The Other McCain

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

Obligatory ‘Miley Cyrus Topless’ Post

Posted on | September 24, 2013 | 29 Comments

You’d hate me if I didn’t do this one.

The piercings, the tattoos, the butch haircut — if you find that look attractive, seek professional psychiatric help immediately.

In her Rolling Stone interview, Miley says stupid stuff:

The 20-year-old says she’s well aware of how ridiculous she looks twerking, but guess what? She couldn’t care less.
“People are like, ‘Miley thinks she’s a black girl, but she’s got the flattest ass ever,’” she says. “I’m like, I’m 108 pounds! I know! Now people expect me to come out and twerk with my tongue out all the time. I’ll probably never do that s*** again.”
As for comments being thrown around that she’s trying to be “black”, the self-aware singer says: “I’m from one of the wealthiest counties in America … I know what I am. But I also know what I like to listen to. Look at any 20-year-old white girl right now — that’s what they’re listening to at the club.”
She had a few choice words for the haters of her VMAs dance with theBlurred Lines singer also: “No one is talking about the man behind the ass. It was a lot of ‘Miley twerks on Robin Thicke,’ but never, ‘Robin Thicke grinds up on Miley.’ They’re only talking about the one that bent over. So obviously there’s a double standard.”

In related starlet-meltdown news, Amanda Bynes is still crazy:

Amanda Bynes is mentally unfit to stand trial … this according to her lawyer in her DUI case … TMZ has learned.
Amanda was supposed to appear in court today for her DUI arrest in West Hollywood back in April, 2012. Amanda’s lawyer, Rich Hutton, told the judge Amanda did not have the mental capacity to understand the nature of the legal proceedings.
The judge apparently had concern … and transferred the matter to the mental health court. The judge in that court will conduct a hearing to determine Amanda’s mental competency.

If you’re too crazy to understand a DUI hearing, you’re just too damned crazy. Miley Cyrus probably isn’t that crazy . . . yet.

 

Category: Celebrities

Complementarity vs. Androgyny

Posted on | September 24, 2013 | 40 Comments

“If Americans can be divorced for ‘incompatibility of temper’ I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.”
— G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World (1912)

The beginning of economics is the division of labor. If we were all hunter-gatherers, there would little for us to exchange in the marketplace. Hunter-gatherer societies are universally poor. Agriculture and the domestication of livestock were the first steps beyond subsistence and those steps were attended by the development of sex roles. It is only with the affluence and convenience provided by advanced industrial market economies that any idea of “sexual equality” becomes feasible.

Our pioneer ancestors never could have conquered the frontier if the men had stayed home cooking, while sending the womenfolk out to hunt, plow and fight off savage Indians.

A great problem of young people today is that they have been so indoctrinated in the gospel of Equality (capitalized, to signify its status as a quasi-religious belief) that they lack even the vocabulary to discuss ideas like sex roles and complementarity.

Young people are afraid of acknowledging the natural differences between male and female — which are evident to everyone — and this fear leads them into a timid artificiality of discourse, trying to tiptoe around the truth that no one is supposed to mention: Insofar as men and women are different, they are not equal, and all attempts to equalize things which are inherently different are doomed to fail.

This comes to mind after I noticed David Covucci’s article, “New Rules for Women” at BroBible.com, which is a response to an article at the feminist site Jezebel, “New Rules for Men.” Some of what Covucci writes is useful and clever, but he cedes far too much to feminism:

There are horrible males out there who believe a woman should literally be chained to the stove because if she leaves the house her tiny brain will forget she put a pot pie in the oven and then the crust might be slightly overdone. These men are 65. Most of us — even if we hate burnt dough — believe in equality and women’s rights. So while I apologize for old, white males, remember they are our fathers. And they ingrained in us their shitty beliefs. We are fighting to overcome them, so realize that occasionally defaulting back to them isn’t MISOGYNY. We are aware when we are wrong. We don’t need to be hit in the head for it.

David, do you think anyone is deceived by your white-knight gesture? “Oh, there are horrible misogynistic Cro-Magnons out there perpetuating the patriarchy, but I’m not one of them.”

Don’t be that guy who denounces Those Hateful Sexists Over There as a way of touting your own egalitarian bona fides. That’s creepy.

Egalitarianism itself is creepy. No sane person desires to live in that androgynous asexual utopia where men and women are the same, but this is the future to which feminism proposes to lead us.

Also, why do you feel the need to “apologize for old, white males”? What have I done that you need to apologize for? Am I such a boor? For that matter, were my own father and grandfathers really such awful misogynistic monsters?

And, while we’re at it, why “old white males”? Are black men, Hispanic men or Asian men more-feminist friendly than white men?

I think not.

A few years ago, when I had written a denunciation of feminism, someone tried to categorize me as a “men’s rights advocate,” a label I wholeheartedly reject. I don’t believe in “men’s rights” for the same reason I don’t believe in “women’s rights,” because the entire concept of collective “rights” is misguided, especially when applied to the relations between men and women. Each couple must negotiate their own terms of cooperation, their own division of labor, and this individual arrangement cannot be dictated by ideology.

It is my own observation and experience that couples are generally happier, and their unions more durable, the more their relationships approach the traditional arrangement of husband-father-breadwinner/wife-mother-homemaker. That is to say, the more successful a man is in his career, the less pressure his wife feels to enter the workplace. Assuming that the wife has any aptitude for domesticity and motherhood, she really doesn’t want to have to work outside the home just to pay the bills. The two-career household is inevitably afflicted with more stress and conflict after children arrive, because the wife resents her need to abandon her children and return to a job, while the husband feels like a failure because his income is insufficient to support the entire household.

Marriage is the object of courtship, and the purpose of marriage is to create a stable household for child-rearing. The more traditional household is structurally more stable, which is not to say that two-career families are doomed to failure, but rather to say that the basic bond between man and woman is stronger where there is something more to their union than the transient emotion of “love.”

Men and women need each other, and the reason for this need is that men and women are different. Insofar as feminism is about encouraging men and women to be more the same — to be androgynous and sexless — then feminism makes marriage less desirable as an object, less durable and more prone to conflict.

David Covucci apparently believes that he can negotiate with feminism, but this is impossible. Feminism is a totalitarian ideology that acknowledges no limits to its ambitions. Men who seek to negotiate a compromise with feminism are like Neville Chamberlain, supposing he could have peace by handing over the Sudetenland to Hitler.

David, where does your policy of compromise with feminism lead us?

If this is the future, you don’t want to go there, man.

 

Category: Feminism

Goldman Sachs Banker Charged With Raping 20-Year-Old Irish Student

Posted on | September 24, 2013 | 33 Comments

Meet Jason Lee, 37, an Ivy League-educated managing director of the equity capital markets department at Goldman Sachs. One weekend in late August, Lee was celebrating his birthday at a bar in the Hamptons when he met a 20-year-old student from Ireland. He bought her and her friends drinks, and invited them to a $33,000-a-month house he was renting in East Hampton.

A sort of pool party ensued and, the woman told police, Lee was naked when he followed her to the bathroom, forced open the door, pinned her to the floor and raped her. Lee is married. His wife was in Manhattan at the time of the alleged assault. Lee’s lawyer admits his client had sex with the woman, but says it was consensual.

I wanted to point out this alleged crime, allegedly perpetrated by a wealthy member of the elite, in case anyone thought sex crimes were only committed by trash like the Alford brothers of Nebraska.

 

Category: Crime, Sex

Nebraska Sex Offender Re-Offends (And His Brother Is a Sex Offender, Too)

Posted on | September 24, 2013 | 24 Comments

Clintus Alford (left); Cletus Alford (right)

Clintus J. Alford, 37, was sentenced to 40  to 60 years in prison Monday for raping two girls, ages 12 and 14. He had previously been convicted in 2004 of false imprisonment for a case involving an 11-year-old girl, and served two years in prison for that offense. The Omaha World-Herald reports that perversion seems to be a family trait:

Alford’s brother, Cletus Alford, is serving an 11-year sentence for assault and for manufacturing child pornography. He took video of a girl he was dating.
That girl, 16-year-old Sarah Neal, was fatally shot in June 2005. Authorities have called Cletus Alford a person of interest in her death, but he has never been charged.

You can read more here about the murder of Sarah Neal.

 

Category: Crime, Sex

I’m Against ‘Revenge Porn,’ But . . .

Posted on | September 24, 2013 | 43 Comments

. . . proposals to create laws against it strike me as troubling:

Revenge porn sites feature explicit photos posted by ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands and ex-lovers, often accompanied by disparaging descriptions and identifying details, like where the women live and work, as well as links to their Facebook pages. The sites, which are proliferating, are largely immune to criminal pursuit. But that may be changing. California lawmakers this month passed the first law aimed at revenge porn sites.
With cellphone cameras ubiquitous and many Americans giving in to the urge to document even the most intimate aspects of their lives, revenge porn has opened up new ways to wreak vengeance.
The effects can be devastating. Victims say they have lost jobs, been approached in stores by strangers who recognized their photographs, and watched close friendships and family relationships dissolve. Some have changed their names or altered their appearance. . . .

What is so difficult about, “Don’t share nude pictures of yourself”? And if you’re not going to share them, why take nude photos of yourself?

Of course, guys who seek revenge by publishing their ex-girlfriends’ pictures are worthless scum, and if all the operators of “revenge porn” sites were beaten to death with ball-peen hammers, I wouldn’t lament their deaths. But legislating against this practice, and then spending taxpayer dollars to enforce anti-“revenge porn” laws, seems a bit much, just to protect women from their own stupidity:

He was a muscular guy with “kind of a nerdy kind of charm,” Marianna Taschinger recalled, a combination that proved irresistible to an 18-year-old girl in a small Texas town.
They dated, broke up, dated again. He asked her to pick out a wedding ring. He also made another request — that she take nude pictures of herself and send them to him.
“He said if I didn’t want to send them to him, that meant that I didn’t trust him, which meant that I didn’t love him,” Ms. Taschinger said.
The photos would never be shared with anyone else, she remembers him promising. And she believed him — until last December, more than a year after the couple broke up, when a dozen nude images of her popped up on a Web site focusing on what has become known as revenge porn. She is suing the site and her ex-boyfriend.

OK, so she’s suing the creeps. Good for her. Pursuing a civil lawsuit is her right. But whose fault is it that Marianna Taschinger is (or once was) such a fool for muscular guys with nerdy charm that she sent him a dozen naked pictures of herself?

Is making the world safe for dumb girls a national priority?

 

Category: Crime, Sex

‘The Dissemination of Hate Speech’

Posted on | September 24, 2013 | 36 Comments

Arkansas Tech University Professor Wayne Helmer wrote a letter to Prism, the magazine of the American Society for Engineering Education, criticizing the inclusion of sexual orientation in “diversity” programs, calling homosexuality a “detrimental, negative lifestyle,” and using scripture to invoke the authority of Jesus Christ.

All hell broke loose, of course:

The letter prompted the association’s president (Kenneth F. Galloway of Vanderbilt University), president-elect (Nicholas J. Altiero of Tulane University) and immediate past president (Walter J. Buchanan of Texas A&M University) to take the unusual step of issuing a joint letter denouncing their own publication for publishing Helmer’s piece. “His specious mischaracterization of homosexuality is unsupported by any reputable literature,” the letter said. “Professor Helmer is entitled to his religious beliefs. However, Prism is not an appropriate place for him to air his judgment of others based on those beliefs.” . . .
Amy E. Slaton, a historian of science and technology at Drexel University, wrote on her blog STEM Equity that the Prism letter raised broad issues. “The line between ‘freedom of speech’ on one hand, and the dissemination of hate speech on the other,  vexes everyone who thinks about diversity in a democratic society, or at least it should,” she wrote. Normally this concern isn’t big in STEM education, she added.
“Then when we do recognize it, our responses to discrimination don’t often rise to the level of audible anger. We’ve developed the habit of seeking ‘respectful dialog’ as mostly, we try to  redirect the thinking of those who traffic in bias and stereotyping; a constructive impulse, perhaps, but not always a way of speaking truth to power. It’s partly a matter of self-preservation, of course: activism, anger, noise? … not the marks of the mature student, or professional educator or engineer,” Slaton wrote. “But a funny thing happened on the way to diversity in engineering this morning … and I am newly worried about the quietness of our STEM diversity efforts, about the sheer timidity of our discussions around difference and inclusion. And mostly: about our reluctance to censure powerfully those who traffic in hateful rhetoric.”

A few questions occur, among them, “Is there a shortage of gay engineers? Do gay people suffer discrimination in the engineering field?” Honestly, I’m not not aware of any such claim. I am aware that engineering is a male-dominated field, and that blacks and Hispanics (but not Asians) are considered “underrepresented minorities” in the field, but I’ve never heard that discrimination against gays is alleged to be commonplace in engineering.

“Diversity” is a vague goal used to justify quotas in education and employment and, as such, is a dishonest scam. So I’m anti-“diversity” and in favor of clear standards of merit. Exactly where Professor Helmer’s controversial remarks fit into such a discussion, I’m not sure, but Slaton’s rhetoric about “hate speech” disturbs me.

One might say Professor Helmer is obviously prejudiced against homosexuals, but unless you can demonstrate that there is actual discrimination against homosexuals, then the expression of such views is not genuinely harmful, except in terms of hurt feelings.

Does anyone have a right not to have their feelings hurt?

 

Category: Education, Gays

Terrorist ‘White Widow’ Killed in Kenya?

Posted on | September 24, 2013 | 47 Comments

Yesterday, I reported that American, Canadian and British terrorists were said to be among the gunmen who perpetrated the massacre at the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Donald Douglas last night linked several reports that Britain’s notorious “White Widow” had been killed by Kenyan security forces when they stormed the mall yesterday. Now there are still more accounts:

“I’m aware that there have been reports of a British woman being involved,” British Home Secretary Theresa May said at a press conference Tuesday morning, “but until we have seen the investigations completed, it is not possible to give further details to confirm or deny that issue.” . . .
Lewthwaite has become an almost “mythological figure,” BBC reporter Peter Taylor said: “If she is dead then she would have achieved the kind of martyrdom that her husband Germaine Lindsay achieved.” A Kenyan newspaper said “multiple survivors of the attack” at the Nairobi mall said a woman “appeared to be giving orders to the attackers” . . .

Read the rest at Viral Read.

 

Category: Kenya, Terrorism

A Rare Disagreement With Thomas Sowell

Posted on | September 24, 2013 | 27 Comments

by Smitty

But, for the same reason that it makes no sense to impeach either President Obama or Chief Justice Roberts, it makes no sense to attempt to defund ObamaCare. That reason is that it cannot be done. The world is full of things that ought to be done but cannot in fact be done.

The reasons for making ever possible effort to defund ObamaCare, as I see it, are:

  • It’s an economic wrecking ball.
  • Fighting now, even if Ted Cruz is a modern Leonidas, plants the seeds. After the wrecking ball has made its rubble, the “Vote your way out of this” cry can arise. But where is the voice for that if the GOP isn’t trying now?
  • From a negotiating standpoint, if you don’t stake out your strongest position, how can you hope to compromise usefully, e.g. a one-year stay of swinging of the wrecking ball?
  • The sheer mendouchious twatwafflery of Nancy Pelosi accusing the ” target=”_blank”>GOP not arguing in good faith would be kinda funny, if there were not so much at stake.

Read the whole thing, which is a typically great Sowell column.
Whether or not the swing of the wrecking ball is delayed, though, 2014 will be a referendum on whether or not six years of no-talent rodeo clown governance was a swift idea.

Category: Barack Obama, Health Care
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