The Other McCain

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

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Ready to Make Feeble Unilateral Gesture Against Syria

Posted on | August 30, 2013 | 56 Comments

The British Parliament voted against war, but now that the oceans stopped rising and the planet has begun to heal and Obama has “restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth” — what, you didn’t notice? — President Gutsy Call has decided that go-it-alone foreign policy and military intervention without congressional authorization are the humane and democratic thing to do:

The goal of the cruise missile strikes the United States is planning to carry out in Syria is to restore the smudged “red line” that President Obama drew a year ago against the use of poison gas. . . .
But the military strategy that the Obama administration is considering is not linked to its larger diplomatic strategy of persuading President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to yield power and support negotiations that would end the bloody civil war. . . .
Mr. Obama appeared to acknowledge as much on Wednesday when he characterized the potential military operation as “a shot across the bow” that would be intended to caution Mr. Assad from further chemical weapons attacks. “That doesn’t solve all the problems inside of Syria,” Mr. Obama told the PBS program “NewsHour,” “and, you know, it doesn’t obviously end the death of innocent civilians inside of Syria.”

A mere gesture — a politically motivated gesture rejected by our allies, a gesture that won’t actually achieve any tangible policy goal, except to remind our nation’s enemies that when Obama talks tough, they can disregard anything he says and suffer no consequence more severe than a token symbolic response and an angry speech or two.

 

Category: Barack Obama, Military, Syria

Bitches Be Cray-Cray: A Heteropatriarchal Theory of Non-Transformative Justice

Posted on | August 30, 2013 | 103 Comments

Otherwise known as the Anglo-American common-law tradition, I figure glitzing up the Rule of Law in fancy intellectual jargon might give it the academic oomph necessary to compete with this crazy crap:

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin verdict, Chicago has seen several public events and workshops exploring its aftermath. On Aug. 15, queer and feminist scholars gathered at the famous Hull House for a panel titled, “Transformative Justice and The Trayvon Martin Case: A Consideration.”
There have been many cries for justice and calls for the prosecution and incarceration of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Martin. However, this panel was put together to explore the possibilities of transformative justice (TJ) in the wake of the event.
TJ emphasizes alternatives to what is called the prison—industrial complex (PIC). For its proponents, TJ forgos revenge and believes that more incarceration only worsens the conditions that made the violence possible in the first place. TJ also resists using the PIC, believing that it is in itself brutal and harmful toward both the guilty and the injured parties.

Oh, shut hell up. And go fix me a sammich. You don’t even describe your own panel as well as does conservative Katherine Timpf:

Capitalism and white supremacy both played roles in the killing of Trayvon Martin, a public university professor said . . .
Dr. Erica R. Meiners, a professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Northeastern Illinois University, made the remarks while speaking on a panel of self-described “queer feminist scholars.”
“[T]he web of interconnected histories and contexts that made it possible for George Zimmerman to shoot Trayvon Martin and walk away cannot be separated from white supremacy, colonialism, heteromasculinity, and capitalism,” said Meiners.
“These killing threads shape the world we inhabit,” she added.

There is a clinical term for people who talk like that: Crazy.

In addition to Dr. Meiners, the other “Queer Theory” panelists were Traci Schlesinger, associate professor of sociology at DePaul University, and Beth Richie, a professor of criminal justice and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The inmates are running the asylum at taxpayer expense. You are sending your kids to college and paying tuition so that anti-American wackjobs like this can teach your children to hate you.

 

 


Category: Education, Feminism

Studying the Master: @AceOfSpadesHQ Brings His Blogging A-Game, Again

Posted on | August 30, 2013 | 31 Comments

Aficionados of Blog-Fu will some day recall Thursday’s AOSHQ beatdown of Slate the way boxing fans remember Clay-Liston:

Slate, the Amateur Online Webzine
Specializing in Hit-Trolling and
Outrage-Fishing: First of a Series

 

Slate, the Group Blog That
Troll-Baits With Provocative Stupidity:
Second in a Series

 

Slate, The Blog That Trolls Its
Own Readers, Last in a Series

What he’s pointing out is that the “counterintuitive”-style article, or the rant that deliberately takes aim at conventional sensibilities in a cheeky pseudo-iconoclastic fashion, is just trolling for reaction, rather than doing anything intellectually valid or useful.

This has become as cliché as the BuzzFeed cute-kitty slideshow or the Think Progress look-at-this-stupid-thing-a-Republican-said outrage piece. (Partisan oppo-research as “investigative journalism.”)

Producers of this assembly-line erzatz intellectualism know their intended readership, and there is a certain art to producing their stuff, in the same way that Brill Building songwriters required skill to crank out a reliable commercial product. But it’s lightweight, and any pretension to seriousness is like the Monkees when they tried to rebel against Don Kirschner and prove that they were a “real” band.

Uh, no. No, not really. No, not at all.

Slate has not yet descended to the level of Salon.com, but it has definitely begun slouching toward Middlebrow, except that one could make a (counterintuitive!) defense of 20th-century Middlebrow literature as something better than any of the cheap dreck being cranked out by Matthew Yglesias, et al., in the Obama era.

Notice how Ace goes from calling Slate an “Amateur Online Webzine” to calling it a “Group Blog,” then just “Blog,” because this is what the folks who market Slate don’t want to admit: This low-investment, don’t-have-to-pick-up-the-phone, just-pull-it-out-of-my-ass stuff isn’t any more legitimate as capital-J Journalism than anything published by scores of people who are Just Bloggers.

Publishing blogs under a “magazine” banner doesn’t make you any better than anybody else, and if institutions of capital-J Journalism can’t do any better than this lame crap, they deserve to fail.

Where Ace really nails it is deep into the third post, where he describes Slate as “something that once sort of tried to pretend to be a ‘smart’ alternative to real media.” DING! DING! DING!

Maybe our nostalgic fondness for Michael Kinsley-era Slate is like most other nostalgic fondness for things that always seem better in memory than they actual were at the time. Counter-intuitively, however, I want to claim that the decline of Slate is quite real.

These kids are just so lazy or, in the case of Allison Benedikt, so hopelessly ignorant that they are incapable of good writing.

Also, it’s much more Team Player these days, isn’t it? Grant that Slate has always been a liberal publication, but hyper-partisanship — by God, epistemic closure! — has warped the whole project. Maybe the tedious predictability of Slate’s political slant is a marketing strategy, but this is now an editorial team so completely trapped inside such an ideological bubble that it’s not even interesting liberalism.

Maybe they know what they’re doing, in terms of a business model, and are satisfied with their readership trends. Whatever.

Not a damned thing Slate has published in recent memory, however, is as good as Ace’s thermonuclear destruction of Allison Benedikt.

A true classic, Ace. Integrity like Paul Fucking Anka.

 


Category: Ace of Spades

States’ Rights: OK for Dopeheads; Hateful Hillbilly Bible-Thumpers, Not So Much

Posted on | August 29, 2013 | 84 Comments

A headline that included the word “butt-f*ckers” — without the asterisk — crossed my mind here. However, because Ace of Spades is on a tear against the deliberate troll-baiting at Slate, I passed it up.

Anyway, the re-election of President Obama meant that the gay agenda would be imposed top-down by executive authority, and the Internal Revenue Service will now recognize same-sex marriage without regard for whether it is legal in the couple’s state of residence.

The “Don’t Ask Bradley Manning, Don’t Tell Chelsea Manning” policy was wiped out by a stroke of Obama’s pen, and the Supreme Court has voided the Defense of Marriage Act, so that the “emerging awareness” doctrine articulated by Justice Kennedy in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling has advanced to the point that, with the de facto federal imposition of gay marriage (despite constitutional amendments to the contrary in more than 30 states) we are now a judicial hop, skip and jump from a Supreme Court decision mandating compulsory sodomy.

OK, maybe that was a bit of hyperbole, but (a) Slate does these cheap stunts daily, and (b) clearly we have drifted off into that part of the map marked “Here Be Dragons” and there’s no telling what’s next.

The Constitution is now whatever liberals say it is.

Mark Newton and Peter Truong could not be reached for comment.

While state-based opposition to gay marriage is thus rendered meaningless by Treasury Department decree, however, the Department of Justice has decided that federal drug laws are optional and if states legalize marijuana, hey, toke up, dude. Party on.

So, basically, Thursday, Aug. 29, 2013, was cause for celebration by dopeheads and buttf*ckers. In Obama’s America, sodomy and sinsemilla are the most important national priorities.

Bottom line: We’re all Andrew Sullivan’s bitches now.

And if you don’t like it, shut up, haters.

 

Category: Constitution, Gays

Will Syria Be #OccupyResoluteDesk’s Resignation Letter?

Posted on | August 29, 2013 | 59 Comments

by Smitty

Stacy hates this sort of noise, but I’ll throw it out there, because I think it’s plausible.

  1. BHO is a narcissist.
  2. BHO has an awful lot of issues/scandals set to go lively after Labor Day:
    • Benghazi
    • IRS
    • Debt ceiling increase
    • Immigration
    • Continuing resolution in general–
    • ObamaCare in particular
  3. BHO is to the Presidency what Wally is to the Dilbert comic strip, hold the laughs.
  4. Leaders such as Coburn and Boehner have already laid down markers saying “Don’t do it” concerning Syria.
  5. This is of such concern that no less than David “the Greasy One” Axelrod himself got on the air to denounce Coburn.

Prediction: citing high-minded concerns about “the children”, #OccupyResoluteDesk gives the orders to bomb Syria.
This triggers a Constitutional crisis so severe that the anti-War movement, dormant since Bush’s last wave goodbye, is roused. It unites with the Tea Partiers and everyone else sick to death of our Rodeo Clown foreign policy, and the House votes to impeach.
Before Harry “the Cadaver” Reid can be roused from his quasi-comatose stupor, #OccupyResoluteDesk grabs the camer for one last, personal-pronoun-drenched, racial dog-whistle soundtracked, interminable, strawman-army-decimating soliloquy that says, in summary, that neither the American people nor this Constitutionally-obsessed Congress are worthy of the power of his glow.
And that’s how he maintains his streak of never dealing with the responsibilities of his office in any intelligible way.

Category: Barack Obama, Republicans

Hmm. @JamesTaranto Mildly Disagrees With @AnnAlthouse? Let Me Try That.

Posted on | August 29, 2013 | 109 Comments

OK, so a Puerto Rican guy kidnapped and raped girls in Cleveland and everybody reported about that case, and not once do I remember anyone arguing that Ariel Castro’s crimes, or the reporting about his crimes, had any specifically racial context. Everybody was just horrified by it, and nobody said either (a) that Puerto Rican guys are particularly prone to chaining up kidnapped girls in their rape dungeons, or (b) that reporting about Ariel Castro was motivated by deliberate racist fearmongering to demonize Puerto Ricans.

Why, then, is there some kind of score-keeping about crime involving blacks and whites? Why can’t we all just get along — and worry about those crazy Puerto Rican rapist kidnappers?

Also, dildo-wielding lesbian cheerleaders, but I digress . . .

Brian Beutler’s shoddy assertion that he knows the Secret Motives of those who have reported about black-on-white crime — and these are, of course, evil racist right-wing motives — mistakes the reaction for the action. That is to say, if there is some kind of backlash going on here, to what is it a backlash, and is it justified? And if Beutler would care to explain why the original action (i.e., relentless wall-to-wall media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case) was justified, he’ll find himself hard-pressed to refute those who argue that a reaction is equally justified, if not more so, by quite similar arguments. This is not an argument about race. It’s an argument about media bias.

The correct conservative argument is that liberal media hyped up and deliberately distorted the Trayvon Martin case because it was an election year and an apparently juicy story about racism and gun control was a nice way to exploit black grievances against whitey. Let’s be honest: If you’re a black person who thinks The Man is keepin’ you down, you’re not going to vote for Mitt Romney, and so Trayvon Martin became a Democrat Party voter-turnout poster child.

There, I said it: This was just Democrats playing ugly partisan politics.

Democrats have never recognized any standard of decorum, civility, decency or honesty in political rhetoric, and the fact that they would exploit a shooting in Florida this way surprises no one who has paid attention to American politics.  (Fact: In 1916, Woodrow Wilson’s re-election slogan was, “He Kept Us Out of War”; less than a year after he was re-elected, America went to war.)

Democrats are just goddamned liars. The fact that one of their more politically useful falsehoods nowadays is telling black people that their problems are caused by white racism should not require us to treat that lie any more seriously than we do any other Democrat lie.

When Democrats say we need “a conversation on race,” what they really mean is they want to have a monologue, a tedious lecture about all the evils perpetrated against black people by those evil racist Republicans. Your part of the “conversation” is, shut up.

All of this was motivated by James Taranto’s defense of colorblindness, including a strategic disagreement with Ann Althouse:

Counter-Trayvonism, according to Althouse, refers to efforts “to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case” by “looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white . . . to undo the distortions.”
She thinks this is a terrible mistake . . .

Althouse’s argument includes the assertion that reporting about black crime “gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.”

Whoa! Hold on there, Professor: Are you saying you know such people? Have you reported these dangerous haters to the Department of Homeland Security? Oh, wait, never mind . . .

Here’s Professor Althouse’s headline: “The conservatives’ high ground on race is colorblindness, and they’d be fools to abandon it.”

And who can argue with that?

Yet the fact remains that Democrats mopped the floor with the GOP last year by exploiting all manner of transparently false appeals (“War on Women,” anybody?) aimed at special-interest groups that compose the Democrat constituency. Because the liberal media enthusiastically promote the Democrat Party’s agitprop campaigns, however, it is very difficult to persuade the targets of such appeals that these partisan lies are not simply “the news.”

For crying out loud, no Republican could get elected in the South for an entire century because Democrats had folks convinced that voting Republican would be a disgrace to the Heroic Cause of the Glorious Dead. (BTW, “Confederate” is the new talking point.)

Go ask any Democrat voter — black, white, male, female, whatever — why they voted to re-elect Obama. And good luck getting any rational explanation of how voting Democrat has actually made life better for themselves or their community.

(Has anybody heard from Peggy Joseph lately?)

It is an undeniable fact of American political life that any precinct that votes overwhelmingly Democrat is typically composed of either (a) affluent white elites, or (b) the most wretchedly poor minority populations in the nation. Somebody’s getting screwed over in that deal, and I’m pretty sure it ain’t the rich white folks.

Whatever your problem is, “vote Democrat” is never the solution.

If you suffer from such low self-esteem that it makes you feel better to have a bunch of rich white liberals throw a year-round pity party for you, you’re going to get just about as much actual help as you deserve, which is to say, none at all.

So I’ll leave Professor Althouse to worry about whether those white supremacists are getting “air” from the daily news. Instead I’m going to focus on the goddamned Democrats and their hired liars in the media who have never said an honest word in their lives.

 

Category: Ann Althouse, Crime, Democrats, Media Bias, Racism

Kim’s Ex-Girlfriend Suffers Heartache, Execution by Firing Squad; Neal Sedaka Could Not Be Reached for Comment

Posted on | August 29, 2013 | 40 Comments

Every guy who has ever been dumped by a girl knows the feeling. You mope around the house, thinking back on all the good times you had together, and then you start dreaming of the day you become the paranoid dictator of a totalitarian police state:

Kim Jong-un’s ex-girlfriend was among a dozen well-known North Korean performers who were executed by firing squad nine days ago, according to South Korean reports.
Hyon Song-wol, a singer, rumoured to be a former lover of the North Korean leader, is said to have been arrested on Aug 17 with 11 others for violating laws against pornography.
The reports in South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper indicate that Hyon, a singer with the Unhasu Orchestra, was among those arrested on August 17 for violating domestic laws on pornography.
All 12 were machine-gunned three days later, with other members of North Korea’s most famous pop groups and their immediate families forced to watch. The onlookers were then sent to prison camps, victims of the regime’s assumption of guilt by association, the reports stated.

Kinda harsh, Kim. Couldn’t you have just asked her to return your varsity jacket? Or maybe work out the stress by nuking somebody?

 

Category: North Korea

Public-School Graduate @abenedikt Attempts Persuasive Writing, Fails

Posted on | August 29, 2013 | 78 Comments

Allison Benedikt hates Ken White at Popehat, but of course, so does Charles Carreon, and we don’t need to go there just yet. I digress . . .

If You Send Your Kid to Private
School, You Are a Bad Person

That’s an interesting headline, which Allison Benedikt endeavors to justify without success, because she’s an idiot.

I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book. . . . I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone’s read? I haven’t. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don’t quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all.

Allison is “doing fine,” because she’s an editor at Slate, where any ill-educated cretin can get hired, as long as they’re a liberal white girl whose wedding was reported by the New York Times.

Oh, and apparently being an anti-Israel Jew helps, too.

Free of knowledge, unencumbered by facts or logic — yes, send your kids to public school so they can be a liberal like Allison Benedikt.

 

Category: Education
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