The Other McCain

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

‘The Immature, Demagogic Phase’

Posted on | May 11, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘The Immature, Demagogic Phase’

 

Who is J.J. McCullough? Never heard of him before yesterday, when someone called my attention to his latest National Review column:

I doubt that many Americans would disagree that the country’s conversation about gay rights is far more mature and considered than it was two decades ago. . . .
Today, there exists broad understanding that homosexual people are unavoidable and common, present in all corners and demographics of American life. Through education, and especially exposure, homosexuality is no longer regarded as bizarre, threatening, or mysterious. . . .
Looking at the state of America’s transgender debate, I often wonder if things are destined to unfold in a similar way.
At present, it feels we’re still in the immature, demagogic phase. In some quarters, it remains fashionable to act theatrically repulsed by transgender people, emphasize their weirdness, and make populist appeals to the preposterousness of women asking to be called “him” or surgeons amputating penises and so forth. Yet this seems more cathartic than anything, in the same way that showy judgment of gays did a generation earlier. As with homosexuality in the 1980s and ’90s, the loud revulsion of critics conceals a fading interest in actually attempting to “solve” transgenderism, as even those most offended by it seem to quietly regard purported cures as quackish and authoritarian. . . .

When he posted this column to Twitter, Mr. McCullough predicted it was “bound to be contentious,” and he was right. His column inspired rejoinders from both Michael Brendan Dougherty and David French at National Review, and I don’t think either of them can be accused of immature demagoguery in this matter. What’s wrong with Mr. McCullough’s argument, for the most part, is that he is young — about 25 years younger than me — and is therefore ignorant of how we got here.

Let anyone answer this question: Where were you when the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision was announced? At the time, I was 43 and working as an assistant national editor at The Washington Times, and was aware that activists in Massachusetts had prepared in advance to make this decision the basis of legalizing same-sex marriage. Because of the “full faith and credit” clause of the Constitution, the act of Massachusetts immediately provoked the question of whether the same-sex marriages recognized in that state would be considered valid in other states. In his dissent in the Lawrence case, Justice Scalia indicated he had foreseen such developments, and he also noted how little concern for stare decisis the Court majority showed in overturning the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision. Well, as it happens, 1986 was the year I began my journalism career in a small town in Cobb County, Georgia. Michael Bowers was Attorney General of Georgia, and this 1986 decision upheld our state’s law against sodomy. Take my word for it when I say that sodomy was not a rare practice in Georgia at the time, and that few of its practitioners even realized they were engaged in a crime. Nevertheless, while this statute was rarely enforced, its existence in Georgia law served valid social purposes, and was of ancient origin, dating back through centuries of Anglo-American common law. The Lawrence decision was therefore of greater importance than most people realized at the time, but I was not most people, and had been warned in advance (thank you, Cheryl Wetzstein) that the Court was opening Pandora’s Box, from which a nightmare of chaos would predictably emerge.

Where was J.J. McCullough in 2003? He would have been about 18 at the time, and almost certainly has no understanding of How We Got Here. So I felt it might be a good idea to send him a courteous email:

Dear Mr. McCullough:
Has the possibility occurred to you that what you call “the loud revulsion of critics” toward the gay-rights movement in the 1980s and ’90s was correct? Your problem, sir, is that you are very young and did not live through the era which you are describing.
I graduated high school the same year (1977) that Anita Bryant made headlines for her opposition to the gay-rights measure then recently enacted in Miami. I was not then (and never was, during my youth) a “young conservative,” and did not really care about politics, still less about the issues that concerned what came to be called the Religious Right.
“Who cares?” That was my basic reaction to much of the sturm und drang of the incipient Culture War at the time, when I was a dangerously reckless young man with hair down to his shoulders, immersed in the “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” way of life. Looking back on my wild youth, it has often occurred to my how miraculous it is that I survived it all. It certainly did not cross my mind at the time — for I was a particularly heedless hedonist — that there was anything political about my pursuit of pleasure. Circa 1984, when I voted for Walter Mondale for president, nobody could have predicted how powerful the LGBT lobby would eventually become. The Cold War was still the major focus of American politics, and the Democrat Party had not yet gone all-in on Cultural Marxism; Mondale was an old-fashioned AFL-CIO Democrat, and if anyone in 1984 accused him of advocating the abolition of laws against sodomy, I must have missed that.
In the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s sodomy law, which of course was so seldom enforced that the illegality of sodomy was important mainly because it permitted police occasionally to crack down on gay “cruising” in public parks, charging people with solicitation of sodomy, a crime unto itself. This was not evident to me at the time, as I had no reason to pay attention to such matters, nor did most other people. We had no Internet, no blogs, no social media, and because young people couldn’t just log on and constantly blab their opinions for an international audience, it was easy to ignore politics, except at election time. And it was not until the mid-1990s, by which time I was a married father of three and working as assistant to the editorial page editor of the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, that I began reconsidering my indifference to the issues of the Culture War.
Fatherhood tends to change a man’s perspective on such things. Would I want my own children to be exposed to the dangerous hedonism that I’d pursued in my youth? No, sir, I would not. Some of my former dope buddies ended up in prison, including one who was sentenced to Georgia’s Death Row, and a few of my high school classmates died of AIDS. If there was “loud revulsion” toward the gay-rights movement in the 1990s, the deadly plague of AIDS was a major factor in that. You could benefit from reading Destructive Generation by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, particularly Chapter 9, “AIDS: The Origins of a Political Epidemic.” One might be sympathetic toward homosexuals, yet still recognize that the ideological idolatry of “equality” and “sexual liberation” on the Left has had catastrophic consequences.
What I have noticed, and frequently written about in recent years, is the fanatical intolerance of the LGBT movement, an attitude I’ve described as the Compulsory Approval Doctrine. It is now considered “hate” for anyone to criticize any policy advocated by LGBT activists, let alone to express disapproval of homosexuality, per se. This intolerant attitude necessarily infringes the religious liberty of Bible-believing Christians, who can cite chapter and verse on the subject of sin.
It would behoove young conservatives who blab their opinions on the Internet to study the actual history of the phenomena about which they so confidently opine. Have you, Mr. McCullough, carefully read the late Justice Scalia’s dissenting opinions in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), U.S. v. Windsor (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)? Justice Scalia stated with great clarity the principles of a conservative opposition to gay rights, as a general matter and, if you are a conservative, you ought to consider how those principles might apply specifically to the transgender issue on which you advocate “compromise.”
Young people naturally want to be popular among their peers, to be one of the “cool kids,” to follow the fashionable trend. This is understandable — if only you could have seen me at 19! — but it is the sacred duty of adults to steer young people away from danger, to warn them against following the path that leads to destruction (Matthew 7:13-14). Do conservatives “act theatrically repulsed by transgender people [and] emphasize their weirdness”? Do you suppose, sir, it is merely an “act”? Insofar as the conservatives you describe are adults, it is likely that they are also parents, and do you think sensible parents are not authentically horrified by the thought of their children being sucked into the vortex of the Transgender Cult? You should spend some time (as I have) talking to parents whose teenagers succumbed to “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.” This phenomenon wasn’t originally identified by right-wingers or fundamentalist Christians, but rather by radical feminists (many of them militant lesbians) who have become profoundly concerned about the way Internet activism has helped foment what they describe as a “social contagion” of transgenderism among young people.
Do you think that the “weirdness” in the transgender community is something conservatives have imagined? Are you familiar with “Zinnia Jones” (a/k/a Zachary Antolak, a/k/a “Lauren McNamara,” a/k/a “Satana Kennedy”)? Or have you investigated “Char Vortryss” (a/k/a Clinton James Crawford, a/k/a “Char the Butcher)? Perhaps you should do some more research before you go blabbing your opinion about this; I could refer you to my friend Cynthia Yockey, a conservative lesbian who is writing a book on the subject. We seem once again to be living through the kind of era Buffalo Springfield sang about in 1967: “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” A few years ago, almost no one could have imagined Donald Trump becoming president, nor could it have been predicted that social conservatives would find common cause with radical feminists in opposing transgender activists. Yet here we are, in this moment of unexpected weirdness, and I should hope a young person like yourself, who aspires to be considered an intellectual, would be more thoughtful about the causes and potential consequences of this uncanny convergence.
Sincerely,
Robert Stacy McCain

Do I think this will change Mr. McCullough’s mind? No, young fools are not apt to admit error or to acknowledge the value of experience when their elders seek to correct the untutored errors of youth. However, I felt it important to suggest to him the nature of his error, so that if he ever repents his folly, he might have some idea of why he was wrong.



 

Category: The Transgender Cult

The Profound Sadness of Christine Emba

Posted on | May 11, 2018 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

Don’t know who this lady is, but she excels at missing the point, emphasis mine:

But that doesn’t mean Peterson is harmless. At times, he leans into an oddly conspiratorial obsession with “neo-Marxist” liberal professors meaning to march us to the gulag via the gender equity in the classroom .?.?. or something. And his interpretations of certain principles — that “loving your neighbor as yourself” should be a utilitarian act, for instance — lend themselves all too well to the right-wing ideology that would pretend structural issues such as racism don’t exist and that people should, and must, care for themselves alone.

Peterson (and I may be personalizing his view too heavily here) seems to strongly reject the Postmodern lies, “gender equity” among them. Emba’s short piece, itself, is an example of Postmodern living in the present tense. JP’s best-seller can be seen as sad in the sense of a comment on a culture that has listened to too many of Emba’s ilk, driving the need to write it.

The Jordan Peterson phenomenon calls to mind recent research, from scholars such as Richard Reeves and Robert Putnam, about an America dividing into social haves and have-nots. There are those lucky few for whom these rules to an orderly, productive life are inculcated from youth. And there are the rest, left to scavenge meaning for themselves, who will have to rely on Jordan Peterson.

Orderly, productive lives are the result of ignoring dreck like “gender equity”.

Our culture is beset by false prophets who have preyed upon our good nature, and assumed that we’d meekly submit to Leftist tyranny. Sorry, Emba: 2008 did not fundamentally transform the United States of America to the extent you’d like. It’s too early to tell if the Trump election means that the political Pearl Harbor that was the Obama Administration has awakened the Sleeping Giant or not, but that giant is certainly rustling about. And we hope to make your sadness over the death of your Postmodern daydreams more profound.

Category: Uncategorized

In The Mailbox: 05.10.18

Posted on | May 10, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 05.10.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Welcome Home – Freed American Prisoners Thankful Upon Release
Twitchy: Ellen Producer Craps On Release Of American Prisoners By North Korea
Louder With Crowder: Sexuality Expert Claims Parents Need Babies’ Consent To Change Diapers


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #83 – The Group Think Episode
American Power: Robert Service, The Last Of The Tsars
American Thinker: Despite The Media, Trump Pulling Down Wins For We The People
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Good News For Once
BattleSwarm: Israel, Iran, & Syria Throw Down
CDR Salamander: Fitzgerald‘s OOD Pleads Guilty
Da Tech Guy: Day Three Of Fasting & Prayer – Take Yes For An Answer
Don Surber: If The FBI Doesn’t Have To Comply With A Subpoena, Why Should The President?
Dustbury: Beyond Mere Hyperinflation
The Geller Report: Iran’s Supreme Leader Says He Can’t Wait For Trump To Die, also, Catholic St. Ambrose U. Opens Gender-Separated Prayer Space For Muslims
Hogewash: Not a Slow News Day, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Gasoline Prices Expected To Climb This Summer
JustOneMinute: Drain The Cohen, also, Blue On Blue At Yale
Legal Insurrection: California Senators’ Tortuous Exchanges With CIA Nominee, also, Michael Cohen’s Lawyers Ask Court To Compel Avenatti To Reveal Source Of Bank Records
Power Line: NYT Embarrasses Itself With Pompeo Hit Piece, also, California’s Suicide Attempt, Part 6 – Let’s Make Housing More Expensive!
Shark Tank: Puerto Rico, The Island Of Massive Debt
Shot In The Dark: The Solid Mathematical Case…
STUMP: Banning All Things Gun – It’s A Poor Weapon That Points Only One Way
The Political Hat: Textbook Social Justice – Sexual Orientation As History, Tokenistic Minorities, And Misogynistic Economics
This Ain’t Hell: MDMA Provides PTSD Relief For Vets, also, What Fools These Liberals Be
Victory Girls: ISIS Leaders Captured By Coalition Troops
Weasel Zippers: Blue States Rally To Upend Electoral College, also, Surprise – Stacy’s Crazy Cousin John Opposes Haspel For CIA


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Category: Linkagery

The Rocky Horror Family Show

Posted on | May 10, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll:

A Michigan mother of five decided she wants to be a man, and now she’s opening up about how much she loves when her kids call her both mom and dad.
Formerly Erica Maison, the 40-year-old mother now goes by Eric Maison, and began her social transition in 2015. She began her medical transition in 2016, according to ABC News.
The Michigan mother, who has been undergoing hormone treatment for 25 months and had an operation to remove her breasts, told ABC News that her kids still call her “mom” but sometimes call her “Daddy Mom” or “Mommy Dad,” which she loves. It’s “absolutely adorable,” she said.
“It has been great watching him [Eric] finally find himself and be free to live his authentic truth,” Les Maison, Eric’s husband, told ABC News.
Eric told the outlet she was inspired to transition after her 16-year-old son decided he wanted to be a girl. Eric fully supports her son going through hormone therapy to become a female, ABC News reported. Maison alleges that her son Corey has identified as female since he was two years old. Corey has been receiving hormone therapy for two and a half years and hopes to soon have surgery to remove his male genitalia.
Corey told ABC News that the family will still celebrate Eric on Mother’s Day Sunday.

So, Mom is now “Dad” and her/“his” son is now her/“his” “daughter”? Life was much simpler when we kept the lunatics in the asylum.

Let’s do the Time Warp again . . .

 

 

Category: The Transgender Cult

‘Give Me Equality — and Pay My Bills!’

Posted on | May 10, 2018 | 3 Comments

 

How much does it cost to get pregnant? Well, a bottle of wine and maybe the price of some candles, doing it the old-fashioned romantic way. Fortunately, my wife doesn’t drink, so we’ve got six kids at an even cheaper rate, but my point is that pregnancy is usually free.

Not everybody does things the old-fashioned way, however, and two years ago, this became the subject of a lawsuit in New Jersey:

[In August 2016] four lesbian women in New Jersey sued the state after being denied insurance coverage for infertility treatments because they couldn’t prove they had tried to conceive naturally.
A New Jersey law from 2001 requires that insurance companies cover infertility treatment as well as in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technology (ART). But there’s a catch: The patient must prove that her infertility has extended for up to “two years of unprotected sexual intercourse.” Since that law was enacted, though, two important things happened. The Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal, and Obamacare prohibited insurance policies from discriminating again patients based on their sexual orientation. In the first lawsuit of its kind since marriage equality and the passage of Obamacare, the New Jersey women are arguing that the law discriminates against same-sex couples because they obviously can’t get pregnant through unprotected sex with their partners.
“These women are already going through what can be a difficult experience, and they have the added stress of affording it financially and the added insult of being treated like a second-class citizen,” Grace Cretcher, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, told the New York Times. “The specific wording of the New Jersey mandate is particularly egregious and one of the most specific and exclusionary.”
Despite progress on a national level, the New Jersey couples’ experiences might not be unusual. Only 14 states require that insurance companies have at least one plan that covers infertility treatments, which can include intra-uterine insemination, drug therapies, and IVF. But many of them use language similar to the New Jersey law and define infertility as the inability to become pregnant after a certain period of unprotected sex, as opposed to only a medical diagnosis indicating infertility or sexual orientation that excludes intercourse. Even in states like California where laws have been updated to protect insurance discrimination against LGBT people, not all policies are in compliance, according to Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. As a result, same-sex couples no matter what their medical circumstances may be, are often told they don’t qualify for coverage.

 

Am I the only one who sees the insanity of such a “discrimination” claim? This is how health insurance mandates — laws requiring coverage for certain treatments — increase insurance rates for everyone. When legislators begin telling insurance companies how to run their business, so that they must provide insurance to high-risk customers or extend coverage for expensive treatments, the companies have no choice to raise rates for healthy patients who don’t need the mandated “protections.”

New Jersey lawmakers who imposed mandatory coverage for infertility treatments in 2001 either did not realize or did not care how this mandate would, in effect, shift costs by requiring everyone to pay higher premiums to cover the people who demanded these treatments. When they passed this law, however, probably none of the legislators imagined that lesbians would someday claim they were victims of discrimination — suffering “the insult of being treated like a second-class citizen” — because of the way the New Jersey law was written.

This is a perfect example of what happens when governments attempt to replace the private decision-making of businesses and consumers with the fiats of legislators and regulators. Do women with gynecological problems have a “right” to expensive treatments that may help them become pregnant? This is what the New Jersey law implies — that insurance companies must provide these treatments, to make women with reproductive disorders “equal” to healthy women, and never mind the costs imposed or any potential unintended consequences.

While I am sympathetic to women with OB/GYN problems, my sympathy is somewhat diminished when it is demanded that health-insurance companies be required by law to provided coverage for expensive procedures like in vitro fertilization. Because I know a few things about reproductive health, I am aware that many cases of infertility could be avoided, if people were better educated about various risk factors. “Fertility delayed is fertility denied,” as every student of demographics knows, and a woman who easily could have become pregnant at age 20 or 25 may find that she is unable to conceive when she’s 30 or 35:

Maternal age is the most significant factor related to a woman’s ability to conceive. While many women today are waiting to become pregnant, the ovary’s ability to produce normal, healthy eggs declines with age, increasing the risk of chromosomal abnormalities and unsuccessful implantation and pregnancy.

This is not a secret. It’s widely known. Why, then, do so many women postpone motherhood so long that they increase the risk that they’ll never become mothers at all? The most common answer is college education, and because most college educated women are from middle-class backgrounds (and earn higher wages than non-college-educated women), their higher risk of infertility means that mandating coverage for such treatments actually tends to subsidize relatively rich women.

So 19-year-old Thelma is raising her baby in the trailer park, and her husband’s working down at the tire store, and his health insurance premium keeps going up because, across town in a posh 4BR/3BA home in an upscale neighborhood, 34-year-old Ashleigh with her master’s degree and her aging ovaries can’t seem to get pregnant and state law mandates that the insurance company pay for IVF treatment ($12,000 per cycle) to enable her to have a baby.

Liberals may defend this as “social justice,” I prefer to call it crazy.

All of my libertarian objections to government inference in the health-insurance business would be sufficient to make me oppose mandatory coverage for fertility treatments, even if such a law applied only to heterosexual women, Now, however, we are told that “equality” requires that everybody must pay to help lesbian couples get pregnant. What next? Will gay men demand payments to hire surrogate mothers for them?

Probably shouldn’t make such jokes, lest we give them ideas . . .

What brought this to mind today was that a Tumblr blog run by a lesbian couple trying to have a baby asked their readers: “How many IUIs did it take before your BFP?” (IUI stands for “intrauterine insemination,” a procedure that costs about $3,000 per cycle; BFP stands for “Big F–king Postive,” i.e., a positive result on a pregnancy test.) One of their Tumblr followers answered: “We went through 16 IUIs, and actually got our BFP on a ICI we did at home as a last attempt before IVF.”

Holy smokes! It may have cost $50,000 for 16 failed IUIs before this couple got pregnant via ICI (intracervical insemination) and did they pay this out of their own pockets or was it covered by their health insurance? What if this coverage became mandatory nationwide?

Never trust anyone arguing for “equality.” There’s always a catch to such arguments, and that catch usually involves a demand for money.



 

Category: Gays

How to Argue With a Feminist

Posted on | May 10, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Rule One: Never argue with a feminist.

This is the only rule you need. There is no point trying to persuade a feminist that she’s wrong. If she were intellectually honest (and thus capable of admitting error) she would not be a feminist.

Because feminists never argue in good faith, nothing is to be gained by engaging in a back-and-forth discussion with them. What must be done instead is to call attention to their errors and lies, so that honest and intelligent people can see for themselves what’s wrong with feminism.

Yesterday, I called attention to Robyn Pennacchia, associate publisher of Wonkette, whose views on “toxic masculinity” struck me as both unusually offensive and easily refuted. The commenters had a field day picking apart Ms. Pennacchia’s errors, although none of them aimed at the point that seemed most obvious to me: The subject of Ms. Pennacchia’s rant against “toxic masculinity” was a March school shooting in Maryland in which the 17-year-old gunman murdered his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend, Jaelynn Willey, and then killed himself.

School shooter Austin Wyatt (left); his victim Jaelynn Willey (right).

By basing her anti-male arguments on this incident, Ms. Pennacchia was engaged in the Atrocity Narrative method of propaganda: Making negative generalizations on the basis of extreme examples.

In 2016, according to the FBI, there were 15,070 homicides in the United States; 11,821 of the victims (78%) were male. To put it another way, males were 3.7 times more like than females to die by homicide. Furthermore, 52.3% of homicide victims were black and nearly all of these black victims were killed by black perpetrators — black-on-black violence accounts for more than half of all U.S. homicides.

The murder of Jaelynn Willey was statistically anomalous. Females account for slightly more than 1-in-5 homicide victims and only 12.6% of 2016 homicide victims (about 1-in-8) were white females.

By making an anomalous incident the basis of her attack on “male privilege,” “male entitlement” and “toxic masculinity,” Ms. Pennacchia was using the same sort of hate propaganda tactics by which Nazis demonized and scapegoated Jews. It is a gross misrepresentation to imply that law-abiding men are somehow responsible — simply by their membership in the category “male” — for a violent crime. Feminists seem incapable of understanding what’s wrong with this dishonest method of argument, and apparently they can’t see why men find it insulting to be falsely implicated as responsible for such atrocities.

So, typically, what happens is this: A feminist makes arguments that amount to a categorical slander of men. Naturally, men feel insulted by these arguments, but do not engage in a rational analysis of the feminist’s rhetoric. Instead, men become angry, and respond to the feminist insults with epithets and slurs, or with amateurish efforts at a rebuttal. The feminist then responds: “See? I told you so — men are awful.”

 

That’s why I say, never argue with a feminist — do not allow yourself to be baited into an emotional response that will only serve as fodder for her next argument about how awful men are. (They have only this one predictable theme, you see.) A man cannot win an argument with a feminist by acting in ways that tend to validate her worldview.

One typical mistake of the amateur anti-feminist is the Equality Error: “Well, yes, men do this particular awful thing, but what about this terrible thing that women do?” Or: “Yes, women suffer from this terrible problem, but what about this typically male problem?”

The error here is in assuming that the feminist actually cares about “equality” and that the key is to appeal to her sense of fairness.

Feminists are essentially sociopaths. The feminist’s characteristic traits are selfishness, dishonesty, and cruelty. She lacks the capacity for empathy, she will tell any lie which suits her purpose, and the raison d’être of her career is to inflict the maximum damage on males.

 

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. Bad causes attract bad people and, as Friedrich Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom, “the worst get on top.” The most “successful” feminist writers are invariably the most dishonest feminist writers, and the same principle applies to feminist politicians. Feminists have been at a loss to explain why American voters in 2016 rejected their chosen champion Hillary Clinton, and the frustration of this failure has made them even less rational than they were before Donald Trump got elected.

If stupid men would just shut up and stop making bad arguments, the feminist movement would discredit itself. Merely quote feminists, call attention to their lies and errors, and permit people to judge the case accurately. Most women are not feminists, and men should reject the premise that criticizing feminism (a movement devoted to a destructive radical ideology) is the same as being “anti-woman” or “anti-equality.” What is fundamentally wrong with feminist ideology, after all, is the belief that “equality” is always the solution to any problem women face. Yet despite decades of feminist activism, and indisputable advances toward “equality,” women have problems today that their grandmothers never imagined. How many kids died in school shootings in 1968? It is an error to think of “equality” as the summum bonum, an inherent good so desirable that everything else may be sacrificed to achieve it, and thus to presume that a more equal society will be a better society.

“One dishonest rhetorical trick feminists use is modifying an extreme statement by a phrase like ‘in Western society’ or ‘in our culture,’ as if there were some other society or culture that is violence-free and egalitarian. No, ma’am, there isn’t, but hey, good luck in your search for it.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Feb. 14, 2017

As I explain in the very first paragraph of my book, the reason many people are confused about feminism is that they think when feminists say “equality” they mean it in the sense of basic fairness. However, a process or system that is fair may yield results that are unequal. For example, on Sept. 23, 2017, the University of Alabama football team defeated Vanderbilt 59-0. A week later, the Crimson Tide beat Ole Miss 66-3. Both games were played according to the rules, as enforced by league-certified referees, and Alabama’s program is governed by the same NCAA regulations that apply to Vanderbilt and Ole Miss. Yet the results of these two games were so lopsidedly unequal that, as a feminist might say, ’Bama oppressed these two opponents. Do these two games mean that Alabama is morally superior to these other schools? Well, Crimson Tide fans would perhaps like to think so, but putting points on the scoreboard in football is not the only possible metric of human value.

What feminists often do is to find some metric — e.g., the number of women in Congress, or the difference between average salaries of men and women in particular career field — and claim that this numerical inequality proves women are victims of oppression. Yet this is an invalid and illogical way of assessing the fairness of processes. There are many possible explanations for why women would not pursue careers in computer science, or not advance as far in those careers as their male peers, without claiming that a pay disparity in high-tech companies reflects sexist discrimination in the computer industry. And why should this particular metric need explaining, rather than some other statistical disparity? Complaints about “inequality” are almost always based on a cherry-picking approach to data that is essentially dishonest, an attempt to prove that someone (e.g., Silicon Valley employers) is treating employees unfairly, simply because members of certain groups are “underrepresented” in the work force. However, numerical inequalities can be found in all sorts of career fields where no one claims that discrimination explains these disparities. Has anyone ever asserted, for example, that the paucity of Korean-American NASCAR drivers reflects an anti-Asian bias in stock-car racing? Or do feminists complain women are “underrepresented” in low-wage jobs in the construction field?

Only because feminism is based on a zero-sum-game mentality do they believe that male success in certain occupations is evidence of discrimination against women, and the feminist “solution” to such statistical inequality involves a scapegoating rhetoric — “male privilege,” “misogyny,” etc. — that demonizes men for their success, a rhetoric quite analogous to the way Nazi propaganda demonized European Jews.

Robyn Pennacchia is a hate-monger who should be ashamed of herself, but if she had any sense of shame, she wouldn’t be a feminist, would she?

And that, my friends, is how you argue with a feminist.



 

 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 05.09.18

Posted on | May 10, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 05.09.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #250
EBL: Nancy Pelosi Promises If Democrats Win Back The House, She’ll Raise Your Taxes!
Twitchy: Peak TDS – Marina Sirtis Blames “Our Fuehrer” For AirBnB Visit Gone Wrong
Louder With Crowder: Gina Haspel Embarrasses Senator Feinstein With Fact-Check

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Stephen Kotkin, Stalin – Waiting For Hitler, also, The Intellectual Dark Web
American Thinker: Was Plato A Trump Supporter?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Trump Withdraws From Iran Deal As Israel Pounds Iranian Positions In Syria
CDR Salamander: GLOCs, SLOCs… ILOCs?
Da Tech Guy: Quoting Some Solid Papal Advice, also, A Reminder To CNN Viewers From POTUS
Don Surber: Newt Says GOP Will Keep The House, also, The Derp State
Dustbury: Reversion To Form
The Geller Report: Afghan Mosque Prayer Leader Blown Up By Own Bomb, also, Al Qaeda Leader Joins Democrats In Attack On CIA Nominee
Hogewash: Saturn, Rings & Moons, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: What Do You Remember Most About Gene Wilder?
JustOneMinute: Wednesday Morning
Legal Insurrection: Soros Dumps Big Money Into US DA Races, also, US Envoy Warns German Firms To Start Winding Down Business In Iran “Immediately”
Michelle Malkin: Sombreros, Qipaos, And Catholic Cosplay, Oh My!
Power Line: A Day With Candace Owens, also, Did John Kerry Violate The Logan Act?
Shark Tank: Corcoran Won’t Run, Poised To Endorse Putnam Over DeSantis
Shot In The Dark: The Little Admiral
STUMP: Divestment & Activist Investing Follies
The Political Hat: The Venezuelan Horror Continues To horrify
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Category: Linkagery

Errors of Logic and Rhetoric

Posted on | May 9, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Robyn Pennacchia condemns “male privilege”:

Women are also rejected. Women also spend their teen years pining after dreamy boys who will never love them back. You don’t see us going around murdering people over it. You don’t see us setting up internet communities for the purpose of talking about how evil and shallow men are for not taking us to pound town. Women don’t go around killing men who don’t like them, because if you’re a woman in this society, a boy not liking you is the least of your problems. It is nowhere near the shittiest thing you’re going to be expected to “just deal with” in your life — one of those things being the fact that we are expected to “just deal with” how men are sometimes going to murder a bunch of people because they felt entitled to romantic attention from women. We are expected to “deal with” that, while never bringing up the terms “male privilege” or “male entitlement” or “toxic masculinity” and why those things so often lead to mass murder, on account of how that might really hurt the feelings of the men who have been gracious enough to not go on killing sprees. . . .

You can read the whole thing. Let me ask the commenters to discuss the flaws in Ms. Pennacchia’s logic and rhetoric. While I could do this at length — her errors are obvious to me — there are other things I’d like to accomplish today, and I get tired of explaining what’s wrong with the feminist rhetoric of “equality.” So have at it, readers, and please remember to check your spelling and grammar. No point bothering to “check your privilege,” feminists hate you no matter what you say or do.

 

Category: Sex Trouble
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