median prime-time viewership of the three major news channels — CNN, Fox News and MSNBC — dropped 11% to about 3 million, the smallest it has been since 2007. The Nielsen Media Research data show that the biggest decline came at MSNBC, which lost nearly a quarter (24%) of its prime-time audience. CNN, under new management, ended its fourth year in third place, with a 13% decline in prime time. Fox, while down 6%, still drew more viewers (1.75 million) than its two competitors combined (619,500 at MSNBC and 543,000 at CNN).

By comparison, despite declining ratings, the three major broadcast evening news programs still reach much larger audiences: NBC Nightly News 8.4 million, ABC World News 7.7 million and CBS Evening News 6.5 million — a combined average nightly viewership of more than 22 million in 2013, about seven times larger than the 3 million total reached by the cable news networks.

That is to say, while Alternative Media have risen and Establishment Media have declined, Establishment Media still matters, and will continue to matter for the foreseeable future. MSNBC made a bet during the Bush years that there was a market for a cable network that was the antithesis of Fox News, and that bet helped MSNBC vault past CNN into second place among cable networks, but the momentum — which took MSNBC from about 350,000 primetime viewers in 2006 to about 750,000 in 2012 — couldn’t be sustained.

Conservatives who watch Fox News to get pro-GOP happy talk are much more numerous than people who tune into MSNBC to get anti-GOP angry talk, but that is cold comfort to Republicans when the Democrat in the White House was able to get re-elected in large measure because MSNBC actually reflects the private opinions of the people who produce mass-market news at the major networks.

Scott Walker: “It’s About Reform”

Posted on | March 27, 2014 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

I, for one, have had enough “borrowing

it forward”:

“I think what we’ve shown in Wisconsin is that it’s not about austerity — it’s about reform,” Walker said. “And what I mean by that is if we just come in our state and cut things across the board that means you cut your priorities as much as you cut things that aren’t quite as important. We reined in collective bargaining. We put more power back in the hands of the taxpayer at the state and the local level. I think nationally we need that same sort of reform no matter who is running for president. I’d slash the marginal tax rates for everyone across the board — go to a simpler, more flat tax.”

We should hasten to add that, in stark contrast to #OccupyResoluteDesk, Walker actually has a record of, you know, reforming.

The MacKinnonite View: Power, Gender, Sexuality and Social Oppression

Posted on | March 26, 2014 | 44 Comments

From time to time, it seems necessary to remind readers that there is no such thing as “moderate feminism.” Feminism is inherently radical — indeed, revolutionary in its aims — and if you are not a radical, you are not a feminist. This is not what I say, this is what feminists themselves say. Women who think of themselves as “moderate feminists” simply have not paid attention to actual feminists.

While searching for a quote earlier today, I came across a complete PDF of Katharine MacKinnon’s 1989 book, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. MacKinnon is not a marginal fringe character. She was influential in the development of sexual harassment law, and this particular book was published by Harvard University Press. These excerpts are from page 54, and from pages 113-114:

[W]oman’s social inequality is not an inevitable attribute of her biology but biologically inherent in the heterosexual sex act. The current meaning of sexual relations between women and men is taken as biologically inevitable. The only thing that is not inevitable is woman’s social oppression through them. Woman’s biology oppresses her only when she relates to men. The basis of the inequality of the sexes here is seen as the inequality inherent in heterosexual intercourse as a result of sex-specific anatomy. To transcend or avoid this in personal life by having sexual relations only with women — lesbianism — eliminates the gender-based underpin­nings of sexual inequality in this view. [Quoting Jill Johnston, 1973:] “For if the phrase biology is destiny has any meaning for a woman right now it has to be the urgent project of woman reclaiming herself, her own biology in her image, and this is why the lesbian is the revolutionary feminist and every other feminist is a woman who wants a better deal from her old man.” Biological problems have biological solutions. . . .
Sexuality, then, is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed, embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual ‘dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality.
Feminism has a theory of power: sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualized. Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex and the distinctively feminist account of gender inequality. Sexual objectification, the central process within this dynamic, is at once epistemological and political. The feminist theory of knowledge is inextricable from the feminist critique of power because the male point of view forces itself upon the world as its way of apprehending it.

MacKinnon is not a stupid woman. Her writing is nuanced and carefully worded and, for example, you can’t say she explicitly endorses Jill Johnston’s viewpoint — she superficially maintains objectivity by use of the phrase “in this view,” so that she (or her defenders) can say she is merely describing a certain perspective, and may dismiss as unfair any critic who points out that MacKinnon does not explicitly reject Johnston’s lesbian separatism.

However, skipping forward from page 57 to page 113, we find MacKinnon saying that “heterosexuality . . . institutionalizes male sexual ‘dominance and female sexual submission,” from which arises “gender inequality” because of “the social meaning of sex.”

It is difficult to read this as anything other than a condemnation of heterosexuality, per se, and especially of the male role in heterosexual relationships. Perhaps there are men and women who could enjoy a relationship that would not offend MacKinnon’s feminist sensibility, but I have a hard time imagining it. What she seems to wish to dictate are relationships in which men have no agency, no initiative, no prerogatives, and no rights. It is not equality, but absolute female hegemony, which MacKinnon seeks.

However strange this anti-male, anti-heterosexual view may seem to most people — including some women who might (mistakenly) think of themselves as “feminists” — it is in fact very influential within academic feminism, a view taught in all university Women’s Studies programs. And as this MacKinnonite perspective has suffused its influence throughout academia and, from there, throughout society — in culture, in politics, in law — what is the practical result? Men on Strike, as Helen Smith calls it.

If male-female relationships are merely a contest for power, as MacKinnon proclaims, then these relationships will necessarily be a source of constant conflict, and who needs that? Men therefore avoid relationships, keeping their interactions with females as casual as possible — “friends with benefits” or short-term “hook-ups” devoid of emotional content — so as to limit the risk of conflict.

Of course, women will blame men for this unsatisfactory stalemate in the War of the Sexes, but that’s what feminism is really about: Whenever a woman is unhappy, some man must be to blame. What MacKinnon calls “the feminist critique of power” means that all men are always wrong about everything, because “woman’s social oppression” deprives women of responsibility for their own problems. Ultimately, feminism teaches that every woman is a victim of patriarchy, and she can only escape by becoming a lesbian.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Of Course, It’s Florida: Teenage Boy Goes to Gay Nightclub and Gets Butt-Raped

Posted on | March 26, 2014 | 31 Comments

Look, I don’t want to get into any slut-shaming, victim-blaming or homophobia here. But some things can only happen in Florida:

For 18 minutes, Justin Hand looks into the camera and recounts how he was raped.
In two videos on YouTube titled “I Was Raped Last Sunday,” the 18-year-old Hand (he turns 19 next week)

tells the story of how he went out on a normal night in late January to Parliament House, a gay club in Orlando, Florida. There, he met a stranger and ended up going back to his hotel room, where the man assured him he wouldn’t try anything, because his sleeping roommate was around anyway. When Justin tried to leave, the man attacked and anally raped him. . . .
“I am not a virgin, I partake in casual sex, and put myself in a situation that was a mistake. And I want people to understand that it’s still rape.”

Thanks for sharing that, Justin. And let that be a warning to the rest of you teenagers: Don’t ever go to Florida. They’ll rape you.

‘Fat Justice’ Feminists Blame Reagan, Praise ‘Communism and Socialism’

Posted on | March 26, 2014 | 76 Comments

“We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.”
— Ronald Reagan, 1964

“Feminism sees women as a group and seeks to define and pursue women’s interest. . . .
“Feminist theory sees the family as a unit of male dominance, a locale of male violence and reproductive exploitation, hence a primary locus of the oppression of women.”
— Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)

“It is one thing to ask us to rethink body image issues; it is quite another to intersperse the terms ‘patriarchy’ and ‘white supremacy’ throughout a decidedly unscientific lecture that claimed to be about health.”
— Paige Willey, Swarthmore Independent

You might think that by now everybody understands feminism is an ideology of man-hating Marxist lesbian baby-killers.

God knows, I’ve explained this often enough, but apparently not everyone reads my blog, and so a Swarthmore University sophomore was shocked to encounter the truth at a campus event last week:

Fat Justice and Feminism
Nicole Sullivan and Cora Segal, two Boston-based feminist organizers, will lead a workshop on fat justice, which is a political stance that seeks to address the ongoing exploitation and oppression of fat people. From the war on obesity to the rise of deadly bariatric surgery, there is an unprecedented attack on fat bodies. This workshop seeks to map out the focal points of this oppression, while delving into the complex history of white supremacy and misogyny that created it. We will set forth an analysis and call to action to make fat justice a priority in women’s movements.
Refreshments provided.
Funded by the Women’s Resource Center, Dean Henry, History Department, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Interpretation Theory, and Worth Health Center.

“Refreshments provided.” (Insert punch line here.)

Any student of Marxist theory must recognize that wherever you encounter “exploitation and oppression” discussed in the context of a “complex history” in pursuit of “justice,” the “organizers” are going to be Bolshevik comrades, no matter what the ostensible topic of their “analysis” may be. Where’s Joe McCarthy now that we really need him?

Highlights of Paige Willey’s account of the “Fat Justice” seminar:

• Body Mass Index (BMI) is an entirely erroneous and useless metric, as it was invented by a “white, male, French astronomer,” Adolphe Quetelet. Thus BMI has “direct links to a white supremacist, patriarchal, colonizing, exploitative force.” . . .
• For Segal and Sullivan, the 1960s and 1970s were notable because they welcomed “communism and socialism as viable alternatives to capitalism and exploitation.” . . .
• Ronald Reagan is partially responsible for all suffering of fat people, as he “f*cked everything up.” . . .
• “There is no scientific consensus whatsoever that fat people need to exercise more, or that fat is unhealthy. There is no evidence that [being] fat causes diabetes. Medical professionals are informed of this so-called knowledge by lobbying groups.”

Which comes first: the Marxism, the lesbianism or the fatness?

Willey was too polite to mention it, but a Vice.com writer who attended a previous “Fat Justice” seminar in Boston last fall noted that both Segal and Sullivan admit they are “what American doctors would consider to be overweight.” And there’s this from Willey: “Sullivan self-identified as an ‘angry, man-hating lesbian’.”

No surprise there, nor are we surprised by Willey’s report that “Segal and Sullivan . . . made clear they were involved in other movements against police brutality, oil pipelines, and abortion regulations.” That is to say, feminism is a radical egalitarian ideology that arose within the 1960s New Left and, as such, feminists reflexively align themselves with all similar movements that are anti-capitalist, anti-religious and anti-American.

‘Fat Justice!’ http://t.co/R0pJbLwesx @campusreform Obviously, this woman is a BMI victim. Blame Ronald Reagan! pic.twitter.com/6332Bd79Da

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) March 26, 2014

It is easy to make jokes about fat feminists, just like it was easy to make jokes about smelly hippies in the 1960s, but as absurd as they may seem, these lunatics are in deadly earnest about their ideologies. The hippies and feminists and other anti-American radicals have taken over our education system and have spent decades indoctrinating young people into their Marxist worldview. How else to explain why 60% of voters ages 18-29 voted to re-elect Barack Obama?

Paige Willey’s article about the “Fat Justice” seminar has been blogged at conservative sites everywhere: The Washington Free Beacon, Campus Reform, the Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit, and so forth. But how many conservatives have bothered to explain the Marxist ideology and New Left origins of the feminist movement? How many conservatives are taking feminism seriously? People need to wake the hell up.

Republicans lost the 2012 election in part because the “War on Women” meme resonated with those who have been indoctrinated in the feminist worldview. If Democrats run Hillary Clinton in 2016, do you think we will be able to ignore feminism as a major political issue?

FLASHBACK: “Roses are red, Violets are blue. The heteronormative patriarchy Is raping you.” http://t.co/RkOvnaagRj #tcot

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) March 26, 2014

In The Mailbox, 03.26.14

Posted on | March 26, 2014 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: To Crush Your Enemies, To See Them Driven Before You, and To Hear the Lamentations of Their Women
First Street Journal: Jonathan Pollard Should Never Be Released
Michelle

Malkin: My Trip To The Pot Shop
Twitchy: White House Tries To Spin Latest Obamacare Non-Delay

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: “I’m Joni Ernst. I Grew Up Castrating Hogs On An Iowa Farm…”
American Thinker: Michelle’s Hard-Knock Life Story Comes To China
Blackfive: Cybersecurity Employment
Conservatives4Palin: Palin – Mama Grizzlies Roaring Again!
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, March 25
Jammie Wearing Fools: Paul Krugman Calls The Koch Brothers “Perfect Villains” And “Serious Evildoers”
Joe For America: Walking Dead Spoiler For Rush Limbaugh
JustOneMinute: The Eternal Genius Of The Spotless Mind
Pat Dollard: White Heterosexual Students Banned From Public University’s Diversity Classes
Protein Wisdom: Jeb Bush Praises Illegals As “Risk Takers”, Finds A Common Core Ally In Hillary Clinton
Shot In The Dark: Open Letter To Every Single News Reporter In Minnesota
The Jawa Report: This Is What You Get For Thinking Outside The Box In Today’s Military
The Lonely Conservative: How The EPA Makes Bad News About Its Regulations Disappear
This Ain’t Hell: More “Help” For Members Of The Military
Megan McArdle: Silicon Valley’s Age Problem

Justices Impersonating Accountants

Posted on | March 26, 2014 | 53 Comments

by Smitty

Kagan went on to say that other U.S. businesses are “voluntarily” dropping their health insurance coverage for employees.
“You know Hobby Lobby is paying something right now for the — for the coverage,” Kagan said. “It’s less than what Hobby Lobby is paying for the coverage. There are employers all over the United States that are doing this voluntarily.”
Chief Justice Roberts interjected that this was in opposition to what Hobby Lobby presented in its lawsuit.
“I thought — I thought that part of the religious commitment of the owners was to provide health care for its employees,” Roberts said and Clements agreed.
“Well, if they want to do that, they can just pay a greater salary and let the employees go in on the exchange,” Sotomayor said.

Listen Sotomayor and Kagan, you brace of bimbos: you can slap a “Constitutional” label on the homesick abortion that is ObamaCare, but you can’t stop it from making you look like clueless idiots. How Hobby Lobby does its accounting is irrelevant to the truth that the law you found Constitutional is a steaming crock.

Maybe you think that you can wear down the resolve of the American people.

Train them to dig life on your Progressive Plantation. But will “elections have consequences” in November? Over time, are we allowed to repent of the abject foolishness that has allowed DC to accrue too much power over every aspect of life?

Or are you just going to ignore what happens, should the GOP retake Congress? Are we going to see more attacks on the Koch brothers and the Tea Parties, as our the Godless Commies who are our purported betters undertake “shaping operations” in order to train us to love Progress?

With the Hobby Lobby case, it's hard for Progressives to advance their cause AND maintain the fiction that they care about the Constitution.

— Keystone Keynesian (@smitty_one_each) March 26, 2014

And do read the ObamaCare blog comment of the day. This thing is a virulent cancer. The GOP had better not harbor hope of making peace with it.

Related, via Hot Air Quotes of the Day:

“One religious group could opt out of this and one religious group could opt out of that, and everything would be piecemeal and nothing would be uniform,” Kagan warned. “Religious objectors would come out of the woodwork.”

In other words, kind of like the Amish, or Congress:

Along with eschewing cars and many other modern technologies, the descendants of 18th-Century German immigrants who practice the Amish and Old Order Mennonite religions, have effectively opted out of Obamacare, along with most federal safety net programs.
A little-known provision of the law with its roots in a 1950s battle over Social Security exempts these communities from the individual mandate, an element of the Affordable Care Act that requires most Americans to purchase health insurance in some form.

I guess Kagan’s point is to warn that our Balkanized system could get kinda fragmented, or something. WHY ARE WE PAYING THIS IDIOT?

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