In The Mailbox: 12.01.17

Posted on | December 1, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 12.01.17

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: When Murder Is Less Serious Than Sexual Harassment
Twitchy: Guess What #PPact Cheerleader Kamala Harris Slammed As “Immoral”?
Louder With Crowder: “Fauxcahontas” Gets Put On Blast By Actual Cherokee
According To Hoyt: Facts Are Facts
Monster Hunter Nation: MHI RPG Kickstarter – By Popular Demand, We’ve Added A Coloring Book
Vox Popoli: Miscarriage Of Justice Or Prosecutorial Overreach? (See also Sarah Rumpf’s article below)
Daily Caller: Hawaii Police Order Medical Pot Users To Surrender Their Guns (h/t NeoWayland)
Sarah Rumpf: Have We Been Lied To About The Kate Steinle Case?

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – Woe Is Me Edition
American Power: DOJ Considers New Charges Against Kate Steinle’s Killer, also, T.H. White, The Once And Future King
American Thinker: CBO Tries To Sink Tax Bill, also, Who’s Mocking The Pence Rule Now?
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Hawaii Screws Over Gun Owners Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For December 1
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: The Steinle Verdict, also, Where’s The “No Such Thing As Right And Wrong” #Pervnado Defense?
Don Surber: Trump Will Not Be Indicted
Dustbury: More Than Just Scraping By
The Geller Report: President Trump Cancels UK Visit After PM May’s Tantrum, also, HuffPo Shariabots Blame Pam Geller For Trump Retweets, Demand Twitter Shut Her Down
Hogewash: Blogsmoke, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Army Vet Says Franken Groped Her During 2003 USO Tour
Joe For America: Minecraft Creator Catches Massive Flak For Tweeting “It’s Okay To Be White”
JustOneMinute: Out Like Flynn
Legal Insurrection: Mueller Finds Another Process Crime, also, Trevor Noah – “Elizabeth Warren Did Something Problematic”
Power Line: Charge Against Flynn Is More Evidence That Mueller Has Nothing, also, Liberals Attack Senator Cotton For Wanting To Enforce The Law, also also, Thoughts From The Ammo Line
Shot In The Dark: $2.1 Billion Doesn’t Getcha What It Used To
STUMP: Around The Web-O-Sphere – Meep Enjoying Herself Too Much
The Political Hat: Peak Guardian – Socialism Is Far-Right Ideologically
This Ain’t Hell: WWII Vet Gets Some Justice, also, Jeffrey Grenier – Stealing From The Dead
Weasel Zippers: Twitter Users Unleash #BoycottSanFrancisco In Revenge For Steinle Verdict, also, Facebook Creates Guide To “Keeping Muslims Safe Online”
Megan McArdle: Prescription Drug Imports Are Banned For A Reason
Mark Steyn: A Profound Miscarriage Of Justice

Cyber Monday Deals Week
AmazonFresh
Shop Amazon Exclusives-Unique Products

Category: Linkagery

‘Just Being Around Men Is Exhausting’

Posted on | November 30, 2017 | 1 Comment

On her Twitter profile, Ali Thompson describes herself as “Fat Activist Bisexual Queer.” On her personal web site, she calls herself “a feminist artist from Philadelphia specializing in pop art that is influenced by riot grrl zines, punk flyers, tattoos and comic art.” She has another Twitter account called @Ok2BeFat and a Patreon account to fund her project “creating fat positive activism, art, fiction, essays and videos.”

Isn’t it a pity she’s so exhausted from “being around men”? Shouldn’t men do everything they can to avoid being around her at all? She’s in Philadelphia, so men should stay away from Philadelphia. Or maybe avoid the entire state of Pennsylvania, just to be on the safe side.

Bonus: Last year, Ali Thompson wrote a column entitled, “4 Ways Fat People Need to Be Included in Reproductive Justice.” Obviously, under no circumstance would we want her to reproduce (“ew”).

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 11.30.17

Posted on | November 30, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Al Franken’s Passionate Kisses
Twitchy: Rep. Marsha Blackburn Vows To Blow Lid Off Congress’ Secret Harassment Fund And Name Names
Louder With Crowder: Late Night Show Ratings Are Dropping, Hard
The Week: Ralph Nader Might Have Saved The Democratic Party (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Sam Dastyari Is Conclusive Proof Of Our Leaders’ Weakness
American Power: More On Matt Lauer
American Thinker: Not All Stings Work – On The War James O’Keefe Is Winning
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Matt Lauer Can Suck It News
BattleSwarm: Broadcasting Bigwigs Behaving Badly
Bring The HEAT: World Of Warships – TF Whiskey Dominates In Clan Battles
Da Tech Guy: Pelosi Turns On Conyers, also, Conyers & Franken Should Face The Voters
Don Surber: Defender Of Polanski Attacks Roy Moore
Dustbury: Level Headed
Fred On Everything: Absolute, Obvious, Unacknowledged Disaster – A Racial Snapshot Of America
The Geller Report: Car Explodes At Christmas Market Festival In North London
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Climate Of Hate Update
Joe For America: RIP Jim Nabors
JustOneMinute: Another Russian Spy Outed!
Legal Insurrection: Campus Newspaper Editorial Tells White Students “Your DNA Is An Abomination”, also, Matt Lauer Breaks Silence, Claims He’s “Truly Sorry”
Power Line: How Hateful Are The Democrats? This Hateful, also, Why Is Trump Picking A Top Clinton Aide For A Key Ambassador Slot?
Shot In The Dark: This Is The Profile In Courage That Could Be Your New State Rep From 61B
STUMP: Moving The Public Pension Goalposts – 60% Is The New 80%
The Political Hat: LOLGender!!1! – Bathrooms, Research, And Pronouns
This Ain’t Hell: Jim Nabors Passes, also, Marines Leave Syria
Weasel Zippers: Conyers Won’t Seek Re-Election, also, This May Explain Why Democrats Are So Desperate To Hang Onto CFPB
Megan McArdle: Must-Reads For 2017 – Mysteries Of The White Working Class
Mark Steyn: Many Happy Returns

Save 20% On Exploding Kittens NSFW Edition – Additional 15% For Prime
Cyber Monday Deals Week
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

The Insane Professor

Posted on | November 30, 2017 | Comments Off on The Insane Professor

Griffin Epstein teaches at George Brown College in Toronto. In 2009, she wrote her master’s thesis on “mad Jewish identity,” which began:

“Can we be accountable to privilege? Can we find a space for coherent anti-racist secular Ashkenazi Jewish identity in North America, where Jews have been deeply implicated in structural violence? Can we be agents of both complicity and change?”

This 200-page “autoethnographic” treatise is crazy on steroids. That someone could obtain a graduate degree on the basis of such work is damning testimony to the abysmal standards of contemporary academia.

Professor Epstein attracted public attention after she published a letter in the Toronto Star, criticizing the newspaper’s coverage of a controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University:

“Instead of taking a stand against hate speech, you have given dangerous credence to the views of (University of Toronto Prof.) Jordan Peterson and his supporters, flying in the face of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

This controversy involves people demanding to be called by gender-neutral pronouns. Lindsey Shepherd, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, showed her students a video of a debate between University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson and Nicholas Matte, a professor in the Waterloo University women’s studies department. Peterson has become “controversial” for refusing to address students by such pronouns as “they/them” or “ze/zir.” Shepherd said she was told “that you can’t debate something like this because it causes an unsafe or toxic learning environment. I ended up being called transphobic and someone who causes harm and violence.” If you don’t do whatever transgender activists demand, you’re Hitler, basically.

When Professor Epstein weighed in on the controversy — condemning Peterson, Shepherd and the Toronto Star as proponents of “hate speech” — Badger Pundit posted a Twitter thread with excerpts from Professor Epstein’s master’s thesis, full of startling revelations. Professor Epstein is mentally ill — diagnosed with anorexia, major depression, generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD — and her “autoethnography” reveals that mental illness runs in her family. (Her uncle Larry was treated by Bruno Bettelheim.) Her master’s thesis includes statements like these:

“As a queer person who has been psychiatrized . . . the marginality that I have experienced has always been experienced in this landscape of privilege. . . .My version of secular North American Ashkenazi Jewishness was stripped to its barest component part: memory. . . . When I renounced Judaism at fourteen, weeks after my rush-job Bat Mitzvah, my mother’s devastation did not arise from my refusal of God, but a refusal to raise my hypothetical kids with the ghostly memory.”

Most people would not confess in a published paper that they've considered suicide, have taken psychiatric medications, and have been to at least 40 therapists to deal with hallucinations. Griffin Epstein does that on p. 172 of her master's thesis. pic.twitter.com/Ed7Zd1gQp1

— Badger Pundit (@BadgerPundit) November 26, 2017

Question: Should mentally ill people be teaching at universities?

Readers will recall that the notorious Deb Frisch was once a tenure-track psychology professor at the University of Oregon. Isn’t it important to keep such lunatics away from impressionable young people? Do we really want nutjobs and wackos teaching our youth? University faculties are beginning to resemble a casting call for a remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Category: Education

In The Mailbox: 11.29.17

Posted on | November 29, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.29.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Garrison Keillor Fired From Minnesota Public Radio For “Inappropriate Behavior”
Twitchy: Variety’s BOMBSHELL Expose Reveals Matt Lauer As “Super Villain-Level” Predator
Louder With Crowder: Did I FAKE The Amazon Alexa Video?
Ars Technica: Judge Rules Against 84-Year-Old Doctor Who Can’t Use Computer (h/t Loyal Commenter NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Studies Have Shown That Studies Are Bunk
American Power: Believe All Women? also, Eight Million Could Die In Nuke War With North Korea
American Thinker: NYT Targets Hannity
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: James Damore Vs. Google
CDR Salamander: Iron Domes And Wooden Doors
Da Tech Guy: Personal Honor, also, Repeating My Question To Liberal Feminists Post-Lauer #Pervnado
Don Surber: 8th Dimensional Chess? Trump Beats Them At Tic-Tac-Toe
Dustbury: Grey Fox
The Geller Report: Milo Leaves Muslima Journalist A Babbling Mess, also, No Justice For Justine Damond?
Hogewash: What’s Going On Under The Porch? also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: NYT Opinion Twitter Account Campaigns Hard Against GOP Tax Bill
Joe For America: Senator Rand Paul’s Wife Sets The Record Straight
JustOneMinute: Matt Lauer Fired!
Legal Insurrection: Garrison Keillor Fired From MN Public Radio For Alleged “Inappropriate Behavior”, also, If Trump Really Wanted To Stick It To Fauxcahontas…
Michelle Malkin: Nancy Pelosi, Sham “Shero”
Power Line: Will There Ever Be An Accounting On North Korea? also, Donald Trump – Feminist Hero
Shark Tank: Curbelo Dreams Big For “Dreamers”
Shot In The Dark: Conundrum
STUMP: Which Public Pension Funds Have The Highest Holdings Of Alternative Assets? Has It Paid Off?
The Political Hat: Hobo Army of Social Justice
This Ain’t Hell: LTC Burnett Sentenced, also, Liberalism And Binders Full Of Women
Weasel Zippers: Congressional Black Caucus Leaders Don’t Want To Answer Questions On Why Conyers Hasn’t Resigned, also, Dems Rushing To Register Thousands Of Alabama Felons Before Deadline
Megan McArdle: Keep Churches’ Tax Break, With Strings Attached
Mark Steyn: Washington’s Redskin

Cyber Monday Deals Week
Certified Refurbished Amazon Devices
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

Chomsky on Foucault (and Also, Exactly What Was Judith Butler Trying to Say?)

Posted on | November 29, 2017 | 2 Comments

Michel Foucault and his very wrong book, ‘The History of Sexuality.’

It’s not my habit to quote Noam Chomsky, whom I despise, but I happened upon something he once said about Michel Foucault:

You can make things look complicated, that’s part of the game that intellectuals play; things must look complicated. You might not be conscious about that, but it’s a way of gaining prestige, power and influence. . . .
The only way to understand Foucault is if you are a graduate student or you are attending a university and have been trained in this particular style of discourse. That’s a way of guaranteeing, it might not be his purpose, but that’s a way of guaranteeing that intellectuals will have power, prestige and influence. If something can be said simply, say it simply, so that the carpenter next door can understand you. Anything that is at all well understood about human affairs is pretty simple. I find Foucault really interesting but I remain skeptical of his mode of expression. I find that I have to decode him, and after I have decoded him, maybe I’m missing something. I don’t get the significance of what I am left with. I have never effectively understood what he was talking about. I mean, when I try to take the big words he uses and put them into words that I can understand and use, it is difficult for me to accomplish this task. It all strikes me as overly convoluted and very abstract. But what happens when you try to skip down to real cases? The trouble with Foucault, and with this certain kind of theory, arises when it tries to come down to earth. Really, nobody was able to explain to me the importance of his work.

It is a damning judgment of postmodernism that someone of Chomsky’s stature as an intellectual was forced to admit that he found Foucault’s writing impenetrable. And what Chomsky says about the deliberate mystification practiced by the purveyors of academic jargon is accurate. Truth tends to reside in ideas that are simple enough for ordinary people to understand without the tutorial guidance of professors. By writing in opaque jargon, intellectuals create a phony prestige for themselves and their colleagues in academia, who act as a priestly caste, interpreting these “sacred texts” for the students who are indoctrinated with the quasi-religious belief system of the intellectuals.

Anyone who has studied Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity knows that her 1990 book is nearly unreadable, and yet it also consistently ranks among the top sellers at Amazon (#9 in Gender Studies, as of Monday), simply because it is required reading for so many college students. Professor Butler’s fundamental idea can be summarized in a few phrases — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix — but it would require hours to explain what this means, and what logical consequences we can expect from the widespread popularization of this theory. However, Professor Butler certainly understood her own purpose in promoting the “subversion of identity,” i.e., the destruction of “gender,” the abolition of what anthropologists used to call “sex-role differentiation.” Professor Butler, like all feminists, is opposed to what many Christian teachers call the complementarity of male and female, particularly between husbands and wives.

Pull up a chair, and let me explain what I mean. Read more

Category: Intellectuals, Sex Trouble

NBC Fires ‘Today’ Host Matt Lauer

Posted on | November 29, 2017 | 1 Comment

Stunning news:

Matt Lauer, the anchor of “Today” for two decades, was fired by NBC News after a detailed complaint about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.
“Today” co-anchors Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb announced Lauer’s firing Wednesday, telling viewers at the top of the show that they were processing his departure but didn’t yet know all of the details.
In a memo to employees sent Wednesday morning, NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack said the complaint, which was made by a colleague of Lauer’s, prompted a serious review and represented a “clear violation of our company’s standards.”
Lack said it was the first complaint lodged against Lauer, 59, for his behavior since he took over as anchor of the show in 1997, but there was “reason to believe” it may not have been an isolated incident.
“Our highest priority is to create a workplace environment where everyone feels safe and protected, and to ensure that any actions that run counter to our core values are met with consequences, no matter who the offender,” Lack said.

UPDATE: We are now about seven weeks into the Sexual Harassment Apocalypse that began in early October with revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior. As I have explained, the reason this is happening is because Hillary lost and Trump won. The zero-tolerance no-mercy attitude toward male misconduct is a product of feminist rage over Trump’s victory; they cannot destroy him, so they’ll destroy any man within range. The only way to save yourself? Avoid feminists.

Matt Lauer has been terminated from NBC News. On Monday night, we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer. As a result, we’ve decided to terminate his employment. pic.twitter.com/1A3UAZpvPb

— TODAY (@TODAYshow) November 29, 2017

Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC for “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.” But when will the top executives at NBC & Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News. Check out Andy Lack’s past!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2017

UPDATE II: Because everybody is now speculating what it was Lauer did, I feel it necessary to share my hunch:

It's not even clear that this is a workplace violation. When I read the NBC statement, I had a hunch: Child pornography? Caught in a law enforcement "sting" operation? Whatever it is, it was serious enough to justify immediate termination… https://t.co/0Cexn0n8f6

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) November 29, 2017

This is only a hunch. When we get breaking news like this, there is always a flood of online speculation, and I don’t want to contribute to that by claiming any special knowledge. However, it is obvious that whatever Lauer did must have been very serious, and possibly criminal.

Category: Celebrities