The Other McCain

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

Study: The Internet Has Made It Harder to Ditch Your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Posted on | May 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Study: The Internet Has Made It Harder to Ditch Your Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Glenn Reynolds highlights a study from Florida Atlantic University:

Defined as using technology to repeatedly harass a love interest, partner, or crush in order to coerce, control, intimidate, threaten, or just plain old annoy, digital dating abuse has developed into a disturbingly common phenomenon. The research team analyzed over 2,200 U.S. middle and high school students, and 28.1% admitted they had been subjected to a form of online dating abuse over the past year.
Perhaps surprisingly, the study also noted that boys (32.3%) appear to be experiencing this type of abuse more often than girls (23.6%).

This finding would seem to contradict what feminists say about abuse generally being something that males inflict on females, but of course, women often don’t recognize their own abusive behavior as abusive. Rollo Tomassi has talked about solipsistic tendencies among women, their inability to view any situation objectively, instead making everything about me! me! me! I don’t wish to generalize too broadly, but I have noticed that women tend to regard their emotions — their personal likes and dislikes, their hurt feelings — as if they were a concrete reality.

Any man who wishes to succeed in relationships with women has to learn to negotiate this typical aspect of the female personality. Boys are raised (or perhaps I should say, boys were once raised) to disregard or restrain our emotions, to shrug off pain, never to pout over disappointment, and thus often find it difficult to cope with female irrationality.

The Internet, smart phones, social media and dating apps have added a new aspect to this problem. Ask any young man today what it’s like when a girl starts “blowing up your phone” with messages to which she expects answers. A guy may be busy doing something — work, school, whatever — and if he does not immediately respond to his girlfriend’s messages, she attributes malign motives to his non-answers: “Why are you ignoring me?” He hasn’t done anything wrong, but try telling her that.

Let us stipulate (and the FAU study shows) that guys also engage in “digital dating abuse,” but apparently women are more likely to do it. And the influence of digital technology has made it more difficult to escape abusive relationships. Your crazy ex-girlfriend can stalk your social-media profile, harass anyone you’re dating, etc. Perhaps worst of all, whether you are male or female, your dating history creates a digital permanent record that may be difficult, if not impossible, to erase. Your past can come back to haunt you in ways that may surprise you. Today’s teenage boy who harbors any ambition toward public life must be extraordinarily careful in his romantic encounters, lest in 20 or 25 years — when he’s running for Congress, perhaps — some crazy ex-girlfriend pops up online to accuse him of rape. Such is the price of “progress.”




 

Category: Sex

Your Low-Rent Friends Are Dead

Posted on | May 3, 2020 | Comments Off on Your Low-Rent Friends Are Dead

 

Glenn Reynolds continues piling up the obscure Steely Dan references, and spotting them is becoming easy: If you see any phrase on Instapundit that doesn’t make sense, Google it, because it’s probably a Steely Dan reference. As for example when, in reference to Joe Biden’s doomed campaign, he drops in a lyric from “Kid Charlemagne”:

You are obsolete.
Look at all the white men on the street!

The professor is educating us here because, even though I vaguely remember “Kid Charlemagne,” a minor hit (#82 on the Billboard chart in 1976) from their fifth album, The Royal Scam, I’d never paid any attention to the lyrics, and had no idea what the song was about. Turns out it’s the story of the downfall of legendary LSD maker Owsley Stanley.

On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean.
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home.

That last line refers to the Merry Pranksters‘ bus, and you can see how, by the mid-1970s, that psychedelic hippie vibe was long gone:

Now your patrons have all left you in the red.
Your low-rent friends are dead.
This life can be very strange.
All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face
They’ve joined the human race.
Some things will never change.

Yes, we’ve all joined the human race, and some of us have even become Republicans. This life can be very strange, indeed.




 

Category: Music

Death Is a Democrat: Florida Fearmonger Stalks Beaches as ‘Grim Reaper’

Posted on | May 2, 2020 | Comments Off on Death Is a Democrat: Florida Fearmonger Stalks Beaches as ‘Grim Reaper’

 

It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how evil and dishonest the Democrats have become. Daniel Uhlfelder is a Florida lawyer who previously made headlines by suing over a private beach in Walton County where former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee happens to live. Huckabee is just one of 900 beachfront property owners in the county, but his name was invoked as a publicity stunt by Uhlfelder first during the 2018 campaign, and then in launching a super PAC earlier this year. Now, Uhlfelder wants people to believe they’re going to die because of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to re-open Florida’s beaches:

Most Floridians hitting the newly reopened beaches are trading stay-at-home sweatpants for shorts and swimsuits.
But when he heads out, Daniel Uhlfelder dons a raggedy black robe, conceals his face with a black cloth and wields his scythe.
Uhlfelder, an attorney, is haunting Florida beaches dressed as the Grim Reaper to protest their reopening, which he believes is premature.
It’s a macabre plea to beachgoers to stay home.
Uhlfelder is a staunch advocate for public beach access in the state, even butting heads with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whose Florida Panhandle home is parked on a private beach. But allowing anyone on the beach during the pandemic is a mistake, he said — one that could endanger the community.
“We aren’t at the point now where we have enough testing, enough data, enough preparation for what’s going to be coming to our state from all over the world from this pandemic,” the lawyer told CNN.
Scythe in hand, he traveled to beaches around Walton County, Florida, that have reopened ahead of the state’s planned May 4 reopening. “Phase One” of the reopening will allow restaurants and retailers to open at 25% capacity. Bars, salons and gyms will stay closed for now.
The beaches he visited Friday were “very crowded,” he said.
“I know how beautiful and attractive our beaches are. But if we don’t take measures to control things, this virus is going to get really, really out of control,” he warned.

Except (a) no, he’s wrong, and (b) the media reports won’t mention the highly relevant fact that Uhlfelder is a Democrat activist, and that this isn’t about public health, it’s about partisan politics — falsely smearing the Republican governor. Actual research indicates that there is little or no danger of the virus spreading outdoors in the sunshine. That’s just not how viruses operate. True, some college kids who traveled to Florida for Spring Break in February and early March contracted coronavirus, but that was probably from partying in crowded nightclubs, or perhaps just from being on commercial airlines. Being outdoors in the sunshine is probably the safest place to be, and if Uhlfelder says the beaches were “very crowded,” could he please specify what that means, in terms of people per square foot? Because I doubt very much that any beach was too crowded to observe the six-foot “social distancing” limit.

Facts don’t matter to the liberal media narrative.




 

Category: Florida

Blue-State Media Continue Wishcasting Coronavirus Epidemic in Red States

Posted on | May 2, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

Since mid-March, at least, we have seen endless reiterations of this narrative: “Oh, sure, the virus is devastating Democratic-controlled urban areas now,” the media keep saying, “but just you wait — eventually those Trump voters out in the sticks will pay the price!”

Two assumptions are baked into this narrative:

  1. Trump is to blame for the COVID-19 catastrophe. Despite the fact that the U.S. coronavirus per-capita death rate is far below the rate in many European countries — Belgium, Spain, France, etc. — liberals want Americans to believe that it’s actually worse here, and that this is Trump’s fault.
  2. Contagious diseases are a sort of political karma. If you vote Republican, you deserve to die, according to the media elite.

Of course, these assumptions are never expressed overtly, but what else can explain this gleeful desire to see rural America devastated?

Rural Counties Seeing Faster Growth in COVID-19 Cases, Deaths
The coronavirus was slower to make an impact in much of rural America, but cases and deaths have risen significantly in recent weeks, a new analysis shows.
The toll of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has shocked urban areas like New Orleans and New York City. But concerns abound that the virus could devastate rural communities, where populations tend to skew older and sicker and where there are fewer intensive care beds. Since 2010, more than 120 rural hospitals have shuttered altogether.
The new analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation indicates that while rural communities have fewer COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people than urban areas, rates of both coronavirus cases and deaths have surged at a faster pace in more rural counties in the last two weeks. The average number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people rose 125% in non-metro counties — or those that are largely rural, according to the analysis — and by 68% in metro counties between April 13 and 27, according to the analysis. Deaths rose 169% in more rural areas and 113% in the more urban counties, reaching respective rates of 4.4 and 17 per 100,000.

There is some statistical voodoo involved in this claim, which I’ll address in a minute, but notice how the headline and lead portray this study: “Finally, the Red State COVID-19 Apocalypse has arrived!”

One can imagine the MSNBC producers grinning at this news that — at last! — those Fox News-watching rubes in the hinterlands are finally getting the karmic retribution they deserve. Except . . .

No, it’s not really happening. This is statistical voodoo, based upon a simple fact: When you are starting from near zero, a fast rate of increase is not difficult to achieve, but this does not mean that the tortoise, who has just taken his first step, will soon overtake the hare. What is embedded in this “watch out, rural America” theme is a message in support of more or less permanent quarantine lockdown orders.

It has not escaped the notice of our media class that the pressure to end these orders — to “re-open America” — has been strongest in areas where infection rates and death rates of COVID-19 have been low. Therefore, they must scavenge around for some kind of “evidence” to suggest that ending the lockdowns will produce catastrophic rural outbreaks.

Let’s disambiguate the data. Obviously it is true that a rural community that has had very few COVID-19 cases thus far could suffer a disastrous outbreak, as has happened in Dougherty County, Georgia, and a few other cases. By and large, however, the disease has mainly affected urban areas where higher population density enables the disease to spread faster. However many new cases emerge as a result of ending the lockdown in Tennessee or Texas, it is impossible that these states will ever eclipse New York as the “epicenter” of the pandemic, in terms of per-capita death rates, simply because (a) the conditions enabling transmission of the virus are not equal and (b) New York has such an enormous head start in the cumulative death toll. Here are the highest per-capita death rates, expressed as deaths per million population:

New York ………………….. 1,227
New Jersey …………………. 849
Connecticut ………………… 653
Massachusetts ……………. 544
Louisiana ………………….. 422
Michigan …………………… 388
District of Columbia …… 337

And here are the rates for other selected states:

Georgia ……………………. 113
Ohio …………………………. 86
Florida ……………………… 64
North Carolina …………… 41
Tennessee ………………….. 31
Texas ………………………… 30

You see that, for example, the death rate in Georgia is about 79% lower than in Massachusetts, and Tennessee’s rate is 95% lower than Connecticut’s. What would it take for the low-rate states to “catch up” with the high-rate states? Whatever hypothetical scenario of a catastrophic rural epidemic you imagine, is it really likely, at this point in the pandemic, that such an outbreak will happen? The fact is, our awareness of how the virus spreads, and who is most vulnerable, has increased a lot since mid-March and, even if all the lockdown orders were rescinded tomorrow, this awareness would have a protective effect, in terms of people taking precautions. Yet the media will not let go of their prejudices, believing that somehow this virus will act as an instrument of “social justice” revenge against those stupid Trump voters in rural areas.

It hasn’t happened yet, nor is it likely that it will happen in the future, but because this belief is rooted in a basic prejudice of the media class, they will continue writing stories reflecting this fantasy narrative.




 

Category: Media Bias

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Did This Feminist Just Endorse Holocaust Denial?

Posted on | May 2, 2020 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous: Did This Feminist Just Endorse Holocaust Denial?

 

Let me start by saying that I am not sure Lux Alptraum is actually a woman, considering her interest in transgenderism and homosexuality, but that’s scarcely relevant to her decision to reinterpret the Holocaust from a perspective that views Jews as possessors of “white privilege.”

On the other hand, perhaps it is relevant whether Lux Alptraum is transgender, in terms of how Third Wave gender theory relies on the postmodernist ideology of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, et al, insisting that there is no such thing as a natural structure of human society. The postmodernist can argue that up is down, black is white, male is female — anything can be made its opposite, if you believe that no binary is valid.

So the problem of anti-Semitism in black culture ceases to be problematic when, by the prestidigitation of Third Wave “intersectional” theory, Lux
Alptraum invokes “institutional power” as an excuse. Thus black violence against Jews — which has become widespread in New York City — isn’t really dangerous because the “proximity to whiteness” means that Jews deserve to get bashed in the head, or something. Lux Alptraum never provides a coherent syllogism, instead walking away with the declaration that “terrible takes” on Twitter make further discussion impossible.

Notice that Lux Alptraum falls back on identity politics, saying that as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, her argument could not possibly be viewed as excusing anti-Semitism or being disrespectful of Holocaust victims. In other words, she’s invoking her Jewishness as a privilege, saying that because she is a Jew, she should be exempt from criticism for making arguments that are offensive (and possibly dangerous) to Jews.

This is a GPS-coordinated trip to insanity. By making membership in an identity group the determining factor in the validity of arguments, the “social justice warriors” undermine basic moral truth, so that whether an action is right or wrong depends on who is doing it. This is an adaptation of Lenin’s notorious formula for terror: “Who, whom?”

No one can advocate this totalitarian worldview without risking the consequence that their enemies will turn it against them, but young fools like Lux Alptraum are ignorant of this lesson of history.

UPDATE: In case you’re wondering how “Anne Frank Is a Becky” got started, a black nationalist who goes by the name of Gazi Kodzo began it with a rant that got him suspended from Twitter.

 

What does it say about Lux Alptraum that she was trying to engage seriously with such hateful craziness? Birds of a feather . . .

Oh, and if want more of this? Vote Democrat!




 

Category: Racism

Stick a Fork in Joe Biden

Posted on | May 1, 2020 | 1 Comment

He is done:

New Biden Accuser: He Complimented
My Breasts When I Was 14 Years Old

Can she prove this? She says there were witnesses:

“When it was Biden and my aunt’s turn to say hello he quickly turned to me and asked how old I was. I replied with my age and he replied with the comment ‘Fourteen? You’re very well endowed for 14!’ I was confused but it was definitely weird, he looked me up and down and hovered his eyes on my chest so I had some clue [about] the notion of his comment but didn’t fully understand at the time. We quickly separated from his area after the encounter.”

Could it be argued that this is defensible? Were her breasts so unusually large that Biden’s expression of astonishment was justified? I mean, in the interests of bipartisanship and, uh . . . due process rights, should we give the old guy a break if she was sporting 38DDs in ninth grade?

Never mind. I suspect my Republican readers are not in a mood to be tolerant of Biden’s idiosyncrasies, but the question is whether Democrats believe it’s OK for a U.S. Senator to remark on the size of a 14-year-old’s breasts, no matter how astonishingly large they might be.

My hunch is that this is just one more shoe dropping, in what will quickly become an avalanche of accusations against Biden. It’s kind of like what happened with Roy Moore. The guy had been in public life in Alabama for decades, and I’d followed Moore’s career since the 1990s, and never heard a word of any inappropriate behavior by him. Then all at once, Moore was accused by a half-dozen women of having harassed them when they were teenagers in the 1970s and ’80s. This avalanche effect has toppled many prominent men in the #MeToo era; once the first accusation of misconduct is made, the accusers seem to come out of the woodwork. One day you’re a senator or a movie star or a network news anchor, and next thing you know Gloria Allred’s holding a press conference with weeping “survivors” and your career’s over.

Once someone becomes a target of this machinery of destruction, the result is never really in doubt. If indeed Biden made the remark attributed to him, isn’t it likely he’s made similar remarks to other large-breasted girls? Of course it is, and now that the starting whistle of the #MeToo Accusation Derby has blown, every other woman who was ever an object of Biden’s interest will soon come forward to tell her tale.

Cui bono? Of course, we know the answer to that question.




 

Category: Joe Biden

Biden Accuses Tara Reade of Lying

Posted on | May 1, 2020 | Comments Off on Biden Accuses Tara Reade of Lying

 

Joe Biden expects us to accept that the #BelieveAllWomen standard that applied to Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers does not apply to Democrats:

Former Vice President Joe Biden explicitly denied the sexual assault accusation against him during an appearance on MSNBC Friday morning. Speaking publicly about the matter for the first time, Biden maintained that he never sexually assaulted Tara Reade and doesn’t remember her at all.
“This never happened,” said Biden. “It’s as simple as that.”
Biden was expertly grilled by Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, who questioned him about the whereabouts of his Senate records, which may contain additional information regarding Reade. But the most important exchange occurred when Brzezinski asked Biden to square his current defense with his previous claims that women should be believed when they come forward as sexual assault victims.
Biden then denied that he had previously advocated such a standard.
“From the very beginning, I’ve said believing the woman means taking the claim seriously, and then it’s vetted, looked into,” said Biden. “Women have a right to be heard, and the press should rigorously investigate claims they make. I’ll always uphold that principle. But in the end the truth is what matters. And these claims are false.”
The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate is misrepresenting his past statements. He absolutely did not take the position that “believing women means taking the claim seriously.” (And if that‘s what believe-all-victims means, why not just say that instead?)
Brzezinski wasn’t having it. She repeatedly reminded Biden that he had advocated believing Christine Blasey Ford, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser. She even read his own words back to him: “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time.” Brzezinski also called out several of Biden’s high profile supports — Stacey Abrams, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) — for participating in the Kavanaugh double standard.
Caught in an obvious contradiction, Biden then tried to say that victims should be believed until contrary evidence emerges.
“Women are to be believed, given the benefit of the doubt,” said Biden. “If they come forward and say something happened to them, they should start with the presumption they are telling the truth. Then you have to look at the facts.
“What I said during the Kavanaugh hearings was she had a right to be heard,” Biden continued. “And she came forward, the presumption would be she’s telling the truth unless it’s proved she wasn’t telling the truth, or unless it’s clear from the facts surrounding it that it isn’t the truth.”

 

For some reason, Biden seems to think his denial constitutes proof that Reade is lying, whereas in 2018, Kavanaugh’s denials proved nothing.

UPDATE: Ace points out that Joe Biden’s Morning Joe performance was damaging not only in terms of his failure to justify a double standard between what he said about Kavanaugh’s accusers and what he’s saying about his own accuser, but Joe also suffered from embarrassing mental lapses during his interview with Mika.




 

Category: Joe Biden

Flynn Won Twitter

Posted on | April 30, 2020 | Comments Off on Flynn Won Twitter

by Smitty

Category: Uncategorized
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