The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox, 03.21.14

Posted on | March 21, 2014 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: Oh, Those Democratic Attorneys General!
Proof Positive: A Fine European Whine
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Trigger Warning – Free Speech
Doug Powers: With Biden And Kerry On Top Of The Russia Issue, Obama Focuses On Important Domestic Issue
Twitchy: Sandra Fluke Wants To #banbossy, Gets Pwned Instead


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Nancy Pelosi Calls Obamacare – Wait, I Mean The Affordable Care Act – A Winner For Democrats In 2014
American Thinker: Too Busy To Be President
Blackfive: Milblogger Heads Back To War
Conservatives4Palin: Washington Times – “Non-Partisan” EPA Going All Out To Help Democrats
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, March 20
Jammie Wearing Fools: Stunner – Obamacare Premiums To Skyrocket, Some To Triple In Cost
Joe For America: One Quote Destroys Charlie Rangel’s Racist Tea Party Lie
JustOneMinute: Bringin’ The Smart Diplomacy
Pat Dollard: Obama Looking At Handing Over $7 Billion In Military Equipment Over To Pakistan
Protein Wisdom: Slaughterhouse Four; also, Female Supremacy And The “Rape Culture” Meme
Shot In The Dark: The Government You Deserve
Stump: Vindication – IT’S NOT HARD
The Jawa Report: National Guardsman Arrested, Wanted To Help Al Qaeda, Blow Up LA Subway
The Lonely Conservative: Standing O For Rand Paul At Berkeley
This Ain’t Hell: Joseph Matthew Scott, The Pretend Ranger At San Joaquin Delta College
Megan McArdle: Please Don’t Hate Me For Gentrifying


Category: Linkagery

Washington Post Smears Koch

Posted on | March 21, 2014 | 13 Comments

John Hinderaker at Powerline shows how two Washington Post writers produced a story based on a report by “the far-left International Forum on Globalization” which falsely claims Koch Industries is “the biggest lease owner” in the Alberta tar sands, so as to create the equally false impression that the XL Pipeline is all about benefiting “the fortune of conservative Koch brothers Charles and David.”

 

Category: Media Bias

Best. Wife. Ever.

Posted on | March 20, 2014 | 21 Comments

Maura Fussell, 26, gives us reason to hope.

Sometimes, the daily grind of the news can get you down. Politics is depressing, and cable TV won’t shut the hell up about that stupid Malaysian plane. And then, while you’re clinging desperately to your last shred of sanity, you see this headline:

Society Is Doomed, Say Scientists

That pretty much settles it, right? Ever since November 2012, I’ve been fighting a sense of hopelessness, but that’s just me. Now, however, scientists say we’re doomed, and you can’t argue with science.

Could the scientists possibly be mistaken? I don’t know, but I took renewed inspiration from the example of Maura Fussell:

Our story begins with a Reston man being arrested at some point Saturday, though Arlington police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck was not sure what he was charged with. Then, around 11 p.m., a reportedly naked woman appeared at the magistrate’s office next to the county jail, demanding to see her husband. Police believe she was intoxicated. . . . The Shamrock Crawl, advertised as Arlington’s largest bar crawl, was held from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, and though Sternbeck was not certain the woman was a pub crawler, “anybody who was in Clarendon that afternoon was participating one way or the other.”
The woman “was given several opportunities to put her clothes back on,” Sternbeck said, “exit the magistrate’s office and go home in a cab. But she refused and took the charges,” which meant spending the night in the county jail. . . . She and her husband were both released the next day . . .
Maura Fussell, 26, of Reston, was charged with indecent exposure and being drunk in public.

America loves you, Mrs. Fussell!

 

Category: humor

FMJRA 2.0: Vernal Equinox Late Edition

Posted on | March 20, 2014 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Rule 5 Sunday: Take It Like A Man

Ann Coulter on Illegal Immigration and Demographics: ‘No, You’re Raping Me.’

Erika Harold For Congress: A CPAC, Rule 5 & Godliness Trifecta

Get ‘Empowered,’ Duke-Style!

FMJRA 2.0: Sweeping Up After CPAC Edition

Actual GOP Leadership On Display

Chateau de Raceur

Daniel Hannan CPAC 2014

Sarah Palin CPAC 2014 Part 1

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.10.14

Yale Girls Are Sluts

Who Is @LenaDunham’s Uncle and Why Does He Keep Making Her Get Naked?

Sarah Palin CPAC 2014 Part 2 (Seuss!)

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.11.14

‘This Is a Tragedy in the Family’: @Belle_Knox’s Horrible Disgrace

Brett Kimberlin and ‘False Narratives’

LIVE AT FIVE: 03.12.14

E-Mail to a Friend: Are We Being Too Judgmental About the Duke Porn Star?

Feminist Professors Gone Wild

‘An Honest Mistake?’ Has Brett Kimberlin Ever Done Anything ‘Honest’ in His Life?

‘I’d Had Enough of the Insanity’

Death at SXSW

Why Does Ezra Klein Hate Gays?

Two Sluts Do ‘Empowering’ Podcast


Top linkers this week:

  1. Regular Right Guy (17)
  2. Batshit Crazy News (8)
  3. Lonely Conservative (7)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery, and apologies for the belated recognition! Deadline to submit links for this weekend’s FMJRA is noon on Saturday, March 22.


Category: FMJRA Award

Also, @Belle_Knox Is a Psycho

Posted on | March 20, 2014 | 55 Comments

Somebody mentioned this in the comments the other day, but I just got around to checking it out: Duke University freshman Miriam Weeks, who has recently become notorious as porn star Belle Knox, is a “cutter,” with visible scars that show her history of self-harm. “Apparently her ex-boyfriend that cheated on her told her she was fat so she carved the word into her thigh.”

The idea that the daughter of an affluent doctor began shooting porn videos because she couldn’t afford tuition always seemed a bit strange, and her claims that doing porn was “empowering,” an expression of “sexual autonomy,” were even stranger. It is becoming obvious that she has struggled with mental health issues for many years, and the liberal media’s ostentatious posture of non-judgmentalism isn’t really the kind of help she needs. Also, it’s boring.

If you want to see how to turn an article about porn into pure tedium, go read Noah Berlatsky’s Atlantic article, “Students Who Do Sex Work.” Berlatsky doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at this startling confession from one student porn performer:

I started modeling three years ago simply because I wanted to. It was a process of trying to reclaim my sexuality and sexual presentation after a series of sexual assaults. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to ameliorate a lot of the trauma I was dealing with, which exacerbated my mental health issues. I was in college full time at that point, getting by financially with a combination of loans, scholarships, and money my parents had set aside for my education. My mental illness progressed to the point that it started affecting my academics, and I was eventually hospitalized. I had to take a medical leave.

WHOA! Sexual assaults, trauma, mental health issues, psychiatric hospitalization? I’m gonna take a wild guess that getting boned on video is not particularly effective as outpatient therapy.

But isn’t this something that common sense suggests? Do we really need case studies and social-science research to know that the porn business harbors a lot of psychologically damaged people with issues relating to sexual abuse and poor self-esteem? Non-judgmentalism is utterly irresponsible when confronted with such a situation, and kudos to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post for this fine sentence:

Letting a man ejaculate on your face is not empowering under anyone’s definition of the term.

 Belle Knox is a symptom of a culture gone mad.

 

Category: Sex

Celebrity News: ‘Flamboyant’ Skater Johnny Weir Divorces His Gay Husband

Posted on | March 20, 2014 | 28 Comments

Whenever I get bored with politics, there’s always the celebrity tabloid headlines at WeSmirch. Of course, most of these “celebrities” nowadays are reality-TV personalities you never heard of, and the stories are mostly exercises in trivial silliness.

Radar Online uses the stereotypical adjective “flamboyant” to describe former Olympic skater (and NBC Sports commentator) Johnny Weir, 29, who announced a divorce from Victor Voronov. Evidently, there were domestic violence issues in their relationship, including an incident when Voronov accused Weir of biting him:

About a month before the games in Russia, Weir’s husband filed a police report in which he alleged the three-time U.S. national champion of biting him.
Despite the allegations, the couple had appeared to have worked out their differences when they appeared in a Lyndhurst, New Jersey, courtroom, requesting a judge dismiss the case.
>Weir married Voronov in December 2011 and recently spoke about their dynamic relationship.
“A marriage between two guys is different than what I imagine a marriage between a man and a woman [to be],” he told Access Hollywood in February. “I mean, we’re both constantly trying to fight to wear the pants in the relationship.
“It’s constant fireworks,” Weir added. “It’s very boom, boom, boom.”

Uh, yeah. But if I said that — obviously, gay marriage is different — they’d call me a homophobic bigot. And “flamboyant”? Why don’t you just call him a mincing sissy and get it over with, Radar?

In other urgent celebrity news, Lindsay Lohan fired her $1,500-a-day “sobriety coach” as soon as she finished shooting her reality show for Opray Winfrey’s network, so expect her to start racking up DUI arrests and a trip back to rehab in the near future.

Also, Kim Kardashian got into some drama with her ex, Charlize Theron in a bikini, and Mick Jagger’s dead girlfriend.

Meh. It’s only slightly less boring than politics.

 

Category: Celebrities

At War With God and Nature: @AmandaMarcotte’s Darwinian Fate

Posted on | March 20, 2014 | 53 Comments

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
— Genesis 1:28 (KJV)

“I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . .
“I like not having a giant growth protruding out of my stomach. I hate hospitals and like not having stretch marks. . . .
“This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 14

Every girl should have a sister, every boy should have a brother, and an ideal family might be two boys and two girls, but things don’t always work out so neatly, which is how my wife and I ended up with six kids: In our quest to provide our eldest daughter Kennedy with a baby sister, we had four boys before Reagan came along.

Despite my joking about the Victory Through Breeding™ program, there wasn’t really an ideology behind our large family. However, by the time our youngest children were born, I was familiar with concerns about demographic decline — the problem of long-term below-replacement fertility rates which had attracted the attention of researchers like Ben Wattenberg (The Birth Dearth, 1989) and others. Low birth rates lead to economic stagnation and other social and political problems, which pro-life activists have been warning about for years.

“In order to turn things around . . . young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children.”
— Jim Sedlak, American Life League, 1999

Jonathan V. Last’s recent book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, is the latest attempt to call attention to this crisis, but because of liberal hegemony in the media and academia, most people don’t even realize there is a crisis. For the past half-century, our elite culture has been dominated by the neo-Malthusian “overpopulation” myth popularized by Paul Ehrlich, a myth fostered by a eugenics cabal led by David Rockefeller (see Donald Critchlow, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government in Modern America, 2001). Progressive feminists like Amanda Marcotte refuse to acknowledge that their “pro-choice” ideology wasn’t developed with an eye toward the rights of women, but instead originated with a racist billionaire who was worried that poor brown people were having too many babies.

A diminished sense of irony is one of the consequences of progressive ideology. If they had any concern for intellectual integrity and philosophical coherence, they wouldn’t be progressives in the first place, which is why a fanatical commitment to radical egalitarianism requires a remarkable ability to tune out the cognitive dissonance inherent to such counterfactual beliefs. This was evident in the controversy that inspired Amanda Marcotte’s weird anti-baby rant last week, namely that “the atheist/skeptic community is in an uproar on the subject of abortion” even though “nearly all non-believers are pro-choice.” The proximate cause of Marcotte’s anger — although she’s so perpetually angry she does not really need a reason to begin ranting like a lunatic — was a post by “pro-life humanist” Kristine Kruszelnicki offering non-religious reasons for protecting the innocent unborn. Among other things, Kruszelnicki pointed to opinion polls showing that 1-in-5 atheists are pro-life, a percentage that doesn’t quite square with Marcotte’s “nearly all” claims about the pro-abortion views of “non-believers.”

Facts and logic can never persuade the ideologue, and Marcotte’s beliefs are clearly rooted in emotions that are deeply irrational and intensely personal. No one who does not already share her radical feminist ideology could be persuaded by Marcotte’s arguments. She is losing, and she knows it: 50% of Americans are pro-life, compared to 41% who are pro-abortion, and the trend toward a pro-life majority is one of those facts which are incompatible with Marcotte’s worldview. This explains the wrathful vehemence with which Marcotte denounced Kruszelnicki:

[I]f wasting time typing that shit out amuses you, knock yourself out. But don’t pretend that you’re advancing the cause of free thought while doing so. That’s because rational, free discourse is predicated on the understanding that everyone involved in the debate is arguing in good faith, and I can assure you, after years of dealing with this issue, that anti-choicers are not arguing in good faith.

Marcotte describes Kruszelnicki’s arguments as “infamous,” and calls Kruszelnicki a “forced-birther.” The disproportion between Kruszelnicki’s stimulus and Marcotte’s over-the-top response is remarkable, signifying the desperate importance of abortion as the philosophical sine qua non of Marcotte’s feminist sensibility.

If killing babies is wrong, Amanda Marcotte doesn’t want to be right.

Christians may perceive in Marcotte’s wicked depravity confirmation of the Bible’s prophetic truth, for she is “full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity . . . without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful.” But when the mask slips and her ghastly hatefulness is revealed, Marcotte goes off an another deranged rant about “compulsory child-bearing” and “traditional gender roles,” in a transparent effort to distract attention from her own problems.

Ah, “the personal is political,” as the ancient feminist maxim declares, and the psychiatric root of Marcotte’s animosity toward “traditional gender roles” is obviously a sour-grapes rationalization: No man has ever wanted her to become the mother of his children, and the reject pretends to be the one doing the rejection. Her boyfriend/roommate is IT director at the Center for Reproductive Choice. No one is trying to impose “compulsory child-bearing” and “traditional gender roles” on her.

Bitter much, Amanda?

Thus the unacknowledged irony of Marcotte addressing her rant to the Darwinians of “the atheist/skeptic community.” If evolution is about the “survival of the fittest,” Marcotte is manifestly unfit, a reproductive reject, a Darwinian dead end approaching her own extinction. And as Pete Da Tech Guy points out, “By choosing not to have children, she is conceding the future to people like the Dugger family.”

It’s completely irrational, but of course, she’s a feminist.

 

Category: Abortion, Contraceptive Culture, Feminism

Premature Obituary?

Posted on | March 20, 2014 | 20 Comments

Josh Kraushaar at National Journal argues that the Tea Party is dead, while at The Federalist, Ben Domenech says that what Kraushaar interprets as rigor mortis is actually evidence of the Tea Party’s success. My own opinion on the subject is nuanced. Having been immersed in the Tea Party movement from its inception, I considered it effectively “dead” the moment in early 2012 when it became apparent that Mitt Romney would be the 2012 GOP nominee. Exactly why and how that happened has been much discussed, and nobody’s paying me to explain it all over again, so I won’t bore you.

 

Category: Tea Party
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