The Other McCain

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

Tennessee Worker Liberty Offends UAW; NLRB Appeal Ensues

Posted on | February 22, 2014 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

We’ve been getting our schadenfreude on over the Volunteers not volunteering for UAW’s auto-economic asphyxiation. But, as Ted Kennedy’s career demonstrated, evil doesn’t die easily. The NYT:

The United Automobile Workers asked the National Labor Relations Board on Friday to order a new unionization election at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., asserting that the union’s loss last week was because of improper interference by the state’s lawmakers.

The complaint filed with the labor board asserts that statements made by Senator Bob Corker and some state lawmakers amounted to “threats” that swayed the VW workers to vote against the U.A.W. In a stinging defeat for the union, workers at the Chattanooga plant voted 712 to 626 against joining the U.A.W., even though the company did not oppose the unionization effort.

You see, disagreement with your organized crime overlords is always “improper interference”. Whatever the Union does to enforce control must be the proper sort of interference, one supposes.

The bad news here is that the NLRB is pretty much a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. Just how far they’re willing to go to push a Senator remains to be seen, and should be interesting.

via Hot Air

Category: Labor Unions, Tennessee, Unions

Because @kmcdonovgh Knows You’re a Victim of Heteronormative Patriarchy

Posted on | February 22, 2014 | 77 Comments

Salon.com assistant editor Katie McDonough:

Evangelical Christianity makes visible — through purity pledges and doctrine assigning women the role of man’s “helpmate” — the norms and expectations about female virginity and subservience that so often remain hidden in the secular world. While it may be tempting to draw a red line around Christian fundamentalist views on gender and sexuality to distinguish them from supposedly evolved “secular” culture, there is considerable, uncomfortable overlap between the two. . . .

(Watch out! Heteronormative patriarchy is comin’ to get ya!)

Susan Patton is a joke, but she’s not the only person arguing in mainstream publications that women who have sex outside of marriage are setting themselves up for disaster and heartbreak. (Hi, Ross Douthat!)
In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal last week, Patton warned single women, “The grandmotherly message of yesterday is still true today: Men won’t buy the cow if the milk is free.”
This is purity culture passed off as “commonsense” wisdom, which was published in a “serious” and secular paper.

Well, she goes on from there, all of it inspired by an article by Kiera Feldman in The New Republic, about which I’d written a few hundred words that got gobbled up by a computer glitch, and I don’t feel like re-writing it. Basically, if you don’t want to travel The Strait and Narrow Way, there are many on-ramps for the Highway to Hell. The idea that somebody is forcing women to adhere to a Christian moral code is one of those persecution fantasies that feminists cherish as justifying their eternal vigilance for “choice.”

Matt Barber takes a whack at the feminist piñata:

In what amounts to little more than an anti-Christian hit piece on Patrick Henry College . . . Ms. McDonough says that it’s time for American women to reject all those biblically imposed “gender complementarian” norms and do away with our “toxic purity culture” once and for all.

Nobody is trying to stop Katie McDonough from whoring around, so why does she feel threatened by “purity culture”? Why do feminists reject moral criticism of fornication — that’s “slut-shaming”! — but accept criticism of fornication by radical lesbian feminists who denounce heterosexual PIV (penis-in-vagina) as “always rape“?

If you study feminist writing carefully, you discover that the ideology presents young women with two alternatives:

  1. Have sex with lots of men, because that’s “empowering”!
    or
  2. Be a lesbian, which is even more “empowering”!

The one option feminism emphatically condemns is traditional Judeo-Christian moral teaching about pre-marital chastity.

“[T]he idea of ‘virginity’ in our culture . . . [is] an extremely problematic concept, bolstering up a highly heteronormative hierarchy of what is and isn’t defined as sex.”
— Jess McCabe, “‘Virginity’ is an outdated concept”

“Even the way we see sexual intercourse is male-defined! . . . What we understand about this concept of virginity, in a sense, invalidates queer sex. . . .
“Society has embedded within our minds that when a woman loses her virginity, she loses something . . . All of this isn’t such a surprise of course when we remember that for centuries, women have been seen as property and not individual human beings. The concept of virginity reinforces this idea, that a woman’s worth is intrinsically linked to her sexuality.”
— Hew Li-Sha, “A Feminist Interpretation of the First Time”

“The idea of your first penis-in-vagina sexual encounter being something significant and life altering (well, for women anyway) has origins in women being considered property.
“That is to say, virginity is a social construction that came about because of the commodification of women. . . .
“Virginity is heteronormative.
“Virginity assumes that penis-in-vagina sex is somehow a special type of sex that is different from all others.
“This means that there is an assumption that engaging in heterosexual vaginal sex is the standard (and should be) for your sexual activities.
“Heterosexuality is the norm, and virginity just works as reinforcement to this.”
— Erin McKelle, “Losing Virginity for Good”

Take notes — this will be on the final exam. The basic feminist idea is that if you have moral objections to screwing around, you’re not only a victim of the patriarchy, you’re a gay-bashing hater, too. You’re invalidating “queer sex” and “bolstering up a highly heteronormative hierarchy.”

Is it a coincidence that this rhetoric sounds like it belongs in a book, Lesbian Pick-Up Lines for Women’s Studies Majors?

 

Category: Feminism

Republican Party Staring Victory Right In The Face, Wetting Itself

Posted on | February 22, 2014 | 25 Comments

by Smitty

It isn’t really that difficult to summarize, people. The country is on the wrong course. Technology is being used to enslave, not liberate. You want liberty, and Progressivism is producing legislation/regulation combinations that look like this, printed out: Once more, with feeling: “managed” liberty is not liberty. So, the GOP is all over liberating us from the clutches of homo bureaucratus, right? No’ so fast. The GOP is also of that ilk, and strangely incapable of putting its leadership where its rhetoric has been. Thus, we see VodkaPundit pointing out that the cause of Statism is far from a lost one this November:

It’s almost enough to make a conservative weep. While Tom rates the chances of a GOP takeover at about 55.4% (with 18 seats in play, compared to Sean’s 17), that’s still within the Democrats’ ability to hold on. Five likely or leaning R races is not a comfortable place to be, even this early on.

But it gets worse.

AK, AR, CO, VA — these should be fairly easy pickings for the Grand Old Party, but the best of them are all tossups at this stage, and Udall as previously mentioned seems likely to win in CO. Cook and Rothenberg each have only four likely or leaning R races, not enough to win control. Sabato is the outlier at six.

The IRS was used to localize and strike a blow at Tea Party leadership, and, well, the voters seem to be accepting it. The GOP elite, more interested in power than actually backing up the party platform, seems strangely comfortable with all of this. Managing a diminishing piece of the pie seems easier than expanding the pie to include those not read in to the overall Statist plan.

I’ve typically fallen on the side of those advocating working to reform the GOP from within, but perhaps a re-assessment is in order.

via Instapundit

Category: Election, Republicans

Bad to Worse for Brett Kimberlin

Posted on | February 22, 2014 | 14 Comments

Brett Kimberlin got bad news with this past week’s decision by Public Citizen attorney Paul Alan Levy (and also the Maryland chapter of the ACLU) to defend Ace of Spades in the federal lawsuit that John Hoge calls Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al.

Kimberlin got worse news, perhaps, on Friday when attorney Mark Bailen filed his motion to dismiss on behalf of the defendants Erick Erickson, Red State, James O’Keefe and Simon & Shuster. Bailen does an excellent job of documenting key aspects of the case, notably (a) Kimberlin’s status as a public figure with a notorious reputation, and (b) the lack of specificity in Kimberlin’s allegations.

The vague nature of Kimberlin’s allegations with regard to his claims of defamation is an aspect of the case that you probably have to be a First Amendment fetishist to understand. Winning a libel suit in this country is very difficult, because the First Amendment has been interpreted by courts to grant very wide latitude when it comes to reporting and commenting about public figures. This is the bottom-line explanation for why Brett Kimberlin’s lawsuits, both the federal RICO suit and the Maryland lawsuit Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., were filed pro se — any competent attorney would have advised him he doesn’t have a case.

Having once consulted an attorney myself in 2007 regarding one particular lying son of a bitch, I remember my buddy Bert the Samoan Lawyer explaining to me that I was a public figure under the Sullivan precedent, and this would make it practically impossible for me to win a libel judgment. This is just the way the law is — lying sons of bitches are usually in the clear, if the target of their lies is a public figure per the Sullivan precedent. (Sarah Palin could tell you all about it.)

If the law protects lying sons of bitches, certainly it must protect people who tell the truth about lying sons of bitches.

“The Wizard of Odd,” as Time magazine called Brett Kimberlin, is not only a liar, but also a public figure, and so therefore any competent attorney looking at this situation would have declined to take his case. In fact, Paul Alan Levy indicates Kimberlin tried to get him to help with the RICO suit and Levy told Kimberlin “that his campaign to suppress criticism though litigation had rather gone overboard” — which was our basic point to begin with, to say nothing of the other forms of harassment Kimberlin’s critics have endured.

We cannot forget the threat Kimberlin sent to Patterico in October 2010: “I have filed over a hundred lawsuits and another one will be no sweat for me. On the other hand, it will cost you a lot of time and money.” That could be construed to indicate vexatious intent, i.e., that Kimberlin sues people as a means of harassment and intimidation and, in Mark Bailen’s Friday filing in the RICO case, he included a crucial footnote.

“Kimberlin’s claims … are sufficiently meritless to suggest bad-faith or vexatious conduct, justifying an award of attorneys’ fees as a sanction,” Bailen argues in a footnote on page 31, citing the 2004 award of attorneys’ fees to the defendants in the Byrd v. Hopson case, in accordance with “dismissal of plaintiff’s ‘baseless’ claims, which alleged a ‘wide-ranging conspiracy against her’ that was guilty of civil rights violations, RICO violations, and state law claims, some of which were barred by the statute of limitations.”

Not being familiar with Byrd v. Hopson, I am not in a position to judge the resemblance between the issues in that case and the “meritless” Kimberlin RICO claim, but considering how many defendants there are in this case — some of whom have yet to file their motions to dismiss — what would the total cost of the defendants’ attorneys’ fees be? Many tens of thousands of dollars, for sure, and if the judge were to award  attorneys’ fees to the defendants . . . Well, it would be a lesson that the students of Acme Law School would not be likely to forget any time soon.

 

BOMBER SUES BLOGGERS




 


Category: The Kimberlin Files

Quote Of The Half-Decade @TedNugent

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 23 Comments

by Smitty

Bad Ted; bad (emphasis mine):

“I do apologize – not necessarily to the President – but on behalf of much better men than myself, like the best governor in America, Gov. Rick Perry, [and] the best attorney general in America, Greg Abbott [of Texas],” Nugent said.

“I apologize for using the street fighter terminology, like ‘subhuman mongrel,’ instead of just using more understandable language such as ‘violator of his oath to the Constitution,’” Nugent continued. “I apologize for using the term. I will try to elevate my vernacular to the level of those great men that I’m learning from in the world of politics.”

Category: Barack Obama, Celebrities

Joseph Ellis Underscores The Need For The Convention Of States

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 54 Comments

by Smitty

Ellis at the L.A. Times serves a moot point as though it were wisdom:

But, seriously, a second Constitutional Convention? It could never succeed, chiefly because the secrecy, elitism and the rest of 1787 reality could never be duplicated in our time. (And ought not be.) Besides — and here I feel an obligation to defend the legacy of the founders — the current gridlock in Congress is not a function of anything in the language of the Constitution.

Gerrymandering and primary election politicking are surely part of the problem. So too is the plutocratic character of our political culture in what has become, in effect, a second Gilded Age. But the core problem in getting legislation through the House and the Senate are procedural rules adopted by both bodies over the last century.

In the Senate, the culprit is the filibuster. Its history is long and labyrinthian, but, in the form it has assumed over the last 30 years or so, a supermajority of 60 votes is required for passage of any and all legislation. (The “nuclear option” weakened the filibuster when applied to some presidential appointments, but not to legislation.)

I think these are tangential points, at best.

  • The House has been frozen in size since 1910; it is relatively less representative.
  • The States as such have had no voice in DC since 1913 and the 17th Amendment. Senators are far more beholden to their party than their state, and generally rich enough to ignore the peasantry back home.
  • The beloved IRS has had eminent domain over the American wallet since 1913 and the 16th Amendment. Recently it has been an iron rod in the service of the White House.
  • The Federal Reserve has successfully demolished the purchasing power of the dollar since 1913.

In response to this, Michael Farris is offering the sort of leadership that the GOP would, were the Republican elite not a pack of anemic, spavined, emasculated examples of the species homo bureaucratus. John McCain, you broken down old tool, I mean you.

An Article V convention, properly controlled and pondered for years beforehand to get it right, (in other words, the precise opposite of ObamaCare), is Exactly. What. We. Need.

We’re going to recover this country from Progressive collapse, Ellis. Do try to keep up.

via HotAir headlines

Category: Constitution

Blame Bush!

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 32 Comments

Or, maybe, blame Karl Rove for the dumbed-down culture of the Republican Party that leads to stupid and unnecessary defeats. Everybody today is talking about Alex Roarty’s National Journal article, “The GOP’s Talent Gap,” which echoes a lot of the complaints one hears from Republican tech consultants and operatives:

The turnout experts, TV whizzes, and all-around gurus of the Grand Old Party have been outnumbered and outsmarted by their adversaries, who have spent a decade retrofitting their entire political infrastructure. The result is a dizzying talent gap between the two parties’ political classes, one that shows few signs of closing as the 2014 midterms begin. In some ways, the GOP is years behind on solving a problem that has no quick fixes.
The chasm is widest in technology, an area where Democrats have innovated heavily while Republican tactics ossified. But the data and digital divide, while getting most of the attention, is only a symptom of a larger problem that cuts fundamentally to how the Republican Party operates — not just at a tactical level but also a philosophical one. The well-worn pathways of the party’s operatives, in which every low-level staffer commits his or her career to becoming a well-paid TV specialist, must change. . . .
A party that celebrates individual achievement must learn to better share information and work together to form a new way of politicking—a practice Democrats have emphasized for years. For conservatives, that will smack of a collectivist mind-set they detest as a matter of public policy. But a top-to-bottom change in how the GOP’s political leadership thinks is exactly what many of its own strategists argue is necessary to catch up to Democrats.
“If you think [the] reason you lost to Obama is because you didn’t have a database, that’s just a fundamental misunderstanding,” said Patrick Ruffini, one of the party’s foremost digital consultants. “The problem lies not so much in not having those specific things. The problem lies in a culture.”
Tech-savvy consultants use the word “culture” a lot as they try to convince party leaders that closing the gap isn’t about finding the next technological widget. It’s about transforming how the party conducts its campaigns, from operations that rely heavily on TV and conventional wisdom to data-driven efforts that reach across all media. Most important, it requires that staffers on those campaigns, from campaign manager to rank-and-file workers, overhaul not just what they do but how they think.

You can read the whole thing. I’d add a couple of caveats:

  1. Good candidates win, bad candidates lose. Politics is really a lot more simple than the gurus and wizards would have you believe. Despite what anyone tells you about high tech, running a campaign is not rocket science, and a successful campaign requires a good candidate — or, at least, a candidate who is not so bad that he’s doomed to defeat from the outset. Barack Obama is a very bad president, but he was a very good candidate, and his success has a way of making Democrat strategists look a lot smarter than they actually are. A party that nominates a guaranteed loser like John McCain for president cannot blame the campaign staff for the inevitable defeat.
  2. Greed and egomania are killing the GOP — Yes, I’m talking about Karl Rove, who has been cashing in on his dubious reputation as “The Architect” for years, and whose American Crossroads super-PAC is a ginormous black hole where stupid rich Republican donors have thrown away millions of dollars for nothing. Rove has become a sort of role model for up-and-coming operatives who play by the same rules: It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, as long as you maintain a reputation as a genius so that people keep paying you the big bucks.
  3. Stupid money buys stupid results — Ultimately, the blame for the Republican Party’s systemic problems can be traced to the mega-donors like Sheldon Adelson, who think they understand politics as well as they understand whatever business they made their money in. They don’t, of course, and so the mega-donors are the pawns of whatever “expert” advisers they listen to.
  4. Media bias still matters — It is important, in considering the relative fortunes of the two major parties, to keep in mind that about 90% of America’s journalists vote Democrat. The GOP is always doomed to be sailing into gale-force headwinds of hostile media coverage, and whatever strategy the “experts” have offered to combat that prejudicial disadvantage, it ain’t working.

Ultimately, however, I blame Bush. Fairly or not, Bush’s reputation as a dimwit — his drawling malapropisms, etc. — alienated an entire generation of smart young kids who weren’t really excited about the American Conquest of Mesopotamia. The catastrophic disaster of the Iraq War permanently tainted the GOP among intellectuals, and the Republican Party hasn’t come to grips with that “brand damage” issue, primarily because the people running the GOP are unwilling to admit that the Bush presidency was a failure.

 

Category: Politics

How to Hate Your Parents

Posted on | February 21, 2014 | 16 Comments

Too many people go through life in a search for scapegoats, seeking someone to blame for their unhappiness, so as to avoid having to confront the fact that they are responsible for their own problems. Whatever their problem is, someone must be blamed, and that someone cannot be themselves, because if they ever were to accept responsibility for their disappointments and misfortunes, their entitled worldview — their status as Special Snowflakes™ — would crumble into dust. Therefore the Great Scapegoat Hunt continues, and some of this blame-shifting is perversely marketed as “self-help.”

Now, I love Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, and so I don’t want this to be misinterpreted as criticism of her, but she tweeted out an article by one of her podcast guests that struck a nerve with me.

Peg Streep’s article “Daughters of Unloving Mothers: 7 Common Wounds” may be helpful to some women seeking to understand their troubled relationships with their mothers, and learning how to deal with the consequences of these relationships. But it also resembles the kind of gooey feel-good psychobabble approach to life that is at the heart of so much modern emotional misery.

In a way, you can blame Sigmund Freud for this trend.

The Viennese quack’s psychoanalytic theories located the sources of all unhappiness in early childhood, and every neurotic hypochondriac was encouraged to think that their problems were rooted in various unresolved “conflicts,” with the result that the family was depicted as a nightmare incubator of mental trauma.

We are a few decades past the Freudian heyday of the 1950s and ’60s, and the neuroscientists have long since dethroned the psychoanalysts as the chief “experts” in the mental health field, but the legacy of Freud lives on in the nervous sense of parental incompetence in which parents are afraid that their child will be permanently warped if they are not raised in the expert-approved way. And the Freudian legacy also endures in the way unhappy people tend to blame their unhappiness on childhood misfortunes, for which they ultimately blame their parents. If kids called you “fatso,” or you didn’t make the cut for varsity cheerleader, somehow this explains your adult problems and, if you follow the psychoanalytic method, it all goes back to Mom and Dad.

This is a dead-end trip, the negation of personal agency.

Good mental health does not begin with a resentful backward glance at our unhappy past. It begins in the here and now, with the idea that we are ultimately authors of our own destinies.

Nobody has perfect parents and a perfect childhood, and contemplating the variation of imperfections can be enlightening. But chances are your parents were more or less average, and your childhood was not much more unfortunate than the average. In fact, in my experience, the people most prone to resenting their parents are actually quite fortunate — they come from middle-class or upper-middle class backgrounds and are themselves usually well-educated and affluent. However, their comparatively privileged backgrounds often equip them with a sense of entitlement, and when their expectations are not met, they seek scapegoats. This is where Special Snowflakes™ Syndrome kicks in.

What is lacking — what we as a society have lost in the century or so since Doctor Freud taught us to second-guess our “impulses” and blame our problems on “complexes” — is the Stoic sensibility, the idea that enduring hardship without complaint is a virtue.

Our 19th-century ancestors — my Alabama dirt-farm forebears, for example — did not have the luxury of sitting around wondering why they weren’t happy. They had to work from dawn to sundown just to put food on the table, and the Culture of Complaint was alien to their worldview. Toiling at hard physical labor simply to avoid starvation has a way of making “happiness” more tangible, less a matter of abstract and transient emotion. It is only in the comfortable affluence of middle-class life that people care about “self-esteem” and other such psychobabble nonsense. When survival is taken for granted, ironically, “happiness” becomes harder to obtain.

OK, so that’s my rant about that. You can now go listen to Amy Alkon’s podcast interview with Peggy Streep about her book, Mastering the Art of Quitting — which is actually a good idea for a lot of people. My decision to quit the Washington Times in 2008 proved in hindsight to be a genius move. After I left, the place went to hell, and most of the people who stayed under the new management (people who thought I was crazy for quitting when I did) were laid off over the course of the next two years.

Sometimes you find yourself in untenable situation, where you feel trapped, and the tendency is to blame others for the situation. Regardless of whose fault the situation is, however, the only person you can control is yourself, and taking responsibility for your life sometimes requires you to sing that old Johnny Paycheck song, “Take This Job and Shove It.”

 

Category: Intellectuals
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin