The Other McCain

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

FMJRA 2.0: I’ve Got The Brains, You’ve Got The Looks

Posted on | January 26, 2020 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Governor Northam Couldn’t Be Setting Up A “Reichstag Fire” Event, Could He?
Bacon Time
The Political Hat
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

Rule 5 Monday: Stacey Dash
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

You Heard It Here First, Folks
EBL

Stoners and Stalinists: Sanders Campaign Staff Is Exactly What You’d Expect
EBL

In The Mailbox: Sunday Leftovers Edition
357 Magnum
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Disintegration
A View From The Beach
EBL

Is Noah Berlatsky a Pedophile?
EBL

Be Careful in Richmond, Please
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.20.20
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

A Mass Shooting CNN Won’t Notice
357 Magnum
Bacon Time
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.21.20
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Another Crisis for the Wombat?
A View From The Beach
EBL

Impeachment Circus Update
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

Eric Ciaramella Is the ‘Whistleblower’ and Other Things You’re Not Allowed to Say
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
EBL

I AM NOT WORTHY
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.22.20
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach
EBL

McCain Killed in Shootout
357 Magnum
EBL

Jonathan ‘Jessica’ Yaniv in Jail?
Wizbang Blog
EBL

Hint: They’re Not ‘Supreme’
Dark Brightness
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.23.20
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Why Does @Victoria_Spratt Hate Men?
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.24.20
357 Magnum
A View from The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending January 24:

  1.  EBL (22)
  2.  A View From The Beach (12)
  3.  357 Magnum (9)
  4.  Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for all the linkagery!

 

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Amazon Prime Music
Amazon Fire TV Stick: $15 Off Game Day Deal
Kindle Unlimited Membership Plans




White Guilt at 28°F: $50,176 a Year

Posted on | January 26, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Let’s begin with the obvious question: If you wanted to send your children to a not-very-prestigious private liberal arts college, why would you choose to send them to one in Moorhead, Minnesota? Concordia College doesn’t even make the top 100 list at U.S. News, and the annual cost of attendance is $50,176 including room and board. Supposing that you are an affluent parent with a kid too dumb to get into Duke or Dartmouth, but you still want to blow $200,000 on your child’s college education, why send them to a campus in Minnesota where the high temperature today will be 28°F? Aren’t there better bargains?

 

Consider, for example, Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) where, even with out-of-state tuition, the annual cost is $31,280 including room and board, and your child could spend their leisure hours under the palm trees on the beach at Sanibel. Even in late January, the high temperatures in Fort Myers are about 70°F, and I can’t imagine that a degree from Concordia has so much more prestige than an FGCU diploma that you’d spend an extra $80,000 to send your kid to frosty Minnesota where they can be lectured about their “white privilege”:

For this past Monday’s Martin Luther King Day, Minnesota’s Concordia College offered a racially segregated seminar titled “How to Embrace Your Inner Racist: A Session for White People.”
One of many “concurrent sessions” offered throughout the day, Professor Ahmed Afzaal’s “Inner Racist” discussion noted that participants would be able to “recognize and acknowledge that there is a nasty little racist inside them, and to do so without becoming angry or defensive.”
In addition, attendees would then “describe the skills of psychological flexibility that they must develop in order to make authentic choices in defiance of their racist tendencies.”
While the workshop included a special note that it was for whites only, the school wouldn’t stop “people of color from attending.” Nevertheless, non-whites needed to be aware “that their presence in the room [was] likely to interfere with the effectiveness of the session.”
Afzaal is a professor of religion at Concordia.
According to the college’s “MLK Day 2020 Theme” page,

they [sic] year 2020 marks the 401st anniversary of slavery in the US. On this day, we ask that you reflect on the progress that has and has not been made in eliminating racial and economic injustices in the U.S. We ask that we be intentional in examining 1) the social systems of race and economics, 2) the role that whiteness plays in keeping us stuck in the space of “negative peace”, and 3) the role that white moderates/Dreamers play in being “obstacles to change.”

Keynote speakers for Monday’s celebration included Ijeoma Oluo, whose writings calling for white people to “find themselves” were part of a 2018 Humboldt State racial identity workshop. Also featured was Janaya Khan, a black, queer, gender-nonconforming activist [and] staunch Afrofuturist and social-justice educator.”
In addition, a “Tunnel of Oppression” was available on January 20 and 24 which “call[ed] attention to the unarmed black and brown lives lost to police violence.” It also “highlight[ed] information about each life lost, as a way to emphasize the impact of police violence.”

Really? Does your child need this? Does anyone need this? How much of a fool do you have to be to pay more than $50,000 a year so your kid can experience the “Tunnel of Oppression” and be taught to “recognize and acknowledge that there is a nasty little racist inside them”? And you’re subjecting them to this in Moorhead, Minnesota? Nah, man — send your kids to Florida and let ’em be nasty little racists under the palm trees.

Bonus: Florida Gulf Coast University is in Lee County.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)


 

How Desperate Do You Have to Be?

Posted on | January 26, 2020 | Comments Off on How Desperate Do You Have to Be?

 

Even if you could get laid this way, would it be worth it?

People on OKCupid are swiping right on climate action — or something? I’ve never used a dating app.
But I do know the company has filters so you can get rid of climate deniers when you’re searching for someone, whether it’s The One or a one-night stand. In a viral tweet earlier this week, the company highlighted the feature. And it turns out a lot of people use it. Not only that, climate is becoming an increasingly popular mention in profiles, a trend that reflects broader changes in society.
In data shared with Earther, the company said there’s been a 240 percent increase in mentions of environmental terms on people’s profiles like “climate change,” “environment,” “global warming,” “Greta Thunberg” and “recycle.”
An overwhelming majority of OKCupid users also care about the climate crisis. Ninety-seven percent of them believe climate change is real, and 82 percent say they’re concerned about it. More 90 percent of users also said they’d take action to correct something they do after discovering it’s bad for the environment.

How many times do I have to repeat this? Online dating is for losers. If you’re so desperate for companionship that you’re using OKCupid, you need to contemplate how you life went wrong, reconsider your lifestyle choices, and perhaps seek professional counseling. Six weeks in a rehab center, maybe, where you go to workshops with titles like, “Stop Staring at Your Smartphone and Talk to Human Beings Occasionally, You Dork.”

Think about the type of people for whom “caring about the climate crisis” is a major life priority. Do you want to have sex with those people? If so, why? To settle a grudge, perhaps. What kind of pervert are you, having erotic fantasies about Greta Thunberg? But to continue:

“Since your match percentage with someone shows how compatible you two are, if you are a climate change activist and they think climate change is fake news, your match percentage is going to decrease,” Michael Kaye, OKCupid’s Global Communication Manager, told Earther in an email. Since most people on the platform aren’t climate deniers, that means vocally caring about the climate crisis is helping people get laid. . . .
“In my experience, people are finding that it’s really difficult to have an intimate relationship unless there’s a really deep alignment on how we’re relating to the issue,” [said] Renee Lertzman, a psychologist who specializes in the melancholic psychological responses to environmental crises . . .
“I’ve talked to a number of people who are experiencing a number of relational difficulties because of the way they respond to these issues,” she said. “People may be struggling with a lot of depression, with anxiety, with agitation, and their partner may not be equipped to handle it and might not relate to having that kind of response.”

Right — nothing like a hook-up with someone who has been overwhelmed with existential gloom ever since their seventh-grade teacher made them watch Earth in the Balance in science class. Do you need that kind of negativity in your life? If the entire planet is doomed — hopelessly and irretrievably doomed by CO2 emissions — why bother dating at all? Just reduce your carbon footprint by jumping off a bridge.

Climate-change cultists claim to worship at the altar of Science, but either they skipped the “survival of the fittest” chapter of Darwinian evolution, or else they think this principle only applied in prehistoric times.

Question: The purpose of dating is . . .?

Answer: To find a mate.

Question: The purpose of mating is . . .?

Answer: To reproduce.

Ergo, the process of mate selection (which is what dating actually is, or should be) is about evaluating potential partners in terms of their overall fitness as a future parent. What traits do you consider desirable, not just physically, but also in terms of personality? If you want your children to be, for example, tall and blue-eyed, then you would screen out the short brown-eyed people as potential partners. And if you want you children to be optimistic and cheerful, you screen out the people who are gloomy and pessimistic. This is why dating climate-change activists is a waste of time, because they are committed to an ideology of despair that views human existence, per se, as a threat to the planet.

This is what most young environmentalists simply don’t know about their own movement. It originated from the same cabal of wealthy misanthropes whose neo-Malthusian obsessions brought us eugenics and The Population Bomb: The idea that there are too many people on the planet, and that the wrong people — brown people — are having “too many” children. “Climate change” is really a euphemism for lebensraum.

So that’s two reasons not to date climate-change fanatics:

  1. They subscribe to a pessimistic and depressing worldview;
    and
  2. They are the kind of fools who are easily deceived by propaganda.

Avoid such people. Do not even bother arguing with them, because it’s a waste of time to try to deprive fools of their folly. They are like Pleistocene mammoths, destined to perish in the La Brea Tar Pits.


 

‘Living the Dream’ With @_32baby.k9_

Posted on | January 25, 2020 | Comments Off on ‘Living the Dream’ With @_32baby.k9_

 

Last weekend’s celebration of Martin Luther King Day in San Antonio, Texas, featured a hiphop concert in the city’s River Walk district:

The 19-year-old accused of shooting and killing two men and injuring five others at a River Walk-area bar on Sunday appears to have been scheduled to perform at the music event where the incident took place.
An Instagram account belonging to suspect Kiernan Williams contains a photo of the flyer for “Living the Dream,” the music event hosted at Ventura Sunday night. Williams’ stage name “32Baby K9” is included on the promotional graphic. He touted the event on his Instagram account as his second show and asked his supporters to ask him for discounts on admission.
Robert Jay Martinez, 20, and Alejandro Robles, 25, were killed at the event. A woman, 46, and four male victims ranging in age from 16 to 19, are expected to survive their injuries, police said.
Williams will face two counts of capital murder and other charges, Police Chief William McManus said.
Williams was arrested Monday afternoon. After being interviewed by police, he told a scrum of reporters and cameras to “follow” him on Instagram. He also admitted to shooting the two, but he did not know them. He said the disagreement started because one of the victims was upset that Williams “bumped” into him.
“He told me because I bumped into him he was going to kill me,” Williams said while being escorted to a police vehicle in handcuffs.

 

You see that the “Dream” in the title of this event was a reference to MLK’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but I don’t recall anything about shooting a couple of Mexicans in the club in that speech. Kiernan (a/k/a “32babyK9”) claims that he was acting in self-defense:

Witnesses on scene said the shooter, later identified as 19-year-old Kiernan Christopher Williams, got into a verbal and physical confrontation with 20-year-old Robert Jay Martinez III during a concert at Ventura Bar, according to an arrest affidavit.
One witness said they had turned away from the argument when they heard the gunfire erupt, the affidavit said. Another witness said they saw Williams intentionally shoot Martinez, the document continued.
Williams then continued to fire his weapon into the crowded venue, hitting six other people, police said.
Martinez died on scene with a gunshot wound to the chest. The second victim, 25-year-old Alejandro Robles, was shot once in the back and later died at the hospital. . . .
Witnesses were able to identify Williams from a photo lineup, the affidavit said. He was arrested Monday near the 100 block of S. Zarzamora Street.
After his arrest, Williams told reporters he acted in self-defense as he was put into the back of a police vehicle.

How is it “self-defense” when you shoot seven people, including a 46-year-old woman? Even if it could be shown that Williams had reasonable grounds to believe Martinez was a threat, he’s still got to explain why he kept firing more or less randomly into the crowd. But my hunch is “32babyK9” hasn’t spent a lot of time studying Texas law, so he’s probably going to be “living the dream” in prison the rest of his life.


 

False Dilemmas and Real Binaries: Patterns of Error in Logic and Rhetoric

Posted on | January 25, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

In his book SJWs Always Lie, Vox Day makes the important distinction between logic (the mental process by which we seek truth) and rhetoric (the language of persuasion). Both logic and rhetoric are skills necessary to statesmanship, because the political leader must first analyze the problems of public policy (logic), then explain the problem and convince others to support his proposed solution (rhetoric). As any student of history knows, it is often the case that there are good arguments on both sides of any public-policy controversy. The classic example of this is the Athenian expedition to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides in his famous History presents the argument made for the expedition by Alcibiades, and the opposing argument by Nicias. Alcibiades “won” the debate — in the sense that he persuaded the Athenian assembly to approve the expedition — but as the subsequent disaster proved, Nicias was entirely correct in arguing against the expedition.

This shows how persuasive rhetoric can triumph over sound logic, and one might think that statesmen would have learned something from this lesson, yet over and over, we see politicians leading their nations to disaster through similar errors. One of the most common tools of demagoguery, by which people are persuaded to support bad policy, is what students of logic recognize as the false dilemma fallacy:

A false dilemma (or sometimes called false dichotomy) is a type of informal fallacy in which something is falsely claimed to be an “either/or” situation, when in fact there is at least one additional option.

In the case of the Sicilian expedition, the debate in Athens was focused on the either/or notion that they must send military aide to their Ionian allies immediately, or else suffer the lost opportunity for what Alcibiades assured them would be an easy victory against their Spartan rivals. Yet the fact was that their allies had brought them a false report, exaggerating the situation in Sicily, and the wise thing to do would have been to send a small party to scout out the situation and report back, so that the assembly might be fully informed before undertaking such an expensive and risk endeavor. Because Alcibiades was ambitious for military glory, however, he derogated the arguments made for a cautious wait-and-see approach, and thus his demagoguery carried the debate.

Creating a sense of now-or-never urgency — “We must do something!” — when there is in fact plenty of time to examine the situation and consider alternatives to drastic action, is where deceptive rhetoric so often becomes outright propaganda. Thomas Sowell examines these propaganda methods in some detail in his excellent book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. Because we associate the word “propaganda” with totalitarian regimes, there is a tendency in democratic polities to ignore the ways in which dishonest methods of persuasion are employed in our own societies. However it can be shown, for example, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1932 was one of the first modern propaganda campaigns, engaging in character assassination against Herbert Hoover, demonizing him as the scapegoat to blame for the Depression (a) which was not his fault, and (b) which Hoover was doing everything he knew to relieve. Hoover was portrayed as a wicked servant of wealthy exploiters, and cruelly indifferent to the suffering of the poor. Subsequently, FDR was credited with having rescued the country from disaster, although it can be argued (as Amity Schlaes has done in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression) that Roosevelt’s New Deal programs actually impeded recovery and made the Depression worse.

The causes of the Great Depression were complex, and there were many possible ways to deal with the economic problems of the 1930s, but FDR’s 1932 campaign (which for the first time employed a full-time director for the Democratic National Committee, with an emphasis on what would now be called “messaging,” i.e., propaganda) painted the choice as a false dilemma between the alleged cruel indifference of the GOP and the determination of Democrats to do something for “the forgotten man.” And this theme, endlessly reiterated, was carried over in successive campaigns over the next two decades into the Truman era, until finally Republicans were able to win back the White House by nominating the war hero Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. To this day, however, the Democrats continue to attract voters with the same dishonest rhetoric that elected FDR in 1932: Republicans are “the party of the rich,” and the only way to help the poor is to vote Democrat.

In a two-party system, our political choices tend to be binary, but Republicans ought not allow Democrats to distort this real binary into a logically invalid false dilemma. Conservatives have duty to point out, for example, that the general pro-business policies of the GOP do not mean that poor people — especially including minorities — will suffer economic harm. This is where the use of the false dilemma fallacy feeds into the zero-sum-game mentality: Poor people are repeatedly told by Democrats that “big business” and Republicans are to blame for their suffering, and that black people especially victimized because Republicans are “racist.” This rhetoric suggests a series of either/or choices: One is either for business (Republican) or against business (Democrat); either for black people (Democrat) or against them (Republican); and so forth through a series of choices between different sides in antagonistic conflicts. Twenty or 30 years ago, for example, Democrats railed relentlessly against “the Religious Right” as the dangerous force behind the GOP. Fifteen years ago, “neoconservatives” were the great Republican enemy, and 10 years ago, it was the Koch brothers. Nowadays, we hear about “white nationalists” and the “alt-right.” Despite all these shifts in Democrat propaganda, the general base of support for the Republican Party and the GOP’s general policy direction haven’t really changed much since 1990; the shifting nature of attack rhetoric from Democrats merely shows an opportunistic search for right-wing bogeymen with which frighten the emotional masses into voting Democrat.

Which brings us, of course, to Orange Man Bad and the impeachment saga. Nancy Pelosi insisted last fall that this was an urgent matter, but after ramming through the House impeachment vote, a long holiday ensued before she was willing to bring the case to trial in the Senate. Now we have Adam Schiff and his colleagues using now-or-never rhetoric to insist that President Trump must be removed from office or else . . .

Or else what, really? We are barely nine months away from the next election and, if Democrats can win in November, a new president will be in office by this time next year. Perhaps someone who paid close attention to last week’s Senate trial — a tedious rehash of arguments Democrats have been making for the past several month — can explain to me the great menace from which Schiff & Co. propose to save us. Those of us who were not persuaded in December, when House Republicans voted as a bloc against impeachment, as not likely to be persuaded by having the same argument reiterated now. What then is the urgent crisis which prompts Democrats to insist that the Senate must either (a) vote to convict and remove the president from office or (b) allow Russia to subvert our democracy by secretly controlling our policy toward Ukraine. This either/or choice requires us to accept as a basic premise that Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin, and it also requires us to ignore the fact that four of the House impeachment managers voted against U.S. military assistance to Ukraine. If they really do care so damned much about Ukraine, why didn’t they vote that way when they had the chance?

You didn’t hear any of this pointed out last week if you were watching CNN or MSNBC or news coverage on any of the Big Three broadcast networks. Our liberal media have embraced the Democrats’ claim that anyone who argues against impeachment is an agent of Russian influence, in the same way that all 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 are believed by the media to be white supremacists.

It’s always either/or with them: Unless you support Democrats, you will be demonized in some way — you’re a Religious Right homophobe, a Kremlin stooge, or whatever. And you either believe this Democrat propaganda, or you don’t. Well, then: I don’t believe it, and I don’t think anyone else should believe it, either. This is the real binary choice.

You might be surprised at how easy it is to just ignore the Democrats, ignore the media, and live your life as if you don’t care what they say.

I, for one, have long since ceased to give a damn.


 

Probably Not a Trump Voter

Posted on | January 25, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Wild guess. Just going out on a limb here:

A man who had been watching the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on Tuesday allegedly choked and punched his girlfriend in a Pennsylvania motel room when she wanted to watch something else, according to charging documents.
Lonnie D. Clark, 53, who lives at the northern York County motel, faces charges of strangulation, simple assault and harassment.
Police responded to the Scottish Inn at about 7:45 p.m. Tuesday after Clark’s girlfriend called 911. The woman reported that Clark had assaulted her and that she had left the room, documents state.
Once Fairview Township Police officers arrived, they spoke with Clark’s girlfriend, noting that she had red marks on her neck and right cheek.
The woman told police that Clark had been drinking alcohol all day while watching the impeachment trial and “was upset,” although documents do not state what caused his anger.
When the woman told Clark she “would like to watch something else,” Clark began to curse at her and called her “dumb” and “stupid.”
She tried to talk to Clark while seated on his lap, but he began to choke her with his hands, causing her to have trouble breathing, documents state.
The woman broke free and tried to leave, but Clark punched her twice and pushed her several times. Clark grabbed her around the neck again and punched her when she attempted to leave a second time, according to documents.
She eventually was able to get to the bathroom, where she hid until Clark left. She then ran out of the room and reached the motel’s main office, where she called 911.
“She advised that she was scared to come back to the room until police arrived,” documents state. . . .
Clark was arraigned on the charges and was released on $5,000 unsecured bail. He has a preliminary hearing before District Judge Scott J. Gross scheduled for Feb. 24, according to online court dockets.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.)

You beat up your girlfriend because she doesn’t want to watch the impeachment hearing. Also, you’re living in a $44-a-night motel room. You might want to reconsider you life choices. Just sayin’ . . .

The ratings for the hearings have not been very impressive.


 

In The Mailbox: 01.24.20

Posted on | January 24, 2020 | 3 Comments

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Even In The Peoples’ Republic Of Illinois
EBL: Obama Administration’s Fraudulent FISA Warrants – How Is This Not A Bigger Story?
Twitchy: Just When You Thought The Dems’ Impeachment Trial Arguments Couldn’t Get More Desperate & Unhinged
Louder With Crowder: President Trump Speaks To The 2020 March For Life
According To Hoyt: Turning Us Inside Out, also, More Prizes For Good Girls
Vox Popoli: Dr. Who Has The Cancer, also, Never Going To Happen

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Dalrock Edition
American Conservative: How Washington Is Ramming REAL ID Down Our Throats
American Greatness: Biden Claims DACA Recipients Are “More American Than Americans”
American Thinker: Sharyl Atkisson Speaks Out
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Second Secession Friday
Babalu Blog: Cuba, Nicaragua, & Venezuela Round Out The Bottom Of Latin America’s Democracy Index
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For January 24
Cafe Hayek: Some Links
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: It’s Time To Play “Name That Speaker”
Don Surber: The Fourth Anniversary Of National Review‘s Suicide, also, NYT Rushes To Save Quid Pro Joe
The Geller Report: CORONAVIRUS – Reports Of 10,000 Dead In Wuhan, also, Photos Of Infected People Dead In The Streets Of Red China, Death Toll Spikes
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, also, Hygiea, Vesta, & Ceres
Hollywood In Toto: The Gentlemen – Ritchie Delivers A Bleepin’ Good Time
Joe For America: NY Post Reports Giuliani To Go Public With Biden Corruption Evidence
JustOneMinute: No City For Old Men, also, Send Better Investigators – Or Newer Clowns
Legal Insurrection: Warren Promises To Fill Her Cabinet With “Women & Non-Binary People”, also, TDS Fatigue Continues – Impeachment Ratings Weak & Dropping
Megan McArdle: That “Emerging Democratic Majority”? It May Always Be Just Over The Horizon
The PanAm Post: Socialist Pol’s New Bid For Colombia’s Presidency, also, Brazil Fosters Economic Growth In Latin America
Power Line: Warren’s “Joe The Plumber” Moment, also, WaPo Columnist Blames Chief Justice Roberts For “Impeachment Mess”
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Invites Secretary Wilkie To Address Veterans’ Issues
Shot In The Dark: Hang Onto Your Plumbing
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – Implications Of Watergate
This Ain’t Hell: After 18 Years Of Service, Officer Discovered To Be A Phony, also, Valor Friday
Victory Girls: Cancel Culture Targets Super Bowl QB Patrick Mahomes
Volokh Conspiracy: The BIA Is Acting Badly, And Judge Easterbrook Is Not Amused
Weasel Zippers: Glenn Beck Reads Letter From Biden Campaign Demanding Press Toe The Biden Line On Hunter, Ukraine, also, This Is What Media Bias Looks Like, Starring George Stephanopoulos
Mark Steyn: Sole Speck On A Ghostly Waste

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Why Does @Victoria_Spratt Hate Men?

Posted on | January 24, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

We could laugh at the recent headline — “The Dangerous Rise Of Men Who Won’t Date ‘Woke’ Women” — if the sense of panic weren’t indicative of a larger social problem, but there are probably a lot of women as worried as British journalist Vicky Spratt. They have been in a condition of despair for at least the past three years, ever since Hillary Clinton lost the election, and everywhere they look, they see more reasons to worry. It’s not merely the rise of nationalism, the elections of right-wing populists like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, the Brexit vote, etc. As the feminist slogan says, “the personal is political,” and a new generation of “empowered” young women is struggling to come to grips with a simple fact: Men generally don’t like feminists.

What set Miss Spratt’s alarm bells to ringing? An actor named Laurence Fox appeared on a BBC panel show called “Question Time,” where audience members ask questions of the panelists, and was dismissive of a woman’s claim that Megan Markle has been a victim of racism:

One audience member sparked the debate, and said: “The problem we’ve got with his is that Meghan has agreed to be Harry’s wife and then the press has torn her to pieces.
“Lets be really clear about what this is, lets call it by its name: it’s racism.”
Many members of the crowd applauded this, with equally as many booing.
The audience member continued: “She’s a black woman and she has been torn to pieces.”
Laurence Fox, an actor most known for his appearance in the series, Inspector Lewis, exclaimed: “It’s not racist!”
The audience member continued: “She has been torn to pieces and it absolutely is racism.”
Mr Fox replied: “It’s not racism, we’re the most tolerant and lovely country in Europe — you can’t just be throwing the charge of racism at everybody and its really starting to get boring now.”
The slanging match continued, as the audience member said: “Says a white privileged man, what worries me about your comment is you’re a white privileged male.” . . .
He said: “I can’t help what I am, I was born like this, it’s an immutable characteristic: to call me a white privileged male is to be racist – you’re being racist.”

As to the substance of that controversy, the problem was never Markle’s race, but her graceless reaction to the way she was treated by the British press. Even if the tabloid coverage of her marriage to Harry was racist, and even if some of the royal family disapproved of Harry’s choice, the Duchess of Sussex might have won over her critics if her reaction had been appropriately aristocratic. A true aristocrat is sufficiently conscious of his superiority that his self-esteem is not dependent upon his popularity. Think about how Winston Churchill endured his “wilderness years” in the 1930s, refusing to cede anything to the architects of appeasement, even though this meant he was smeared in the press as a warmonger. When, exactly as he had predicted, appeasement led to disaster, Churchill did not retaliate against those who had frozen him out of power for so long, but graciously credited Chamberlain with having acted with good intentions, however mistaken his policy had been.

That is what an aristocratic temperament looks like, and Markle alienated the British public by her failure to display such a temperament. But what caused Vicky Pratt to push the panic button was Laurence Fox’s further discussion of the problem of “woke” attitudes. He has said he couldn’t date a woman under 35 for that reason:

[H]e said he no longer dates younger ladies because they are “too woke” and many of them are “absolutely bonkers.”
He said women under 35 are “primed to believe they are victims.”
Fox then revealed he had broken up with an ex when she praised a Gillette advert which highlighted “toxic masculinity.”
He said: “I don’t know how we ended up together. It was a very short relationship.
“We were walking down the road together and she was talking about how good the Gillette advert was. I just looked at her and went, ‘Bye. Sorry I can’t do this with you.'”
Asked what his ex-girlfriend would think of him discussing their break-up in public, he said: “She will probably sit there and say, ‘See I told you he was patriarchal. He’s abusing me and I’m offended.'”

Indeed, a man would be better off alone than to be forced to surrender his intellectual independence for fear that his opinions might be deemed “offensive” to a politically correct girlfriend. Leftists never acknowledge the totalitarian tendency of their intolerance for dissent. It’s not conservatives, after all, who are forever trying to get their opponents banned from YouTube or Facebook for expressing unpopular opinions.

We might note that, for Laurence Fox, the personal is also political, as he endured a divorce and custody battle in 2016 that he says drained his bank account and nearly cost him his sanity. If he isn’t exactly enthusiastic about the feminist agenda, who can blame him?

The kind of “intersectional” feminism that Vicky Spratt embraces means that white heterosexual males have no rights — not even the right to their own opinions — and yet she cannot seem to understand why the men she hates so much don’t want to date women like her:

Not wanting to date “woke” women, far from being laughable, is actually one of the more insidious aspects of it. Spend an afternoon on any major dating app and you’ll come across (generally white) men saying openly sexist and misogynistic things. They might say “no psychos” or that they “f–king hate big eyebrows” in their bios. And, by and large, they also tend to hold extremely right-wing views and see themselves as victims of liberal thinking.
In fact, as I was writing this, a dear friend sent me a screenshot of a guy she’s just matched with who describes Jordan B Peterson as his “dream dinner guest”. Yes, the same Jordan B Peterson who thinks that white privilege is a “Marxist lie” and wants millennials to drop their obsession with “social justice”.
I, meanwhile, recently had to block someone who after matching with me launched into a vile rant about how women are “evil”, “only want sex” and treat men as though they are “disposable”. When I asked him if he hated women he replied that he had “only moderate disdain” for us before asking me whether I didn’t want to date him because I’m actually “pretty rough”.
All of this, of course, speaks not only to the presence of the very active online communities of anti-feminist incels but to the prevalence of the hideous and incorrect ideas they promote. It doesn’t take magical thinking to see how men are radicalised by anti-feminism. . . .

You can read the whole thing but — spoiler alert! — Miss Spratt goes off into the paranoid everything-is-connected kind of “intersectionality” in which (a) some guy saying rude things on Tinder is linked to (b) violent extremists with AK-47s committing mass murder. By that kind of logic, of course, every socialist is responsible for the Khmer Rouge, every Muslim is implicated in 9/11, and all Germans are to blame for the Holocaust. Only by such a collective blame-game mentality can Miss Spratt make this leap of logic to accuse Laurence Fox of endorsing “insidious” ideas merely because he’s not interested in dating “woke” women. As for the type of men Miss Spratt is meeting via dating apps, well, what does she expect? At age 31, she is past her prime, and the quality of choices available to her reflects her diminished SMV.

Online dating is for losers. How many times do I have to repeat this? If nobody who actually knows you in real life wants to date you, why do you imagine the Internet will magically solve your problem? And doesn’t she understand that the guy who “launched into a vile rant” might have been just giving her the brush-off or, perhaps, just being typical of the kind of loser who can’t get a date from any who actually knows him? If losers on Tinder are the standard by which all men are to be judged, then I must be a veritable prince among men! Never once have I asserted that women “only want sex,” or told a stranger she looked “pretty rough.”

Also, if a guy says “no psychos” on his Tinder profile — well, he’s been dealing with the kind of women who use Tinder, OK? Emotionally dysfunctional women who can’t get a date with anyone who knows them in real life? Yeah, they’re a dime a dozen on Tinder, which is why I advise guys against using Tinder or any other dating app.

 

Speaking of emotional dysfunction, Vicky Spratt wasted seven years of her life — her peak SMV years — on a guy who recently dumped her. “Two months earlier,” she wrote in December, “I closed the door on a seven-year relationship both literally and metaphorically after the person I owned a home with left”:

Had I thought I would marry them? I guess so. . . .
My long-term relationship fell apart in slow motion. By the time I’d got a grip on the situation I realised I didn’t want to hold it together anymore.

People never ask for my advice, and when I volunteer advice, people seldom seem to listen, but I’ll try it once again. Ladies, never let a man string you along in a “relationship.” Notice I put that word inside quotation marks? That’s because having a “relationship” has become synonymous with what used to be called fornication. There is a reason why the Bible condemns fornication, and there is also a reason why people who fornicate nowadays use the euphemism “relationship,” i.e., because they don’t want to admit they’re doing something wrong.

When you do bad things, bad consequences are to be expected, and yet women like Vicky Spratt always seem surprised to discover that fornication — which is what “long-term relationship” means — ultimately results in unhappiness. You’re 24, you move in with your boyfriend, then seven years later, after it “fell apart in slow motion,” you’re having to block creeps on a dating app because you’re 31 and basically the only guys available and/or interested are creeps on dating apps.

That, my friends, is the answer to the question in the headline: Why does Vicky Spratt hate men? Because she wasted her youth on a guy who dumped her, and she has a right to be bitter about her experience, just as Laurence Fox has a right to be bitter about his divorce.


 

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