The Other McCain

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

Venezuela: ‘The Government Is Taking Us into the Slaughterhouse’

Posted on | February 16, 2014 | 25 Comments

In Hugo Chavez, the peasants at least had a demagogic “hero” they believed in. Chavez’s successor lacks that dictatorial charisma, and people are starting to notice that socialism sucks:

Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, the target of a police manhunt for allegedly inciting violence that left three dead at anti-government protests, said Sunday that he will surrender himself after one more demonstration.
Lopez said in a video that he didn’t fear arrest but accused authorities of trying to violate his constitutional right to protest against President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government. . . .
Rioters burned trash and threw stones at police in the city’s Plaza Altamira. In return, authorities used water cannons and tear gas to disperse crowds numbering more than 1,000.
There is growing anger here at soaring inflation — which is up to 56.3% over the past 12 months — and a murder rate that, according to local NGOs, is one of the world’s highest.
“The government is taking us into the slaughterhouse,” said Valentina Ortiz, 33, a pediatrician in Plaza Altamira. “We’ll just be able to get food and water soon.”
Like Ortiz, other protesters vowed to rally until things change.
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes, a week, a month. We’ll be here every single day,” said Jose Pérez, 34. “We are at war.”

Socialism: People keep on trying it, and it keeps on failing.

 

Category: Venezuela

Miracles Still Happen

Posted on | February 16, 2014 | 34 Comments

Perhaps my method — relentless sarcasm — is not ideal, but somebody’s got to be Andy Sipowicz. Jesus gets to be the “Good Cop”:

As a professor of English and women’s studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. . . .
After my tenure book was published, I used my post to advance the understandable allegiances of a leftist lesbian professor. . . .
I began researching the Religious Right and their politics of hatred against queers like me. . . .
As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview, but Christianity is a supernatural worldview. . . .

Spoiler alert: “Hate” wins. Way to go, Good Cop.

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Gays, Religion

Dissent Must Be Abolished!

Posted on | February 16, 2014 | 22 Comments

Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) is a totalitarian commissar trapped in a college professor’s body. This phenomenon — trans-Stalinism — has become increasingly common in American academia over the past 30 years, as Marxist intellectuals strive to liberate universities from the reactionary oppression of bourgeois dissent.

So, a well-meaning columnist for a Canadian paper asked whether the trend toward supporting “transgender” identity in young children is really as good an idea as certain activists nowadays would have us believe. In fact, some therapists and academic researchers have profound concerns about this trend. Predictably, Margaret Wente’s column pushed Lemieux’s button.

THIS CANNOT BE PERMITTED!

Wente is “revolting . . . a crackpot” and, most horrifying to Lemieux, Wente is “being paid to write these atrocious columns.”

How dare she? A journalist committing journalism for money!

Certified Reactionary Hater™ Donald Douglas quotes Wente at length.

Wente’s column doesn’t seem like transmisogynist homophobia to me, but Commissar Lemieux reserves to himself the authority to detect and denounce deviation from the Approved Ideology.

OBEDIENCE IS FREEDOM!
DISSENT IS OPPRESSION!
DOUBT IS HATE!

You will think what the Commissar tells you to think — or else!

 

Category: Education, Gays

About the @EllenPage #Lesbian Thing …

Posted on | February 15, 2014 | 78 Comments

While the whole freaking online world — to say nothing of the practitioners of allegedly objective journalism — were gushing with orgasmic joy over the news that actress Ellen Page is publicly committed to Dinner at the Y, some of us were respectfully silent.

And by “respectfully silent,” of course, I mean researching a massive article about the prevalence of lesbian sex offenders in public schools, but this turned out to be a project that will take another dozen hours of work to complete, so you’ll have to wait. Suffice to say, it’s a follow-up on “If It Was a Rape, It Was Good Rape” and other recent writings on radical feminist ideology. Anyway . . .

Ellen Page’s lesbianism was not exactly secret, and I learned of her “coming out” when I noticed a surge of traffic to an article I wrote in 2011, “Outing’ Ellen Page: The Politicization of Sex and the Sexualization of Politics.” So, no surprise and none of my business, except of course that the Official Gay Movement insists that it is my business, and all Enlightened People are now obliged to celebrate the fact that Ellen Page is as hostile to PIV as Radical Wind. Failure to applaud her lesbianism is hate. In 2014, if you’re not marching in the Gay Pride Parade, you are a bigoted enemy of Progress and Equality.

Being told what to think has never been my idea of freedom, however, and my habitual skepticism is aroused by mobs chanting in unison. Somehow, totalitarian groupthink always reminds me of the sound of hobnailed boots marching over broken glass.

Did I mention that Ellen Page’s Pledge of Sapphic Allegiance occurred in Las Vegas, at the Human Rights Campaign’s  first national LGBT youth conference? Did I mention that the sponsors of that gay youth conference include the nation’s two largest  teacher’s unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers? Because nothing says “safety and inclusion” like teenagers getting together with public school teachers to spend Valentine’s Day weekend celebrating their homosexuality in Las Vegas.

IYKWIMAITYD.

Well, that massive article about the prevalence of lesbian sex offenders in public schools isn’t going to write itself . . .

UPDATE: Professor Donald Douglas has video of Ellen Page’s speech, which he calls “mock-worthy.” Failure to applaud homosexuality is hate. I’m sure the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs has added this reactionary outburst to Donald’s file.

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Gays

Workers 712, Union Thugs 626

Posted on | February 15, 2014 | 19 Comments

Big Labor suffered a “devastating defeat” Friday when workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga voted against joining the UAW. This was a personal defeat for President Obama:

President Barack Obama on Friday waded into a high-stakes union vote at Volkswagen AG’s plant in Tennessee, accusing Republican politicians who oppose unionization of being more concerned about German shareholders than U.S. workers.

But it wasn’t “Republican politicians” who rejected the UAW, it was actual flesh-and-blood wage-earning factory workers:

In a defeat for organized labor in the South, employees at the Volkswagen plant here voted 712 to 626 against joining the United Automobile Workers.
The loss is an especially stinging blow for U.A.W. because Volkswagen did not even oppose the unionization drive. The union’s defeat — in what was one of the most closely watched unionization votes in decades — is expected to slow, perhaps stymie, the union’s long-term plans to organize other auto plants in the South. . . .
Standing outside the Volkswagen plant, Mike Jarvis, a three-year employee who works on the finishing line, said the majority had voted against U.A.W. because they were persuaded the union had hurt Detroit’s automakers.
“Look at what happened to the auto manufacturers in Detroit and how they struggled. They all shared one huge factor: the U.A.W.,” said Mr. Jarvis, who added that he had had bad experiences with other labor unions. “If you look at how the U.A.W’s membership has plunged, that shows they’re doing a lot wrong.”

Oh, nothing is so sweet as the Tears of Unfathomable Sadness!

 

Category: Labor Unions

Narcissism vs. Objectivity

Posted on | February 15, 2014 | 16 Comments

Everything you need to know about the entitled mentality typical of Millennials can be explained by Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch was a man of the Left and enthralled by Freudian categories, so conservative readers must be prepared to endure occasional jabs at “modern industrial capitalism” and references to obsolete psychoanalytic nonsense. With those caveats, however, Lasch’s critique of what became known as the “Me Generation” of the 1980s is an invaluable primer in the causes and effects of a syndrome that has plagued American society for decades.

What the narcissistic personality lacks more than anything else is an objectivity about the relationship between the Self and others. The narcissist is unrealistic about himself because he cannot step outside himself and view his own flaws and failures as they actually are. The gap between who he thinks he is and who he really is, and perhaps more importantly, the gap between how others see him and how he sees himself, creates an existential crisis which he attempts to evade through various rationalizations and psychological defense mechanisms.

The narcissist becomes so obsessed with “image” — that is, the superficial facade he presents to others, in an attempt to elicit their admiration — that his life becomes a sort of performance, reducing others to the role of spectators whose applause is expected.

If the narcissist has sufficient abilities and personal attributes (beauty, charm, wealth, etc.) to “succeed” in this performance, that is often problematic in several ways that we could discuss. However, inevitably, even the most highly capable and personally attractive narcissist must sometimes fail, and it is the inability to cope with failure that leads narcissists into destructive patterns of behavior.

The narcissist’s devotion to self-image — what he thinks of himself, and what he wishes others to think of him — blinds him to his own faults and errors, so that he must always find scapegoats to blame for his failures. The narcissist can never take responsibility for failure, because his damaged ego is so fragile that it is impossible for him to accept that he is the cause of his own problems.

Of course, I use the generic “he” in discussing this, although female narcissists are at least as common as their male counterparts, and what is important to understand is that, as the Culture of Narcissism has become embedded in our society, many people are incapable of seeing how unhealthy and harmful this worldview is. A phenomenon that psychologists recognize as a personality disorder has become so common that it is almost The New Normal. If you’re  not a narcissistic image manipulator, constantly striving to impress others and elicit their admiration, you must be some kind of weirdo.

All of this is preamble to an excellent item published last fall, “Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy.” A brief excerpt:

Paul Harvey, a University of New Hampshire professor . . . has researched this, finding that Gen Y has “unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback,” and “an inflated view of oneself.” He says that “a great source of frustration for people with a strong sense of entitlement is unmet expectations. They often feel entitled to a level of respect and rewards that aren’t in line with their actual ability and effort levels, and so they might not get the level of respect and rewards they are expecting.”
For those hiring members of Gen Y, Harvey suggests asking the interview question, “Do you feel you are generally superior to your coworkers/classmates/etc., and if so, why?” He says that “if the candidate answers yes to the first part but struggles with the ‘why,’ there may be an entitlement issue. This is because entitlement perceptions are often based on an unfounded sense of superiority and deservingness. They’ve been led to believe, perhaps through overzealous self-esteem building exercises in their youth, that they are somehow special but often lack any real justification for this belief.”

Read the whole thing. Feelings of entitlement and unrealistic expectations based on an inflated sense of superiority — this is classic narcissism. And when narcissists fail, their reaction is always predicably to engage in evasive blame-shifting and scapegoating.

But really, I’m bored with discussing President Obama . . .

 

Category: Culture

Liberals Hate Books They Don’t Read

Posted on | February 15, 2014 | 14 Comments

Eugene Volokh:

Last week, E.J. Dionne Jr. penned a column in the Washington Post that blamed adherence to the tenets of the Austrian school of economics for gridlock in Washington. Well, sort of. He seemed to say that Austrian economics simultaneously was an obscure set of ideas of which no one has heard (except Ron Paul) and is yet powerful enough to provide the rallying cry for the Republican Party in Washington. More important, he says that Austrian economics is troublesome as a practical matter by blocking activist-government Keynesian-style interventions and deficit spending that would spur the economy and bring about greater wealth redistribution, but [also that] Austrian economics is wrong as a theoretical and historical matter.

Volokh observes that Dionne presumes to attack Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, although “it isn’t evident from the column that Dionne has actually read The Road to Serfdom itself, as opposed to just reading commentators on the book who have also fundamentally misunderstood the book.” Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that the problem with socialism is that, “sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money”. However, we might add, liberals never run out of bad arguments for failed policies.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

 

Category: Economics, Intellectuals

One Month After Prison Release, Sex Offender Raped Girl, 13, Police Say

Posted on | February 14, 2014 | 18 Comments

In 2010, when he was 19, Bert McDaniel Jones was convicted of having sex with a 14-year-old girl and put on probation with orders to register as a sex offender. When he failed to comply with terms of his probation, the judge sentenced Jones to prison. He got out of prison Jan. 5, but was arrested today after police say Jones raped a 13-year-old he met online while posing as a teenager:

Police began investigating the 13-year-old’s claims last week. The girl told police that a person she knew as Daniel Jones, 17, held her down and raped her.
Detectives searched every database available to them trying to locate Jones, but came up empty handed. Police said Friday that investigators discovered the person the girl knew as Daniel Jones was actually Bert McDaniel Jones. . . .
Slidell police said Jones was arrested in the forcible rape case Friday without incident. He is being held in the Slidell city jail and eventually will be transported to the St. Tammany Parish jail.
Police believe Jones was preying on young females through social media and through a local youth church group. They are continuing to investigate.

Why isn’t this creep being featured on ABC’s 20/20? Why is Kaitlyn Hunt a celebrity sex offender, but not Bert McDaniel Jones?

 

Category: Crime, Sex
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