The Other McCain

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

Now @MikeElk Calls @betsyscribeindc a ‘Racist,’ Because … Journalism!

Posted on | December 10, 2013 | 64 Comments

My apology for treating you to more of this kook’s kookiness, but these nutjobs just fascinate me. Mike Elk responded to Betsy Rothstein’s Monday article with a series of typically bizarre e-mails:

[C]riticize him at your own peril — he’ll charge that you’re against people with conditions like Asperger’s and write your boss and insist on your termination. He wrote in 16 times today to tell me why I’m not a journalist and he is. . . .

11:53 a.m. Mike: Reporter with tact for saying racists things against asians [sic] writes story downplaying the racist behavior of Eli Lake – no wonder it was a hit piece. Betsy: I do hope you have a Happy Holidays. And p.s. go fuck yourself. . . .
11:54 a.m. Mike: Quite the solidarity of racists Betsy. Betsy: Okay Mike. You keep believing whatever stupid shit you want.
12 p.m. Mike: [sic] Its not just me. I mean Lee Fang other asians believe it, but you downplay serious life or death issues. People like Eli Lake a racist fascists not actual reporters. Betsy: Great, strangers believe something. I don’t give a shit, Elk. Your thinking is very twisted and weird and I’ll have no part of it. . . .
Mike: Hey Betsy, There is a difference here. The difference is that I am coming after you hard over what you do, you guys mock and make fun of people over how they were born – their race, neorological impairments etc. Learn what real journalism is Betsy. melk Betsy:  Interesting. You have the same pattern again and again with everyone. You are the king of journalism, of course. You are seriously demented. And no, that’s not a slam on your mental illness or your dyslexia, it’s a slam on you personally for being such an idiot. And you’re coming after me hard? Oh, also interesting. Thanks for sharing.
12:13 p.m. Mike: Betsy, You work at the Daily Caller enough said? melk Betsy: And your point is what? I’ve never read your magazine. You work at In These Times. Are we just going through our resumes now?  You’ve tried to disparage and get three reporters fired in about 7 weeks. Let me fill you in … you’re not some warrior. Your thoughts and accusations don’t add up. Enough said, Mike Elk. . . .

You can read the whole thing — yes, there’s lots more crazy where that came from — and keep this in mind: I have no especial reason to like Betsy Rothstein, or Eli Lake or Rosie Gray, for that matter. It’s not as though we’re all best buddies and ideological soul mates. The story here is quite simple: Mike Elk is dangerously crazy.

But you probably figured that out by now, you racists.

 


Category: Journalism

Because @MikeElk Deserves a Reply

Posted on | December 10, 2013 | 80 Comments

An e-mail arrived at 9:50 a.m. today:

Subject: u still sore you lost the civil war?

From: Mike Elk ([email protected])
To: Robert Stacy McCain

Shit son, I am about to go visit some Civil War battlefields where we kicked the fuck out of you degenerate Confederate bastards. I bet you are still sore you guys lost that one Bobby.
—
Mike Elk
In These Times Staff Writer
Cell: (412) 613-8423
Twitter – @MikeElk

Simple courtesy required a polite reply:

Sir:
You have an obnoxious habit of making your personal superiority the point of every argument, and you always seem disappointed that others do not admire you as much as you admire yourself. Declining your invitation to join the Mike Elk Fan Club, I will also waive the opportunity to tutor you in grammar, but must make a few additions to your pathetically small store of historical knowledge.
My Alabama ancestors were not degenerate, and were certainly no less patriotic than my wife’s ancestors from Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio who fought for the Union. However — and perhaps this touches also on your erratic grammar — your first person plural pronoun would seem misplaced: “we kicked the fuck out of you,” et cetera.
To whom does your “we” refer in that context?
In an e-mail to Eli Lake, you said your grandparents were “the children of Russian Jewish immigrants.” In which Civil War regiment did your ancestors serve?
My own paternal grandmother was the daughter of Private Winston Wood Bolt, who served in the 13th Alabama Regiment, Company K. The colonel of my great-grandfather’s regiment was Birkett Davenport Fry, and they were brigaded under A.H. Colquitt (at Seven Pines, South Mountain and Sharpsburg), then under J.J. Archer at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Both General Archer and my great-grandfather were captured in the first day’s fight at Gettysburg when the Union’s famed “Iron Brigade” turned their right flank. I’ve walked the ground where Winston Bolt was captured — just east of Willoughby Run, a hundred yards or so from where Union General Reynolds was killed — but regret that I’ve never had an opportunity to visit Fort Delaware, where my great-grandfather spent the next two years as a prisoner of war.
At any rate, it seems quite likely your ancestors never fired a shot at any of my ancestors, and so your use of the first person plural “we” is wrong. But you’ve never let being wrong stop you before, and I doubt you’ll let it impede you in the future. All you ever do is boast and threaten and insult, then claim to be a helpless victim when someone calls attention to the symptomatic traits of your warped and sadistic personality. My confident prediction is that these habits of yours will eventually bring you unhappiness and misfortune in life, and that in the near term you will be deeply offended by anyone’s effort to counsel you against continuing in your present course of conduct. Your conceited sense of superiority has the effect of alienating you even from those would-be friends who might dissuade you from your doomed folly.
You will excuse me if I take the liberty of publishing our correspondence immediately, as I consider it a waste of time to respond privately to a deliberate insult.
— RSM

 Don’t expect Mike Elk to appreciate such courtesy. Fools never do.

UPDATE: It took six minutes for Elk to reply:

Subject: Re: u still sore you lost the civil war?

From: Mike Elk ([email protected])
To: Robert Stacy McCain

By we I mean boys from my home state of Pennsylvania. Look at this monument, those keystone boys sure cleaned up at orchad’s knob — makes me proud to be a Pennsylvanian think of the slavers ass that they kicked
Sent from my iPhone

He’s proud to be from the same state as Jerry Sandusky? The mere accident of having been born in Pennsylvania instills in Mike Elk such fierce emotion? Exactly where this “orchad’s knob” is located, I’m not sure. No photo was attached to his e-mail.

UPDATE II: A Google search for “Mike + Elk +Pennsylvania” turns up this typically demented rant against Penn State:

“As a native Pennsylvanian, I never once considered attending Penn State University. Penn State always seemed like a place full of cliquish white people recalling their glory years of making fun of the dorky kids in high school. More progressive white people and people of color went to big city state schools like Pitt or Temple while whiter, more conservative types tended to dominate the settings of the rural, fraternity-heavy Penn State campus.”

Read the whole thing to get an idea of exactly how long Mike Elk has been a blustering fool (i.e., his entire life).

 

Category: History, Journalism

In The Mailbox: 12.10.13

Posted on | December 10, 2013 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: L.A. County Sheriff’s Officials Arrested In FBI Sting
Michelle Malkin: Obamacare’s Perilous Protection Plan For Debtors
Twitchy: Obamacare’s Crushing Consequences – This Doctor’s Practice-Closing Newspaper Ad Says It All
Sondrakistan: Can You Top This?


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: State Obamacare Exchanges Vulnerable To Wi-Fi Attacks
American Thinker: The Sound Of Music And Culture Shock
Blackfive: Some Retired LTC “Strategist” Living In England Wants To Take Your Guns
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – What About Romneycare
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, December 9
Jammie Wearing Fools: Oh Well! Loathsome Democrat Alan Grayson Lost $18 Million To Fraud Scheme
JustOneMinute: The First Narcissist And The Challenges Of Staying On Script
Pat Dollard: Exposed – Voice Of Girl Scouts Of America Is Homocore Punk Band’s Front Man
Protein Wisdom: “Obama’s Base Crumbling Amid Obamacare Debacle”
Shot In The Dark: Since We’re All About Equality Here…
The Jawa Report: Dan Rather Still Claiming His Story Was “Fake But True”
The Lonely Conservative: Video – Dem Rep REALLY Doesn’t Want To Talk About Benghazi
This Ain’t Hell: Karzai Rails Against US “Threats”
Megan McArdle: Should DC’s Poor Get To Keep Their Housing Windfall?


Category: Linkagery

Taxpayers Lose $10.5 Billion on UAW Bailout; Does @DavidCookTFP Care?

Posted on | December 10, 2013 | 68 Comments

Before we talk about @DavidCookTFP — a liberal columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press — let’s talk about Detroit, the city driven into bankruptcy by Democrats and organized labor.

If there is one sentence which should be indelibly etched in your mind about President Obama’s bailout of General Motors, it is this:

“GM was relieved of about $28 billion of bondholder
obligations as UAW claims were protected.”

In other words, the folks who had loaned GM money got screwed over, and the benefit went directly to Obama’s friends in Big Labor, who had done so much to destroy the company’s profitability. Delivering effective control of the company to the UAW — anybody want to guess how that deal worked out at contract negotiation time?

GM Offers $5,000 ‘Signing Bonus’ as
Part of Deal With Union That Owns GM

It makes perfect sense: Screw over the bondholders, put the UAW in charge of the company and then have the UAW negotiate with itself!

While you’re contemplating that psychotic madness, now let’s take a look at the bottom line for U.S. taxpayers:

DETROIT — The U.S. government ended up losing $10.5 billion on the General Motors bailout, but it says the alternative would have been far worse.
The Treasury Department sold its final shares of the Detroit auto giant Monday, recovering $39 billion of the $49.5 billion it spent to save the dying automaker at the height of the financial crisis five years ago.
Without the bailout, the country would have lost more than 1 million jobs, and the economy could have slipped from recession into a depression, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said on a conference call with reporters.

Well, if Jacob Lew says the alternative was worse than losing $10.5 billion of taxpayer money, who are we to disagree? Because the effects of hypothesized alternative scenarios are always subject to speculation, officials can justify any policy by declaring that things would have been worse if we had done something different. (Let’s keep this principle of Liberal Logic™ in mind: Next time some hippie peacenik tells you that Bush’s Iraq policy was a failure, just remind him that an imaginary hypothetical alternative — e.g., Saddam Hussein’s army invading Connecticut — would have been much worse.)

“Mr. President — How could you lie to Whoopi Goldberg?
And the rest of us too . . . In 2010 President Obama
appeared on The View and promised we would get
all of our money back from the auto bailout . . .”

Remember: There are 5 A’s in “RAAAAACIST!”

Also, Obama’s promises always carry an expiration date.

Anyone who ever believed a single word Obama said — other than that promise about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” — is neurologically impaired, mentally defective, demented, deranged, wacko, bonkers, zany and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

And speaking of Mike Elk . . .

Look, it would be cruel beyond words if we were to start funding mental health services by charging admission for spectators to visit psychiatric wards and watch the lunatics shuffle through the halls jabbering  madness to themselves. Fortunately, we have the Internet, so it costs nothing to watch Mike Elk’s continuing meltdown.

What are we supposed to do with Mike Elk, who is to journalism what Amanda Bynes is to Hollywood starlets? Elk flaunts his mental illness like a badge of honor — preemptively pleading insanity, as it were — and yet if any critic should mention it, this becomes an occasion for Elk to start screaming “bully!” and then claim victimhood: Heads, he wins; tails, you’re a hateful racist wingnut.

Which brings us, rather surprisingly, to the latest offering from Chattanooga Times Free Press columnist David Cook:

It’s right there on the list. Just before food and clothing. Right after the section on people being able to vote and participate in government.
“Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”
It’s Article 23 on the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The 30-article document was written after the horrors of World War II (one of its primary authors was Eleanor Roosevelt) and expresses an exalted vision of what’s possible for humans here on earth.
It lists the fundamental rights we should have — any and all of us — simply by virtue of being alive. . . .

(When a newspaper columnist begins by citing the  United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, sane readers turn the page.)

Will that happen here? Will the United Auto Workers unionize the Volkswagen plant at Enterprise South? . . .

(David Cook certainly hopes so. Did I mention that he “holds a master’s degree in Peace and Justice Studies from Prescott College“?)

The debate on the UAW and VW has reached hyperbole and rhetoric on the level of an election year. Mike Elk, a journalist with In These Times, published a story last month showing how out-of-state conservative groups have financed efforts to oppose unionization here. . . .

(You see what I mean? It’s as if there were some kind of private club where these kooks all know each other — the Marxist version of the Masonic lodge, with secret handshakes and stuff. But that would be a paranoid conspiracy theory. Speaking of which . . .)

Elk discusses the role of Matt Patterson, a consultant based in Washington, D.C., who developed a playbook on how to defeat the UAW’s efforts here.
“Within a few weeks, I had organized a coalition consisting of members of the Tea Party, Students for Liberty, former VW employees, politicians and businessmen to craft and deliver a consistent message that has shaped public opinion,” Patterson wrote in a report Elk obtained.
The funders behind Patterson’s work are of particular interest to Elk . . .

(Astonishing! Shocking! People who are opposed to labor unions have hired Matt Patterson, who is opposed to labor unions, to organize people who are opposed to labor unions. Quick — you call the FBI and I’ll e-mail the Pulitzer Prize committee!)

This Thursday, Elk comes to town, speaking at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga’s UC Auditorium at 6 p.m. His trip is being sponsored by Chattanooga for Workers. It’s open to the public.

“Well, my, my, my!” as Lt. Joe Kenda would say. “What have we here?”

It must an evil corporate conspiracy, you see, for anyone to pay Matt Patterson — “a consultant based in Washington, D.C.” — to organize opposition to the UAW in Chattanooga and, therefore, these shadowy “funders behind Patterson’s work” must be investigated by Mike Elk who, last time I checked, was based in Washington, D.C.

Speaking of the “funders” of shadowy organizations, who do you suppose is bankrolling “Chattanooga for Workers”? Do you think there might be any overlap between (a) the money for “Chattanooga for Workers” and (b) the people funding In These Times magazine? In other words, do you suppose that the people who (c) fund Mike Elk’s “investigation” of the opposition to the UAW would also be interested in (d) bringing Mike Elk to Chattanooga, and then (e) enlisting such of their friends as Times Free Press columnist David Cook to publicize both (f) their unionization drive, and (g) Mike Elk’s “investigation” of their opponents?

Do you need me to draw a Venn diagram to explain that there might be some substantial overlap of categories (a) through (g)?

Hey, who is this “Chattanooga Organized for Action” (COA) that’s promoting Mike Elk’s speech Thursday at UTC? Aug. 10, 2012:

A 2-year-old Chattanooga social justice and community-organizing nonprofit is hoping to expand the scope of its work after receiving a $40,000 grant from one of Chattanooga’s most prominent foundations.
Chattanooga Organized for Action announced last week it had become the newest local recipient of a Community Grant from the Benwood Foundation. Community Grants, given to groups planning to “address issues of critical concern to the future of Hamilton County,” are awarded to more than a dozen different area groups annually.
Leaders for COA, which played a role in supporting recent grassroots efforts to block a proposed redevelopment project on the Westside, along with the movement to recall Mayor Ron Littlefield, said the new funds would be put toward creating a “Justice School,” with the goal of replicating similar member-driven interventions in other Chattanooga communities. The group hopes to train individuals on organizing their own responses to their own specific issues.

Just a spontaneous grassroots thing, you see? And there’s no reason for anyone to suspect that the Benwood Foundation’s $40,000 grant to COA was coordinated with a slightly larger donation to the Benwood Foundation from someone who maybe didn’t want their fingerprints on a donation given directly to COA. Nor need anyone investigate whether the non-profit “Institute for Public Affairs” that publishes In These Times also receives funding from the same people who contributed to the Benwood Foundation in 2012.

Like I said, do you want me to draw you a Venn diagram?

Yeah, the 501(c)3 Benwood Foundation just randomly decided to fund COA, so that it could organize protests against McDonald’s and support a UAW unionization drive at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. Nothing remotely suspicious about this coincidence.

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along.”

Readers may go back to the top of this post if they need a reminder: Obama bailed out GM in a deal that screwed over the bondholders, protected the UAW and cost American taxpayers $10.5 billion, and now it seems as if the UAW has plenty of money to throw around for organizing drives in Chattanooga, where there’s this wonderful “grassroots” group COA that will be hosting an event Thursday featuring that courageous (but perhaps insane) investigative journalist Mike Elk.

“Well, my, my, my . . .”

What’s this at the bottom of David Cook’s column? “Contact David Cook at [email protected] or 423-757-6329.”





 

 


Category: Economics, Labor Unions

Were Vassar Students Who Perpetrated Hate Hoax Linked to Another Injustice?

Posted on | December 9, 2013 | 78 Comments

In August, I mentioned Peter Yu, who was expelled from Vassar College in what K.C. Johnson called  “The Dubious Rape Trial at Vassar.” And last week, there was another Vassar story: “Hispanic Transgender Student Kicked Out After Faking College Hate Incident.”

There may be a connection between these two incidents:

Genesis Hernandez, a transgendered, minority student who served as a member of the Bias Incident and Response Team as well as the Vice President of Student Life, was one of the two students responsible for the falsified hate speech. . . .
Cases such as [the rape accusation against Yu] are overseen by the Sexual and Violence Prevention Committee (SAVP), which is made up of a combination of faculty and students. One of the student members on this year’s committee is Genesis Hernandez, whose name is still listed on the webpage. The SAVP has a diagram on its webpage that describes the process for reporting sexual misconduct. The diagram was created by Imani Wong, the girlfriend of Genesis Hernandez.
Although Vassar has not officially reported the name of the second perpetrator of the bias, leaked records of discussions among members of the Vassar Student Association state that she is, in fact, the second actor in this hoax. Like Genesis, Imani has also left the school. If people who can commit such devious, fraudulent acts are on these committees, how can students trust that they will be treated fairly?

WHOA! Both Wong and Hernandez — now apparently kicked out of Vassar for perpetrating a hate hoax — were members of the committee  that oversaw the prosecution of Peter Yu? Emily Rose DeMarco writes:

If all that is required of a woman is a declaration of rape for a man to be punished, what is to stop any bitter ex girlfriend from doing great harm to her former lover? The school does not appear to have a handle on this bias, as students who are falsifying hate speech are chosen to serve on committees meant to protect people from these very actions. To maintain its integrity as a fair institution, Vassar must take this issue very seriously and investigate how widespread this discrimination is on campus.

Follow Emily Rose DeMarco on Twitter.

 

Category: Education

Harry Reid’s Game

Posted on | December 9, 2013 | 22 Comments

“Reid isn’t worried about winning votes, he’s all about making sure no Democrat has to make any decision that the American people might hold them accountable for.”

Category: Harry Reid

What, If Anything, Does the @MikeElk Meltdown Prove About the Left?

Posted on | December 9, 2013 | 50 Comments

Do you really care about a personal feud between Mike Elk (a labor reporter for the progressive journal In These Times) and Eli Lake (a national security reporter for The Daily Beast)?

You probably don’t, and who am I to say you should? But you probably don’t really care about Charles Johnson, Barrett Brown, Neal Rauhauser, Bill Schmalfeldt, Roger Shuler or any of the other kooks and weirdos who have occasionally crossed my path in recent years, and there is an odd affinity between those kooks and Mike Elk.

Volkswagen Gave Money to Anti-Union
Group That Used Pro-Confederate Rhetoric

That’s the headline on a Nov. 15 article Mike Elk wrote at In These Times, and let’s start with the obvious question, “What does ‘Pro-Confederate Rhetoric’ have to do with Volkswagen?”

The equally obvious answer: Nothing whatsoever.

Mike Elk was simply doing a guilt-by-association smear against Matt Patterson of Americans for Tax Reform. The United Auto Workers, having wrecked Detroit’s economy, are now attempting to do the same at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. Patterson wrote an op-ed for the Chattanooga Times-Free Press referencing the 1863 Battle of Chickamaugua and a “union invasion” of Tennessee.

Union invasion, get it?

And pro-Confederate rhetoric, get it?

It’s a cheap “gotcha” smear that has nothing to do with the merits of any argument for or against unionizing the Volkswagen plant, and this is the kind of “reporting” Mike Elk gets paid to produce at In These Times. Want to see how easy that kind of tactic is?

A clearinghouse for the hard-left agenda, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) lays claim to the title of “the nation’s oldest multi-issue progressive think tank.” It was founded in 1963 as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) by Richard J. Barnet and Marcus Raskin, who shared a vision of transforming the United States . . .
Throughout its history, the IPS has committed itself to the task of advancing leftist causes, working with agents of the Castro regime, championing environmentalist and anti-war positions in the 1960s and 1970s; declaring against the Reagan administration’s efforts to roll back communism in the 1980s . . .
Begun in Washington, DC, IPS headquarters quickly became a resource center for national reporters and a place for KGB agents from the nearby Soviet embassy to convene and strategize. . . .
The anti-Israel Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) was begun in 1971 by IPS fellow Joe Stork, who is now a director with Human Rights Watch. The magazine Mother Jones was founded in 1975 by the IPS spinoff Foundation for National Progress. In These Times, founded in 1976 as a leftwing tabloid, was financed by the IPS until 1982. . . .
The IPS, which created the Chicago-based socialist newspaper In These Times, has consistently tried to derail American efforts to combat Communism.

OK, so Mike Elk works for a magazine that was essentially a pro-Soviet KGB front during the 1980s. But wait! There’s more!

In August 2010, [unrepentant terrorist Bill] Ayers announced that he was retiring from his teaching post at the University of Illinois. However, he continues his work with AERA and serves also as an editorial-board member of In These Times, a Chicago-based socialist journal.

Ayers’ name has been removed from the masthead of In These Times, which is published by something called the Institute for Public Affairs in Chicago and — because I’m having no luck finding any public information about that outfit — I’ll just go ahead and insinuate it’s funded by shadowy foreigners with sinister anti-American agendas.

In These Times is a subversive terrorist organization! Q.E.D.

This kind of sick parody of journalism is what Mike Elk does for a living and he imagines that being a leftist makes him a courageous hero. Mike Elk expects admiration for his moral superiority to those evil right-wing nutjobs who get corporate money — DIRTY, DIRTY CORPORATE MONEY! — to write op-eds opposing the UAW.

Did I mention that Mike Elk is afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome and dyslexia? His neurological and emotional impairment are directly relevant to his recent online meltdown:

Elk has long charged that he has been “cyberbullied” about his mental illness, Asperger’s syndrome. He has also admitted to having dyslexia. The Free Beacon has poked fun at Elk’s penchant for typos — we can attest from emails we’ve studied and received that Elk butchers verb tenses, names and sentence structure. He claims [BuzzFeed reporter] Gray is making light of his mental condition and learning disability by giving an Elk parody account — @ElkMinusContext — a #FF (for the blissfully unaware, this is a “Follow Friday” on Twitter). The account does not explicitly make fun of Elk’s conditions.
Elk, whose own Twitter account has a dyslexia disclaimer, has consistently used his Asperger’s and dyslexia to play the victim online and to cry “cyberbully” even when the charge makes no sense. When pressed on this point — where’s the proof of Lake’s cyberbullying? — he had a wild explanation that Lake is a social king of sorts over a group of a reporters that includes [Free Beacon reporter Alana] Goodman, Gray and others. He told The Mirror over the weekend, “Eli has you know is kinda like the old man of that crew he is always tweeting about partying and rapping and being in his 40s. Like did you see all these #elilakecyberbully hashtag where like all the kids who party with him joked about Eli lake playing grand theft auto with them. It was really a demonstration of their frat culture. Eli the old white guy rapper that his brand that makes him seem cool to all these young kids at the free beacon.” 

Umm, yeah.

Mike Elk’s social life is also kind of relevant here:

Elk says the debacle began when WSJ’s [Sohrab] Ahmari remarked on Twitter on Dec. 5: “Early Friday #FF @MikeElk to see a journalist at something called ‘In These Times’ going through a real-time mental breakdown.” In that string of tweets, Lake said, “Early #FF for @SohrabAhmari a great writer and a real mensch with a kind and sensitive soul.” Elk perceived this as Lake “validating” Ahmari’s call to watch Elk’s so-called “mental breakdown.” . . .
Elk claims Lake made a derogatory statement against [freelance writer] Rania Khalek and demanded that he apologize. . . .

[E-mail from Elk to Lake] Oct. 28, 9:09 p.m.
Subject line: apologize to my ex Rania Khalek
Eli,
I just now saw the racist slur you put against my ex, Rania Khalek. Given the way that Rania was treated following 9-11, her parents her own history of being bombed and imprisoned in Lebanon, and you are a white man its clear you need to apologize. For you to treat my ex this way is absolutely horrendous. You need to apologize now or I am going to call your editor.
Mike

“Racist slur”? There was no such thing. But note the “complete moral authority” gesture by which Elk claims that his ex-girlfriend’s personal experience entitles her to an apology, simply because Lake was sarcastic toward her on Twitter. (Sarcasm on Twitter? I’m shocked!)

Read the whole ridiculous mess, including the part where Mike Elk calls Eli Lake a “coward” for not replying to his e-mails.

How strangely Schmalfeldtian . . .

Does this prove anything about the Left? I’m not sure it would be fair to generalize too much from this one example, but Charles Johnson, Barrett Brown, Neal Rauhauser, Bill Schmalfeldt, Roger Shuler — am I the only one who sees a pattern here?

 

Category: Journalism

To Answer Your Question, Seth …

Posted on | December 9, 2013 | 92 Comments

“How Many American Men Are Gay?”

At the New York Times? All of them.

At Harvard University? All of them.

So when I read in the New York Times, “Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a contributing opinion writer who recently received a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard,” I know where he’s coming from — a world in which homosexuality is so common as to seem pervasive.

No self-respecting heterosexual would set foot on the campus of Harvard University, much less write for the New York Times, and what perplexes Seth Stephens-Davidowitz  is what’s going on in those “less tolerant” places where not everyone is gay (yet):

While these data sources all measure different degrees of openness, one result is strikingly similar: All three suggest that the openly gay population is dramatically higher in more tolerant states, defined using an estimate by Nate Silver of support for same-sex marriage. On Facebook, for example, about 1 percent of men in Mississippi who list a gender preference say that they are interested in men; in California, more than 3 percent do.
Are there really so many fewer gay men living in less tolerant states? There is no evidence that gay men would be less likely to be born in these states. Have many of them moved to more tolerant areas? Some have, but Facebook data show that mobility can explain only a small fraction of the difference in the totally out population. I searched gay and straight men by state of birth and state of current residence. (This information is available only for a subset of Facebook users.) Some gay men do move out of less tolerant states, but this effect is small. I estimate that the openly gay population would be about 0.1 percentage points higher in the least tolerant states if everyone stayed in place
The percent of male high school students who identify themselves as gay on Facebook is also much lower in less tolerant areas. . . .

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz‘s conclusion, basically, is that there are millions of closeted gay men — including teenage boys (oh, goodie!) — cowering in fear in “less tolerant” states like Mississippi. He doesn’t bother examining the obverse thesis: The New York Times and Harvard University invented homosexuality, which has since oozed out across the country in every direction, except in those places like Mississippi where the Gospel continues to be preached.

You don’t find many vampires near a garlic farm. Just sayin’ . . .

 


Category: Gays, New York Times
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