The Other McCain

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

Feds Charge NYU Law Student Who ‘Terrorized’ Middle School Girl

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Feds Charge NYU Law Student Who ‘Terrorized’ Middle School Girl

 

This guy’s probably going to be quite popular in federal prison:

A suburban Chicago man was charged Tuesday with threatening to publish sexually explicit photos of an underage girl unless she created child pornography for him.
This indictment was announced by U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr., Northern District of Illinois, and Special Agent in Charge James M. Gibbons, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
David J. Cottrell, 28, of Niles, Illinois, is charged with two counts of transporting child pornography, one count of extortion, one count of inducing a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity, one count of attempting to produce child pornography, one count of producing of child pornography, and one count of possessing child pornography.
According to the indictment and the government’s memorandum in support of detention, Cottrell in 2014 induced the underage victim into sending him sexually explicit photos through the internet.
After collecting semi-nude photos of the victim, Cottrell informed her that he knew her real name, the name of her school, and her parents’ jobs, and he threatened to post the images online and send them to her family unless the girl sent him additional, more explicit images, the government’s memorandum states.
The victim complied with Cottrell’s demands by creating and sending additional photos and videos to him, the memorandum states.
Cottrell contacted the victim on a near-daily basis until her parents discovered the messages in 2017 and contacted law enforcement, according to the memorandum.

The Chicago Tribune reports more details of the case:

A former law school student from north suburban Niles is facing federal charges alleging he extorted and terrorized a young teenage girl for more than three years by threatening to expose her if she didn’t send him pornographic videos of herself on a nearly daily basis.
David Cottrell, 28, forced the girl to comply with his every demand, including staying up late on school nights to act out pornographic “scripts” for him and leaving her middle school classes at times to take nude photos of herself in the bathroom, prosecutors alleged in an 18-page filing.
“One bad move and ur parents get a letter from concerned parents about their daughter distributing porn to other children,” Cottrell allegedly messaged to the victim, who was 13 at the time. . . .
Cottrell has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
His lawyer, Kenneth Yeadon, could not immediately be reached for comment, but in a recent court filing, Yeadon said Cottrell has “lived a quiet life” at home with his parents despite knowing he was a target in the investigation. Cottrell has lived in Niles all his life except while attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison as an undergraduate and law school at New York University in Manhattan, Yeadon said.
Cottrell left law school in 2017 to return to Niles, Yeadon said. Until he was taken into custody, he had been taking classes to finish his law degree and working at his father’s public accounting practice in Park Ridge, Yeadon said. . . .
According to prosecutors, Cottrell met the victim — identified as Minor A — in an online chat site when she was in 7th grade and he was attending law school in New York. In later conversations over Snapchat, Cottrell asked the girl to send him nude photos of herself, according to the prosecution filing. She did so “thinking she was anonymous,” authorities said.
In fall 2014, Cottrell told Minor A he knew her real name, address, her parents’ and sister’s name, where her parents worked and the middle school she attended. He started threatening the teen, saying he would “post her photos on the internet and send them to her family” if she didn’t comply with his demands for more material, prosecutors alleged. . . .
Several times, Cottrell made Minor A leave class during school to take a photo of herself in the bathroom, prosecutors alleged. In one instance in October 2016, Cottrell messaged the girl while she was in math class, telling her, “I f—— own you and don’t tolerate disobedience,” prosecutors said.
The extortion continued until July 2017 when the girl’s parents found Cottrell’s threats on her phone and contacted law enforcement, according to prosecutors. When agents searched the phone, they found a five-minute video she’d made for Cottrell just two days earlier.
“Three and a half minutes into the video, Minor A starts crying as she is forced to perform for the defendant,” prosecutors wrote.

Oh, the guys in prison are going to be so happy to see Mr. Cottrell.

 

Category: Crime

Rick Scott Wins, as Democrats Admit Nelson Doomed in Florida Recount

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Rick Scott Wins, as Democrats Admit Nelson Doomed in Florida Recount

 

The bungling dimwits in Broward County are still counting ballots, but there’s no hope left for Democrats to keep the Senate seat:

Sen. Bill Nelson has run out of time, run out of favorable court rulings and is about to officially run out of votes.
After losing to Gov. Rick Scott on Election Day, losing after an automatic recount and appearing to not make up the gap following a manual recount Friday, Nelson’s campaign was dealt a mortal blow later that evening by U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker, who crushed the Democrat’s last major hope by upholding a Florida law that forbids county election offices from counting vote-by-mail ballots received after 7 p.m. Election Day.
“It’s done. But it was done before today. This was a total Hail Mary,” said a top Democrat involved in Nelson’s campaign who didn’t want to speak publicly before the Democratic Party icon conceded defeat to one of the party’s most-hated rivals. . . .
Without favorable court rulings to expand the available ballot pool, Nelson has no way to make up his 12,603-vote deficit with Scott. . . .
The counties officially have to submit their manual recount totals to the state Sunday. The election is supposed to be certified Tuesday. . . .
While party officials refused to discuss the hopelessness of the situation on the record, the Florida Democratic Party on Friday continued to fundraise off the recount, suggesting to donors that Nelson had a shot when his own top backers knew he didn’t.
Nelson, a three-term U.S. Senator, was the last Democratic statewide elected official in Florida for years. . . .
Scott’s defeat of Nelson certifies him as a Democratic giant-killer who continues to prove party elites wrong. In three straight elections, Democratic insiders have predicted his defeat. Scott first beat Alex Sink, the woman once thought to be the future of the party, in his first gubernatorial race. Then he defeated former Gov. Charlie Crist, a once-highly popular governor. And now he has bested the one politician Democrats thought was unbeatable in a Florida general election, Nelson.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) In case you missed it earlier, Republican Ron DeSantis will be Florida’s next governor, defeating Democrat Andrew Gillum by more than 30,000 votes, enough to avoid a manual recount. So, it would appear, #StopTheSteal was effective. Good work.



 

Category: Election, Florida

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous

 

Does this guy look crazy to you? Yeah, it’s obvious. Gregory Allen Bush should have been locked up a long time ago:

According to court records, Bush has a history of domestic violence against his parents, his brother and his ex-wife, who is African American.
Sheryl Bush married Gregory Bush in 1997, according to court records. They had a son in 1998, before separating in 1999. According to divorce records, Gregory Bush attempted suicide in 2000 while his 2-year-old son slept in a bed in the next room.
In 2001, Sheryl Bush filed a domestic violence petition, telling a court that when she went to pick up her son from Bush’s home, he threatened her and called her the n-word.
In 2009, Gregory Bush’s father, William Bush, filed a restraining order against his son, telling a court that Gregory Bush “put his hands around my wife’s neck and picked her up by her neck and put her down.”
The court ordered Bush to comply with mental health treatment and prohibited from him possessing a weapon. A judge wrote on the order, “No Guns!”

If your own father is forced to take out a restraining order against you because you tried to strangle your mother, you shouldn’t be allowed to roam around freely, because you’re likely to do bad things:

Gregory A. Bush, 51, was indicted today by a federal grand jury on hate crime and firearm charges arising out of the racially motivated murder of two African-American patrons at a Kroger grocery store, and the attempted murder of a third, on Oct. 24 in Jeffersontown, Kentucky. The indictment was announced by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman, and FBI Louisville Special Agent in Charge James Robert Brown, Jr.
Today’s indictment charges Bush with hate crimes for shooting and killing two victims because of their race and color; and for shooting at a third man because of his race and color. The indictment also charges Bush for using and discharging a firearm during and in relation to those crimes of violence. The indictment alleges that Bush committed the offenses after substantial planning and premeditation, that he killed more than one person in a single criminal episode, and that he knowingly created a grave risk of death to others on the scene.
The maximum penalty for the charges in the indictment is life imprisonment or the death penalty. The Justice Department will determine at a later date whether, in this particular case, it will seek the death penalty.
“The crimes alleged in this indictment are horrific,” Acting Attorney General Whitaker said. “We cannot and will not tolerate violence motivated by racism. We will bring the full force of the law against these and any other alleged hate crimes against fellow Americans of any race. And so I want to thank the FBI, Trial Attorney Christopher Perras, and Assistant United States Attorney Amanda Gregory for all of their hard work that has made this indictment possible. Today we take one step closer to justice for the victims and their families and one step closer to helping this community try to heal.”
“There is no place for hate-fueled violence in our community or Commonwealth,” stated U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman. “Federal, state, and local law enforcement stand united to ensure that Kentuckians can shop, worship, or attend school without the specter of fear.”
“The tragic events of October 24, 2018, are a grim reminder of why the FBI prioritizes investigations of civil rights violations among the top of its criminal programs,” said FBI Louisville Special Agent in Charge James Robert Brown, Jr. “Today’s indictment should be a reminder to those who are motivated by hate and are intent on committing violence; your hateful ideology will not have the last word. The FBI, and the Department of Justice, will be there, and you will be caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Far be it from me to question the FBI’s priorities, but maybe they wouldn’t have so many “civil rights violations” to investigate if dangerous lunatics weren’t allowed to run around on the streets.

Speaking of dangerous lunatics, a Salon-dot-com writer mentioned this Kentucky crime among those he blamed on — you guessed, didn’t you?

Donald Trump has made a decision that he isn’t the president not of the United States of America, but president of the red states of America. Trump has embraced a new confederacy, and he is their Jefferson Davis, and a new civil war has been joined.

Maybe this Salon-dot-com writer is off his medications? I dunno.

Crazy People Are Dangerous.

 



 

Category: Crime, Kentucky, Racism

Stacey Abrams Loses in Georgia, and Democrats Claim GOP ‘Stole’ Election

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | Comments Off on Stacey Abrams Loses in Georgia, and Democrats Claim GOP ‘Stole’ Election

 

As a native Georgian, I’m frankly shocked that this election was even close, but Democrats don’t live in reality:

Democrat Georgia gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams admitted Friday that she cannot win against Republican opponent Brian Kemp and vowed to file a federal lawsuit challenging the “gross mismanagement” of the state’s elections
Abrams made her announcement shortly after 5 p.m., the earliest state officials could certify the results after a court-ordered review of absentee, provisional and other uncounted ballots. Abrams’ campaign had contended there were potentially enough uncounted votes to force a runoff.
Abrams told supporters that Kemp placed “his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote.”
“Concession means to acknowledge an act is right, true or proper…I cannot concede that,” she added. . . .
“In the coming days, we will be filing a major federal lawsuit against the state of Georgia for the gross mismanagement of this election and to protect future elections,” she said.
Abrams had hoped to become the first black governor of the Deep South state and the first black female governor of any state.
Abrams and voting rights activists have claimed for months that Kemp mismanaged the elections system in his post as secretary of state. . . .
Allegra Lawrence-Hardy, Abrams’ campaign chairwoman, is overseeing a team of almost three-dozen lawyers who in the coming days will draft the petition, along with a ream of affidavits from voters and would-be voters who say they were disenfranchised.

Call this what it is, a paranoid conspiracy theory, a partisan propaganda claim deliberately intended to inflame racial fear: “The white folks cheated! We’re disenfranchised! It’s a 21st-century Jim Crow!”

Bullshit.

Permit me to explain, in case it is not obvious, what happened in Georgia. National Democrats had hoped that an anti-Trump backlash would inspire a “blue wave” of such miraculous proportions that, for example, Beto O’Rourke could beat Ted Cruz in Texas. You can see the delusional aspect of Democrats’ 2018 hopes in the kind of candidates they nominated in various “swing” congressional districts. In race after race where the GOP was vulnerable, Democrats lost because their primary voters went for nominees (e.g., Gina Ortiz Jones in TX23, Lauren Baer in FL18, Leslie Cockburn in VA5) who were simply too extreme to be competitive. And this was the story of Stacey Abrams in a nutshell — another far-left candidate who won the Democrat primary on the basis of unrealistic “blue wave” hopes. Inside the echo-chamber of liberal media, Abrams’ primary victory in May was celebrated with this CNN headline: “Stacey Abrams wins Democratic primary in Georgia. She could become the nation’s first black woman governor.”

Georgia Republicans were laughing out loud at that headline. Brian Kemp might not have been the smoothest politician in the GOP field, but he wasn’t so bad he could lose to . . . well, an Atlanta Democrat.

Do I really need to explain what that means? I should hope not.

We live in the real world, and not in the liberal fantasyland inhabited by CNN viewers, so we understand why an Atlanta Democrat might have difficulty winning a statewide election in Georgia. But let’s take a look at some exit-poll numbers, just to make the point.

 

 

 

White voters went 3-to-1 for Kemp, who also won 2-to-1 among married voters, and won decisive majorities of all voters earning over $30,000. Did you notice, by the way, that Kemp got more than 10% of black male voters? You can bet most of those are upper-income married black men. Despite the polarizing effect of Trump — whose personality tends to alienate some respectable church-going types who normally vote Republican — Kemp nevertheless won what we might call the bourgeois vote, because Stacey Abrams was simply not the kind of candidate who could appeal to responsible middle-class taxpayers.

Why, then, are Democrats claiming Kemp had to cheat to win?

 

Democrat donors like George Soros poured millions of dollars into the Abrams campaign, because “experts” (like former Clinton strategist Peter Daou) somehow convinced these wealthy idiots that Abrams had a chance of winning. If you spend enough money, and get Oprah and Obama to campaign for you, it’s possible to “energize the base” enough to make such an election competitive, even in a Republican stronghold like Georgia. But even with a maximum turnout of, uh, Atlanta Democrats (Abrams racked up more than 300,000 votes in Fulton County, and more than 250,000 in DeKalb), liberal fantasies ultimately encounter the “red wall.” Go look at the election map in Georgia, particularly in those counties north of Atlanta — Kemp won Paulding with 67%, Forsyth with 71%, Cherokee with 72%, Hall with 73%. Abrams amassed huge margins in Atlanta, and even won about 55% in the Cobb and Gwinnett suburbs, but in vast swaths of the state, Kemp won by 70% or more. (In Gordon County, where I spent four years as sports editor of the local newspaper, Kemp got 82%.) Democrats and their big-money donors simply can’t cope with that kind of political reality. It’s racist for white people in Georgia to vote Republican, liberals believe, and so they claim “voter suppression tactics” must have been involved. As if officials in Atlanta were “suppressing” Democrat voters? Never mind. It’s a paranoid conspiracy theory, and as such doesn’t require facts or logic.

One the one hand, Democrats claim the election was “stolen” as an excuse for wasting all that money from their liberal donors, but on the other hand, such claims are about maintaining anti-white resentment among their voter base, because if Democrats don’t get 90% of the black vote (and 80% of the Hispanic vote) they can’t win any elections anywhere south of Illinois or east of Nevada. There simply aren’t enough white liberals in most of America to make up a Democrat majority, and so the kind of people who live inside the CNN echo chamber must always have some kind of wacko theory to explain away Republican victories.

By the way, does anyone think racism alone explains why Abrams lost?

 

“One million dollars — that’s how much Stacey Abrams made over the last five years. But when it came time to pay her $54,000 tax bill, she didn’t. Instead, Abrams decided to loan her campaign for governor $50,000. Pushing a radical agenda to raise your taxes while delaying what she owes in order to fund her political campaign — Stacey Abrams, a self-serving, fiscally irresponsible career politician.”

That ad highlighted something Peter Daou and the Democrats don’t want to talk about. Despite her high income, Abrams had personal debt of more than $170,000, including a $54,000 debt to the IRS. Is that the kind of person you want to elect governor? Maybe if you’re a Democrat, but most Georgians are Republicans. And thank God for that.



 

Category: Democrats, Election, Georgia

Wretchedly Late Night With In The Mailbox: 11.16.18

Posted on | November 17, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Roy Clark, RIP
Twitchy: After Threatening To Nuke Americans Who Won’t Give Up Their Guns, Rep. Eric Swalwell Bemoans Lack of Progress On Gun Control Debate
Louder With Crowder: Republic, WA Police Chief Refuses To Enforce Unconstitutional Gun Laws
According To Hoyt: Lift That Light High!
Monster Hunter Nation: November Update Post
Vox Popoli: Just Do It Already

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Links & Chicks – Angrywhitemenistan Edition
American Thinker: Democrat Corruption Is A Clear & Present Danger To America
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Three-Time Loser Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For November 16
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Downballot, Some Life-Issue News
Don Surber: Trump Everyone’s Hard Passes Then
Dustbury: That Side Of Paradise
First Street Journal: Gov. Cuomo Slips Up & Tells The Truth
The Geller Report: UN Passes Nine Resolutions Slamming Israel In One Day, also, Judge Orders Trump Admin To Restore Acosta’s Press Pass
Hogewash: Kamala Harris, ICE, And The Klan, also, Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
JustOneMinute: Keep Hate Alive!
Legal Insurrection:  Stacey Abrams May Sue For Do-Over In GA Governor Race, also, Justice Kavanaugh Gets Standing Ovation At Federalist Society Convention
The PanAm Post: Cabello Accuses Petro Of Seeking Chavista Help For Colombian Presidential Campaign
Power Line: Democrats Begin To Fold Their Tents, also, High Snobbery From The Washington Post
Shot In The Dark: Paranoid
The Jawa Report: Cornhole Watch – Tyler Barriss
The Political Hat: How SJWs Infest Companies & Destroy Industries
This Ain’t Hell: Friday Feelgood Stories, also, Fort Trump? Maybe
Victory Girls: Virtue Signalers Swoop Down On Baraboo, WI
Volokh Conspiracy: What Constitutional Lawyers Can Learn From Spiderman
Weasel Zippers: NARAL & Rep. Joe Kennedy Lie About Title IX Change, also, GOP To Audit AZ County Elections Office That Swung Elections To Democrats
Mark Steyn: Voting & Counting, also, Steyn In For Rush Friday


Black Friday Deals Week
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Outlet Deals

Category: Linkagery

There Are No ‘Good’ Public Schools

Posted on | November 16, 2018 | 1 Comment

Public education in America is a disaster. If taxpayers had any idea what was being done to children in these government indoctrination centers, they would be outraged. However, the bureaucrats who run the system are trained in methods of suppressing the sordid secrets of what goes on, and it is only when disaster strikes — e.g., the Parkland massacre — that the public gets a glimpse of the corruption and incompetence that prevails even in allegedly “good” suburban schools. Parents who think it is safe to send their children to public school generally have no inkling of actual conditions inside their child’s school. Consider what’s happening at Harlandale High School in San Antonio, Texas:

A 9th grader and her family fear for their safety after the Harlandale High School student was jumped just minutes after the last bell rang.
Melissa Serna said when she was on her way to pick up her daughter from school, she got a text saying her daughter had been attacked.
“My thing was just going to the hospital to make sure my daughter was fine,” Serna said. “Because she had suffered from a concussion, she passed out when she was getting the kicks and punches to her head.”
Serna said surveillance and cell phone video captured the assault, showing two female students beating her daughter on school grounds while others watched. Serna said school staff was still on campus but claim they did not see the fight until the students fled.
“I mean every person, my family, that’s seen the video has cried watching it,” Serna said. “She had two teachers who cried with her.”
The two students were suspended for three days, but are now back on campus. Serna said additional video surfacing on social media shows one of the students shooting a gun out of a moving car.
Serna said her daughter is still being bullied and taunted at school every day.
Harlandale ISD released this statement Wednesday regarding the incident:
“The Harlandale Police Department is investigating this incident and has filed charges with the District Attorney’s office. The students will follow due process to the fullest extent of the law and will be disciplined according to the Harlandale ISD Student Code of Conduct and School Board Policy. The safety of our students is always our top priority and the Harlandale ISD takes all potential threats to students’ safety very seriously.”

Watch the video:

 

What was the motive for this brutal attack on a 14-year-old girl? Well, it can’t be racism or homophobia, because if that was the motive, there would be a massive civil-rights protest and you’d probably be getting hourly updates on CNN. Most likely, the motive is that Ms. Serna’s daughter is pretty, and this gang of ugly goons were jealous of her.

But the “Student Code of Conduct and School Board Policy,” you see, doesn’t allow the school to permanently ban these juvenile thugs. The little monsters have a “right” to attend school and so, after serving a mere three-day suspension, the attackers are back on campus, and this girl “is still being bullied and taunted at school every day.”

DO NOT SEND YOUR CHILDREN TO PUBLIC SCHOOL. It’s not safe.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Category: Education, Texas

A Reliable Warning Sign of Craziness

Posted on | November 16, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Interest in astrology is evidence of irrationality. Nothing could be more obviously false than the claim that all people born under a particular “sign” share the same traits and are linked by a common destiny, so that by knowing my birthday is Oct. 6 you could say, “Oh, a Libra!” and then make generalizations about my personality and provide me with a horoscope that predicts what will happen to me today. Demonstrating the falsehood of astrology is a matter of simple math. The year I was born, there were about 4.3 million births in the United States, which means there were approximately 360,000 Americans born under each of the Zodiac signs that year. What commonalities of personality, or what similarities of fortune, could I possibly share with all of the other 359,999 Americans born as Libras in 1959? Yet this is the basic claim of astrology. It is manifestly absurd, and no sane person could believe in it.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of crazy people in the world who can’t understand what’s wrong with such ridiculous superstition and — surprise, surprise! — many of these people are queer feminists:

Over the past two to three years, astrology has shifted from being a niche interest to a major point of enthusiasm for many women and queer people. Broadly, VICE’s channel geared towards women and the LGBTQ community, gets a huge amount of traffic from astrological features and horoscopes. Other media platforms for women have noticeably ramped up astrology content from filler to the forefront. In the UK, Google searches for “birth chart” doubled between November of 2013 and November of 2018. Since September of 2017, there’s been a steady increase in people searching “astrological compatibility”. All that interest has given publishing a boost: sales of mind, body and spirit books are booming; in 2017, sales rose by 13 percent in just a year.
Swipe through a dating app and you’ll soon find a woman who’s included their sign in emoji in their bio as shorthand for personality traits, likes and dislikes, and an indicator for compatibility. . . .
[S]traight men seem to be frequently apathetic or adverse to astrology. In a 2005 Gallup UK poll, just over twice as many women in the UK believed in astrology compared to men (30 percent to 14 percent of a data pool of 1,010 people). A 2017 study by Pew Research Centre found that 20 percent of adult men in the US believed in astrology, compared to 37 percent of women.
If you’re a straight man with a lot of female friends, you probably tolerate astrology (“It’s gotten to the point where I’m sharing Virgo memes in the group chat like ‘lol, me’, but I still don’t like it,” says Adam from Manchester). And if you don’t, you likely think it’s a load of sh– (“If you try to bring up that sh– with me, I’ll think you’re a mindless bimbo,” Tom, 25, London). There are obviously women and LGBTQ people who feel similarly, but why is this attitude so prevalent among straight men in particular? Is it because astrology is generally seen as a “women’s” interest?

No, ma’am, it’s because straight men know that crazy women are trouble.

Why are you 28 and unmarried, Hannah Rose Ewens? Isn’t it a fact that you struggle with mental health problems? Isn’t your “bisexuality” merely a rationalization of your inability to get a boyfriend? And why, in addition to astrology, are you also dabbling in tarot readings? Well, I didn’t need to do a Zodiac chart to know these things about you, Ms. Ewens, I just spent a few minutes browsing your social media and it’s pretty obvious why heterosexual men avoid you. A quick scan of your Instagram account would be sufficient to convince any shrewd observer that you’re a kook.

Is it a coincidence that interest in astrology has increased during the same timeframe as the increase in interest in feminism? I think not. For a woman to believe she is a victim of heteropatriarchy is as irrational as believing that “Libra” is a meaningful category. Both feminism and astrology appeal to irrational impulses, and take advantage of confirmation bias to create a cult mentality, an echo chamber that automatically delegitimizes (and thereby excludes) voices of skepticism and dissent. As a devotee of astrology, Ms. Ewens thinks of herself as possessing esoteric knowledge that makes her superior to anyone who doesn’t share her belief, and the same is true with regard to her feminist worldview. (Did I mention she’s a Labour voter?) So the real question is not, as Ms. Ewens would have us believe, “Why Straight Men Hate Astrology So Much,” but rather why she can’t recognize the folly of her own superstition. Does it really make sense for her to put her Zodiac sign in her dating-app profile? This is the kind of gesture — like her dyeing her hair pink — calculated to frighten away any male with common sense.

Men really should be grateful for the self-identifying gestures by which crazy women alert us to their craziness. Aposematic hairstyles, facial piercing, tattoos — as much as men might lament these fashionable self-desecrations, at least when you see a woman with pink hair (or notice the Zodiac sign in her Tinder profile) you have a fair warning that she’s a dangerous nutjob who’s probably on Prozac and/or Xanax.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Mark Zuckerberg’s Sister Hates You

Posted on | November 16, 2018 | Comments Off on Mark Zuckerberg’s Sister Hates You

 

Oh, where to start with this intellectual bilge?

Donna Zuckerberg didn’t expect to spend two years trawling through the corner of the internet defined as “the manosphere”, unpicking the grim alliance between pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, incels (involuntarily celibate men), the far right and the most ardent Make America Great Again advocates.
“It started as a curiosity,” she says, as we video call from her home in Silicon Valley, which she shares with her husband and two children. “But it took on a life of its own.” A classicist with a PhD from Princeton, Zuckerberg edits the online journal Eidolon, publishing scholarly essays on the Greco-Roman world from academics and students.
In the summer of 2015, she noticed an unprecedented level of traffic towards a piece entitled “Why is stoicism having a cultural moment?” and went down a rabbit hole to determine why. The results stunned her: men — or rather, misogynists — were using an armchair enthusiasm for the classics to justify manifestos of hate against women. The results were spreading online under a pseudo-intellectual guise, twisting ancient world philosophy to buttress a contemporary hatred of feminism. And it wasn’t a one-off.
“So, there are online communities that exist under the umbrella of what we know as the Red Pill, which are men connected by common resentments against women, immigrants, people of colour,” she explains. “What I was surprised to find was the extent to which they are using ancient Greek and Roman figures and texts to prop up an ideal of white masculinity.”
Red Pillers name themselves after a scene in The Matrix, in which Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) the option of taking the red or blue pill and arriving at either gritty, painful truth (red) or blissful ignorance (blue). Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor and YouTube sermoniser who rails against identity politics and feminism, is revered as one of the high priests of the movement, while incels have gathered much attention this year.
But in the case of stoicism’s sudden revival, Zuckerberg found that an active corner of Reddit was applying Hellenistic philosophy to explain the pain and hardship white western men were suffering in the 21st century. Except these men didn’t consider themselves angry – they considered themselves oppressed.
“The ancient world was deeply misogynistic — it was a time when there was no word for rape, feminism did not exist and women’s actions were determined by male relatives,” says Zuckerberg. But now the classical texts are being “distorted and stripped of context” online to lend gravitas to campaigns of misogyny and white supremacy. Not only is it toxic but, as Zuckerberg calmly outlines in her new book, Not All Dead White Men, it is deeply dangerous.

First of all, what does it mean to be Stoic? Among other things, the Stoic admires a certain temperament, not being prone to panic or rage, not endlessly complaining about one’s misfortunes. Given the fact that white males are currently the targets of a left-wing propaganda campaign that demonizes them as “privileged” scapegoats for every problem in the world, one could see why a study of Stoic philosophy — as part of an effort to remain calm and reasonable in the face of this relentless drumbeat of anti-white, anti-male rhetoric — might be helpful. Personally, I would recommend that they read Ecclesiastes or Proverbs, but if they find the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius more helpful, OK.

Ms. Zuckerberg evidently does not wish to acknowledge that (a) feminism is an anti-male hate movement and therefore (b) every man intelligent enough to understand feminism is against feminism. There is no need for an Ivy League intellectual to offer us an elaborate explanation of why men hate feminism; all that is necessary is to know what feminism actually is, a truth that Ms. Zuckerberg wishes to obscure. This is how it always is with left-wing ideologues; they never question their own destructive agenda. Anti-male policies that deprive young men of opportunities for education and employment are advocated by feminists as “social justice.” To be male is to be wrong, according to feminists like Donna Zuckerberg, and what needs to be explained, in her mind, is why some men refuse to accept the inferior status assigned to them.

A point that I have repeatedly made:

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.

Avoid feminists as far as possible, and never speak to a feminist at all. If men were to follow my advice — to shun feminists with aloof silence — there would never be any complaint about “harassment.”

How can a man harass feminists if he never speaks to feminists, if he makes it his habit to walk out of the room as soon as a feminist walks in? This would be the genuinely Stoic response to feminism. What is happening — idiots making obscene comments to women on the Internet, or “incels” going on murder rampages — is definitely not Stoic.

(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas on Twitter.)

 

Category: Sex Trouble
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