The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 01.19.18

Posted on | January 20, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.19.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Will Democrats Shut Down The Government?
Twitchy: MAMA BEAR – Jenna Jameson Posts #MarchForLife Pic, Takes On Hordes Of Frothing, Nasty Pro-Aborts
Louder With Crowder: CA Dems – Trump Cut Business Taxes? We’ll Raise Them!
According To Hoyt: Shiny! Let’s Be Bad!
Monster Hunter Nation: Gritty Cop Show Test Game Recap #1
Vox Popoli: Disabled Veteran Fired By SJWs
City Journal: California, Poverty Capital (h/t NeoWayland)


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Three New Sites On The Old Blogroll
American Power: LA Times Publisher Levinsohn Accused Of Sexual Improprieties
American Thinker: Facebook’s Expanding Insanity
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Dynasties Ending Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For January 19
Bring The HEAT: Primitive Technology Guy Builds A Hut
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: The News And The Dregs, also, A GOP Strategy To Win The Shutdown So Simple Only A “Stupid Party” Could Blow It
Don Surber: Trump’s Got Them By The Tweets
Dustbury: The Right To Be An Asshat
The Geller Report: State Department Withholds Another $45 Million From UNRWA, also, Dresden Burka Workshop Goes Forward With Support From City Authorities
Hogewash: Blogsmoke, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: Democrats On Intel Committee Vote Against Transparency For Fusion GPS Documents
JustOneMinute: Showdown Drama!
Legal Insurrection: Republicans Demand Declassification Of Report On Obama/Russian/Deep State Collusion, also, #SchumerShutdown/#DACAShutdown
Power Line: A Primer On The “Government Shutdown”, also, Schumer Flees From Tom Cotton
Shark Tank: Trump Asks Americans To Crown The “King Of Fake News” For 2017
Shot In The Dark: This Is Your New Senator
STUMP: Friday Foolery – Centsless In Seattle & Cook County Regrets
The Jawa Report: Deso Dogg Finally Really Dead Jim!
The Political Hat: An Absolute Nonsense
This Ain’t Hell: Deso Dogg Dead, also, SSG Joshua Stokes Alters Active Duty Records
Weasel Zippers: Senate Cloture Vote Fails, #SchumerShutdown Likely, also, Facebook To Have Users Grade News Sources To Decide Which Are “Broadly Trusted”
Megan McArdle: Why Hospitals Aren’t In The Drug Business
Mark Steyn: God’s Apology, also, Weaponizing The Shutdown


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Category: Linkagery

Hogwash, ESR

Posted on | January 20, 2018 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

Eric S. Raymond’s feedback on the Aziz Ansari comedy of manners-in-the-buff has one of my favorite hobby horses requiring a ride. ESR is far smarter than I, and an avowed libertarian. Hence my amusement at this:

“Grace” behaved as she did because she doesn’t have a realistic option to hold out for romance before sex; women who do that put themselves at high risk of not getting second dates, there are too many others willing to play by the new rules. So she has to do sex instead and hope lightning strikes.

Questions for ESR and “the world” in general:

  • Does “Grace” have free will, or is it the case that “she doesn’t have a realistic option”?
  • Is the individual the unit of analysis, or is Grace just a component of “women who do that”, who war endlessly with “too many others”?
  • What does “do sex instead and hope lightning strikes” even mean beyond the scope of a certain hormonal instant?

Let me offer an explanatory model. Think of people in three dimensions: body, mind, and soul. Nobody argues against the body, few against the mind, and only fools against the soul. These are orthogonal, and in tension. The discussion at hand is body verses mind.

“Grace” let the body drive. Pure materialism. Maybe she wanted the release of the moment, and maybe she hoped to leverage that moment in a “lightning strike” to form a relationship with Ansari. The body always lives in the moment. Quite often, if not usually, to its detriment.

The mind (for the mature) tends to have a longer planning horizon than the body. Mature people can recognize the temptations of the body, but live past the moment and gauge whether it makes sense to get naked with someone you’ve just met. Or, figuring that most people are roughly the trash one knows oneself to be at heart, maybe one holds back.

The soul, if one subscribes to the notion, grasps that there is this Destiny thing in play. If the body and mind are subordinated to the soul, then concerns about “[people] who do that” are just the body using fear to trick the mind into rationalize giving the body free reign.

Be liberated from that fear of “[people] who do that”; from the lusts of the body; from the “Sorry (Not) Ansari” cycle of flesh devouring flesh. People who play that game are the ones writing open letters, kicking up social controversies, gripped by fear of being buried alive in a box, seeing therapists, and dying in opioid epidemics.

Which gets us back to my amusement with the intellectual libertarian set. If we’re free, why make collectivist arguments like

The old ways had features we now find ugly and unacceptable, but maybe that was the best adaptation they could manage to a hard problem! It is unlikely we can go back…”How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm”, and all that. But what do we do to go forward?

There is no “hard problem” to manage in any collective way. There are only individuals working out their respective Destinies.

Aside for Ansari: be a man, and quit treating your manhood like the joystick of some video game. The boyish act of indulging in bimbos prepared for acts of hooverism at first blush is Russian roulette: you’ll end up with something incurable. Never go Full Charlie Sheen.

Category: Uncategorized

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | January 19, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

The girl (later known as Mindy) blowing by, is the penultimate humiliation. Not the first. That’d been the blind runner, seeming to putz along with his guide, casually passing my struggling flesh. No, the final thing was the arch cramp, reducing me to a limping skip for the final miles. But by the power of God, Gu, and ibuprofin, I complete the act of self-torture.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
She’s the job interviewer a week later. The marathon hasn’t come up. Thank heaven. I still ache, everywhere, as the yoga pants turn to leave the room.
Over her shoulder, smiling: “What was your time?”

—
Thanks, Darleen!

Category: Friday Fiction

You Should Be Reading Dalrock

Posted on | January 19, 2018 | 1 Comment

The blogger called Dalrock describes himself thus:

I’m a happily married man living with my sexy wife and our two wonderful kids in the Dallas/Forth Worth area. I’m very interested in how the post feminist world impacts myself and my family, and am using this blog to explore these kinds of issues.

I’ve occasionally linked and quoted Dalrock here, and some of his regular readers are also my regular readers. He is unafraid to make tough arguments: “Child support is designed to replace marriage, and it is wickedly effective at this. . . . Child support doesn’t just encourage women to have children out of wedlock, it also encourages women to kick married fathers out of the home.” Remember all those Maury Povich show episodes where unwed mothers learned the results of DNA tests to determine who their Baby Daddy was? That kind of irresponsibility is actually encouraged by the existence of a legal system that uses punitive measures to enforce child-support payments. It protects women’s “right” to screw around by forcing men to pay for the predictable result of such promiscuity. But as Dalrock points out, many conservatives are OK with this destructive policy. “We are trapped on Slut Island and Traditional Conservatives are our Gilligan” is the title of one of Dalrock’s classic rants, in which he makes the point that “slut shaming” works.

Too many conservatives are unwilling to confront feminist ideology directly and answer it with an emphatic “no.” It is folly to grant the first premise of an opponent’s argument and then try to argue for a different conclusion to the syllogism. Because many conservatives do not wish to seem prejudiced or unenlightened, they have a habit of giving away the game by accepting the idea of “gender equality” as a desirable goal. This is a strategic error, accepting battle on a field of their opponent’s choosing. A better strategy is the truth — no such thing as “gender equality” has ever existed in human history, and there is no policy which will bring about “gender equality” in the future. Even if it were possible to create “gender equality” by governmental fiat, this would not result in an increase in happiness. In fact, because “gender equality” is self-evidently contrary to human nature, such a regime would require a totalitarian system of enforcement which would negate personal liberty. The increasing insanity on our university campuses — where Title IX has long been a totalitarian mechanism for the enforcement of “gender equality” — is an omen of what feminist policy would produce in society at large.

Do I agree with every argument Dalrock makes? No, but I never agree 100% with anyone. Some of his arguments are offensive, but the point is that he is willing to question the basis premise of feminism, and unafraid to offend us in doing so. Dalrock points out, for example, that Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network recently featured a dialogue between two women who have “mastered the art of not finding a husband.” CBN host Wendy Griffith is 53 and unmarried, while her guest Mandy Hale is 38 and unmarried. Are they really the best qualified experts to offer “family values” advice to young women?

It seems rather rude to raise such questions, but when we are fighting (and losing) a battle to preserve Western civilization, being overly concerned with courtesy is a hindrance to effective warfare. Dalrock’s insulting attitude toward Miss Griffith offends my sense of chivalry, but in doing so, he raises the question of whether Christian parents are giving their daughters advice that is as unbiblical as it is impractical:

[M]odern Christian culture has identified the feminist life script as coming from God. The very unbiblical feminist obsession with women’s self esteem has become a core tenet of modern Christianity.

Ouch! Dalrock summarizes the argument of Lori Gottlieb that “women who delay marriage too long will find themselves with a rapidly declining pool of marriage prospects,” and this is very important for several reasons. Christians who proclaim their devotion to “family values” have a sacred obligation to resist the decadence of secular society: “be not conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2). The Apostle Paul warned Timothy against those “seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” that counsel “forbidding to marry.” That scripture can be read as a prophetic warning against those heretical cults which became known as Gnosticism, but in our day we find a sort of neo-Gnosticism creeping stealthily into many churches in the form of “Christian feminism,” an oxymoron.

“The Temptation of Eve,” John Roddam Spencer Stanhope,

Years ago, I warned that conservatives were losing the battle against same-sex “marriage” because they were unwilling to confront the secular gospel of “equality.” See “Gay Rights, Gay Rage” (Nov. 17, 2008) which I amplified in “Whither Marriage?” (Jan. 3, 2009), making the point that men and women are different in ways that are socially significant:

Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility — the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man.

The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.

This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that “man” and “woman” define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.

Attempts to advance “gender equality” require us to ignore or suppress the biological reality and social significance of sexual difference.

A successful marriage requires voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit, and this becomes impossible if a husband and wife see themselves as antagonists in a competition for “equality.” It is entirely possible to have a happy and enduring marriage that does not conform to a 1950s sitcom script of what a “traditional” family should look like. Yet a marriage is unlikely to be happy, and is not likely to endure, if an obsession with “equality” causes the spouses to resent each other for their different (and hence, unequal) contributions to their household.

Malaysia: Imam says girls
should marry before 15,
otherwise their value drops
Malaysian Imam Azhar Idrus stated that “girls are getting married at a later age due to education, adding that they are about 28 years old by the time they are finished with university” and that by “28 years old, no one would want to marry them.” . . .
Azhar added it is haram (prohibited) for teenagers of a marriageable age to befriend men unless the intention is to marry the man.
“Even after finishing school, it is haram to befriend men in any way at all,” he said.

Far be it from me to endorse the views of a radical Islamic imam, but Christian conservatives ought to ask themselves what the consequences will be if Muslims follow the imam’s teachings (which are certainly justified by the Koran) while the Western world embraces feminist dogma. The total fertility rate (average lifetime births per woman) in Malaysia is 2.5, which is 34% higher than the U.S. rate of 1.87.

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and if we wish to prevent that destruction, we must be willing to think seriously, and ask uncomfortable questions, about the causes of social decadence. That’s why I say: You should be reading Dalrock.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 01.18.18

Posted on | January 19, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.18.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: But What About The DREAMers?
Twitchy: NOT SO FAST. Here’s The Reason Senator Cotton’s Office Told A Liberal To Cease And Desist
Louder With Crowder: Apple CEO Tim Cook Discusses 20,000 New Jobs Created By Tax Cuts
Jim Bovard: Enraged Readers Cheer Federal Killings Of Gun Owners (h/t NeoWayland)


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Sovietman Reviews Pushing Rubber Downhill
American Power: Minority Unemployment Lowest On Record, also, Fake Twitter Memes About Homeless Along Santa Ana Trail
American Thinker: Breaking – Donald Trump Is Not Pregnant
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Random Thoughts
BattleSwarm: House Report – Awan Gang Rampaged Through Democrat Servers
Da Tech Guy: I Propose The 48 Hour Trump/MSM News Rule, also, What Does It Mean To Be Genuine?
Don Surber: Where Is The Media’s Shame?
Dustbury: The Man Who Would Be Governor
The Geller Report: Muslima Ex-Student Sets Eight Fires At St. Kate’s, also, Indian PM Modi Abandons Legacy Of Muslim Appeasement
Hogewash: Zooming In On NGC 3201, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: Five Months After Hurricane Maria, PR Officials Caught Hoarding Relief Supplies
JustOneMinute: Not The Collusion I Was Promised, But…
Legal Insurrection: Kenneth Davis Nomination To DOE Civil Rights Offices Clears Senate Committee, also, SCOTUS Halts NC Court-Ordered Redraw Of Congressional Districts
Power Line: BOMBSHELL – Simpson Admits Fusion GPS Went To The Press To Salvage Hillary’s Campaign, also, With Alex Acosta History Repeats Itself
Shark Tank: Sean Hannity Endorses DeSantis For FL Governor
Shot In The Dark: “Unarmed”
STUMP: Divestment & Activist Investing Follies – Democratic Politicians Rev It Up
The Jawa Report: 75% Of U.S. Terrorists Foreign Born
The Political Hat: Jail For The Mind – Policing Speech, Policing Equity, Policing Privilege
This Ain’t Hell: SPC Bozdogan & PFC Krajnik Saving The World, also, Deplorable Vet To Attend SOTU
Weasel Zippers: Lib Pundit Bill Press – Trump’s Base “Wacko Racists”, “Rednecks”, also, Swiss Town Denies Passport To Dutch Vegan Because She’s “Too Annoying”
Megan McArdle: How The U.S. Wound Up Enthralled By Unions
Mark Steyn: The Media Get Waisted, also, Grab ‘Em By The Pussyhat


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Category: Linkagery

‘Maybe as an Old Chick I Don’t Get it’

Posted on | January 18, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Maybe as an Old Chick I Don’t Get it’

 

You’ve probably heard about the Aziz Ansari “scandal,” in which a 22-year-old photographer (“Grace”) had a bad date with the 36-year-old TV star. Darleen Click’s take on the story is excellent:

It’s a cringe-worthy endeavor to read, not just because Grace keeps remembering her interior dialogue of feeling uncomfortable accompanied with little girl astonishment that Ansari wasn’t a mindreader, but that she never takes any responsibility for her own part in active participation in sending signals that are easily interpreted as coyness, not reticence. She receives and gives oral sex. Indeed, after she told him she didn’t want intercourse that night, she remained naked and even consented to give him another round of oral sex.
Maybe as an old chick I don’t get it, but wandering around a guy’s apartment in the nude and giving him head when he asks usually is an indication I’m consenting to sexual behavior.
Now, I get that Ansari, if I’m to accept at face value everything Grace says, acted boorishly and too aggressively in trying to get her into bed. However, persistence isn’t assault. Being on the receiving end of wolfish or piggish behavior makes for a bad experience, but an adult chalks it up to a learning experience, not an excuse to engage in public character assassination and virtue-signalling.

“If you don’t want to race, stay off the track.” How hard can it be to understand this game? What did 22-year-old “Grace” expect when Ansari invited her to his TriBeCa apartment? Do we have to draw her a diagram? Does she need a Powerpoint presentation? The object of the game being well-known, the two basic questions are:

  1. Do you want to play at all?
    and
  2. Who do you want to play it with?

When a young woman accepts an invitation to the guy’s apartment, it’s like an audition: He plays his game, she plays her game and, if both players enjoy the game, there will be a future rematch. The story told by Grace is a classic of the emerging #MeToo “I’m-a-traumatized-victim” genre, although lacking the kinky LGBTQ thrills of the Melanie Martinez saga or the Eli Erlick story. As heterosexual hookup-gone-wrong tales go, it’s most interesting for its detail of the crudeness of Aziz’s technique. If you expected a 36-year-old millionaire celebrity bachelor to be smooth and tactful — perhaps even romantic — you’re going to be disappointed. As several critics have pointed out, however, “Grace” did a very bad job of communicating her own desires — or, as it were, her lack of desire:

In the Uber home from Ansari’s apartment, Grace texted a friend: “I hate men.” She continued: “I had to say no a lot. He wanted sex. He wanted to get me drunk and then f–k me.”

Male sexual desire is inherently wrong — this is feminism, 2018.

It was wrong for Aziz Ansari to want to have sex with “Grace,” because she is a feminist. She hates men because she hates sex.

Let us stipulate that Ansari’s technique was a huge problem. Darleen Click says he acted “entitled,” but technique is a matter of habit, and we may imagine that the millionaire show-biz celebrity is accustomed to dating women who don’t mind his “cut-to-the-chase” approach. Or maybe he’s used to hiring hookers, and doesn’t know how to deal with a 22-year-old amateur, an NYU student who expects . . . Well, what?

That’s the real mystery here. Did “Grace” think that her date with Ansari was going to be romantic, the beginning of a relationship? Did she therefore expect Ansari to proceed as tentatively as a college boy eager to impress her with his thoughtfulness and sensitivity? There was clearly a mismatch of expectations in this encounter, with Ansari flooring the accelerator, so to speak, going full-speed toward his intended destination from the moment they got back to his apartment after dinner.

Ansari is 36 years old, and he can’t read signals? That’s another baffling aspect of this story, how a grown man who had hitherto enjoyed a reputation as a progressive “woke” guy completely misread his date’s mood. Here’s a suggestion: He should have ended the date after dinner.

“Stick and move” — that’s the smart technique. Instead of moving so fast as to overwhelm her with a sexual blitzkrieg, leave her enough space to choose the next move. So she comes over to your place, you go out to dinner, and as you’re leaving the restaurant, you say something like, “Hey, I’m thinking I should probably just call you a cab.”

This puts the ball in her court, and requires her to respond with an expression of her own interest. It’s analogous to a “fork” in chess. You’re giving her a chance to bail out and, by taking the initiative to do so, you’re signaling that maybe you’re not really that interested.

She faces the dilemma: A guy who, on the one hand, is interested in her, but on the other hand, is willing to walk away — that’s the real power move young bachelors must master. In the age of “affirmative consent,” guys must learn to embrace the power of “no.”

There are 3.5 billion women in the world, and as much as you’d like to close the deal with this one tonight, you could just take a pass, chalk it up to bad luck and try again tomorrow night with some other girl. Or at least that’s message you convey when you offer to end the date early, at which point, it’s her dilemma: Did she fail to make a good impression? Did she say the wrong thing? Are her thighs too fat?

Every girl in the world has insecurities, see? When a guy conveys the message that he’s willing to walk away, she starts hearing that little voice inside her head telling her: “He doesn’t really like you. Nobody really likes you. Nobody’s ever going to like you. It’s the cellulite.”

While I don’t endorse emotional manipulation, an understanding of female psychology helps avoid the kind of disaster Aziz Ansari experienced. And let’s be clear: He is the victim of what has been called “3,000 words of revenge porn” — a bad date turned into a #MeToo story, inflicting permanent damage to his reputation, and giving feminists another excuse to lecture the world about “rape culture.”

 

Yes, the obnoxious Lindy West had to weigh in:

The notion of affirmative consent did not fall from space in October 2017 to confound well-meaning but bumbling men; it was built, loudly and painstakingly and in public, at great personal cost to its proponents, over decades. If you’re fretting about the perceived overreach of #MeToo, maybe start by examining the ways you’ve upheld the stigmatization of feminism. Nuanced conversations about consent and gendered socialization have been happening every single day that Aziz Ansari has spent as a living, sentient human on this earth. The reason they feel foreign to so many men is that so many men never felt like they needed to listen.

She speaks of “the stigmatization of feminism” as if it’s a bad thing, but let’s re-read those text messages “Grace” sent during her Uber ride home:

“I hate men. . . . He wanted sex.”

That’s the bottom line here. No feminist in 2018 approves of men wanting sex. It is wrong for men to want sex, according to feminism.

This is what Darleen Click means when she says “as an old chick I don’t get it.” Back in the day, women knew men wanted sex, but they were cool with it because women wanted sex, too. It may be difficult for young feminists to believe, but there used to be women who actually liked men. In fact, there still are women who like men, but none of those women are invited to write op-eds for the New York Times. In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat, feminists have removed the mask of “equality.” Feminism is now an unapologetic anti-male hate movement.

“Men are the enemy. Heterosexual women are collaborators with the enemy. . . .
“We see heterosexuality as an institution of male domination, not a free expression of personal preference.”
— Leeds Revolutionary Feminists, 1981

Back in the day, the lesbian separatism of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminists was an extreme fringe, but 21st-century feminism is about mainstreaming this radical anti-male/anti-heterosexual worldview.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 01.17.18

Posted on | January 18, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #138
EBL: Beats Looking At Squirrels…
Twitchy: President Trump’s Fake News Awards Breaks The GOP’s Website
Louder With Crowder: Democrats Okay With Shutting Down Government Over 800,000 Illegal Immigrants
Daily Caller: FBI, DOJ Argue For Dismissal Of Suit Over Garland, TX Jihadi Attack


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: I Don’t Take Photos, also, Gone Skiing
American Power: David Weinberger, Too Big To Know, also, Robert J. Gordon, The Rise And Fall Of American Growth
American Thinker: What I Learned In The Peace Corps In Africa – Trump Is Right
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: UT – “Hey, Look At This Sweet Chicom Money!” Ted Cruz – “DON’T EVEN.” UT – (whimpering)
CDR Salamander: A Note To A Rump Admiralty
Da Tech Guy: Booker’s Senatorial Tears, also, The Social Media Facts Of Life Explained Once More
Don Surber: Grading Trump’s Fake News Awards
Dustbury: Plastic Fantastic Haters
The Geller Report: Trump Orders CNN’s Acosta Out Of Oval Office After Reporter’s Outburst, also, House Reports Muslim Spies Made “Unauthorized Access” To House Servers
Hogewash: A Burping Black Hole, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: The #MeToo Movement Has Officially Jumped The Shark
Joe For America: CIA Officer Caught Spying For Chicoms – Responsible For Numerous Dead Informants
JustOneMinute: Russian Spies Were Actually Spying?
Legal Insurrection: “New California” Moves To Split Off From Golden State, also, Yale Psych Prof Has Second Meeting With Dems, Claims She’s Getting Death Threats
Power Line: The Press Corps Is Crazy – Trump Isn’t, also, Are There Any Sharks Left To Jump?
Shark Tank: Republican Rep Ros-Lehtinen Calls Trump A Racist
Shot In The Dark: In Some Ways…
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Following The Efforts To Dodge Federal Taxes
The Jawa Report: American ISIS Head-Chopper Identified As Zulfi Hoxha
The Political Hat: Free Healthcare Is Neither Free Nor Healthcare
This Ain’t Hell: Illegal Scumbag Charged For Sacramento County Deputies’ Murder, also, Navy Commanders Facing Negligent Homicide Charges For Collisions
Weasel Zippers: Dems Think 800,000 Illegals Are Worth Not Paying Active Duty Military, also, Linda Sarsour Endorses Bradley Manning For Senate
Megan McArdle: Listen To The “Bad Feminists”
Mark Steyn: **** ***, ******! also, Look You, Boyo


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The Tyranny of Bright Normal

Posted on | January 17, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

Why do the media hate President Trump so much? Well, to begin with, he’s a Republican, and they’re Democrat operatives with bylines. Beyond that, however, the media think of themselves as members of what Richard Florida calls “the creative class,” and Trump’s a bright normal.

Readers familiar with The Bell Curve understand that cognitive sorting occurs by occupation and education level. However, students of economics understand that not all skills are created equal. You may think I’m a clever writer, but what’s cleverness worth in the marketplace? How much demand for clever writing exists, and how limited is the supply? The average reader doesn’t discern much difference in value between writing that’s just competent and writing that’s truly excellent and, in the grand scheme of things, I am nothing more than what the digital gurus call a “content provider,” the value of which is a dime a dozen.

Being a mature adult, I long ago adjusted to this economic reality, but this is quite obviously not true of the reporters who spent Tuesday afternoon shouting questions at President Trump’s physician. What’s the salary of a New York Times White House correspondent?

A. Probably more than you make;
B. Much more than I’ve ever made;
and yet also
C. Far less than he thinks he’s worth.

This is one of the most astonishing things about the media elite. They’re paid salaries that far exceed the average American’s income, yet they consider themselves as underpaid and underappreciated, and therefore emotionally identify with the oppressed victims of social injustice.

Why? Because status is always relative. Read more

Category: Donald Trump, Intellectuals, Journalism, Media Bias
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