The Other McCain

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

Messed-Up People Make Bad Choices in Disastrously Dysfunctional Relationships

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 25 Comments

Instapundit had this headline:

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS:
My Ex Posted “Revenge Porn” Photos Of Me.

OK, so this was intriguing, but the whole “revenge porn” theme was forgotten as soon as I started reading the article by the (obviously pseudonymous) “Rhoda Kelly”:

I started dating Rob toward the end of high school. He was five years my senior.

Whoa. Full stop. Isn’t this a gigantic red flag? I’m not saying that it is impossible for a 17-year-old and a 22-year-old to have positive romantic experience together, but it was like the first clue (besides the headline, of course) that this story wasn’t going to end happily ever after.

He added me on Myspace, and we talked online occasionally. Then, after hanging out in real life only a handful of times, he insisted that we become a couple.

See there? That’s three warning signs right away:

  1. Older guy dating teenager.
  2. Meeting via online social-networking.
  3. Guy insists on quick rush into “couple” status.

Just on the basis of that, I figure there’s not only something wrong with the guy, but there’s something wrong with this girl, too.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned. Maybe I don’t “get” the whole online-dating thing. But it seems to me that, unless the girl was of the lonely/desperate misfit/oddball type, she’d be meeting guys through the regular real-life routines — a guy from school, someone she met through an after-school job, “friend of a friend,” whatever. When somebody asks, How did you meet your boyfriend? and your answer is, He added me on Myspace, excuse me for thinking there’s something wrong with you. So I keep reading and find out, yeah, my hunch was right:

I liked him. He played guitar in a punk band and was a gifted graphic designer. He was quiet and cynical, but sweet to me.
Fast-forward three years, after the initial sweetness diluted considerably, and what was left was a controlling, territorial, sardonic, and deeply troubled man who I knew I had to leave, but who by then was like an extension of me. We both struggled with psychological disorders: I was diagnosed with major depression when I was nineteen, and he would have such severe depressive episodes that he couldn’t get out of bed to go to work many days. Or he’d stay awake for two weeks straight because of his recurring nightmares about being abducted by aliens. Once, believing me to be an alien, he lay in my bed sobbing uncontrollably. Later, I looked up alien-abduction dreams and found that many studies pointed to childhood sexual abuse as a cause; after we broke up, he told me that he had in fact been molested as a child.

OK, you can go read the whole thing, and you’ll eventually get to the part where she gets drunk and lets him take a video of them having sex,  then finds out he’s posted it online as an act of revenge after they broke up, but that’s not what the story is really about.

What the story is really about is a vulnerable misfit/oddball chick who has trouble attracting a boyfriend in her real-life environment, and instead hooks up with some weirdo she meets online.

Insufficiently aware of her own vulnerability, and apparently incapable of recognizing that Mr. Controlling Older Guy She Met Online might have problematic “issues” of his own, Little Miss Oddball is therefore shocked to find that this leads to a Harmful Relationship That Ends Badly.

The “revenge porn” thing may be the hook that sells the story, but more important is the lesson about How Not to Find Healthy Relationships.

If you’re in that lonely/desperate situation where you’re willing to accept “He added me on Myspace” as an invitation to romance . . .

Do I even have to finish that sentence to explain why it’s a signal that you might be vulnerable to a bad relationship?

Seventeen-year-old girls aren’t always good judges of character. This is why, in ancient days of yore (i.e., when I was a kid), parents made it their business to keep an eye on their 17-year-old daughters. And the default parental position was, Keep Away From My Daughter, Creep.

Lots of bad things happen to people who stray from the wise ways of the ancient days of yore, and being victimized by “revenge porn” is certainly one possibility. All things considered, though, “Rhoda Kelly” should be thankful she’s alive to tell her story. A lot of stories like hers end up with headlines like, “Woman Slain by Obsessive Stalker Ex-Boyfriend.”

 

Category: Crime, Instapundit, Sex

What Depression Is, and Isn’t

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 29 Comments

Thursday evening my wife came home and said, “Hey, I bought coffee!”

I just stared at her, in kind of a fog.

“No more drinking decaf,” my wife said.

“What? We’ve been drinking decaf? Since when?”

“All week. We ran out of regular coffee Monday, but  I just made decaf and didn’t tell you, because I figured it would only depress you.”

Damn. So that’s it. Here I’d been feeling bummed out, listless and unmotivated for three days, and was worried I was slipping into depression. Instead, I was just suffering from caffeine withdrawal.

Depression is a mental illness, a mood disorder, which psychiatrists say is caused by an organic malfunction of neurochemistry. Depression isn’t just about feeling bad because something bad happened to you.

Kids don’t understand this. You made a “C” in algebra, your boyfriend broke up with you and you’ve got a pimple on your nose — no, sweetheart, that’s not “depression.” Your life just sucks.

Over the course of time, everybody goes through phases where their life sucks. And feeling bad about that is just normal. No pills are necessary to treat a normal reaction to the objective reality that your life sucks.

This is something that should cheer you up: Your life sucks? Good news! You’re not suffering from clinical depression!

On the other hand, if you’re actually suffering from clinical depression — good news! Your life doesn’t suck as bad as you think it does.

This is something that came to mind when I saw the news via Memeorandum about a computer whiz kid who committed suicide:

Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11, according to his uncle, Michael Wolf, in a comment to The Tech. Swartz was 26.
“The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” confirmed Swartz’ attorney, Elliot R. Peters of Kecker and Van Nest, in an email to The Tech.

According to various sites, Swartz was a teenager when he wrote the software that basically made Reddit possible. He was a good-looking kid and a genius and probably would have been a gazillionaire, except he decided to kill himself. Via Mashable, a clue:

A blog post from 2007 on Swartz’s website reveals a possible cause for taking his own life: depression. In the post, Swartz describes his experiences with severe depression, as well as several other health issues, including migraines.

Also, Swartz was being hassled by the feds because he illegally downloaded some stuff that should have been free to begin with. Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection discusses that.

Did Swartz actually suffer from depression? I don’t know. Despite his legal hassles, it would be hard to say his life objectively sucked, and his future was one of great potential — until he decided to kill himself, that is. Killing yourself pretty much guarantees it won’t get better.

Try drinking more coffee. And not the decaf kind. Just sayin’ . . .

 

Category: Uncategorized

Nobody Really Likes @LenaDunham, and Deep Down Inside She Knows It, Too

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 72 Comments

“It’s a little fat girl . . . and she keeps taking her clothes off and . . . I don’t want to see that. . . . I learned that this little fat chick writes the show and directs the show and that makes sense to me because she’s such a camera hog that the other characters barely are on.”
— Howard Stern

Maybe you know somebody like Lena Dunham. In a way, it’s hard not to feel sorry for people like her. She’s not really that fat or that ugly, but she just can’t get over the fact that she’s not pretty and skinny.

She can never manage to recover from some deep psychic wound, a sort of juvenile ego-trauma that left her with such a profoundly damaged personality that she spends the rest of her life trying to get revenge against the world for bad things that happened to her years ago.

Anyway, if you know somebody like Lena Dunham, you understand what she’s doing: “I’m fat and ugly and unpopular, but maybe if I add ‘cruel’ and ‘obnoxious’ to the list, I can pretend like people who don’t like me are intimidated by my intelligence and courage.” This isn’t really an effective compensation, but it provides her an excuse — a rationalization, a defense mechanism — she can alternately cling to as a crutch or wield as a weapon, harming others without actually helping herself. The damage is never healed, because her inner feelings of worthlessness are so intense, she scorns as contemptible anyone who wants to help her: “If you like me, there must be something wrong with you.”

All of which is a necessary preamble to the latest manifestation of Lena Dunham’s tendency toward vengeful cruelty: People complained about the lack of diversity on Lena’s Not Very Popular HBO Show, so she decided to bring on a black guy . . . as a Republican villain:

I want to start with the fourth scene of the entire season, which is you, topless …
… on top of Donald Glover.
Having sex.
Yes.
Which is pretty much a summary of every single thing that people complained about in season one. How conscious was that?
We always wanted to work with Donald — he’s the cutest and the funniest, and why would you not want to kiss him on TV? But I think that when we shot that scene, there was both a feeling that it was the appropriate place for the character to be and a sense that it would, for people who had been paying attention to the backlash, at least evoke some sense that we were in a dialogue with our audience. It definitely wasn’t a “Fuck you, haters!” That’s not really how I tend to roll my game. But at the same time, it was a pretty clear statement that we are comfortable, that there isn’t a political agenda against having black characters in the show.
Why make him a Republican?
We liked the idea of a Republican entering their universe. And Hannah doesn’t really have a clear sense of why you shouldn’t date a Republican; it’s kind of just like the same reason why you shouldn’t date a Nazi: You just shouldn’t.

Real-life black Republican Ali Akbar observes:

Dunham spends a lot of her time associating sex, bad sex, lack of sex, with . . . you guessed it, Republicans. . . .
So to avoid the show looking racist — Dunham creates a black character that she’ll teach her audience to love to hate.

Hey, her ratings might finally beat Honey Boo Boo . . .

UPDATE: Donald Douglas at American Power:

This is interesting because I was just reading about Lena Dunham at the Los Angeles Times, “Review: Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’.”
“Maybe I’ll check it out,” I was thinking to myself.

Don’t bother. It’s just another reason why HBO isn’t worth the premium. If you like watching unhappy women try to cope with their self-loathing, just cue up an old Kathy Griffin special.

UPDATE II: Twitchy:

Did we mention Dunham was named one of 2012’s “Brave Thinkers”?

 

 


Category: Celebrities

FMJRA 2.0: Modern Love

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

If ‘Crazy’ Were a Political Philosophy, Its Spokesman Would Be Alex Jones

A Soldier and Two Marines: Sworn to ‘Support and Defend the Constitution’

The Incident at St. Aloysius: 911 Call in Illinois Raises Questions for Church

‘Learning French,’ IYKWIMAITYD

FMJRA 2.0: Beautiful World

Hey, GOP: The IRS Is A Substantial Reform Target

Damn It, Jim, I’m a Blogger!

OBAMA’S THIRD TERM? Democrat Proposes Repeal of 22nd Amendment

Rule 5 Sunday: Les Chants Magnetiques

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.07.13

Illinois: Fire Department Official Accused of Attacking Woman With Knife, Duct Tape and ‘an 8-Inch Sexual Device’

Mandates, Regulation and ‘Rights’

#RMFT: You WILL Click This Link

The Nick Saban Approach to the Problem of Chuck Hagel: ‘Make His Ass Quit’

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Has A Point: Having Aborted Common Sense, Babies Should Be Easy For Charlie Crist

Alabama Wins Second Consecutive BCS Title, Humiliates Notre Dame 42-14

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.08.13

Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Middle Class’ Looks an Awful Lot Like Occupy’s ’99 Percent’

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.09.13

Everybody Hates Gawker’s @JohnJCook and It’s About Damned Time, Too

Leave Brent Musberger Alone!

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 01.10.13

When Your Gun Is Not Your Gun

Liberal Ethics: If It’s OK to Kill Babies, Why Is It Wrong to Molest Children?

Shorter Joe Scarborough: ‘Who Do You Think You’re Calling Chauvinistic, Bitch?’

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.11.13

AR-15 Saleswoman of the Year?

A Lesson from Lindsay Lohan

Friday News Dump: D.C. Won’t Prosecute David Gregory’s Clear Violation of Law

Rush Limbaugh Is Right: The Academic Pro-Pedophile Movement Is a Real Danger

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (11 the hard way)
  2. Daley Gator (6)
  3. Hogewash (5)

…and this week we had a bunch of folks who missed the cutoff by that much. Well, there’s always next week, and speaking of next week, the deadline to submit your links is Friday, January 18. Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!

Category: FMJRA Award

In Which @MattKLewis Makes @BenHowe His Enemy for Life

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 49 Comments

Ben Howe: Just some random dude on the Internet?

“The socially-awkward gadfly who might once have been relegated to writing letters to the editor of Ron Paul’s newsletter, can today build an online identity that disguises his quirks. . . .
“Some of my colleagues actually take perverse pleasure in fighting with their stalkers. . . . . My arms are getting tired from punching down, as it is.”
— Matt K. Lewis, Daily Caller, Jan. 9, “Confronting Ben Howe: My own personal Twitter troll”

Let’s talk about professionalism, shall we? Let’s also talk about ambition and misguided career strategies, while we’re at it.

There is no rule that requires everybody in the conservative movement to like everybody else in the conservative movement. But it is a good idea to choose one’s enemies wisely, to keep one’s Enemies List as short as possible, and to avoid turning minor squabbles into all-out feuds.

In September, for reasons best known to himself, Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller decided that he needed to be on Michelle Malkin’s Enemies List.

This created serious problems for Matt Lewis’s friends because, in such a situation, how can one continue to be Matt Lewis’s friend without risk of adding one’s name to Michelle Malkin’s Enemies List?

Dude: “Execrable”?

No one is so powerful, so successful or so popular that they can just go around making enemies like that without eventually paying a price for it. People need to think before doing stuff like that.

Avoid escalation. A few weeks ago, Ali Akbar got into a Twitter argument with John Ekdahl and, when I found out about it, I told Ali to lay off. John Ekdahl is good people and a contributor at AOSHQ, so whatever quarrel Ali had with Ekdahl, it wasn’t worth turning into a blood feud that would risk estranging Ace. As much as Ali might have wanted to double down, entrench his position and turn his disagreement with Ekdahl into an online Battle of Verdun, it was a bad move.

Forget it. Just walk away. Read more

Category: Matt Lewis

Smitty’s Corollary To Godwin’s Law

Posted on | January 12, 2013 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

I’m likely not the first to notice this effect, varying Mike Godwin:

Category: Uncategorized

Rush Limbaugh Is Right: The Academic Pro-Pedophile Movement Is a Real Danger

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 44 Comments

Rush Limbaugh sparked criticism this week by pointing to an article in the British Guardian newspaper as evidence of “a movement to normalize pedophilia.” Limbaugh’s liberal critics are ridiculing his contention, but the movement he described is very real.

In 2002, Judith Levine published Harmful to Minors, a book which stirred a massive controversy because of its claims that the dangers of pedophilia were exaggerated. I covered the controversy in a long article for The Washington Times:

[Levine] said, “The research shows us that in some minority of cases, young — even quite young — people can have a positive sexual experience with an adult. That’s what the research shows.”
Featuring a foreword by Clinton administration Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Ms. Levine’s book endorses a Dutch law, passed in 1990, that effectively lowered the age of consent to 12. Ms. Levine cites research about “happy consensual sex among kids under 12,” and writes: “America’s drive to protect kids from sex is protecting them from nothing. Instead, often it is harming them.” . . .
A 1998 “meta-analytic” study in an American Psychological Association (APA) journal argued, among other things, that “value-neutral” language such as “adult-child sex” should be used to describe child molestation if it was a “willing encounter.” . . .
Ms. Levine’s book favorably cites the Rind study and, in a telephone interview, she defended the study as “methodologically meticulous.” But Baltimore psychologist Joy Silberg, whose clinical practice involves treating child-abuse victims, says the study is “horribly flawed.”
“I can’t call it science,” she said.
One co-author of the 1998 study was Robert Bauserman, now employed by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. As early as 1989, Mr. Bauserman had written about “man-boy sexual relationships” in Paidika. He also co-authored a 1993 article with Mr. Rind about “adult-nonadult sex.”

You can read the whole thing. The point is that, more than a decade ago, there was a clearly identifiable movement within academia that was attempting to normalize “adult-child sex.”

Rind and Bauserman were part of it, and Bauserman’s history of association with the Dutch pedophile journal Paidika should raise red flags. Indeed, the Guardian article that caught Limbaugh’s attention actually cites a Paidika contributor:

A Dutch study published in 1987 found that a sample of boys in paedophilic relationships felt positively about them.

That study was by Theo Sandfort, a Dutch academic and member of Paidika‘s editorial board. Sandfort contributed an article entitled “Constructive Questions Regarding Paedophilia” to the third issue of the journal in 1988, contributed another article (“The World is Bursting with Adults, so I’m always Glad to See a Little Girl”) to the eighth issue in 1992, and published a two-part article (“The Sexual Experiences of Children”) in consecutive issues of Paidika in 1993 and ’94.

For several years, Professor Sandfort wrote about almost nothing else. He is author of the 2001 book Childhood Sexuality and co-edited the 1990 book Male Intergenerational Intimacy with fellow Paidika contributor Edward Brongersma, who was convicted for having sex with a 16-year-old boy. Readers will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Sandfort is now on the faculty of Columbia University.

Judith Levine’s 2002 book cited Sandfort and Brongersma among her sources, and she also cited another Paidika contributor, a lawyer named Lawrence A. Stanley, as an expert on the supposed non-danger of child pornography. Under the aliases “N.S. Aristoff” and “L.A. Stanaman,” Stanley was quite directly involved in the business, and was arrested a few months after Levine’s book was published:

An American lawyer who specialized in defending those accused of child pornography is under arrest in Brazil, charged with violating that country’s laws against child exploitation.
Lawrence Allen Stanley, 47, was arrested June 8 after police in Salvador say they found more than 1,000 photographs and more than 100 videos of young girls in swimsuits and underwear.
The arrest came days after the Brazilian magazine Epocha reported that Stanley, a fugitive who has lived in Brazil since 1998, had built an international business photographing Brazilian girls and selling their photos through the Internet. . . .
Under the alias L.A. Stanaman, Stanley operated the “MiniModels” Web site, featuring photos of girls ages 8 to 14 in what police Officer Rui Gomes described to the Associated Press as “sensual poses.” . . .
Stanley has been identified as the owner of Alessandra’s Smile, a New York company that sells erotic material about girls. He is also the publisher of Ophelia Editions, which produces books with pedophile themes, and Uncommon Desires, a newsletter that has called itself “the voice of a politically conscious girl-love underground.”
Stanley has a criminal record. He was charged with “sexual aggression” against a girl in Quebec in 1990, but Canadian officials never sought extradition. In 1998, a Dutch court convicted Stanley in absentia for sexual abuse of three children ages 7 to 10, Epocha reported. He faces a three-year prison sentence if he returns to the Netherlands. . . .
In 1989, federal authorities accused Stanley of conspiring with a client, photographer Don Marcus, to import child pornography. Marcus — who fled to France to escape prosecution and is still a fugitive — asked Stanley to pick up a suitcase that was found to contain child pornography. His attorney argued that Stanley did not know what was in the suitcase, and a jury acquitted him in 1993. . . .

Read the whole thing. The point is that the “research” cited in favor of the normalization of pedophilia is generally produced by “experts” of a very dubious nature, whose interest in the subject matter does not seem to be merely academic. And yet, as evidenced by Columbia University’s hiring of Professor Sandfort, there are evidently those in the academic community who do not see this movement as dangerous.

When Rush Limbaugh called attention to this Monday — after National Review‘s Wesley J. Smith wrote about the Guardian article — Limbaugh was mocked by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien:

Rush Limbaugh speaking out against what he is calling a liberal attempt to, quote, “normalize pedophilia.” The conservative radio show host says it could be the next step for those who support gay marriage. . . .
Limbaugh citing a column in the “Guardian” newspaper that quotes researchers that claim pedophilia is a distinct sexual orientation. He said, Exhibit A, is that the media went easy on Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash who lost his job on Sesame Street after several men came forward saying they had a sexual relationship with Clash back when they were teenagers.

Ed Driscoll refers to O’Brien’s reaction as evidence of “epistemic closure” on the Left, and it goes to show the reflexive political reaction of liberals to everything nowadays: If conservatives are on one side of an issue, liberals feel obliged to weigh in on the other side.

Therefore, if Rush Limbaugh warns against the dangers of an effort to normalize pedophilia — a very real movement, and one which the administration of Columbia University evidently approves — liberals must declare that the movement is not dangerous.

 

Category: CNN, Crime, Culture, Education, Sex, Talk Radio

Doggy Style: Delaware Couple Arrested, Now Facing Felony Bestiality Charges

Posted on | January 11, 2013 | 95 Comments

Police say Samantha L. Golt had sex with a dog.

A 24-year-old Delaware mother had sex with a dog while her boyfriend took pictures, according to officials who arrested the couple this week.

Samanth L. Golt and 25-year-old boyfriend James P. Crow were arrested Tuesday and charged with felony bestiality and felony second-degree conspiracy for the alleged sex act that police say occurred at the couple’s Milford home, Delaware State News reports:

The investigation began when a Delaware State Police trooper was contacted by a concerned citizen in reference to abuse of a canine on Dec. 28, papers said.
During the investigation, photographs taken by Mr. Crow were collected as evidence, court documents said.
Police said they compared a Delaware Justice Information System Web Portal photograph to the evidence photo and positively identified Ms. Golt as the female having sex with the dog. . . .
Bestiality is a class D felony under state law. . . . A person convicted of bestiality would be placed on the state’s sex offender registry, the Delaware Attorney General’s Office said.

Samantha Golt is the mother of a 4-year-old girl. Golt had mentioned on Facebook that she owned three dogs, pit bulls and mixed breeds, the Digital Journal reported.

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Category: Crime, Delaware, Sex
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