The Other McCain

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

German Union Threatens U.S. Jobs

Posted on | February 19, 2014 | 25 Comments

After workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga voted to reject a United Auto Workers contract, most friends of free labor breathed a sigh of relief, but a deal that gives German workers a seat on the VW board may threaten the Tennessee workers’ jobs:

A Volkswagen board member is threatening to withhold future investments in its Tennessee facility if the workers do not unionize, according to Reuters.

“I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in theUnited States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the south again,” said Bernd Osterloh, head of VW’s works council.
“If co-determination isn’t guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor” of potentially building another plant in the U.S. south, Osterloh, who is also on VW’s supervisory board, said.

A weird side-effect of globalization.

 

Category: Labor Unions

‘Feminist Dogma’

Posted on | February 19, 2014 | 25 Comments

The claim by radical feminists that heterosexuality is a form of oppression imposed on women by male violence — “PIV is always rape, OK?” — has shocked many people who don’t pay attention to trends among intellectuals in academia. Yet this extreme anti-male view has been “mainstream” among feminists for many years:

The [1998] Houghton Mifflin Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History contains an entry by E. Kay Trimberger on “Heterosexuality,” which . . . summarizes feminist dogma unproblematically:

Sexuality is not private, but is political and related to power. “Compulsive heterosexuality” is part of a power structure benefiting heterosexual males at the expense of women and homosexuals. This inequity is justified by an ideology that sees heterosexuality as natural, universal, and biologically necessary, and homosexuality as the opposite. The system also is reinforced by legal sanctions and violence against women (rape, battering, incest, and murder) and against lesbians, gays and transgendered persons (verbal harassment, physical assault, and murder).

So, “heteronormativity” is imposed by “a power structure” and a “system” whose means of enforcement are rape, assault and murder. Feminism teaches women that the only way they can escape the patriarchy’s violent oppression is to become lesbians.

If you’re not a lesbian feminist, you are pro-rape and pro-murder.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

 

 


Category: Feminism

Olympic Pussy Riot

Posted on | February 19, 2014 | 22 Comments

Some days, the news is like an acid hallucination or a scene from a science fiction dystopia, and you feel as if you’re a Jeopardy contestant in an alternative-universe: “I’ll take ‘Headlines That Sound Like Sideshow Acts‘ for $400, Alex.” You have to ask, if Russia bans Pussy Riot, how about a peaceful Pudenda Protest? Or maybe a Scrotum Mob counter-demonstration?

 

Category: Russia

In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Becomes a First Amendment Cause Célèbre

Posted on | February 19, 2014 | 33 Comments

One June 4, 2012, Ace published a blog post that began, “I’m writing a post about what’s happened to Ali Akbar.”

That post was cited by Brett Kimberlin as “evidence” that Ace was part of a vast conspiracy. Now, it’s like a latter-day Dreyfuss case:

Convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin’s federal lawsuit against bloggers and journalists is “an attack on free speech,” a prominent First Amendment attorney said Tuesday, announcing that he would represent an anonymous blogger who is a defendant in the case.
Paul Alan Levy of the non-profit group Public Citizen noted that he had once represented Kimberlin, at the time a federal prison inmate, in a case where Kimberlin’s First Amendment rights were at stake. However, Levy said, Kimberlin is now threatening the rights of others in his attempt to use his current federal lawsuit to obtain the identity of the popular conservative blogger known as Ace of Spades: “Among the defendants in the action is an anonymous blogger whom Kimberlin sued for allegedly ‘imputing’ that Kimberlin was involved in SWATting. . . . Because the blog post said nothing of the kind, I agreed to represent defendant ‘Ace of Spades’ in opposing Kimberlin’s request for judicial permission to pursue discovery to identify Ace of Spades.” . . .
In his court motion on behalf of Ace of Spades — whose defense is also supported by the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — Levy argues: “Protection for the right to engage in anonymous communication is fundamental to a free society. … Not only his conservative adversaries but other bloggers attentive to free speech issues have taken Kimberlin to task for improperly using the courts as a weapon against his critics, a technique that they call ‘lawfare.’ … For example, several bloggers have taken Kimberlin to task for using a subpoena to identify one Aaron Walker, which resulted in Walker’s being terminated from his employment, and then pursuing a series of peace orders in Maryland state court which led to Walker’s arrest because a state trial judge believed that Walker’s having blogged about Kimberlin was a violation of a previous peace order.”

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator. I doubt Kimberlin v. Ace of Spades will ever become a landmark Supreme Court ruling, something your grandchildren will read about in histor4y books, but crazier things have happened, so you never know.

 

Category: Ace of Spades, Constitution, The Kimberlin Files

Liars Gotta Lie, Failures Gotta Fail

Posted on | February 18, 2014 | 39 Comments

Thanks to The Lonely Conservative for inspiring the headline: I have just seen a motion to dismiss Brett Kimberlin’s ludicrous federal RICO suit — Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al. — as regards the defendants whom Kimberlin has failed to serve, and this motion includes the following beautiful words:

Plaintiff Has Failed to Serve
Anonymous Defendant “Ace of Spades”

It is obvious that Plaintiff does not know the identity of the person or person(s) blogging under the pseudonym Ace of Spades (“Ace”). This is demonstrated by Plaintiff’s recent seeking of third-party subpoenas for information that might lead to Ace’s identity. Plaintiff’s egregious delay in identifying this Defendant should not be permitted to stall the progress of the instant lawsuit. Given Plaintiff’s lack of service on Ace after 120 days, the instant lawsuit should be dismissed against that Defendant.

Yeah, tough to serve a subpoena on the Forest Moon of Endor.

In case you didn’t know it, identifying (“doxing”) Ace of Spades has been a pet project of Neal Rauhauser’s since 2011. One of the ways I knew that the pro-Kimberlin “Breitbart Unmasked” site was connected to Rauhauser was that in 2012 there were a couple of posts there (which may have been deleted since) speculating about Ace’s identity/location. Why Ace? Well, Ace did some of the best work on the 2011 WeinerGate scandal and Neal was obsessed with that, which is also how Neal became obsessed with Patterico.

Keep in mind that Rauhauser’s obsession with Ace pre-dated the whole “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin” uproar. Here we are, 21 months later — and long since anybody gave a damn about Anthony Weiner — and Rauhauser’s grandiose vengeance fantasy lives on in the form of Ace being named as a RICO defendant.

You can click here to see how Rauhauser was bragging in December about what a wonderful thing this RICO suit was going to be, all the defendants were going to prison, yadda yadda yadda.

Fuck you, Neal Rauhauser.

 

Category: Ace of Spades, The Kimberlin Files

Evil Triumphs as @Clementine_Ford Misquotes Edmund Burke

Posted on | February 18, 2014 | 37 Comments

There are rumors that Australian feminist Clementine Ford has read books, but no one has verified this, and it may be idle gossip.

What Ms. Ford unquestionably has in abundance, however, is the certainty of her own intellectual and moral superiority, so that we — the unenlightened and flawed — are expected to be grateful that she occasionally condescends to share her wisdom with us:

The universal male decency we keep hearing about is largely a myth.
Sure, most men might not be bad. But it takes more than ‘not being bad’ to be ‘actually good’. . . .
Whenever conversation is raised about patriarchy, violence and the lack of equality that still permeates our society, I find myself inundated with messages or comments from men offended by the discussion of male perpetrated violence. Most men, they take ostentatious pains to remind me, are ‘decent’ — so why do I insist on tarring all of them with the same brush? It’s not fair and it’s not true. If I want their ongoing support, I had jolly well better start being nicer to them.
Leaving aside for a moment the arrogance it requires to listen to a conversation about the gendered violence suffered by women and make it about their hurt feelings, let’s define what they mean by ‘decency’.

The minute a woman invokes “patriarchy,” you know where the discourse is heading: Universal female victimhood by universal male oppressors. No man may question these claims except at peril of being labeled a hateful misogynist. Ms. Ford continues:

This is apparently what ‘being decent’ looks like. It’s a conditional expression of privilege that pays lip service to equality but doesn’t actually go out of its way to defend it, and whose benevolent support ends the moment it asks us to actually do something. Worse, it balks at this request for demonstration, as if it is enough for our decency to remain an impotent figurehead, and an insult worse than all the discriminations put together to challenge its legitimacy. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a man tell me that if I want his support to continue, I had better start being nicer to him…well, then I wouldn’t have to worry quite so much about the wage gap.
Edmund Burke once wrote, “In order for evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to do nothing.”

Except that Edmund Burke never actually wrote that, of course. The quote usually attributed to Burke is, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” but this is evidently apocryphal, and the nearest thing to it that Burke actually wrote is, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” The quote’s nearest approximation by any famous writer is John Stuart Mill: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

So other than getting wrong the one (attempted) direct quote in her column, what else has Clementine Ford accomplished? Glancing over her archives at Australia’s Daily Life, I see nothing but column after column of feminist cant. She is one of these women, like Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valenti, whose only qualification as a “journalist” is a fanatical devotion to feminist ideology, and who are occasionally invited onto TV and radio shows to give The Woman’s Point of View (because, of course, feminists arrogate to themselves the authority to speak for all women). There is a sort of Gilded Ghetto of such Professional Feminists, where a certain number of columnists, authors and Women’s Studies professors are reasonably well-paid for their services to the advancement of this ideology. Below the top tier of visible Celebrity Feminists, toiling away in obscurity and comparative poverty, are the wannabes and drones, mostly grad students and women who staff non-profit activist organizations of various kinds.

It’s a racket, really, but once a woman decides to major in Women’s Studies, she is unlikely ever again to question the Critical Theory framework of historical oppression, no matter what humiliations and failures await her in the career scramble to obtain recognition as a Professional Feminist. No, to the feminist ideologue, her every disappointment is interpreted as evidence of male oppression, requiring still greater struggle against misogyny. If she spends 15 years in the racket only to find herself permanently struck as a mid-level drone in an NGO — well, blame the patriarchy!

If Clementine Ford wishes to quote Burke, here’s an excellent excerpt:

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. . . . I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. . . .
Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!

Never did ten thousand swords defend Clementine Ford against insult, and why should they? She scorns the “unbought grace of life,” and rejects “that subordination of heart” necessary to chivalry, so that she is left with nothing but bitter whining about equality, impugning all men for the lack of “decency” she alleges.

 

Category: Feminism

Does #LGBT Care About a Religious Extremist Burning a Gay Bar?

Posted on | February 18, 2014 | 42 Comments

Apparently not, if the religious extremist is named Musab Musmari, who police say “poured gasoline on a carpeted stairway and set it ablaze” inside Seattle’s “popular gay nightclub” Neighbours on New Year’s Eve, when 750 people were inside the club.

The gay-rights movement in America is entirely owned by the Democrat Party, and is therefore concerned with destroying everything — capitalism, Christianity, patriotism — that is an obstacle to the advancement of the Democrat Party agenda. So if the Seattle arsonist had been a Christian extremist or some other person who could be labeled “right wing,” the headlines coast-to-coast in the Democrat-controlled press would be “HATE CRIME IN SEATTLE” and this story would have rivaled the Chris Christie “Bridgegate” scandal as a subject for endless discussions on MSNBC.

Only this blind partisan fanaticism, the product of decades of anti-Republican propaganda aimed at the gay community, could produce a media “cone of silence” around Musab Musmari’s crime: News of an Islamic terrorist attack might have encouraged some people to vote GOP, and the Official Gay Movement can’t let that happen.

 

Category: Gays, Islam, Terrorism

Testing Masochists Will Understand. . .

Posted on | February 17, 2014 | 6 Comments


Thank heaven that’s done with me.

Category: Uncategorized
« 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