The Other McCain

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

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: 1,071 Miles to Orlando — How About $30?

Posted on | May 2, 2019 | 3 Comments

 

Billed as “The World’s Ultimate Event for Fathers,” the 21 Convention in Orlando begins Friday, and I’m leaving this morning to drive there in a rental car — 1,071 miles one-way, 2,142 round-trip. So far as I know, I’m one of only two journalists — along with Mike Cernovich — invited to cover this “red pill” manosphere gathering.

My wife and I recently celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary, and if readers would like to make a $30 hit to the tip jar, that would go a long way to ease Mrs. McCain’s concerns about the family budget.

If there is any “red pill” secret to a successful marriage, it can be summarized rather simply: Get yourself a good wife.

 

 

 

 

“Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. . . . Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.”
— Proverbs 31:10-12, 30 (KJV)

Because I believe in the power of intercessory prayer, I’ve always felt that my Grandmother Kirby’s prayers on my behalf may have had something to do with my good fortune in finding a God-fearing wife. Secular readers will dismiss this as superstition, I suppose, but how else to explain the miracle whereby I not only married this wonderful woman, but have stayed married to her for three decades? Other men, perhaps much better men than me, have fared far worse in their marriages, and as I am basically Calvinist in my theology, I must interpret the blessing bestowed on me as evidence of unmerited grace — not what I have deserved, but what it has pleased God to grant me, making manifest His mercy.

Readers may ponder this mystery, while I call attention to a reaction to Tuesday’s blog post, “Insta-Whores,” in which I talked about how social media is enabling prostitution. This prompted some commentary from “red-pill” blogger Dalrock:

But this also raises the question of what we expect young (and not so young) women to do while they delay marriage. Nearly all people are troubled by the idea of a woman marrying at 18, 19, or even in her early 20s, and most would be troubled to learn that she did so without having sex with other men first. How can she be ready to marry if she lacks “life experience”? . . .
But again, what do we really expect young women to do in the interim, as the median age of first marriage continues to advance?  In theory they are supposed to be looking for their soulmate, but while busily sampling their options are also not supposed to find him too soon.

You can read the whole thing, and Dalrock’s point is correct. Most Americans do expect their daughters to delay marriage and, consequentially, they at least tacitly endorse pre-marital sex (fornication). Even many self-professed Christians have adopted this attitude, deeming college education and a professional career (the usual reasons for postponing marriage) more valuable than virtue.

Having contemplated this problem, I have no one-size-fits-all solution to offer, except to say that we need to change our expectations, and warn our children against this amoral and materialistic view.

Sin happens — we cannot change human nature — but: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.” This is what’s happening in our upside-down culture, where fornication flourishes, marriage is declining, and abortion is celebrated as a “right.” Whether these subjects will be addressed this weekend in Orlando, I don’t know, but I do look forward to interviewing the “red pill” guys who are at least trying to find common-sense (i.e., non-feminist) answers to these problems.

Well, I’m running late to pick up that rental car, so there’s only time to remind you of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Shoe Leather Fund

Barr Testifies, Democrats Attack

Posted on | May 2, 2019 | Comments Off on Barr Testifies, Democrats Attack

 

The low moment of Wednesday’s Senate hearing:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) shut down Sen. Mazie Hirono’s (D-HI) line of questioning Wednesday against Attorney General William Barr, saying that she “slandered” Barr “from top to bottom.”
During Barr’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding special counsel Robert Mueller’s report which concluded that President Donald Trump did not collude with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election and that he did not obstruct justice by firing former FBI director Robert Mueller.
During her questioning of Barr, Hirono said that he joins Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Giuliani as people who have “sacrificed their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar that sits in the Oval Office.”
Hirono added, “You know the difference, but you’ve chosen to be the president’s lawyer and side with him over the interests of the American people.”
The Hawaii Democrat continued, “You called a press conference to once again clear Donald Trump” and that Barr “used every advantage of your office to create the impression that the president was cleared of misconduct.”
“You lied to Congress,” Hirono said. “You knew you lied. And now, we know.”
Hirono then noted that she voted against Barr’s confirmation and then called on him to resign, saying, “You have betrayed that trust. America deserves better. You should resign. I have some questions for you.”
Sen. Hirono then proceeded to ask Barr a series of questions, including whether he believes it remains ok for a president to ask someone to lie.
During Hirono’s questioning of Barr, Graham interrupted the Hawaii Democrat, saying, “Not really to this line of questioning. Listen, you’ve slandered this man.”
“You slandered this man from top to bottom, so, if you want more of this, you’re not going to get it, if you want to ask questions, you can,” Graham charged.

To state the obvious: If you’re a Democrat who’s been watching CNN or MSNBC for the past two years, you are convinced that “Russian collusion” was real, and therefore if Mueller didn’t prove this beyond all doubt, it was because of “obstruction of justice.” Nothing can convince Rachel Maddow or her audience otherwise. Trump must be guilty of wrongdoing — this is a foundational belief of the Left’s worldview — and therefore the Attorney General is part of the Trump conspiracy.

After testifying all day to the Senate committee, Barr decided against testifying to the House Judiciary Committee, which had wanted to have him interrogated by Democrat staffers who, I suspect, were endeavoring to set up a perjury trap so they could impeach Barr himself.

The Wall Street Journal:

This trashing of Bill Barr shows how frustrated and angry Democrats continue to be that the special counsel came up empty in his Russia collusion probe. He was supposed to be their fast-track to impeachment. Now they’re left trying to gin up an obstruction tale, but the probe wasn’t obstructed and there was no underlying crime. So they’re shouting and pounding the table against Bill Barr for acting like a real Attorney General.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Democrats, Senate

In The Mailbox: 05.01.19

Posted on | May 1, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links in April!


OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #607
357 Magnum: Would You Let A Random Stranger Install Cameras In Your Home?
EBL: Victims Of Communism Day
Twitchy: Nikki Haley Lowers The Boom On Ilhan Omar And Her Support Of The Maduro Regime
Louder With Crowder: Ilhan Omar Says America Shouldn’t Be A Country Of White People

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Why Aren’t There People Of Color In Game Of Thrones? also, Four Floors Of Whores
American Greatness: Why Don’t Climate Activists Support Nuclear Power?, also, Senator Hirono Calls AG Barr A Liar
American Power: A Rising Tide Of Antisemitism
American Thinker: Whitewashing Black College Beach Week
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Violence & Bloodshed In Venezuela As The People Rise Against Maduro, also, Guaido Accuses Cuba & Russia Of Keeping Maduro In Power
BattleSwarm: Venezuela – Scenes From A Revolution
CDR Salamander: 2030 Is Now
Da Tech Guy: Hey Limbaugh, Time To Start Beta’s Global Warming Countdown Clock
Don Surber: Lawyer Up, Jim Comey
Dustbury: Defending Mary Sue
First Street Journal: The Washington Post Promotes A One-Sided Racial Fight
The Geller Report: Sri Lanka Suspends Sunday, Weekly Masses Indefinitely, also, Muslim Migrant Who Raped Eleven Women In Two Weeks Not Deported
Hogewash: A Coming Attraction
Hollywood In Toto: Truth To Power Jordan Klepper Fawns Over Clintons
Joe For America: Alabama Democrat Says “Some Children Are Just Unwanted. You Either Kill Them Now Or Kill Them Later…”
JustOneMinute: Life Is Unfair, Let’s Make It Worse
Legal Insurrection: Ilhan Omar Joins NYT In Spreading Lie That Jesus Was Palestinian, also, NY State Government Joins The War On Trump
Michelle Malkin: The Beltway Bidens – Creepy, Crooked, And NOT Just Like Us
The PanAm Post: The US Begins To Understand That A Military Option May Be Unavoidable
Power Line: Mueller’s Moan, also, The Barr Testimony – Democrats Gone Wild
Shot In The Dark: The Definition Of Insanity
The Political Hat: Victims Of Communism Day, 2019
This Ain’t Hell: Latest Venezuela News, also, KS Shootings Add To Concern Over Ex-Military Extremists
Victory Girls: WaPo Twists And Spins Mueller Note To Barr
Volokh Conspiracy: Victims Of Communism Day
Weasel Zippers: AG Barr Confirms Multiple Criminal Leak Investigations Underway, also, MSNBC Report On Venezuela Inadvertently Makes Case For Second Amendment


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Category: Linkagery

CNN’s Ratings Fall Even Further

Posted on | May 1, 2019 | Comments Off on CNN’s Ratings Fall Even Further

 

How bad are CNN’s ratings? Lower than the Hallmark Channel, so low that their highest-rated show (“Chris Cuomo Primetime”) is 26th among all cable news programs, a smaller audience than most daytime hours on Fox News. A complete collapse for the trapped-in-the-airport network:

CNN’s prime-time ratings dropped a whopping 26 percent in April compared to last year, according to Nielsen Media Research.
MSNBC’s ratings were down 14 percent in April 2019 compared to April 2018, while Fox News’s ratings overall were flat.
The sharp decrease for CNN marked its lowest-rated month in total viewers since October 2015.
In the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet most, it was the network’s least-watched month since Aug. 2015.
In prime time, Fox News finished first with an average of 2.4 million viewers. In April 2018, the network also averaged 2.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen.
MSNBC was second with an average of 1.66 million viewers, down from 1.93 million in April 2018.
CNN was third with 767,000 average primetime viewers, down from 1.04 million in April 2018.

If you see Anderson Cooper’s picture on a milk carton, you’ll know why.



 

Category: CNN

The Socialist Catastrophe in Venezuela

Posted on | May 1, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

The dictator Maduro is still holding on, blaming “American imperialism” for the poverty his socialist regime has inflicted on Venezuela:

Venezuela is a human catastrophe. The evidence is brutally visible and can no longer be explained away by apologists for tyranny. So many people enamored with long-debunked theories had high hopes that for Venezuela — despite the enormous historical and empirical evidence to the contrary — the promise of socialism would work and would not lead to the loss of liberties or drive the once-prosperous nation into poverty. Looking back on the 20th century, we should turn to some of the most prominent thinkers who lived under similar conditions and dissected their experiences for us to learn from. Venezuela’s crisis is a good example of harsh lessons learned by one generation but forgotten by the next.
In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that tyranny inevitably results when a government exercises complete control of the economy through central planning. Over half a century later, beginning with Hugo Chávez’s revolution, Venezuela began its own road to serfdom by expropriating thousands of businesses and even entire industries. The more fortunate companies left before it was too late, while the businesses that remained were handed over to the Venezuelan military, under whose oversight they were neglected into ruins. In a typical demonstration of class warfare, the government publicly vilified these business owners as unpatriotic, greedy lackeys of American interests, claiming that Venezuela’s poverty had been a direct result of their existence.
Chavismo created an atmosphere of distrust in which no one felt safe enough to invest in Venezuela. More important, the courts were no longer the place to get redress. Since 1999, the Venezuelan judiciary had been systematically stacked with judges loyal to the executive. Twenty years after socialism took hold of the country, Venezuela has hit rock bottom on every possible development index. Today, 90 percent of Venezuelans are living below the poverty line and inflation rates exceed 1 million percent.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

Category: Venezuela

Know-Nothings, Old and New

Posted on | May 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Know-Nothings, Old and New

Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks.

Let’s revisit some relevant history:

“Immigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati’s crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston’s expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period.” . . .
In spring 1854, the Know Nothings carried Boston, Salem, and other New England cities. They swept the state of Massachusetts in the fall 1854 elections, their biggest victory.

What is seldom recognized — because our schools don’t properly teach history — is the extent to which the rise of the Republican Party was inspired by anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiment, especially in New England, where the American Party (“Know-Nothings”) actually captured a majority in the Massachusetts legislature in 1854. Teachers of history generally wish to portray a simplistic understanding of the political conflict that preceded the Civil War. “North good, South bad” is a fair summary of this theme, and so most Americans have never been acquainted with the actual history of those years and the political forces involved. What had happened, in the first five decades since the Constitution was ratified, was that the Democrat Party had consolidated a nationwide majority, which had the effect of marginalizing the political influence of the New England elite. From the election of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson in 1800 through the presidency of Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson, Southerners occupied the White House for 32 of 36 years, interrupted only by the four-year term of John Quincy Adams. Given that federal jobs (including local postmasters) were then a matter of political patronage, the Democrats were able to staff these offices with their adherents, which had the effect of excluding their antagonists from federal employment. As can be shown from, e.g., the Hartford Convention of 1814, this ascendancy of Democrats especially provoked opposition in New England, where the Adamses had supplied the only two presidents from the North prior to the election of Martin van Buren from New York in 1840 (and Van Buren was a Democrat).

What had been the old Federalist Party in John Adams’s day was eventually reassembled, in the Jacksonian era, as the Whig Party, with a platform emphasizing a national bank, protective tariffs and “internal improvements” (i.e., taxpayer-funded public projects). There were Whigs in every region — North, South and West — but the party’s bulwark was Massachusetts, where the Whig presidential candidate Daniel Webster got 55% of the vote against Van Buren in 1836 and the Whig candidate William Henry Harrison got 57% in 1840. The election of Harrison made him the first of two Whig presidents, the second being Zachary Taylor, both of them being war heroes and natives of Virginia.

During an era when there was little or no agitation over slavery, an issue that had seemingly been settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, political divisions mainly involved economic policy (e.g., free trade vs. tariffs), and this might have continued indefinitely had it not been for developments in Europe. First, the potato famine in Ireland brought an influx of impoverished Irish immigrants, and then the European revolutions of 1848 brought another influx of refugees from Germany and other continental countries, many of them adherents of radical causes.

Most of these immigrants immediately settled in the coastal cities of the Northeast, particularly in Boston and New York, and this gave rise to the anti-immigrant “Know Nothing” movement, which among other things had the effect of breaking up the Whig Party coalition. Among the ex-Whigs who subsequently flourished in politics were an Illinois congressman named Abraham Lincoln, and a Georgia congressman named Alexander Stephens, who subsequently became vice president of the Confederacy. As history as now taught, the division between North and South is made to seem inevitable — an impersonal trend of history — but this division was produced by the labors of flesh-and-blood politicians, including those who led the Know Nothing movement.

We have been taught that politicians of the past were idealistic statesmen, patriotic humanitarians concerned with great causes, but how does this interpretation fare when we examine the rise of the Know Nothings in the decade preceding the Civil War? Consider the career of Nathaniel Banks, a Massachusetts Democrat-turned-Know Nothing, who was eventually appointed a general by Lincoln. His erratic career in politics began after Banks lost a federal patronage job, as a customs officer in the port of Boston, following the Whig election victory of 1848. Banks eventually drifted along with the tide of events into the Republican Party, which explains why Lincoln made him a major general despite his absolute dearth of military training or skill. During the Civil War, his supply trains so often got captured by the Confederates that Stonewall Jackson’s men took to calling him “Commissary Banks,” and his role in the catastrophic Red River campaign of 1864 secured his ignominious reputation.

It should be obvious that, whatever his devotion to any particular principles might have been, the political career of Nathaniel Banks was at all times motivated by his own personal ambition — not unlike most politicians in our own age. Well, what of statesmanship? What about the commonly taught “North good, South bad” belief that Lincoln and the Republicans of 1860 were idealists inspired by humanitarian sympathy for the oppressed slave? How can this myth be reconciled with the facts concerning Banks and the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s?

One of the most interesting interpretations I’ve ever encountered was by Georgia Sen. Robert Toombs, in his declaration of the causes of Georgia’s secession in 1861. “The party of Lincoln,” Toombs declared, “attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government.” Toombs went on to locate the reasons for the disruption of the Union in a long series of controversies regarding tariffs, in particular, the Walker Tariff of 1846, which reduced the rates on imports and (in an early demonstration of the Laffer Curve effect) produced an increase in total revenues. Various interests in the North, however, remained devoted to protectionism (i.e., “condemned theories of political economy”) and, after their defeat in 1846, “cast about for new allies,” Toombs said: “The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support, but a united North was now strong enough to control the Government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon. Time and issues upon slavery were necessary to its completion and final triumph.”

What Toombs was saying was that advocates of protectionism — what today would be called “special interests” — exploited controversies over slavery for their own selfish reasons, in much the same way as Nathaniel Banks followed the trends of politics, going from Democrat to Know-Nothing to Republican in the span of a single decade. And why should we imagine that politicians of 150 years ago were more motivated by humanitarian idealism than are politicians of the 21 century? We can look at the results and realize that, much like our recent policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the North in the Civil War won the war and lost the peace. Having begun the war with no aim other than the restoration of the Union, and having emancipated some 4 million slaves in the process, the North was deeply divided over what to do with the conquered South. The result was about a decade’s worth of so-called “Reconstruction,” a radical policy of military occupation that increasingly lost support in the North until, in the so-called “corrupt bargain” following the 1876 election, Republicans agreed to withdraw troops from the South in exchange for obtaining the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes. Short-term partisan advantage ultimately mattered more than anything else.

Opportunistic selfishness in politics manifests itself in different ways at different times. Consider one recent event:

A group of white supremacist neo-Nazis interrupted an author discussion Saturday at the popular Washington, DC bookstore Politics and Prose.
Author Jonathan Metzl, director of Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, was discussing his book “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland,” when about 10 men thought to be from a group called the American Identity Movement — formerly known as Identity Evropa — barged into the bookstore with a megaphone and began chanting white supremacist slogans.
One of the men said, “You would have the white working class trade their homeland for handouts.” He added, “But we, as nationalists and identitarians, can offer the workers of this country a homeland, their birthright, in addition to health care, good jobs and so forth.”
As they walked through the bookstore and out the door, the men chanted, “This land is our land.” The incident lasted about 10 minutes.

What good can result from such “activism”? Well-meaning people concerned about the problems caused by our current out-of-control immigration situation are discredited by association with such people as Patrick Casey, Justin Peek and Peter Diezel, to name three of the “American Identity Movement” activists identified at this protest.

Because their rhetoric and tactics are self-evidently helpful to the Left — making it easy to smear conservatives as neo-Nazis — what could possibly explain this kind of behavior? Over the years, I’ve noticed that fringe movements on the right tend to attract people whose ambition is to be a Big Fish, and who prefer the Small Pond of the extremist fringe as the best venue for that ambition. Denouncing mainstream conservatism as ineffective and/or inauthentic, they advocate a radicalism that puts their followers outside the political system. They can’t elect a single congressman or state legislator, nor even a county commissioner, who shares their fringe beliefs, and apparently do not see their lack of political success as a problem. America is never going to embrace Nazism, and therefore neo-Nazism is a waste of time. There is, however, a canary-in-the-coal-mine aspect to this kind of “white identity” fringe. Would otherwise promising young men devote their time to such efforts if there were no actual problems with racial issues in contemporary America?

If young people want to do something useful to confront these problems, perhaps they should focus their energies on something besides obnoxious protest tactics. Consider the case of Noah Carl, a 28-year-old British sociologist who has become the target of a witch-hunt because he has defended academic freedom. Although his own work has been widely published and cited, and he has never written anything about the subject of race, he is being denounced as a promoter of “racist pseudoscience” because he defended scientific research on the subject:

It is often asserted that, when it comes to taboo topics like race, genes and IQ, scholars should be held to higher evidentiary standards or even censored entirely because of the harm that might result if their findings became widely known. There is held to be an asymmetry whereby the societal costs of discussing certain topics inevitably outweigh any benefits from doing so. This paper argues that no such asymmetry has been empirically demonstrated, and that stifling debate around taboo topics can itself do active harm.

Carl notes that concerns about political correctness tend to be a predictor of support for Donald Trump; ergo, the perception that academia is “stifling debate around taboo topics” contributes to a rightward shift in politics that is the exact opposite of what proponents of suppression wish to achieve. Truth must ultimately win, although the enemies of truth can inflict lasting social harm while they hold power, as was the case in the Soviet Union, or more recently in Venezuela. Truth deserves to be defended by the best people, employing the wisest methods, so as not to be brought into disrepute by association with irresponsible idiots.



 

Category: History, Racism

In The Mailbox: 04.30.19

Posted on | May 1, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.30.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: On This Day In 1789
Twitchy: Company Buys Airtime On Fox News, Is Appalled Their Ad Ran During Tucker Carlson’s “Repugnant” Show
Louder With Crowder: MSNBC Just Admitted Individual Gun Rights Matter

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: An Ode To The 70s
American Greatness: The Real “Bombshells” Are About To Hit Their Targets, also, Why Aren’t Brennan & Clapper In Jail?
American Thinker: The Left Keeps Lying That Trump is A Threat To Press Freedom
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily World’s Most Expensive Fish News
Babalu Blog: Socialism In Action – Cuban Mother, Lady In White Gets Four Years In Prison For Political Activism
BattleSwarm: Stacey Adams Isn’t Running For The Senate
CDR Salamander: Waiting On A National Strategy, also, Venezuela Goes Hot
Da Tech Guy: Blame The Silly Seattle Voters For Their Snakes, also, A Little Bit About Those Refugee Camps In Kenya
Don Surber: Warren Buffett On Why Newspapers Are Dead, also, Rosenstein Resigns, Fake News Continues
Dustbury: White Boys Playing
First Street Journal: Antisemitism In The New York Times
The Geller Report: Former CIA Officer Alleges Brennan About To Be Indicted, also, President Trump Moves To Name Muslim Brotherhood A Terrorist Organization
Hogewash: Better/Faster/Cheaper – Choose Two, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day (Featuring Johnny Atsign!)
Hollywood In Toto: Will Weird Al Apologize For These Songs? also, Late Night Lies Are No Laughing Matter
Joe For America: Rosenstein Throws Obama & Comey Under The Bus As He Resigns, also, Biden-Chicom Collusion Revealed
JustOneMinute: Down In Venezuela
Legal Insurrection: Beta O’Rourke Suggests Spending $5 Trillion To Fight Climate Change, also, Biden Mumbles Through First Campaign Speech
The PanAm Post: Operation Liberty – Venezuelans Fight To Topple Maduro Regime, also, Colombian Court Rules Leftists Broke Electoral Laws
Power Line: Communist Murderers For Ilhan Omar, also, At The Noor Trial – Noor Convicted
Shot In The Dark: Habitually Fabulistic, Intellectually Slothful Nancy
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Feds Take An Interest In Chicago Shenanigans
The Political Hat: NHS Not Down With Down’s Syndrome
This Ain’t Hell: Revive Screening, also, Military Gunfire Exchange In Venezuela
Victory Girls: Not A Coup – Venezuela In Chaos
Volokh Conspiracy: Circuit Split On Whether Autoerotic Asphyxiation Is Self-Inflicted Injury
Weasel Zippers: CNN Supporting Russian Propaganda That US Is Behind Guaido Rebellion In Venezuela, also, Occasional Cortex Doubles Down, Claims VA Problems Are A Myth
Megan McArdle: Uber & Lyft Are Locked In A Price War. There Are Only Two Ways Out.
Mark Steyn: The Hill To Diaper On, also, Year Zero


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Category: Linkagery

Insta-Whores

Posted on | April 30, 2019 | 2 Comments

Telling the truth about social-media and prostitution:

Have you ever seen a group of girls [on Instagram] sporting skimpy bikinis on a gorgeous yacht? Or that “model” who continually posts thong and hand-bra pics and is ALWAYS traveling to the most exotic (and expensive) places?
I always used to wonder, “how does she have so much money?” Flights alone are expensive, not to mention her designer shoes and Celine sunglasses. Do you ever notice she never posts a photo of who she’s with? There’s a reason for that. . . .

You can read the whole thing, but the bottom line is, young women have discovered that Instagram provides them a platform to market their services, so to speak, in ways that are difficult for law enforcement to detect or prevent. There are men with money who represent the demand side of a market equation, and these young women — really, how does she afford that trip to Bali? — represent the supply side of the equation.

Much of the behavior enabled by this emerging online market isn’t exactly prostitution — not a straightforward fee-for-service arrangement — but in general, social media is a mechanism by which good-looking young women may discover the cash value of their youth and beauty. This involves an international marketplace, with wealthy men all over the world bidding up the value of the desired commodity, and various “agents” acting as brokers for, uh, transactional companionship.

One result of this phenomenon — so-called “sugar babies” vending themselves to “sugar daddies” — is widespread cynicism and distrust. College girls who become accustomed to jetting off to Miami, Palm Springs or the French Rivera for “vacations” with well-heeled clients are not likely to be impressed with their male classmates, who can’t afford to spoil them in this manner. And a young man never knows whether the attractive woman with whom he’s trying to strike up a conversation is secretly engaging in such commercial activity. Recall the experience of Anthony Johnson (“Hypergamy Doesn’t Care,” April 23) who says he discovered his ex-wife had been engaged in prostitution for years. Once you become aware that this hidden sexual marketplace exists, the awareness changes your perception of women’s behavior.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

 

Category: Sex Trouble
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