The Other McCain

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

Washington Post Publishes Jailbait Apologist (Ain’t I Done Told You So?)

Posted on | August 31, 2013 | 301 Comments

Besty Karasik is an airhead who quit her job as a laywer to become a painter. Whatever the art community gained by that transaction, the legal community lost no wisdom. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Karasik argues for decriminalizing student-teacher sex:

[W]ith our legal and moral codes failing us, our society needs to have an uncensored dialogue about the reality of sex in schools. . . .
I don’t believe that all sexual conduct between underage students and teachers should necessarily be classified as rape, and I believe that absent extenuating circumstances, consensual sexual activity between teachers and students should not be criminalized.  . . .
[T]he utter hysteria with which society responds to these situations does less to protect children than to assuage society’s need to feel that we are protecting them.

See, the problem is not teachers having sex with students. No, the real problem is the “utter hysteria” about this, and “society’s need to feel” that children are protected. In other words, the problem is your irrationality, whereas teachers banging their students . . . well,  they’re in need of understanding and sympathy. Teachers who have sex with kids are victims, really — victims of your “utter hysteria.”

Coincidentally, I had just been re-reading Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed, which addresses this rhetorical trick:

A concern that is important to the anointed is called “a matter of principle,” while a concern that is important to the benighted is called “an emotional issue.” Apparently other people don’t have reasons or principles; all they have are emotions.

So if you think teachers having sex with students should be criminally prosecuted, Karasik dismisses you as a hysteric. By contrast, Karasik’s own enthusiasms — “My loyalty is to justice and the planet,” she declares on her Twitter profile — she regards as entirely valid.

Betsy Karasik’s experience is simply superior to yours:

I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all of my female friends. When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier. Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relations with teachers. To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.

You have never been a 14-year-old girl, so your opinion doesn’t count. And if you have been a 14-year-old girl, but still don’t think it should be legal for teachers to have sex with students? Well, never mind your objections, because Betsy Karasik says it’s just fine.

No harm, no foul — maybe some bruised feelings, but teachers banging their students is really only a problem because of “society” which, having already been condemned for its “utter hysteria,” she now diagnoses as being in the grip of “the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex.” But is this really what society believes? Are “hysteria” and “fantasy” the basis of our laws? Are there no valid reasons to treat student-teacher sex as a crime?

After saying that workplace sexual harassment is worse than consensual sex between teenagers and teachers, Karasik alludes in passing to “certain teachers I considered friends despite their sexual relations with students.” Who are these teachers? Would she be so kind as to tell us their names, so that we might examine whether (as Karasik assures us) their sexual involvement with students was harmless?

But, no, she just throws this strange fact out there — some of Betsy Karasik’s friends are teachers who have sex with their students — and continues with her condemnation of society:

The point is that there is a vast and extremely nuanced continuum of sexual interactions involving teachers and students, ranging from flirtation to mutual lust to harassment to predatory behavior. Painting all of these behaviors with the same brush sends a damaging message to students and sets the stage for hypocrisy and distortion of the truth. Many teenagers are, biologically speaking, sexually mature. Pretending that this kind of thing won’t happen if we simply punish it severely enough is delusional.

Her rhetoric — “utter hysteria . . . fantasy . . . delusional” — is deliberately dismissive. All who disagree with Betsy Karasik are irrational, or are too stupid to understand that “vast and extremely nuanced continuum” of which enligthened people like herself are aware.

It’s not as if you couldn’t predict that such arguments would be made as our culture slid slowly down the slippery slope. In April 2002, I published an article with the headline, “Promoting pedophilia; Attempts to legitimize adult-child sex on rise,” and there were people then who said that such concerns were irrational.

In January of this year, Rush Limbaugh warned about “a movement to normalize pedophilia,” and was mocked by Soledad O’Brien.

Well, here we are in August, and the Washington Post is publishing columns advocating the legalization of student-teacher sex.

Wesley J. Smith at National Review says, “How low can we go? I am afraid we are going to find out.” Betsy Karasik finds herself shocked by the “tsunami of attackers” on Twitter:

Of course, in her mind, the “tsunami” only confirms to Betsy Karasik that “society” is hysterical and delusional. She wants to “open discussion” about legalizing sex with 14-year-olds. And when society answers back, “Oh, hell, no”? This just proves you’re crazy.

 

 

UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread, with further commentary by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air and Tim Graham at the Media Research Center, but I like Stephen Kruiser’s solution best: “Kill the media.”

The world is full of idiots with bad ideas and the editors of the Washington Post are obligated to publish only the very worst of them. One cannot reform such institutions as the Washington Post and the New York Times, but can only pray for their well-deserved destruction, because their wicked depravity is not accidental.

The publishers are amoral monsters, their editors are active agents of evil, and their deliberate policy is to employ no honest or decent person. Nor could any honest or decent person ever wish to be associated with publications whose daily business is the destruction of Western civilization. A Christian would no more desire to be published by the Washington Post than to work in an abortion clinic or a bordello. It is a disgraceful stain on the conscience of our nation.

Fact: It’s hard to type when your fingers are trembling with rage.

UPDATE II: A couple of trolls got zapped. Wombat seems to be offline today, so I had to wield the troll-hammer myself, especially since one of these was a false-flag moby troll — the very worst kind, worse even than concern trolls. The comments are moderated and, while the proprietors obviously do not approve of everything in the comments (hell, I never even see most of them), there are certain lines that shall not be crossed, and vicious creatures who use bogus identities for deliberate evil will be zapped. If necessary, you will be IP-banned.

Go troll somewhere else, you monstrous fucktards.

 


Category: Culture, Education, Sex

Hard Times for Gender Studies Major

Posted on | August 30, 2013 | 341 Comments

Hilarity ensued Monday after @Andria_XX complained that social-media criticism of Miley Cyrus included “bodyshaming/slutshaming” and “heteropatriarchal crap.” Readers will recall that Andria has an “Honors BA in Social Justice and Peace Studies” and is pursuing a Master’s degree in Gender Studies. So . . . how’s that going?

“I have a honors BA and I’m defending my MA thesis
in two weeks. I am also apply for jobs and I can
only find stuff in the service industry. I applied
for a Hotel Front Desk Clerk job today.
My degrees mean NOTHING.
I am at the end of my rope.“

What? Being an advanced student of useless ideology doesn’t result in meaningful employment? That’s just really . . . unfair.

UPDATE: Linked by Tarpon’s Swamp and Rio Norte Line — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

Category: Education, Feminism

Any #ManBearPig Sightings In Peru?

Posted on | August 30, 2013 | 24 Comments

by Smitty

The Government of Peru has declared a state of emergency in parts of the southern Andean region of Puno after temperatures have plummeted to the coldest they have been in a decade. President Ollanta Humala announced emergency states in seven separate Puno provinces: Carabay, Sandia, Lampa, San Antonio de Putina, Melgar, Puno and El Collao.
Not only have hundreds of families been affected, but more than 250,000 alpacas have died due to the freezing temperatures.

Category: Democrats, Global Warming

Is Obama Pivoting From Jobs To Syria To ObamaCare Like A Rodeo Clown Ballerina?

Posted on | August 30, 2013 | 63 Comments

by Smitty

The only way to make this any worse would be to give it full animation and “Dancing Queen”, by ABBA, for a soundtrack.


I guess if Syria isn’t proving enough of a distraction, or the IRS scandal, or the Benghazi scandal, then #OccupyResoluteDesk is just going to have to hit the road and whack the people with his rhetorical bludgeon to keep them from noticing the debt ceiling negotiations (emphasis mine):

The White House is mapping out a strategy to deploy the president, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Jill Biden in what will be their most coordinated effort yet to sell Obamacare, senior administration officials said.
A burst of activity will coincide with the October opening of the insurance marketplaces, but the West Wing views this next phase as something more akin to a political campaign’s push for early votes. Over the six-month enrollment period, the White House will use the Obamas and Bidens strategically, tracking the turnout for the exchanges in key states and sending them into weak markets to boost numbers.

This promises to be rich. I can’t wait to see the Potemkin villages, with their Potemkin marketplaces, on this Potemkin tour.
Then there is a question over whether there is enough hush money for the unions:

A few weeks ago, I discussed the fact that labor unions have been increasing vocal about their objections to certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will “shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class,” wrote three labor leaders in July. Now, according to a report from InsideHealthPolicy, the Obama administration is considering offering insurance subsidies—intended for the uninsured—to labor union members who already have employer-sponsored coverage.
…
Now, according to Rachana Dixit of InsideHealthPolicy, the administration is “working on regulations to address the issue” that people covered under Taft-Hartley plans aren’t eligible for subsidies. But it’s not an “issue” in the sense of being a glitch or a mistake; union leaders are seeking special treatment, and additional taxpayer subsidies, that other participants in employer-sponsored coverage don’t get.

Assad aside: let no one think the U.S. would be so crass as to undertake unilateral action:

The United States can always look to Bulungi for support.

via Rare
and Rare
and Breitbart

Category: Barack Obama, Health Care

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
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