The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 10.24.17

Posted on | October 24, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Architect Speaks
Twitchy: Apple Or Banana? Sarah Palin Calls Out CNN On Fake News; Tapper’s Weak Response
Louder With Crowder: PLOT TWIST! Black Man Arrested For Racist Klan Graffiti At University


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Piggott Farm
American Power: In Paperback – Volker Ullrich, Hitler
American Thinker: Honor Killing Victim Jessica Mokdad’s Mom Leaves Islam, Apologizes
Animal Magnetism: Hunting Season Totty II
BattleSwarm: Scenes From The Continuing Democratic Suicide
CDR Salamander: Trumpism, NeverTrumpism, And Their Discontents
Da Tech Guy: Cop Killers, also, It’s Time To Vote Barry Bonds Into The Hall Of Fame
Don Surber: Flake Off, Flake
Dustbury: Quick Feedback
The Geller Report: SCOTUS Kills Refugee Ban Challenge, also, Trump To Kill Boeing Sale To Iran
Hogewash: NGC 4993
Jammie Wearing Fools: Michael Moore’s Dopey Broadway Show Dies In Darkness
JustOneMinute: Flake Out
Legal Insurrection: Kid Rock – “F*ck No, I’m Not Running For Senate”, also, Did Fauxcahontas Exaggerate Her “Me Too” Story?
Power Line: And Now for Some Real “Fake News”, also, Collusion Clinton Style
Shot In The Dark: Friends In Low Places
STUMP: Waiting For Hartford To Default While State Legislators Throw A Little Cash Around
The Jawa Report: Islamic Snuff-O-Gram Losing
The Political Hat: Modern Venezuela – Electoral Shenanigans, Bitcoin, And Hookers
This Ain’t Hell: Valor Thief Drops Out Of Mayoral Campaign, also, Florida Man Attempts Mall Bombing
Weasel Zippers: Professor Claims Math, Algebra, & Geometry Promote “White Privilege”, also, Number Of Americans On Food Stamps Plummets By 1.5 Million After Trump Takes Office
Megan McArdle: Be Careful Who You Call A “White Supremacist”
Mark Steyn: The Rubber Hits The Road


Ends Today – Hans Schantz’ The Hidden Truth Just 99 Cents!
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Category: Linkagery

The Sexual Harassment Bonfire Continues in the Wake of the Weinstein Scandal

Posted on | October 24, 2017 | 2 Comments

Famed fashion photographer Terry Richardson has been banned from working for Condé Nast publications including Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair. Richardson “has been dogged for years by allegations of sexual exploitation of models,” according to the Telegraph.

Last week, one of Hollywood’s top talent agencies fired Tyler Grasham, who had represented many child stars, after he was accused of sexually harassing and/or assaulting young men. Also last week, Nickelodeon fired Chris Savino, creator of the animated series The Loud House, over allegations of sexual harassment, with at least 12 accusers referencing “unwanted sexual advances as well as threats of retribution after the end of consensual relationships.” The Los Angeles Times published a long article Sunday about a long history of alleged sexual harassment by writer/director James Toback. Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, multiple women have made accusations of harassment against Robert Scoble, a well-known commentator on the tech industry.

In London, British GQ correspondent Rupert Myers was fired in the wake of a woman’s accusation of sexual harassment:

Myers, who deactivated his Twitter account after [Karen] Leaver started tweeting her story, is a known feminist who has written stories such as, “Men’s rights activist are cave dwelling idiots.” In the 2015 story, Myers wrote, “There is a new, global group dedicated to undermining significant social change. They wear the mask of an online avatar and use technology to harass, threaten and silence their targets. Their cause? To prevent steps towards the equality of men and women. They are the ‘Men’s rights activists.’”
Daily Caller reporter Ian Miles Cheong had harsh words for Myers, tweeting, “Male feminists who claim the moral high ground, who turn their noses up at the ‘misogynists’ below, are the very demons they claim to fight.”

Amid this inferno of career-ending accusations touched off by the Harvey Weinstein scandal, Professor Ann Althouse sounds a note of caution:

What are the rules for going out for drinks with a co-worker? . . .
Let’s not fling ourselves headlong into a new era of sexual repression. . . .
Without knowing more [about the accusations against Myers], I can’t think of what else to say except that conservatives who’ve been crying out about the lack of due process for men accused of sexual assault should not be gleefully enjoying this man’s loss of a job. That would be hypocritical, and your glee is based on the notion that Myers is a hypocrite. That’s double hypocrisy!

This is an important point. The destruction of Harvey Weinstein was a consequence of feminist rage over the election of Donald Trump, whose words and alleged behavior in this regard were so offensive to so many. There was also apparently a “boys will be boys” environment at Fox News. Certainly, there are many Republicans who have not been paragons of virtue, and there is a clear line between (a) conservatives enjoying some schadenfreude at the downfall of liberals who claimed to be champions of “women’s rights,” and (b) self-righteous hubris.

Professor Althouse’s mention of conservative concerns over due process rights in campus sexual assault cases gets right to the point, because many of those cases involve a “he-said/she-said” situation between two drunk students, where it is impossible to know what actually happened. Furthermore, as I pointed out after Vox Media executive Lockhart Steele was fired, we may be witnessing an incipient witch-hunt:

When a witch-hunt hysteria takes hold, differences between minor and major forms of witchcraft soon cease to matter. Amid a paranoid climate of suspicion, any accusation of witch-type behavior will suffice to have the target burned at the stake before sundown. . . .
A witch-hunt has no statute of limitations, nor any standard of due process and, as for evidence, who needs evidence? If a woman says her ex-boyfriend did awful things to her in 2007 or 1997, feminists will applaud her for her “courage” in “breaking the silence,” and nothing that the targeted scapegoat says in his own defense will save him.

In the case of Lockhart Steele, there was allegedly a pattern of bad behavior that had continued for many years, but Steele was reportedly protected by Vox because he “had too many shares” in the company to be fired. This parallels the Weinstein saga, where the Hollywood mogul abused his power as a serial harasser of women, a perpetrator with a well-established modus operandi that involved inviting women to his hotel rooms, soliciting massages, exposing himself, masturbating, etc.

Habitual offenders, abusers of power, and institutional protection of such behaviors — this is the proper focus of sexual harassment concerns. The way the BBC covered for Jimmy Savile, the way the Catholic Church dealt with pedophile priests by reassigning them to new parishes, the way Arkansas State Troopers were employed to protect Gov. Bill Clinton’s womanizing escapades — these were all newsworthy scandals.

There is a danger, as Professor Althouse points out, that a witch-hunt hysteria could obliterate the distinction between such serious abuses and comparatively trivial incidents. Nevertheless, as we watch this bonfire immolate the careers of the famous and the obscure alike, everyone is put on notice that there is a zero-tolerance policy now in effect regarding “unwanted sexual advances.” As a father of teenagers, I’ve been cautioning my kids for years about this, especially when it comes to their online behavior. The Internet is dangerous. Online dating? No, never, period. “Sexting”? No, never, period. The fate of Anthony Weiner should serve as a scarecrow to warn young people against this stuff. And smart young people, now as always, should be instructed to pair up. Find a steady partner and avoid the hook-up carousel. My eldest three children married in their early 20s, and I expect my younger three to follow the same path. Whether or not our society is headed into “a new era of sexual repression,” as Professor Althouse warns, parents in every era have a duty to protect their own children — sons and daughters alike — by warning them against the perils and pitfalls of hedonism. Selah.



 

Category: Celebrities, Hollywood, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 10.23.17

Posted on | October 24, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.23.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Megyn Kelly Tries To Boost Her Ratings
Twitchy: MSNBC Segment Questioning Need For Border Wall Interrupted By…Guess What?
Louder With Crowder: Jenna Jameson Blasts Playboy Over Shemale Playmate


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Winter Is Coming Down Under
American Power: The Report On The Virginia Governor’s Race, also, George Saunders, Lincoln In The Bardo
American Thinker: Why Is Jeff Sessions Hiding The Uranium One Informant?
Animal Magnetism: Hunting Season Totty I
BattleSwarm: Ted Cruz On North Korea
Bring The HEAT: Searing Lessons – How The 2007 Wildfires Changed San Diego County
CDR Salamander: On To The Next Stage Of Foreverwar
Da Tech Guy: Illinois Math – Chicago Public Schools Have Fewer Students, But Taxes Go Up, also, Oh, Shut Up, George!
Don Surber: Bush Speech Was A Cry From The Swamp, also, Eighteen Times Jennifer Rubin Wanted To Impeach Trump
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, Someone Is Wrong On The Internet
The Geller Report: Watch As Milo Slays Liberal TV Panel
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Yours Truly, Johnny Atsign
Joe For America: Jimmy Carter Breaks Ranks
JustOneMinute: Discouraging Saving In Order To Reduce The Deficit
Legal Insurrection: 25 Conservatives (Not Approved By Salon) Worth Following On Twitter, also, Mayim Bialik And The Politics Of Sexual Harassment & Personal Responsibility
Michelle Malkin:
Power Line: Liberal Visits South Dakota, Freaks Out On Seeing Guns, also, The European Revolt Continues
Shark Tank: New Poll Finds Las Vegas Shooting Doesn’t Alter Opinions On Guns
Shot In The Dark: Prioritization
STUMP: Meep Media – Wacky Mysteries
The Jawa Report: Trump Drones Umar Khalid Khorasani, also, Muslima Arrested For Inciting Rebellion
The Political Hat: Court Upholds Legality Of Objective Biological Reality
This Ain’t Hell: Masha Gessen – John Kelly And The Language Of The Military Coup, also, ISIS “Nipped In The Bud” In The Philippines
Weasel Zippers: Melania Trump Cuts Bloated FLOTUS Payroll, also, Chinese/Nork Relationship Reportedly At An End; Next Nork Missile Test Means War With China
Megan McArdle: We Libertarians Were Really Wrong About School Vouchers
Mark Steyn: Where The Blue Of The Night, also, Readying The Knife


99 Cents Today & Tomorrow – Hans Schantz’ The Hidden Truth
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Category: Linkagery

Corporation Promotes Lesbian Feminist Slogan Expressing Anti-Male Rage

Posted on | October 23, 2017 | 3 Comments

 

“The Future Is Female” originated in the extreme fringe of the lesbian separatist movement of the 1970s. By the time Alix Dobkin was photographed wearing this slogan on a T-shirt — promoting a feminist bookstore in New York — the so-called Women’s Liberation Movement that arose in the late 1960s had burned out and fragmented. Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, however. In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, Third Wave feminists have repeated the error of their predecessors, doubling-down on their anti-male rhetoric and hurling accusations of “misogyny” at anyone who criticizes them.

 

Consider the case of Elise Williams, content editor for the online advertising firm Inuvo, who used their site Earn Spend Live as a platform for a “feminist rant” endorsing this radical anti-male slogan:

The other day, Earn Spend Live’s other co-founder, Meleah, rocked her “The Future is Female” tee. As someone who 1) knows Meleah and 2) knows the meaning and origin of this famous saying, I didn’t even bat an eye. I said “love it” and went about my business. But she later told me that at one point during the day, a woman took her to the side, hugged her, and told her that “with love,” she wanted to let her know that her shirt could be offensive. “What if little boys saw it? What if my 26-year-old son saw it?”
Meleah insisted that the interaction was overall a pleasant one — the woman was nice, Meleah politely told her that little boys had 45 presidents and a million superheroes to look up to so they’d be fine, and that was that. But no matter how “nice” this interaction was, it just didn’t sit well with me. And once I did a little reading on the internet, I discovered this is actually a fairly common reaction, especially for women with sons. . . .

Let’s briefly interrupt this “feminist rant” to point out that (a) Meleah Bowles has purple hair, (b) neither Ms. Bowles nor Ms. Williams has any children, so that (c) they are discussing a “future” that will include none of their own offspring. On her Instagram profile, Ms. Williams calls herself a “cat mom,” while Ms. Bowles’ Twitter profile describes her as devoted to “coffee, dogs, and TV.” No husbands, no children, no family — this is what “The Future Is Female” means, and Ms. Williams emphasizes that she “knows the meaning and origin” of this anti-male/anti-heterosexual slogan: “I love it.” Ms. Williams continues:

I only recently became a feminist. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment — it’s not like you get sprinkled with holy water or you get a free t-shirt — but I’d say it happened while we were creating Earn Spend Live. I had a super privileged upbringing (white, middle class, the works) and amazing parents; I was never made to feel like I was less than men. Plus, I only had a sister, so unlike most of my friends, I was never compared to my brother or told to do the dishes while he mowed the yard. . . .

Notice that Ms. Williams attributes her “super privileged upbringing” to her “amazing parents,” so that we may assume that her father deserves some credit for her good fortune, but never mind that:

But after becoming attached at the hip to Meleah (a proud feminist with blue, sometimes green, sometimes purple hair and t-shirts that say things like “The Future is Female” and “I <3 the Female Orgasm), entering the “real world,” and hearing the stories of older, more experienced female professionals via Earn Spend Live, I realized that I had actually been a feminist in the truest sense of the word my whole life; I just had never been taught the meaning of the word and I had no idea the struggles other women faced. . . .

You can read the rest of that. The point is that, in the process of “creating Earn Spend Live,” Ms. Williams became “attached at the hip” to the purple-haired feminist Ms. Bowles and, as a result, decided she “had actually been a feminist . . . my whole life.” She now endorses the lesbian separatist slogan “The Future Is Female” and is being paid to promote this radical anti-male ideology by her corporate employer, Inuvo.

Meleah Bowles (left) and Elise Williams (right).

Does Inuvo CEO Richard Howe know what he is funding? Are the stockholders, board of directors and customers of Inuvo aware of this? How did a publicly-traded corporation become a sponsor of radical feminism? Well, you hire one social-justice warrior (SJW) and then she’ll begin recruiting others, and next thing you know, you’ve got a feminist cult on your payroll — kind of the way SJWs took over Google and other tech companies. If a corporation is profitable (and Inuvo reported more than $71 million in revenue last year), executives may figure there is no harm in hiring a purple-haired English major and giving her a project like Earn Spend Live, whose mission is “to create a community of women helping each other grapple their finances, navigate their career, and live life to the fullest.” This could be social justice as a marketing strategy, a bit of corporate virtue-signaling to position Inuvo as a “progressive” company. More cynically, it’s a form of litigation insurance: if any female employees at Inuvo ever claim to be victims of discrimination, the executives can just point to the purple-haired SJW running this “community of women” and say, “See? We’re all about equality!”

What does Inuvo’s endorsement of “The Future Is Female” mean? The company’s hiring of Meleah Bowles cannot be an accident. Her senior thesis in college was a denunciation of weddings as a “patriarchal ceremony,” an analysis based on Third Wave feminist gender theory:

Feminist rhetorical criticism is critical to a feminist understanding of gendered institutions, such as bridal ceremonies. . . .
Like feminist rhetorical criticism, feminist critical discourse analysis is concerned with the construction of gender. . . .
Feminist discourse is, at its most basic, a way of discussing the gender dynamics of power particularly as they relate to and reinforce the patriarchal structure of society.

Because Ms. Bowles posted this radical feminist essay to her personal blog as a sample of her “professional writing,” certainly whoever makes the hiring decisions at Inuvo must have been aware of it. Nor has Ms. Bowles made a secret of her far-left politics — an Obama voter who supported Bernie Sanders in last year’s Democrat primaries and, of course, hashtagging #ImWithHer in October 2016.

 

What does such a hire signify about Inuvo’s corporate policy goals? Last month, Ms. Bowles wore her “The Future Is Female” shirt while she and Ms. Williams gave a presentation entitled “Unmasking Modern Day Workplace Discrimination” at a women’s networking event.

 

What sort of “workplace discrimination” do they propose to “unmask”?  Doesn’t the very fact that these feminists are employed by Inuvo, assigned to organize a “community of women,” more likely suggest that the company intends henceforth to stop hiring males? Certainly, young men seeking employment should be advised to avoid Inuvo, whose hiring policies connote the embrace of an anti-male agenda.

When the SJW handwriting is on the corporate wall, so to speak, intelligent young men seek opportunities elsewhere. There are no career opportunities for an ambitious young man in a workplace where slogans about “diversity,” “inclusion” and “social justice” replace productivity and competitive success as organizational goals. Look at how the NFL destroyed its brand by embracing SJW ideology. The league’s half-empty stadiums ought to be a warning to corporate America that “social justice” is a toxic formula for business disaster.

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. Corporate executives who seek to appease feminists are likely to be as successful as Neville Chamberlain was in appeasing Hitler:

Feminism is not just anti-male. Feminism is anti-marriage, anti-motherhood, anti-capitalist and anti-Christian. Feminism is destructive in its goals and methods, entirely negative in its purpose and spirit, defining itself by what it is against, i.e., basically everything good and decent in human life. The only things feminists can said to be for are abortion, socialism and homosexuality.

When I explain this in blunt language, people think I’m exaggerating, until I start quoting from the vast library of feminist books I’ve read in the course of three years of research into this subject. (You can view YouTube video of my presentation last month in Massachusetts.)

 

“Certainly all those institutions which were designed on the assumption and for the reinforcement of the male and female role system such as the family (and its sub-institution, marriage), sex, and love must be destroyed.”
— “The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles,” 1969, in Radical Feminism, edited by Anne Koedt, et al. (1973)

“Women are a degraded and terrorized people. Women are degraded and terrorized by men. … Women’s bodies are possessed by men. … Women are an enslaved population. … Women are an occupied people.”
— Andrea Dworkin, 1977 speech at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in Letters from a War Zone (1993)

“The first condition for escaping from forced motherhood and sexual slavery is escape from the patriarchal institution of marriage.”
— Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1988)

“As those familiar with feminist theory know, feminists advocate lesbianism on a variety of grounds. . . .
“Patriarchy, although it takes different forms in different cultures, always depends on the ability of men to control women through heterosexuality.”
— Joyce Trebilcot, “Taking Responsibility for Sexuality,” 1982, in Dyke Ideas: Process, Politics, Daily Life (1994)

“Women’s heterosexual orientation perpetuates their social, economic, emotional, and sexual dependence on and accessibility by men. Heterosexuality is thus a system of male ownership of women.”
— Cheshire Calhoun, “Separating Lesbian Theory from Feminist Theory,” 1994, in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Carole McCann and Seung-kyung Kim (2013)

“[F]eminist scholars argue that heteorosexuality is a prime facet through which male power and dominance is managed and maintained . . . a patriarchal institution that functions to subordinate, degrade and oppress women.”
— Claire O’Callaghan, Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics (2017)

You see that this is not what I say feminism means; this is what feminists say feminism means. Third Wave feminists like Ms. Bowles and Ms. Williams believe the gender binary is socially constructed by the heterosexual matrix. In other words, feminists assert that there are no natural differences between men and women. Feminists believe all women are oppressed by “the gender dynamics of power” which “reinforce the patriarchal structure of society,” to employ the rhetoric of Ms. Bowles’s senior thesis. The family and marriage must be “destroyed” (Koedt, et al., 1973) because women are “enslaved” (Dworkin, 1993) by “the patriarchal institution of marriage” (Jaggar, 1988). Because “men . . . control women through heterosexuality” (Trebilcot, 1994), feminists are against this “system of male ownership of women” (Calhoun, 1994), “a patriarchal institution that functions to subordinate, degrade and oppress women” (O’Callaghan, 2017). And feminists condemn anyone who disagrees with them as a “misogynist,” a woman-hater.

Feminists have been saying these things for decades, but it seems that no conservative ever bothered to conduct a systematic survey and analysis of feminist theory until I took up this project in 2014.

Feminist rhetoric (e.g., “Smash the Patriarchy”) demonizes males as oppressors, treating all men as villainous enemies in a social-justice narrative based on a zero-sum game mentality in which male success is stigmatized as the result of unjust “male privilege.” The only way any man obtains professional success, according to feminist theory, is through the oppression and exploitation of women. The more men succeed, the more women are oppressed; ergo, feminists regard successful male executives like Inuvo’s Richard Howe as evil.

 

When Maleah Bowles says she is fighting patriarchy, what does she mean? Isn’t it reasonable to interpret this as a denunciation of her male co-workers at Inuvo as perpetrators of systematic oppression? Shouldn’t men be insulted by such an accusation? If we believe that incomes are earned by productive labor, then the more productive we are, the more valuable our labor becomes, and the higher our earnings. What is the value produced by Elise Williams’s “feminist rant” at Inuvo’s Earn Spend Live site? How does this “community of women” contribute to the profitability of Inuvo? Isn’t it likely that embracing this radical ideology will ultimately be harmful to Inuvo’s business? Well, that’s their call to make, and if the company’s stockholders are eager to fund feminism’s agenda of anti-male hatred, they are free to do so. However, if anyone at Inuvo were to complain about this, they’d probably be fired (like James Damore), because it’s discrimination to disagree with feminists.

Feminist demands for “equality” are actually a demand for uncontested power, especially including the power to silence dissent.





 

 

Category: Sex Trouble

FMJRA 2.0: Wolf Creek Pass

Posted on | October 22, 2017 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Wolf Creek Pass

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Pussycat No More
Animal Magnetism
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
EBL

Harvey Weinstein Is the ‘Patriarchy,’ and Other Feminist Non Sequiturs
Welcome To My Playpen
Adam Piggott

FMJRA 2.0: Casanova
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 10.16.17
Proof Positive
EBL

Dear @AnnaKendrick47 …
EBL

In The Mailbox: 10.17.17
Proof Positive
EBL

The Transgender Cult: Parents Speak Out About ‘Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria’
Welcome To My Playpen
Adam Piggott
EBL

In The Mailbox: 10.18.17
Proof Positive

BOOM! Anti-#GamerGate ‘Male Feminist’ @Sam_Kriss Accused of Sexual Assault
Adam Piggott
EBL

In The Mailbox: 10.19.17
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 10.20.17
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers this week:

  1. EBL (10)
  2. Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


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Category: FMJRA Award

Actress Flees Italy as ‘Sophisticated’ Europeans Side With Harvey Weinstein

Posted on | October 21, 2017 | 5 Comments

Our “allies” are so thoughtful and enlightened:

Italian movie actress and director Asia Argento is facing pushback in her home country after speaking out about an alleged rape at the hands of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. While Argento’s courage in speaking about what happened to her was praised in Hollywood, and helped encourage at least 40 women to speak out about their own experiences of assault at the hands of Weinstein, public opinion in Italy has sided more with Weinstein than with Argento, according to Quartz’s Annalisa Merelli.
Merelli points out that the opinion writers have been remarkably bold in their condemnation of Argento and other actresses speaking out against sexual assault — former journalist and MP Renato Farina, for instance, has suggested that the assaults described by actresses are “prostitution, not rape.” Vittorio Feltri, editor in chief of Libero, a right wing populist newspaper, said that since Weinstein didn’t physically harm Argento that the sex must have been consensual — and that, if anything, Argento should be thankful to Weinstein for forcibly performing oral sex on her. Politician Vittorio Sgarbi went still further, arguing that Weinstein “was actually assaulted by her.”
Prominent Italian women have targeted Argento as well, questioning why she didn’t speak out earlier about the rape or claiming that she deserved what happened to her since she willingly visited Weinstein in his hotel room.
In wake of the public outcry against her, Argento has said that she is leaving Italy for Germany to escape the “climate of tension” and “victim blaming.”
“Italy,” Argento said, “is far behind the rest of the world in its view of women.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Every American woman I’ve known who has traveled in Europe has talked about how different attitudes are there. Especially in France and Italy, women report that the cat-calling is horrific. In fact, if you pay attention to complaints about cat-calling in America, you’ll notice that the problem has an ethnic aspect. When a video of a woman being harassed on the streets of New York went viral in 2014, nearly all the harassers were black or Latino. This resulted in a discussion among feminists of whether complaining about cat-calling is racist. This is how “intersectionality” works: Only white men are to blame for sexism — and only American white men, because every American liberal believes Europe is better than America.

 

Category: Europe, Italy, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 10.20.17

Posted on | October 20, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.20.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: DEMOCRAT RUSSIAN FUSION COLLUSION
Twitchy: Lefties Lose Their Minds Over Latest Dana Loesch NRA Ad
Louder With Crowder: College Students Love Trump’s Tax Plan – When They Think It’s Bernie’s
According To Hoyt: A Generation With No Past
Monster Hunter Nation: New MHI RPG Featuring Savage Worlds Rules
Vox Popoli: Everyone Knew


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #60 – The White Men Episode, also, Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Tranny Edition
American Power: Stuart Varney Rips Rep. Wilson For Listening In On President’s Phone Call To Fallen Soldier’s Mother
American Thinker: How Corrupt Are American Institutions?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Power Of Tears Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For October 20
Bring The HEAT: Old Ironsides To Leave Port For First Time In Three Years
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: #ItWasntMe, also, Who Wanted To Meet With The Russians? Bill Clinton
Don Surber: The Cognitive Dissonance Pundit
Dustbury: The Eternal Need For Speed
Fred On Everything:
The Geller Report: UK Anti-Terror Watchdog Doesn’t Want “Naive” Young Jihadis Prosecuted On Return From Middle East
Hogewash: Blognet, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Vile Left Wing Hacks Attack Gen. Kelly; Lunatic Congresscritter Wilson Claims “Empty Barrel” Is Racist Term
JustOneMinute: Send Better Czars
Legal Insurrection: Megyn Kelly Attempts to Dance As Ratings Plummet, also, Pardon? Sheriff Joe’s Request To Vacate Criminal Contempt Finding Denied
Michelle Malkin: Happy birthday, young lady!
Power Line: Listen To Donald Trump Speak To Gold Star Widow, also, Frederica Wilson Plays The Race Card
Shot In The Dark: But What Could The Problem Be?
STUMP: Connecticut Continuing – Is There A Budget Yet?
The Jawa Report: Where’s Dr. Rusty? Road Rage Edition, also, Sandcrawler PSA – Russians Run MSM?
The Political Hat: The Transing Of Health
This Ain’t Hell: David Meier Doubles Down On The Dumb, also, Frederica Wilson Claims Empty Barrels Are Racist
Weasel Zippers: Puerto Rico Governor Backs Trump, “Very Grateful” For Speedy Maria Response, also, New Yorker Claims Kelly’s Speech About Fallen Soldiers Could Be Preview Of Military Coup
Mark Steyn: Uranium & Diarrhea, Inc.


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Category: Linkagery

Vox Media Sexual Harassment Scandal: Another Sign the SJW Left Is Imploding

Posted on | October 20, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Would you sexually harass Eden Rohatensky? Pierced septum, weird hair — what kind of guy would look at her and say, “Yeah, that girl needs some uninvited sexual attention from a 40-something co-worker”?

Say hello to erstwhile Vox Media VP Lockhart Steele:

 

Steele was once something of a blog wunderkind. He moved to New York in his 20s and launched a site focusing on real estate (Curbed), then spun off a site on shopping (Racked) and another one about restaurants (Eater). He became a managing editor at Gawker, and then in 2013, hired on at Vox with a deal that reportedly paid him $20 million for his sites.

Alas, evidently, Steele was notorious for getting drunk at company events and causing problems. Eden Rohatensky recounts her experience:

Later that weekend, all of my colleagues had attended a party and were headed in a convoy of Ubers to go get something to eat. I was in the back seat, in the middle. To my left was my coworker and friend. In the front, the head of my department. To my right, one of the company’s VPs.
We drove towards our destination and suddenly I felt the VP caress my hand. And then my arm. And then suddenly, in the dark corner of the car, he was kissing my neck. I grabbed his hand and held it down, worried he would try to go further with it. My coworker and my boss were unaware.
I was fired a month later due to lack of productivity. No longer fearful of losing my job, I reached out to a few of the people I had worked with. I reported what had happened with the VP. A year later, I found out that an investigation had been done. That he had multiple victims within the company. That his punishment was being told he could not drink at corporate events any longer. He had too many shares in the company. There was nothing they could do.

Alcohol impairs judgment, and chronic heavy drinking produces cumulative damage to the prefrontal cortex, so that the habitual drunk becomes increasingly irresponsible and impulsive in his behavior, even when he’s not drinking. This may explain why a millionaire online media executive like Lockhart Steele would decide, “Hey, maybe that blue-haired girl from the IT department needs me to start kissing her neck.”

Of course, the saga of Steele’s self-destruction isn’t being told as a cautionary tale about the catastrophic consequences of alcoholism. Rather, it’s about “male power” and the “floodgates of assault and harassment survivors speaking out against their attackers.”

 

 

 

 

What happened was that, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, some female journalists compiled a list of “Sh*tty Media Men” alleged to be guilty of Weinstein-type abuse. Because the accusers were anonymous, Erin Gloria Ryan of the Daily Beast urged caution:

The sheet documents a wide range of violations, lumping in sexual and physical abuse with such crimes as “creepy AF in the DM’s.” It ropes “being a monster” in with “being a jerk.” . . .
[S]ocial media has made “whisper networks” much more powerful, with a low barrier to entry and a high payoff. Now, a woman could conceivably warn thousands of women at once rather than just a few, or a vengeful ex-girlfriend could lob a serious accusation at a lover who spurned her. Exposing the origin of the accusations is against the rules, so it’s impossible to tell the difference between those in column A and column B.

Welcome to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, my friends. The witch-hunt has begun, and the witches are doing the hunting.

Never mind the specific wrongs that Lockhart Steele may have perpetrated. When a witch-hunt hysteria takes hold, differences between minor and major forms of witchcraft soon cease to matter. Amid a paranoid climate of suspicion, any accusation of witch-type behavior will suffice to have the target burned at the stake before sundown.

While we enjoy ourselves roasting marshmallows over the media flames, however, it’s important to keep in mind why this is happening. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Democrats claimed that Republicans were waging a “War on Women,” a propaganda tactic that helped Obama win re-election with the largest “gender gap” ever recorded by Gallup. This helped pave the way for the “campus rape epidemic” narrative that emerged in 2014, a preview of Hillary Clinton’s feminist-themed campaign in 2016. For the past five years, you see, what Andrew Breitbart dubbed the Democrat-Media Complex has been stoking the flames of feminist fury in hopes of thereby gaining a partisan political advantage.

Well, how’d that work out for you, Lockhart Steele? How about you, Sam Kriss? Matt Hickey, Devin Faraci, Sunil Patel, et al.?

What does this remind you of? It reminds me of Leon Trotsky. He was arguably the most crucial figure of the Bolshevik Revolution. A former Menshevik, Trotsky switched sides to join Lenin in urging a violent coup to overthrow the short-lived constitutional republic in Russia. Following the so-called October Revolution, Trotsky became commander of the Red Army during the civil war, and was second only to Lenin in the Soviet regime. Yet after Lenin fell ill, Trotsky was out-maneuvered by Stalin in the struggle to become Lenin’s successor. Trotsky was eventually purged and exiled, and assassinated by an NKVD agent in Mexico less than a year after Stalin had made his murderous bargain with Hitler.

The lesson of Trotsky’s life is that those who associate themselves with radical movements often become victims of their own “success.”

When we see so many soi-disant “progressive” men being destroyed by the regime of “social justice” they have sought to impose upon us, we may be tempted to dismiss this as mere hypocrisy. Yet the real problem is that there is no such thing as “social justice.” The promised egalitarian utopia is a mirage, as Hayek said. The Left pursues a destructive agenda — condemning “all hitherto existing society,” to quote the Communist Manifesto — based on the implicit claim that they have a plan to bring about a social order that is better than what they have destroyed.

You say you got a real solution.
Well, you know, we’d all love to see the plan.

John Lennon’s cynical putdown of 1960s radicals captures the real crux of the problem with the Left, generally and historically. What will the promised “equality” look like? How many people will have to die to bring about the “dictatorship of the proletarian”? Who will become the victims of the totalitarian regime? Why is it that these revolutionaries never produce an actual utopia, but only misery and bloodshed?

Wise people stay far away from radical movements and feminism is inherently radical, an attack on the fundamental structure of society.

“[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
— Pat Robertson, 1992

Every word of that is quite literally true. Anyone who wishes to examine the documentation can just buy my book, but my research is always producing further evidence. You can read, for example, Professor Marilyn Frye’s essay: “Do You Have to Be a Lesbian to Be a Feminist?” Professor Frye argues that “the patriarchal institution of female heterosexuality . . . is central to the continuous replication of the patriarchy.” She concludes that a feminist “cannot be heterosexual in any standard patriarchal meaning of the word — you cannot be any version of a patriarchal wife.” This confronts the would-be feminist with a choice of either (a) pondering what a non-patriarchal heterosexuality might look like, or (b) giving up on men altogether and becoming a lesbian feminist.

Unless, of course, she is willing to choose (c) not being a feminist at all.

It’s like the Bolshevik Revolution. If you were a smart Russian in 1917, you would have fled the country as soon as Lenin took over. No member of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie could have been mistaken about what “the dictatorship of the proletariat” would mean for them. Better to get out alive, even if it meant being a penniless refugee, than to stick around and hope somehow to survive The Red Terror.

However, the Soviet regime also imprisoned, slaughtered or starved to death many millions of workers and peasants, the very classes in whose name the Bolsheviks had waged their revolutionary coup. Ultimately, as with Trotsky, the regime turned against the revolutionaries themselves, as the paranoid Stalin purged and annihilated his potential rivals. As with the Bolsheviks, so also with the feminists, who have been waging their own revolution for nearly half a century, but who would have us believe that the “patriarchy” is more powerful and dangerous than ever.

Feminism has now reached its Moscow Show Trial phase. The purges are underway, and their Popular Front strategy will soon be abandoned. Any progressive man who believes he can survive as a “male feminist” is apt to become a target for destruction, like Lockhart Steele. Surely he must be dumbfounded by his sudden and awful downfall. When he was in college, after all, liberals were dismissing the Lewinsky scandal because it was “just about sex” and “everybody lies about sex.” Nina Burleigh declared “American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads” to thank President Clinton for his devotion to abortion rights.

Here we are in 2017, however, and Lockhart Steele, millionaire executive for the self-described progressive media company Vox, can’t kiss a girl on the neck without being immolated on the feminist bonfire. Times have changed, and Lockhart Steele didn’t notice the writing on the wall. Perhaps he was too drunk to pay attention to the evidence that feminists were increasingly angry at being groped by “progressive” men who thought they could emulate the Clintonian style. But dear God, how intoxicated must Lockhart Steele have been the night he made a move on Eden Rohatensky? Her aposematic hairstyle should have warned him that she was dangerously crazy. And the septum ring? Hello?

 

Guys, wake up! If you ever encounter a woman with facial piercings, beware. Avoid eye contact. Say nothing. Do not interact with her.

No psychologically healthy woman has a pierced septum. Eden Rohatensky has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and identifies as “non-binary.” Women who cultivate a deliberately weird appearance — tattoos, piercings, bizarre “Goth” makeup, etc. — are presenting the world with a visual warning sign: “Stay away! Leave me alone!”

Lockhart Steele must have been too drunk to understand this. And his folly is symptomatic of the larger problem of the Left in the Trump Age. During the eight-year holiday from reality that was the Obama presidency, the Left got the idea that they could do whatever they wanted to do, without suffering any serious consequences. In 2011, mobs of smelly anarchists launched the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which ought to have been a disastrous embarrassment for the Democrat Party, but Obama got re-elected with little difficulty. All the scandals and failures of the Obama administration seemed to have no impact, and electing Hillary Clinton as his successor was regarded as such a foregone conclusion that, when Trump was elected, Democrats went into a sort of post-traumatic crisis. The Left is now imploding in a genocidal rage, à la Cambodia under Pol Pot, a hunt for scapegoats to be destroyed in order to “purify” the progressive movement.

  • Question: Did Hillary Clinton lose because Democrats were too sympathetic to the interests of heterosexual males?
  • Answer: No, of course not. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The feminist witch-hunt against sexual harassers in the liberal media is counterintuitive, if the future of the Democrat Party requires a movement that can appeal to more than blue-haired feminist weirdos. Yet feminists now seem determined to destroy any male within the progressive movement who is even suspected of heterosexual tendencies.

A witch-hunt has no statute of limitations, nor any standard of due process and, as for evidence, who needs evidence? If a woman says her ex-boyfriend did awful things to her in 2007 or 1997, feminists will applaud her for her “courage” in “breaking the silence,” and nothing that the targeted scapegoat says in his own defense will save him.

“The politics of personal destruction” — that’s what Hillary Clinton called it when her husband was exposed in the Lewinsky scandal, and now it’s being unleashed by feminists against the men of the Left.

A left-wing bonfire is really such a beautiful thing to watch. . .

Smores, anyone?



 

 

Category: Sex Trouble
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