The Other McCain

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

Will Sydney Leathers Porn Video Be Entitled, ‘Not Enough Latex on Earth’?

Posted on | August 5, 2013 | 56 Comments

A Democrat finally created a job, as Donald Douglas points out, which explains why tattoo-covered skanks are a Democrat key constituency.

If you want to see more of Sydney Leathers, let me warn you that this link is Not Safe For Work, by which I mean, you might get fired for projectile vomiting in your office cubicle. One look at that skeezy tramp, and whatever capacity for arousal you might have will be instantly neutralized by an overwhelming fear of infection. Viral, bacterial, fungal — probably some spiders and cockroaches in there, too.

Did somebody say “nasty”?

She could be the Typhoid Mary of chlamydia — the poster girl for National Sexually Transmitted Disease Awareness Week.

 

Category: Anthony Weiner, Scandal, Sex

Meltdown Monday: Does Bill Schmalfeldt Need a Brief Vacation at Spring Grove?

Posted on | August 5, 2013 | 112 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt ranting, 2011. (Image via Thomas Anderson at Vimeo)

“The point is, the sound advice I gave Barrett Brown could apply equally to you, Mr. Schmalfeldt: ‘Spare me your lawsuit threats … you are traveling a road to destruction.’ …
“As for your own understanding (of law or anything else), sir, I am quite certain it is impaired by the fact that YOU’RE CRAZY.
“Crackers. Psycho. Loopy. Off your rocker.
“Nuttier than a Snickers bar.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, July 26

“Spring Grove Hospital Center is the oldest hospital for the mentally ill in Maryland, and the third oldest in the United States. … It was renamed the Maryland Hospital for the Insane in 1838, and moved to its present site at Catonsville in 1872. …
“With 295 inpatient beds and 62 assisted-living beds, the Center provides acute, subacute and long-term psychiatric care to adult and geriatric patients …”
— Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

It would be wrong to say that Bill Schmalfeldt “went crazy” today, because clearly he arrived at that destination long ago. Having been ordered by Carroll County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Stansfield June 14 to cease all contact with John Hoge, Schmalfeldt’s insane obsession makes it impossible for him to comply. So when for the third time Schmalfeldt “accidentally” addressed Hoge in a Twitter message (the difference between speaking about someone and speaking to someone on Twitter) what does Schmalfeldt do? He sends a crazy e-mail to the Carroll County State’s Attorney’s office:

“People contacting me now are surreptitiously adding @wjjhoge to their tweets hoping to catch me in this mistake, and they have succeeded again. . . .
“Hoge’s friends have been trying to trap me this way. . . .
“I know that I have blundered into the trap that was set for me . . .”

Exactly whom does Schmalfeldt mean to accuse of “trying to trap me”?

What is actually happening — you should read this post by Hoge — is that Bill Schmalfeldt is engaged in cyberstalking: Obsessively watching Hoge and Hoge’s friends to see what they’re talking about, and them jumping into their timelines to shout his crazy accusatory gibberish at them.

If anyone wants me to provide a court affidavit to explain how Schmalfeldt’s particular form of harassment works (in terms of tactics, strategy and purpose), I’ll be glad to do so, but I’m not going to describe it here, because I don’t endorse it, and I don’t want to accidentally offer a “How To Be a Troll” guide for copycats.

Schmalfeldt’s problem is that he has become so obsessive and/or compulsive about his cyberstalking that he lacks the rationality necessary to avoid violating the court order.

Bill can’t help himself. So when he starts ranting about “POOP FLAKES” and scrotums (trust me, you don’t want to see those Tweets), this is not merely evidence, it’s symptomatic. His Twitter timeline got so crazy, even his left-wing buddies were telling Schmalfeldt he was losing his mind and finally Hoge felt it necessary to ask police to do a welfare check to make sure Schmalfeldt had not become a danger to himself or others.

Having expended 5,000 words to explain to Bill Schmalfeldt that he’s crazy, I don’t know what more can be done. When the nice young men in white coats show up to cart him away for a psychiatric evaluation, we can expect that Schmalfeldt will blame other people for his problems.

Because that’s what crazy people always do.

UPDATE: This was predictable:

Switching your Twitter account to “protected” status is, in this kind of situation, very much like waving a white flag. Bill Schmalfeldt was the aggressor, and it’s impossible to accomplish much in terms of Twitter aggression once you switch to “protected” status.

 



 

 


Category: Bill Schmalfeldt

Primary Politics: Can the Grassroots Defeat the GOP Establishment in 2014?

Posted on | August 5, 2013 | 142 Comments

Interesting developments: Matt Bevin is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky GOP primary.

Checking his biography, I’m glad to see that Bevin is a graduate of Washington & Lee University, a U.S. Army veteran, and a small business owner — exactly the kind of outsider “not a politician” profile anyone would want in a Tea Party candidate. If grassroots conservatives in Kentucky rally behind Bevin, I think we can start chilling the champagne for Mitch McConnell’s retirement party. However, defeating the party’s Senate leader in a primary would be completely unprecedented.

If this is Star Wars, Luke Skywalker and the rebel alliance can’t expect Darth Vader to surrender the Empire without a fight. Or can we?

FLASHBACK MAY 2009:

We were standing outside the Continental Lounge in Rosslyn, Va., while the young Republican operative explained it to me.
“All they care about is getting their chairmanships back, and they don’t care how they get there,” said the operative. “They don’t want to spend any money, so they were looking for a self-funder.”
“They” are Republican senators, and what my friend was explaining was the otherwise inexplicable decision of the National Republican Senatorial Committee to endorse Charlie Crist in the Florida Senate race — 15 months before the primary!

Ah, those heady days of 2009, when the Tea Party uprising was a new and untested force in American political life, when Marco Rubio was 35 points behind Charlie Crist in the polls and supporters of that unknown underdog Marco Rubio were told he had no chance!

Rubio’s role in the “Gang of Eight” has rather tarnished his reputation among conservatives, but thank God he beat Charlie Crist, eh?

Nothing could be more corrupt than the shabby deal whereby John Cornyn, the NRSC and Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer — I pause to spit on the ground — lined up behind Crist in May 2009.

The “Not One Red Cent” rebellion was the first shot of a guerrilla struggle, with the Tea Party grassroots as the ragtag insurgents in a long war for control of the Republican Party that has not ended yet, and won’t end — cannot end — until the rebels have utterly vanquished the Beltway GOP Establishment and their go-along-to-get-along philosophy of bipartisan compromise. There is nothing that the present-day Democrat Party believes in that any patriotic American can endorse, and all talk of “bipartisanship” is anathema.

You cannot defeat Democrats by promising to cooperate with Democrats, and the GOP’s corrupt compromisers must be replaced by a new generation of conservatives who understand a very old idea: Give voters a choice, not an echo, as Phyllis Schalfly said in 1964.

To hell with anyone who says the politics of principle is unrealistic, who argues that it is a “smart” and pragmatic thing for Republicans to position themselves as the “Me, Too” party, promising voters a more efficient Welfare State — Democrat Lite, as it were.

The Democrat are wrong, their liberal policy agenda is bad, and Republicans need not apologize for being the party of Right and Good.

Mid-term elections are always more about the grassroots than are the pursuit of independent “swing” voters that is typical of those gaudy national spectacles of a presidential campaign. Turnout is always lower in the mid-terms. So-called low-information voters — who are usually counted in opinion polls as undecided, “don’t know/don’t care” — can be spurred to vote in a presidential election by emotional appeals to do their patriotic duty as citizens. But it is very difficult to explain to these disaffected and ill-informed people why electing congressmen and senators and state legislators is ultimately important to the future of the country. And it is only in closely contested “swing” states that the parties make any real effort to mobilize voters even in a presidential campaign.

Understanding this factor is crucial to evaluating the stakes in 2014. In a deeply “red” state like Kentucky in a mid-term election, there is comparatively little chance that a bruising primary fight for the GOP Senate nomination will damage Republican prospects in November 2014. If Matt Bevin can somehow mobilize the kind of grassroots support necessary to defeat Mitch McConnell in the primary, Bevin will stomp Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in the general election the way Godzilla stomped Tokyo.

Conservatives therefore need not listen to any scaredy-cat talk that support for Matt Bevin will endanger Republican hopes for capturing control of the Senate in 2014. The GOP Establishment will encourage such fears, and the liberal media will cheerfully publicize such talk, in exactly the same way the same people claimed that the Tea Party uprising of 2009-2010 was bad for Republicans. Yet the result in November 2010 was a historic landslide victory for Republicans, and if John Boehner doesn’t understand that he owes his control of the House Speaker’s gavel to the conservative grassroots, how better to remind Boehner of this fact than to send his Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell into early retirement?

Simple message for you, Mister Speaker: You could be next.

All of these thoughts were inspired by Erick Erickson’s commentary on his encounter with an NRSC representative at this past weekend’s Red State Gathering  in New Orleans.

What Erick relates is unfortunate on all sides. The NRSC operative was, we may suppose, just following orders, and Erick and I have had more than a few disputes in the past couple of years. But my own position in the fundamental question that Erick addresses hasn’t changed since 2009, when he and I were in 100% agreement: The NRSC should stay the hell out of contested Republican primaries, period.

Set aside any question of ideology, friendship or personal interest, and what it comes down to is this: Either the Republican Party represents an active and organic popular movement — a principled and patriotic opposition to the corrupt agenda of the Democrats — or else the GOP is simply a vehicle of careerist political ambition.

A top-down party controlled by insiders motivated by their narrow private interests cannot expect the kind of committed loyalty that a genuinely principled grassroots movement inspires. For the NRSC to go meddling in a primary — even on behalf of the Senate Minority Leader — is anathema to the kind of grassroots party the GOP must be, if it is ever to defeat the Democrats and become a governing majority again.

If Mitch McConnell wants to be re-nominated as the Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky, let him spend his own campaign funds and mobilize his own resources for that purpose, and not dishonestly use national party resources against Matt Bevin.

And frankly, I think the spectacle of a contested primary can and should be averted altogether: Mitch McConnell should retire.

No hard feelings, Senator. Cash in your chips and walk away from the table, take up a gig at a think tank or lobby shop, collect your pension and appear on TV as an “elder statesman.” I’m sure Fox News would pay you a nice six-figure salary as a commentator.

There is a quite recent precedent, after all.

Last November, when the Retire #Taxby Chambliss movement began, nobody imagined it might actually happen, but it did, didn’t it?

Is this crazy? Of course it is. But everybody told us we were crazy to imagine that Marco Rubio could defeat Charlie Crist.

Until this morning, I’d never even heard the name Matt Bevin. All I know about him is what I’ve quickly skimmed from his Web site biography, and frankly I don’t give a damn about whatever his political “negatives” might be. This isn’t really about Matt Bevin. It’s not about Mitch McConnell. It’s not about Erick Erickson. This is about America’s future, and we are not a nation built by timid and fearful souls.

Here’s the way I see it: We’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em. It’s been one of those long nights — win a little, lose a little, up and down, never a chance to rake a big pot. The chips are dwindling. No guts, no glory, so if we get any kind of a decent hand, we might as well go all-in.

Folks, as crazy as this may seem, I think that if we will all rally behind Matt Bevin — and rally now — Mitch McConnell will announce by Christmas that he won’t seek re-election to the Senate.

No contested primary, no wasted resources, no hard feelings, just a changing of the guard, and a passing of the torch.

This development will shock the daylights out of the GOP Beltway Establishment, which has “tamed” Marco Rubio and thought they had domesticated the Tea Party movement.

Do we want bipartisan compromise?

Do we want Democrat Lite? Go along to get along?

Not just “no” — hell, no. All in!

 

MATT BEVIN for U.S. SENATE

 


Category: Conservatism 101, Election, Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, Senate, Tea Party

Is the Mother of a Convicted Drug Dealer Running the #FreeKate Facebook Page?

Posted on | August 4, 2013 | 45 Comments

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve written anything about accused sex offender Kaitlyn Hunt, whose supporters seem to think there should be a “lesbian loophole” in statutory rape laws. The “Free Kate” movement has undergone a substantial meltdown since the glory days of May, when Kaitlyn was featured on the Today show, before the facts of the case were widely know (See SupportHonesty.net).

The most recent news is that Kaitlyn Hunt’s trial in Indian River County, Florida, which had been scheduled for Sept. 9, has been postponed indefinitely because Circuit Court Judge Robert Pegg has to hear a murder trial. Meanwhile, Jeanette Runyon has been keeping tabs on the “Free Kate” activists and reports that one of the Facebook group’s administrators is the mother of a notorious felon, Zachary Rose, who was convicted in federal court in May:

The mastermind behind a multimillion-dollar Jacksonville pill mill operation that illegally sold painkillers to thousands, including a man who died from an overdose, pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to a drug conspiracy charge.
Zachary Timothy Rose, 27, faces a maximum of 30 years in prison and the forfeiture of $3.1 million in cash after pleading guilty to conspiring to illegally distribute oxycodone and Xanax. Rose also agreed not to file an appeal in the case and has offered to cooperate against co-defendants.
The plea before U.S. Magistrate Jim Klindt allowed Rose to avoid a possible mandatory life sentence on a charge of aiding and abetting in the 2010 overdose death of a Jacksonville man who received oxycodone from one of Rose’s clinics. The aiding and abetting charge and a money-laundering charge were dropped as part of the plea agreement.

According to TheDirty.com, Zachary Rose was a party animal who loved the nightlife, clubbing in Atlanta and Miami. He had a criminal record dating back at least to 2005, when he was arrested on a cocaine charge in Tallahassee. When he turned himself in to authorities in 2011, he said he had been treated for mental illness since childhood and — oh, by the way — he’s got herpes:

When asked by the judge, Rose said he was on medications relating to a bipolar condition he said he was diagnosed with in 2007, painkillers from a back injury and other medicines to treat genital herpes.
He said the painkillers are “kind of an on-and-off thing” and that he was an “experimental child,” referring to the several medications he said doctors prescribed him as he grew up with mental health conditions.

Jeanette’s identification of “Free Kate” Facebook administrator Deb Rose as this man’s mother seemed to me circumstantial. But then a Twitter account popped up with a few choice words.

You stay classy, Free Kate supporters!

 

Category: Kaitlyn Hunt

Rule 5 Sunday: Jump They Say

Posted on | August 4, 2013 | 20 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

[Obligatory disclaimer goes here.]

Randy’s Roundtable leads off this week with Sara Jean Underwood in her underoos, followed by Fishersville Mike who is looking forward to the start of the NFL cheerleader season. Animal Magnetism brings Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, and 90 Miles From Tyranny goes for the hat trick with Late Night Ladies, Steampunk Hotness, and Hot Pick of the Late Night. Wine, Women and Politics also has a threefer with TGIF Female Finery, Fine on Friday,  and Thursday Hotness. Postaldog has Improbably Named Rule 5, Mia Corday, and Taylor Swift with four girls in better bikinis, while Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’s Pretty Girls on a Thursday is all about Girls With Guns.

***MUSICAL INTERMISSION***

***END OF INTERMISSION***

Speaking of girls with guns, First Street Journal is back from vacation, and adds some Ashley Dupre to the mix.

EBL has a herd of links this week, starting with Hamptons Summer Party and continuing with Penelope Cruz, Anthony Weiner Campaign Meltdown, Monica Vs. Sydney, The Horny Bunch, and Disney Princesses.

A View From The beach has Danica McKellar, Your Morning Workout, Girls Don’t Like Boys, Leathers Or Lewinsky?, Water In Motion, On The Horizon, That’s Gotta Hurt, and American Apes, Japanese Weirdness.

Soylent Siberia kicks off the week with Your Sunday Angel, followed by Linky Love Hawtness Contender Shelby, a Monday Motivationer Weather Forecast, Overnighty Jessie, Chain Mail Linky Love, Tuesday Titillation Lindsey, Humpday Hawtness Sarah, A Soylent PSA, Seven Lousy Snooches (A Rant), Spassfabrik Doggie Days, Corsetcare Conservatory, Irony Thy Name Is Snooch, T-GIF Friday, Doggie Days Overnighty Tyran, and Morning Delight Amelia.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Aimee Mullins; his vintage babe is Catherine Bach, and let’s not forget Sex in Advertising. Dustbury offers Marissa Mayer and Florence Welch, while at The Camp of the Saints it’s Melissa Manning and the return of Rule 5 News.

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week include Torrie Wilson, Nicky Whelan, Daniela Razetto, Natalia Paris, Cheryl Cole, Syunka Ayami, Mikaru Asahina, Vanessa Huppenkothen, Tika Sumpter, Keke Palmer, Yvonne Strahovski, Stephanie Christine, Aida Yespica, Mara Roland, Vanessa Hudgens, Reshma Shetty, Jhenny Andrade, Chika Tono, Jill Marie Jones, and Gugu Mbatha Raw. Also, a Rule 5 Tour and Sunday Morning Beauty.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Submissions for next week’s Rule 5 compilation will be due to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox by Saturday, August 10.


Category: Rule 5

Brain Molesters Spend $40,000 to Assign Smutty Comics to College Freshmen

Posted on | August 4, 2013 | 49 Comments

Kids nowadays don’t believe an old geezer when he says, “Y’know, when I was a college freshman, we had to buy our own smutty comics!”

Faculty and administrators at the College of Charleston (CofC) have assigned all freshman students a graphic sex memoir as part of their mandatory 2013 summer reading.
The College of Charleston has come under fire after assigning a graphic memoir as part of their mandatory summer reading for all incoming freshman.
The controversial book entitled, “Fun Home,” includes an account of author Alison Bechdel’s closeted gay father’s trial over his sexual relationships with young boys, her coming out as a lesbian, and commentary on masturbation and her first sexual relationship with a woman.
The book, which was apparently selected by a committee of faculty, administrators, and students, cost the school $39k for distribution to 4k freshmen, according to a local newspaper, the Post and Courier. The school also plans to pay the book’s author $13k to make a speech in October.

For crying out loud, why not just tell the kids to Google “lesbian cartoon”? I’m sure they’d find lots of educational material that way. That’s what’s wrong with these young whippersnappers — ain’t got enough gumption to find porn by themselves, so they need to have it assigned to them as required reading in college! Oh, but it’s not about pornography, it’s about diversity and stuff:

College of Charleston Provost George Hynd said the school isn’t considering changing the book selection. The college strives to be a diverse and safe place for all students, and to teach students to listen to each other and engage in respectful conversation. The book is consistent with those goals, he said.
Associate Provost Lynne Ford said the book was selected by a committee made up of faculty members, administrators, staff and students. The group solicits recommendations for books from the campus community and the public.
She thinks the book is especially appropriate for freshmen because it deals with questions of identity, including, “Who am I and how do I fit in?”
“The book,” she said, “will help students to learn that they are not unique. Our experience is shared by millions.”

In order for a college “to be a diverse and safe place for all students,” you have to spend $40,000 to provide freshmen with a perverted comic book? Campuses that don’t do this are unsafe? Whereas the College of Charleston, where “faculty members, administrators, staff and students” think this comic book makes sense as assigned reading for freshmen, yeah, that’s perfectly safe.

I’m not sure what the official motto of the College of Charleston is. Probably the Latin phrase for “Wanna look at some dirty pictures?”

(Hat-tip: Daily Caller.)

 

Category: Education

The @Popehat Reign of Terror and the Censorious Douchebag Charles Carreon

Posted on | August 4, 2013 | 67 Comments

Charles Carreon on Bloomberg News, March 2012.

“See, a legal threat like the one Charles Carreon sent — ‘shut up, delete your criticism of my client, give me $20,000, or I’ll file a federal lawsuit against you’ — is unquestionably a form of bullying. . . .
“Our system privileges Charles Carreon to issue that threat, rather than jailing or flogging him for it. And so Carreon supports bullying like that. He’s got a license to do it.”
— Ken White, Popehat.com, June 13, 2012

Somebody informed me that my name appears in a list of “rapers” who have allegedly victimized Brett Kimberlin:

Brett Kimberlin — obtained peace order prohibiting blogger Aaron Walker (Worthing) from writing about him (convicted domestic terrorist, bomber, perjurer; wounded a man so badly he later took his own life; laughed off the judgment; made vague and undocumented claims that he suffered threats from unidentified people; astoundingly vile; terrifyingly sociopathic; leads a contemptible life; crazy; quite evil; victimizer; malevolent; outrageous; despicable; remorseless and amoral psycho; crazy stalker) (Rapers: Aaron Walker, Patterico’s Pontifications; Eugene Volokh; Ali A. Akbar of the National Bloggers Club; Elizabeth Kingsley of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, LLP; Robert Stacy McCain)

This list was evidently compiled by Charles Carreon, whom I’d never heard of before, but who seems to be an infamous douchebag.

Not infamous enough, yet.

Is Charles Carreon a pervert? Does he hang around middle-school playgrounds selling heroin to children? No one has ever made any such accusation against him. Nor, as far as I know, is there any reason to believe that Charles Carreon is a serial killer with a basement dungeon and the bones of prostitutes buried in his backyard.

No, he’s just a douchebag. And a big-shot lawyer.

But I repeat myself.

So there are two humor sites, The Oatmeal and FunnyJunk, and the proprietor of the former site said the latter site was ripping him off. At which point, the proprietor of the FunnyJunk hired Tucson, Arizona, lawyer Charles Carreon to send a letter to Matt Inman, proprietor of The Oatmeal, accusing him of damaging FunnyJunk’s reputation and threatening a federal lawsuit, a letter that ended thus:

Accordingly, demand is hereby made upon you to perform the following remedial acts on or before June 12, 2012:

  • Remove all mention of FunnyJunk and FunnyJunk.com from TheOatmeal.com from your website and any other website over which you have control.
  • Deliver to me a check in the amount of $20,000 payable to the order of FunnyJunk LLC.

I look forward to your prompt response.
Very truly yours,
Charles Carreon

He got a “prompt response,” all right — arguably the most hilarious “fuck you” in the history of the Internet.

Popehat.com proprietor Ken White is a famed defender of online free speech. His immediate response included this:

Their lawyer has just given himself +eleventy in “censorious twatwaffle” on Klout, and the Streisand Effect is looming.
Pack it up and go home, FunnyJunk. This isn’t going to turn out well for you. . . .
Fuck him. He’s vermin. He’s not forgivable. Let any good he has ever done be wiped out. Let the name “Charles Carreon” be synonymous with petulant, amoral censorious douchebaggery.

Indeed, and Charles Carreon cooperated admirably, doubling down over and over — chasing his losses, as a gambler would say. A guy created a site mocking Charles Carreon. That led to threats and a lawsuit and Carreon was eventually handed his own ass in federal court:

Today [April 12, 2013] a federal judge in the Northern District of California granted the motion for fees by the satirical blogger, granting $46,100.25 in fees to the blogger’s attorneys, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen and attorney and blogger Cathy Gellis. They had been seeking a total of $77,765.25.
Judge United States District Judge Richard Seeborg’s order awarding fees is devastating to Carreon. Judge Seeborg rejects Carreon’s arguments one by one, and finds Carreon’s litigation conduct rendered the case exceptional . . .

 The key to understanding this is Charles Carreon’s sense of entitlement. He is a big-shot lawyer and therefore entitled to a good reputation, so if people say mean things about him on the Internet, Charles Carreon believes he has been wrongly deprived of something that is rightfully his. He whined to NBC News after The Oatmeal mocked him:

“I really did not expect that he would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene emails,” he says.
“I’m completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat — I’ve never really seen it before,” Carreon explains. “I don’t like seeing anyone referring to my mother as a sexual deviant.”

Is Charles Carreon’s mother a “sexual deviant”? I’d never heard that before, but now that you mention it — and hey, Charles, you invited me to your reign-of-terror pity party, remember? — your mother being a sexual deviant might explain a lot of things.

Ken White offers apologies for his reign of terror, but who’s going to apologize for all those hookers who have disappeared from the streets of Tucson in recent years, huh? And what about the epidemic of heroin addiction among Arizona middle schoolers?

No one has accused Charles Carreon of dealing heroin or carving up kidnapped prostitutes in his basement torture dungeon — he’s never even been suspected of such things — and if anybody has a hunch that the hard drive on Charles Carreon’s laptop is crammed full of illegal pornography, they’ve never mentioned this to me.

As for the alleged sexual deviancy of Charles Carreon’s mother, I’ve double-checked that NBC article, and he didn’t deny it, did he?

We know of no actual evidence for any such allegations, and he probably doesn’t have a torture dungeon in his basement, although you never know about such things. Most of Ariel Castro‘s neighbors in Cleveland thought he was just a law-abiding citizen and at least Ariel Castro never threatened to sue a blogger for $20,000.

Charles Carreon is in the Douchebag Hall of Fame because of his own actions. He refuses to accept responsibility for this, however. Instead he shifts blame onto scapegoats, demonizing Ken White and others and, in the process, causing me to take notice of his censorious douchebaggery.

He chose poorly — again.

 

Category: How This Here Internet Thingy Works

Colin McGinn (D-Philosophy): The New York Times Wants a ‘Debate Over Sexism’

Posted on | August 4, 2013 | 33 Comments

Long story short: Philosophy professor Colin McGinn has resigned from the University of Miami after being accused of sexual harassment by a graduate student. This, according to the New York Times, has caused a “Debate Over Sexism” because most philosophy professors are men and life just sucks for women seeking academic careers in philosophy. Patriarchy, oppression, and so forth.

Let’s distinguish between two phenomena:

  1. Alleged discrimination against female philosophers;
    and
  2. Creepy old professors like Colin McGinn hitting on students.

Now, I’m going to take a wild guess that when Colin McGinn was a younger professor, he had at least a few affairs with his students that never became public scandals. The consensual (if unethical) affairs that a professor can get away with when he is 35 or 40 become problematic — his advances are unwanted — when he’s 63.

Therefore, Colin McGinn is a victim of age discrimination by coeds, who unfairly accuse a creepy old professor of “harassment” when they wouldn’t complain if the professor was young and sexy.

My point is that to invoke the concept of “rights” and “equality” in such situations is a mistake. There is no reason to suppose that the two phenomena — alleged discrimination, on the one hand, and creepy old professors, on the other — are related. Of course they may indeed be related, but only in the simplest way: In environments where women are relatively rare, a woman is more likely to attract male attention.

In the military, this is known as “deployment points”: Women who rated no better than a “6” stateside were at least an “8” if they were deployed to Baghdad during the Iraq War. So Professor McGinn is like a homesick and horny G.I. — women are so rare in philosophy that he hasn’t seen a good-looking woman at close range in years and doesn’t know how to behave himself in mixed company any more.

Really, he’s a victim — or rather, the New York Times would consider him a victim, if Professor McGinn can find a way to portray himself as a progressive Democrat, and suggest that his accuser is a right-wing Republican. “Phony scandal”! Instead, we get this:

In Mr. McGinn’s telling, his relationship with the student, a first-year doctoral candidate who worked as his research assistant during the 2012 spring semester, was an unconventional mentorship gone sour.
It was “a warm, consensual, collaborative relationship,” an “intellectual romance” that never became sexual but was full of “bantering,” Mr. McGinn said in a telephone interview. . . .
Benjamin Yelle, the student’s boyfriend and a fifth-year graduate student in philosophy at Miami, said she had been subject to months of unwanted innuendo and propositions from Mr. McGinn, documented in numerous e-mails and text messages of an explicit and escalating sexual nature she had shown him. In one from May 2012, Mr. Yelle said, Mr. McGinn suggested he and the student have sex three times over the summer “when no one is around.” . . .
Amie Thomasson, a professor of philosophy at Miami, said the student, shortly after filing her complaint in September 2012, had shown her a stack of e-mails from Mr. McGinn. They included the message mentioning sex over the summer, along with a number of other sexually explicit messages, Ms. Thomasson said.
“This was not an academic discussion of human sexuality,” Ms. Thomasson said. “It was not just jokes. It was personal.” . . .
Whatever the facts of the case, many philosophers say that the accusations of misbehavior against Mr. McGinn are the edge of a much bigger problem, one that women have long been unwilling to discuss publicly, lest it harm their careers.
Many credit the blog What Is It Like to Be a Woman in Philosophy?, which in 2010 began posting anonymous stories of harassment, with helping to highlight the issue. “Just about every woman you talk to in philosophy has experienced first- or secondhand some form of sexual harassment that is egregious,” said Gideon Rosen, a philosopher at Princeton. “It’s not just one or two striking anecdotes.”

I have no problem believing that academia is crawling with perverts and weirdos, and maybe philosophy departments are especially overcrowded with creeps, but you’re not going to solve that problem by establishing citation quotas:

[G]ender bias and outright sexual harassment are endemic in philosophy, where women make up less than 20 percent of university faculty members, lower than in any other humanities field, and account for a tiny fraction of citations in top scholarly journals.
While the status of women in the sciences has received broad national attention, debate about sexism in philosophy has remained mostly within the confines of academia. . . .
In July, after the sociologist Kieran Healy published a study showing that women made up less than 4 percent of top citations in leading philosophy journals since 1992, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sent out an e-mail asking contributors to make sure that entries do not cite work by white men on a given topic while ignoring prior contributions by women and other underrepresented groups.

Oh, so now it’s “women and other underrepresented groups,” but what does the resignation of Colin McGinn have to do with the number of citations in scholarly journals by, say, Latinos? Nothing, and yet the zer0-sum game/fixed-pie quota-mongering mentality (common to both the New York Times and academia) seizes upon this one professor’s case to make this into a “Debate Over Sexism,” in the same way that the Trayvon Martin case got turned into a debate about racism, just because that’s what the media wanted.

Professor Donald Douglas has thoughts about this case, but I don’t want to be accused of discrimination in linkage, so I’ll also link Professor Ann Althouse, who has a great many thoughts about this case. I should probably say something crudely sexist here, just to show that a man can be fair without singing soprano in the choir.

Now go fix me a sandwich.

 

Category: Education, Feminism, Intellectuals
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