The Other McCain

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

FMJRA 2.0: Secret World

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


“Once you were secret – but now you are public!”
-NKVD prison camp guard, ~1946
(It seemed appropriate to the ongoing events, on a number of fronts.)


PHOTO: ‘Model Citizen’ Kaitlyn Hunt Helps Sister in 2-on-1 Beach Beatdown

Marshall University Journalism Professor Expresses Violent Fantasies Against NRA

Special Rights for Teen Lesbians?

But … It Was Consensual!

Rule 5 Sunday: Desert Plains

Damn You, Josh Barro!

‘A Conspiracy So Immense’ — Was FDR Aide Harry Hopkins a Soviet Agent?

‘Honey, I Blew $200 Million’

You Stay Classy, Cleveland!

Don’t #FreeKate: The Hunt Family’s Hate

World’s Youngest Blogger: Resist This, Rachel Maddow!

FMJRA 2.0: Keine Liebe für den Technischen Support

2004: Kaitlyn Hunt’s Father ‘Pressured a Victim Not to File a Battery Charge’

It’s the New Astrology, or Something

LIVE AT FIVEEIGHT: 06.02.13

Comprehensive Aggregation Reform

Grow Up or Go Home

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.04.13

David Frum Worries Republican ‘Frenzy’ Over Scandals ‘Will Paralyze Congress’

Adrian Lamo Is a Hero

Becky Gerritson FTW!

‘Low-Information Voter,’ IYKWIMAITYD

Why Are Lesbians So Racist?

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.06.13

#DDayVA Stand Up for Veterans Today!

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.07.13

#FreeKate Update: Accused Teenager Attends Fundraising Party at Gay Bar

Obama Keeps Lying; Reporters Don’t Care

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (20 the hard way)
  2. EBL (17, ditto)
  3. The Conservatory (6)

Lots of folks who just missed the five-link threshold again…


Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, June 14.


Category: FMJRA Award

She Blinded Me With Pseudo-Science

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 59 Comments

“Pretty Baby has been banned outright in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Saskatchewan. No less a moral arbiter than Rona Barrett solemnly advised her TV audience that the movie is ‘child pornography.’ Others have attacked its French director . . . as a combination of Humbert Humbert and Roman Polanski.”
— Kristin McMurran, People magazine, May 1978

“Some people view children as the next sexual frontier.”
— Stephanie Dallam, April 2002

“A Dutch study published [by Paidika editorial board member Theo Sandfort] in 1987 found that a sample of boys in paedophilic relationships felt positively about them.”
— Jon Henley, Guardian (U.K.), January 2013

“So it appears that younger youth are just as capable of making healthy sexual decisions as are older youth, and yet they are treated differently under the law.”
— Marina Adshade, Ph.D., Psychology Today, May 2013

If you had to fix a date in history when the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s reached its Jacobins-and-guillotines stage, when even those who had originally welcomed and applauded the revolution began to recoil from the perverse “liberation” they had wrought, the 1978 release of Pretty Baby may well have been the pivot-point. The AIDS scare of the 1980s would accelerate the counter-revolution — in fact, the disease was already beginning to spread in the late 1970s, although it was not until the ’80s that the pandemic was recognized — but it was Pretty Baby and headlines about child pornography that alarmed American mothers about the encroaching danger to their daughters.

Of course, the slow approach toward this red line had been going on for many years, but it had occurred on the bohemian fringes of society and had escaped widespread notice by the respectable bourgeoisie. During the 1960s, there was a lot of talk about “high-school dropouts” and “runaway teenagers,” and plenty of minors — 15 or 16 years old, some even younger — were among the hippies and flower children who drifted toward San Francisco in the 1967 “Summer of Love.”

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.

Whether they were seeking enlightenment and world peace, or just “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll,” there were plenty of young teens who were drawn into the hippie orbit. The anti-Establishment mood of that radical youth culture was such that no hairy freak was going to alert police — “the pigs” — that his dopehead buddy was making it with a teenybopper not yet old enough to get a driver’s license.

“Hang-ups” about sex? That’s for squares, man.

During the classic rock heyday of the ’70s, one learns from memoirs and biographies, plenty of high-school girls were among the “groupies” who flung themselves at guitar gods and heavy metal icons. Legendary tales of hotel-room-wrecking rock-tour decadence occasionally include scenes of 13-year-olds quite eagerly donating themselves as love offerings to the platinum-album superstars of that era.

“Well . . . it was consensual.”

This attitude — expressed in many variations by the “Free Kate” fanatics who celebrate Kaitlyn Hunt as a heroic martyr for her jailbait romance with a 14-year-old — is really nothing new to those who have paid attention long enough. How strange is it, then, that more than three decades after that zenith (or rather, nadir) of the Sexual Revolution, somebody like Canadian economist Marina Adshade thinks we’re in need of a social-science lecture on this topic?

The basis of the age-of-consent laws, like the ones invoked in this case, is that young adolescents are less capable of making healthy sexual decisions than are older adolescents because do not fully comprehend the risks. . . .
So there must be pretty good evidence that younger teens are less capable of making healthily sexual decisions than are slightly older teens who are free to choose the nature of their own sexual relationships, right?
Not exactly and, in fact, comprehensive research using data collected from 26,000 high school students in British Columbia found that the sexual decision making of those who became sexually active when they were 14 to 15 years old was no worse than those who became sexually active when they were 16 to 17 years old.

Damn you, damn your “research” and damn Canada, while we’re at it.

As a general rule, the more you know about social science, the more skeptical you are about its findings, especially when confronted with studies that seem to contradict common sense. The media appetite for “counter-intuitive” research findings (as practiced by the fraudulent Jonah Lerner, for example) and the generally liberal leanings of academic researchers (we are not surprised to find the eminent professor of perversion Theo Sandfort on the Columbia University faculty) tend to generate a lot of studies (and publicity for those studies) that tell us sexual hedonism is essentially harmless, even for “younger teens.”

And if you dare so much as raise an eyebrow of skepticism toward this kind of “science,” you’re obviously a bigoted hater. Read more

Category: Canada, Crime, Culture, Intellectuals, Kaitlyn Hunt, Science, Sex

World’s Youngest Blogger Dismayed By #OccupyResoluteDesk News

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 6 Comments

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

Al Gore Has More Nerve Than The NHL Has Hockey Sticks

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

Al Gore at Breitbart (no embed for autoplay reasons) was whinging on about the failure of Democracy, mainly because (a) he couldn’t tip the 2000 election his way, and (b) anybody with a shred of sense understands he IS the quintessential vulture capitalist.
I like to call as much attention as possible to his doofery in the NYT:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

No, you moron: no.

Category: Democrats, Global Warming

Rush Limbaugh: Still Winning

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 19 Comments

On Thursday, Professor William Jacobson called attention to evidence that the “Stop Rush” boycott campaign has failed. Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the “Stop Rush” campaign, Matt “Shoq” Edelstein, had his lawyer send a cease-and-desist letter to his ex-girlfriend, who had been saying some unflattering things about Shoq.

So the anti-Limbaugh forces are failing and in disarray, while the man they sought to destroy is more relevant than ever:

Even before I heard about Prism, I am hearing from the intelligentsia in Washington that there’s nothing to be really concerned about here with what we had learned, the NSA demanding and getting every phone record from Verizon. And, by the way, we now know T-Mobile and AT&T have been added to it.
But the intelligent people were saying, “Nothing to see here. The reaction is way overblown.” Those of us who think there’s something worrisome here are overreacting and we’re too oriented in politics. . . .
I’m saying, “Do these people not realize what we just learned in the last three weeks?” We got the IRS starting in 2010 taking action to suppress the political involvement and ultimately votes of Tea Party people and conservative Republicans. This regime, this government, on the orders of the highest level. In fact, that investigation is ongoing. We have Fast and Furious. We have Obamacare. The evidence of the totalitarian nature or the authoritarian nature of this administration is on display undeniably every day and yet in the midst of this, “Well, don’t go off half cocked on this, Rush. Be very levelheaded. Nothing really to see,” as though there’s no context here.

Read the whole thing, because he really rips it up:

More than two decades since he invented modern talk radio, Rush Limbaugh is still changing hearts and minds. Mega-dittos, Rush!

UPDATE: You have to be careful when joking about the Obama administration, because the punchline is usually all too true:

 


Category: Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio

‘Relationship’ as a Euphemism: What Does This Tell Us About the Culture?

Posted on | June 8, 2013 | 59 Comments

Kaitlyn Hunt’s family says she’s a victim of homophobia.

A week ago, Canadian lesbian Kristin Ireland wrote:

The Kaitlyn Hunt case haunts me. Never more than a few moments out of my mind. I read every word I can find on the subject. And I search for similar cases. How many of our young people are caught up a legal web of irrationality? . . .
[Critics of Hunt] claim to be “telling the truth” and “stating the facts.” They focus on days and months and birth dates. A few pages on the calendar flip and suddenly we should all be sharpening our pitch forks and cheering to see a young life destroyed. We all know it’s not that simple don’t we?

This was brought to my attention by a commenter:

She deleted my comment to her May 30 Kate post. I just politely pointed out that age-of-consent laws are inherently based on “a few flips of the calendar.”
If no law should be contingent on calendar dates, then all age-of-consent laws should be repealed.
I didn’t even add that such would be the dawning of paradise on earth for all pedophiles. I just pointed that out and she deleted it . . .

The title of Kristin Ireland’s May 30 post? “Kate Hunt, The Internet, and Rationality,” as if she were capable of recognizing “rationality.” People have asked me why I dug in so hard on this story, and I explain it’s the same reason I drove to Kentucky in 2009 to prove Andrew Sullivan wrong: The media do this kind of stuff routinely — grab hold of some story that seems conveniently to “prove” liberal beliefs and then blow it up into a national drama. But the minute the ugly facts emerge to contradict the narrative, the media move on to the next story that, by similar distortions, can be used to validate their worldview.

They act as if we’re too stupid to see what they’re doing, and always seem shocked when we catch them doing it. Read more

Category: Crime, Culture, Gays, Kaitlyn Hunt, Sex

Stop, Thief!

Posted on | June 7, 2013 | 11 Comments

Good Lord, what have we come to, when a guy who gets caught making up quotes by Bob Dylan then scores a book deal based on a proposal chock full of plagiarism? Having written previously about Jonah Lehrer, I was shocked at the very thought that anyone would give this lying bastard a book deal under any circumstance.

But . . . Simon & Schuster?

This isn’t some obscure second-rate publisher. This is arguably the most prestigious publishing house in the entire world. And, as Daniel Engber explains, Lehrer peddles a familiar sort of “pop science”:

Each chapter begins with an anecdote of love, often taken from the life of a cultural icon—Montaigne, Berlioz, Tolstoy, etc.—and then progresses in an onslaught of social-science data, cherry-picked to make a simple point that’s been dressed up to look like counter-intuition. That is to say, it’s Lehrer doing exactly what he’s done before. He loves to start with straw-man science, using published research to establish some flagrant bit of nonsense—”marriage is a waste of time,” let’s say—so he can batter and abuse it with other, better published research. (“And yet,” he explains, “a number of subsequent studies have revealed a surprising upside to marriage.”)

Ick. This discount-rack erzatz Gladwellism — a shabby imitation of the best-selling work of Malcolm Gladwell — is a clever way of either (a) getting people to think what you want them to think, or (b) flattering them by telling them what they already think is scientifically valid.

It isn’t science, it’s “scientism” — the mystic belief that everything can be proven by scientific research, and that anything that isn’t proven by scientific research is therefore invalid. That Lehrer apparently resorts to fraud to accomplish this is merely the evidence that his larger philosophy is fundamentally fraudulent, and it seems Simon & Schuster would rather publish popular fraud than actual science.

 

Category: Books, Scandal, Science

Obama Keeps Lying; Reporters Don’t Care

Posted on | June 7, 2013 | 28 Comments

Frankly, I don’t know which pisses me off more: Obama’s shameless dishonesty or the White House press corps’ evident indifference to truth. The Obama presidency has been one big lie all along, and by now there is not an honest or intelligent person who believes a word he says, and you might think that White House reporters would be so thoroughly fed up with his reeking bullshit, they would call him on it.

But no, their supine obeisance to the Hope and Change mythology has become so habitual that, even after he has been caught in lie after proven lie, they’re still rolling over like gutless punks.

Based on past experience, every time Obama begins a sentence by saying, “In fact …” or “The truth is …” whatever he says after that is going to be the exact opposite of fact and truth. This is how we now can be certain that the government is listening to our phone calls:

The only time Barack Obama has ever been within arm’s reach of the truth was when he was trying to strangle it with his bare hands. His name should be a synonym for deliberate deception. His presidency is a stain on the White House, and on the nation that elected him.

This Reign of Deceit cannot possibly end soon enough.

 


Category: Barack Obama, Media Bias
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