The Other McCain

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

Book Launch!

Posted on | September 3, 2019 | 1 Comment

— by Wombat-socho

I could have sworn we had a “Shameless Capitalism” tag in here somewhere, but I guess not. Anyway, since I took the day off yesterday, I’ll be doubling up on the linkagery today as soon as I get back from having my claws filed this afternoon, but I did want to mention that I have a new book out. It’s a collection of short SF stories titled The Anti-Dog Tank and Other Stories, and it’s available for $1.99 from Amazon. You can also read it through Kindle Unlimited or the Prime Lending Library, if you have access to those. I think if you liked my essay collections, The Last Falangist and What Did You Do In The Cold War, Dad?, you’ll like The Anti-Dog Tank and Other Stories.

Category: Books

The Dangerous Myth of ‘Gender Equality’

Posted on | September 3, 2019 | Comments Off on The Dangerous Myth of ‘Gender Equality’

 

Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi called my attention to a recently published study by Florida State University psychology professor James McNulty and his colleagues, summarized thus:

Sex is critical to marriage. Yet, there are several reasons to expect spouses to experience declines in the desire for sex over time, and the rates of any declines in sexual desire may differ for men and women.. . . Results demonstrated that women’s sexual desire declined more steeply over time than did men’s sexual desire, which did not decline on average. Further, childbirth accentuated this sex difference by partially, though not completely, accounting for declines in women’s sexual desire but not men’s. Finally, declines in women’s but not men’s sexual desire predicted declines in both partners’ marital satisfaction.

These results are surprising only to people who permit political ideology to blind them to what any adult with common sense already knows.

Men and women are different.

The differences between men and women are socially significant.

Pretending that men and women are the same, for the sake of an ideology that treats male-female differences as a product of patriarchal oppression, is a surefire formula for social catastrophe, and while some women may benefit in some ways from a regime of legally enforced “gender equality,” most women will suffer as a result of the instability and conflict that such a regime will predictably produce.

Having spent five years studying radical feminism, I can tell you that there are some feminists (see Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax, 1990) who never bought into so-called “pro-sex” feminism. They understood that what was being sold to women as “sexual liberation” from the 1960s onward — a celebration of shameless promiscuity as “empowering” — was contrary to women’s best interests. Indeed, it is unnatural to expect women to enjoy meaningless hook-ups, and such behavior tends to undermine women’s psychological health, to say nothing of the risks of venereal disease and other gynecological problems. Furthermore, a culture that promotes sexual promiscuity will expose women to greater risk of male violence. If nothing else, The Law of Large Numbers suggests that the more men a woman has sex with, the greater her risk of encountering at least one violence-prone partner. The harms of “sexual liberation” are so numerous that they cannot be summarized in a single blog post, but my point is that the harmful effects on women of this kind of “equality” are obvious enough that radical feminists cannot deny the common-sense observation: Men and women are different, and nowhere is this difference more clear than in the matter of sexual behavior.

What the Florida State study found — not surprisingly — was that men and women began marriage with different levels of sexual desire. Men want more sex than women do, quite generally. Everyone with two eyes and a brain can observe this as a matter of fact, and adjust their expectations accordingly, but the ideology of “gender equality” tells us we’re not supposed to notice this difference, let alone talk about it.

What happens when we silence discussion of important facts? How are relationships damaged by unrealistic expectations? Why do so many feminists become enraged by any attempt to explain meaningful differences between men and women? Who is afraid facts?



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Please Go Hit Kirby’s Tip Jar

Posted on | September 3, 2019 | 2 Comments

My brother Kirby has been out of work for two months because of health problems. The good news is, he apparently won’t need more surgery. The bad news is, he’s still getting tied up with the process of getting medical clearance to return to work, so I sent him $100 via Pay Pal. He’s also got a fundraiser at Go Fund Me, if you’d like to contribute that way.

Thanks in advance and God bless.

Category: Family

Let’s Take Chris Hayes Seriously

Posted on | September 2, 2019 | Comments Off on Let’s Take Chris Hayes Seriously

 

Nothing was easier than the point-and-laugh reaction over the weekend after Chris Hayes argued on MSNBC that “the weirdest thing about the Electoral College is the fact that if it wasn’t specifically in the Constitution for the presidency, it would be unconstitutional.”

This bizarre tautology — “The ocean would be dry if it wasn’t so wet” — provoked howls of laughter, and a stinging rebuttal on Twitter:

As I’ve pointed out before, Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote majority in 2016 was entirely explained by her lopsided margin in California:

One of the “arguments” (an excuse, actually) employed by Democrats after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election was, “She won the popular vote!” To which the proper reply is, “Where?” In a handful of large urban states where Republican Donald Trump did not campaign, Clinton won by huge margins, and this proves . . .? Nothing, really.
In California, Clinton won with 62% of the vote, 7.4 million to 3.9 million, a margin of nearly 3.5 million votes (3,446,281 to be exact). Nationwide, Clinton got 65,853,516 votes to Trump’s 62,984,825 — a margin of exactly 2,868,691. In other words, her margin in California alone was more than enough to account for why she “won” the popular vote, which is completely irrelevant in our Electoral College system.

If it had been the intent of our Founding Fathers that the president be elected by a nationwide referendum, they could have done that, and yet they didn’t, to the puzzlement of Chris Hayes. Presidential campaigns might be organized much differently — why bother visiting New Hampshire or Iowa? — if it were all just a 50-percent-plus-one referendum. But the Constitution says otherwise.

When you look at election maps, you see that the Republican Party suffers from a disadvantage because it has failed to organize or campaign effectively in three large states — California (55 Electoral College votes), New York (29) and Illinois (20). Given the landslide majorities enjoyed by Democrats in those states (62% for Hillary in California, 59% in New York, 56% in Illinois), the GOP begins every presidential campaign by conceding 104 Electoral College votes to Democrats, who thus more or less automatically have 39% of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. And yet if you look at the county-by-county map, you realize that, even in these three Democrat landslide states, there are still large areas where the GOP vote is a majority. Republicans win among rural, small-town and suburban voters, whereas the Democrat vote is concentrated in urban areas. Does anyone, even Chris Hayes, imagine that the authors of our Constitution intended the federal government to represent only urban interests? Don’t be absurd.

Seriously, what was the substance of Chris Hayes’s argument?

You can see why, on just basic tactical grounds, why the Republican Party would want to continue a system in which they can lose a majority of votes and still get all the powers of the presidency, appointing the Supreme Court justices and judges and signing legislation, vetoing legislation, commanding the army, everything, right? All of that with less [or fewer] votes than the Democrat got.
No wonder they like. But I think there’s actually a deeper philosophical thing happening, which is the question of what exactly American democracy is for. And the weirdest thing about the Electoral College is the fact that if it wasn’t specifically in the Constitution for the presidency, it would be unconstitutional.
Here’s what I mean by that. Starting the 1960s, 1961 particularly, the Supreme Court started developing a jurisprudence of one person, one vote, right? The idea is that each individual vote has to carry roughly the same amount of weight as each other individual vote which is a pretty intuitive concept but it was not a reality.

In other words, Chris Hayes is basing his argument against the Constitution on Supreme Court decisions from the 1960s. What he calls “a jurisprudence of one person, one vote” was established in a series of cases (Baker v. Carr, 1962; Gray v. Sanders, 1963; Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims, 1964) in which the Warren Court replaced the actual requirements of the Constitution with an egalitarian doctrine derived from an imaginative interpretation of the Fourteen Amendment.

Justice John Marshall Harlan II’s dissent in Reynolds is a memorable denunciation of the Warren Court majority’s usurpation of authority that the Constitution never contemplated for the Supreme Court, given that nothing in the Constitution (and certainly not in the Fourteenth Amendment) gives the federal government any role in determining legislative districts. As in so many other issues during the 1960s and ’70s, the Supreme Court’s claim to near-dictatorial power (“the pervasive overlordship of the federal judiciary,” as Harlan called it) helped inspire the rise of the conservative movement as a means of limiting this kind of judicial tyranny. The mischievous activity of the Warren Court, which Chris Hayes argues is more relevant than the Constitution itself, tended toward a manifestly un-democratic system — centralized government by an elite that recognized no limitations to its power to interfere with the lives of citizens in ways that would have shocked the Founders.

The fact that Chris Hayes and other Democrats are now arguing for the abolition of the Electoral College is yet another reason to re-elect Trump in 2020, just in case you needed another reason.



 

Category: Constitution, MSNBC

What Was the Texas Gunman’s Motive?

Posted on | September 2, 2019 | Comments Off on What Was the Texas Gunman’s Motive?

The man whose shooting rampage in Odessa, Texas, killed seven people had been fired from his job at a trucking company shortly before the spree that ended when he was shot by police. Seth Ator, 36, had a minor criminal record involving offenses committed when he was 19, but authorities were at a loss to explain what happened Saturday:

Ator was pulled over by Texas troopers in Midland on Saturday afternoon for failing to use his signal, police said. He then shot at them with what police described as an AR-type weapon and sped away. Driving on streets and the highway, he sprayed bullets randomly at residents and motorists, police said.
The man then hijacked a postal truck and ditched his gold Honda, shooting at people as he made his way into Odessa about 20 miles away. There, police confronted him in a movie theater parking lot and killed him in a shootout.

There is no “manifesto,” no “white supremacy,” no terrorist connection, just a Texas truck driver who got fired from his job. The “AR-type weapon” is the most popular rifle in America — there are an estimated 20 million such rifles owned by civilians in the United States. Any gun-control proposal to ban and confiscate these weapons would obviously be a non-starter, particularly in Texas: “Come and take it,” as they say.

But Democrats don’t care about obvious facts.



 

Category: Crime, Texas

Rule 5 Sunday: Labor Day With Jayne Mansfield

Posted on | September 2, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

We had Sophia Loren a couple of weeks ago, and it seems only right to post Jayne Mansfield for the long Labor Day weekend, which I hope you’re all enjoying. Here she is in a fetching leopard-print bikini.

Rawr.

Leading off is Ninety Miles From Tyranny with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #727, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. At Animal Magnetism, it’s Rule Five Cato’s Letters Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, while Bacon Time serves up Rule Five Jiggleboomers.

EBL’s heifers this week include Bond Girls, Bad Movie Rule 5, Beth Mynett, Jessi Combs RIP, Leaky Madeline Westerhout, Hurricane Pretardedness, Lana Del Rey, Polly Bergen in Cape Fear, and Dinah Washington.

A View From The Beach has more Brazilian, and lots of other goodies: Time for Another Brazilian – Juliana Martins, Leak Plugged, I Still Blame Jenny McCarthy, Fish Pic Friday – Capt. Emily Riemer, Today’s Chesapeake Bay News, “Girl with the Fishing Rod”, “No Surprises”, Maryland Gets $300k to Save the Sturgeon, Paper Straws Won’t Save the World, The Washington Post Hates Dogs, I Don’t Think That Word Means What She Thinks It Means and Let ‘Em Eat Bugs!

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babe this week is Zsa Zsa Gabor, and at Dustbury, it’s Neha Sharma and Not The Formerly Unspeakable Armenian.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!


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Category: Rule 5

One Less Criminal on the Streets

Posted on | September 1, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

“Overkill is underrated,” says Jesse Kelly, commenting on video of an attempted robbery at a Metro PCS phone store in Philadelphia. The store had repeatedly been targeted by criminals in the past, but this time the clerk had a licensed firearm and was ready to use it. Video shows the robber walk in the door, pull a pistol and toss a bag on the counter. Then the robber turns to one side, apparently either to pull a mask over his face or to take his weapon off safety, but before he can do so, the clerk swiftly draws his own weapon and begins firing. The clerk doesn’t stop shooting until he has emptied the magazine, then he grabs his cell phone from the counter and leaves the store.

 

Officials say no charges will be filed against the clerk.

And there is one less criminal walking the streets of Philadelphia.

If you want to read more about armed self-defense, permit me to recommend the work of my good friend Robert A. Waters. He has written multiple books about such situations, including The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a Firearm, and his most recent book, co-authored with his son, Guns and Self-Defense: 23 Inspirational True Crime Stories of Survival with Firearms.



 

Category: Crime

Death by ‘Social Justice’: Zoe Quinn Drives Game Maker Alec Holowka to Suicide

Posted on | September 1, 2019 | 1 Comment

 

Who is Zoe Quinn?

“Zoe Quinn” was Patient Zero of the #GamerGate controversy. A tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, Quinn was the creator of a tediously dull game called “Depression Quest.” She broke up with her boyfriend, a software geek named Eron Gjoni, and allegedly became intimate with a videogame journalist named Nathan Grayson. In August 2014, Gjoni published a nearly 10,000-word article exposing Quinn’s alleged misconduct.

Every time she makes news, I get a surge of traffic because of that concise biographical summary, and this week the cause of the traffic surge was that Zoe had accused an ex-boyfriend, Alec Holowka, of abusing her when they lived together briefly in Winnipeg in 2009. As a result of her accusation, Holowka was fired from the game-development company he had co-founded and then Saturday, Holowka committed suicide:

No formal investigation was conducted, no reports were filed, no police were involved, no evidence against Holowka ever surfaced. It was basically career execution by the court of public opinion. . . .
I’m sure there will be a number of people hand-waving away the allegations against him, claiming that they had nothing to do with the suicide, but having an entire industry turn against you based on unproven and unsubstantiated claims with the intent of making sure you never have a successful career in interactive entertainment seems too big to ignore.
In any case, the public castigation of Holowka courtesy of cancel culture did more than just cancel his career, it ended his life.

Recall that the #GamerGate controversy involved social justice warriors (SJWs) trying to gain influence in the videogame industry, with the assistance of unscrupulous journalists acting as publicity agents.

This #MeToo game of using unsubstantiated rape accusations to destroy men — we saw it in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings — is “social justice,” according to Zoe Quinn and her supporters. The issue involved here is not whether Holowka was a bad boyfriend. His sister, in reporting his death, said that Holowka had psychiatric issues, and Zoe’s psychiatric issues are notorious, so that the combination of the two was like combining two highly unstable chemicals. But whatever happened between them was never reported to police, and there was no way to establish the truth, just as we can never know what (if anything) transpired between Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford in 1982.

 

Think back to how and why the #MeToo crusade began in 2017. Feminists were angry because Trump was president, and they decided to expiate their wrath by destroying Harvey Weinstein, a powerful Hollywood producer who was a serial abuser of women. Once the Weinstein bonfire was lit, other powerful men in Hollywood, media and politics were tossed onto the flames — Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, Al Franken — in a sort of social-justice carnival. One day, a guy was a millionaire celebrity and the next day — WHOOSH! — up in flames, his reputation destroyed and his career ended by a disgruntled ex-girlfriend. Amid the climate of witch-hunt hysteria, the distinctions were blurred between minor “offensive” behavior and serious crimes.

Weinstein had long been notorious in Hollywood, and his predatory behavior was more or less continual for decades, but some of the men incinerated by the #MeToo bonfire were never accused of anything like that. As the outrage mobs danced in the lurid light of the social-justice flames, the original reason for the bonfire was forgotten.

 

This was about Trump, and because feminists felt powerless in the wake of a Republican’s election, they had begun lashing out at men whose bad behavior was in some way Trump-like (“Grab ’em by the p***y”).

Now look where it has led. Whatever anyone might say about Alec Holowka, he wasn’t a powerful Hollywood mogul. He was a geek making videogames whose misfortune was that, 10 years ago, he invited Zoe Quinn to move in with him for a month. Anyone who cares to research Zoe Quinn’s biography will discover that she has a habit of causing drama and then claiming victimhood. For some reason, there’s always a “white knight” eager to rescue the tattoo-covered damsel in distress and, by reinforcing her sense of victimhood, these rescuers encourage repetition of the cycle. When other women see Zoe Quinn celebrated as a courageous heroine (there was even talk of her being played by Scarlett Johansson in a movie about #GamerGate), this inspires emulation: “Monkey see, monkey do.” Every emotionally troubled bimbo who has ever had a “bad boyfriend” situation with a guy in the videogame industry knows she can get attention by playing the heroic victim, and it’s not difficult to imagine the climate of fear this has induced.

Suppose you’re a game-developer guy in your early 30s, and you’ve had a dozen girlfriends since you graduated high school. Most of those girlfriends you’ve met through work, and how many of your ex-girlfriends might hold a grudge against you? Probably two or three, at least. All it takes is for one of your ex-girlfriends to go public with a #MeToo story, and it’s almost certain that every ex-girlfriend with a grudge is going to come out of the woodwork to add her victimhood tale to the narrative. Somewhere along the way, of course, you might have been in a situation that could be construed as “harassment” — an incident when you had a few too many cocktails at a party, or whatever — and you can bet that story’s gonna get told if you become that target of a #MeToo mob. Over the course of the past 15 years or so, then, you’ve got two or three ex-girlfriends trashing you on the Internet, plus the possible “harassment” incident, and these tales are piled up online, forming a sort of prosecutor’s brief portraying you as a serial abuser.

Your career is over. You’ve been “canceled,” as they say.

It was inevitable, from the moment the first spark of the #MeToo bonfire was lit, that eventually some man would commit suicide as a result.

R.I.P., Alec Holowka. Cause of death? “Social justice.”



 

Category: Sex Trouble
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