The Other McCain

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

‘The Least Worthwhile People’ and @The_Moviebob’s Darwinian Inversion

Posted on | September 6, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

If you don’t know who Bob Chipman is, it’s not your fault. He’s an untalented nobody with a YouTube channel who was a movie critic or something for a site called The Escapist until (a) in 2014 he became obsessed with ranting against #GamerGate and (b) in 2015 was laid off from The Escapist, and although (c) it would be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to suppose (a) and (b) were related, (d) most people do.

Anyway, I never heard of the guy until Tuesday, when Ian Miles Cheong tweeted about “Bob Chipman and the Unhealthy Preoccupation with The Superior Future,” which turns out to be one of Chipman’s stock phrases.

 

You see that, to Bob Chipman, the kind of people who vote Republican do not belong in the “superior future.” Another of his stock phrases is “properly evolved,” signifying the supposed genetic inferiority of — you guessed it — the kind of people who vote Republican.

 

One might think that Bob Chipman, being so superior as to be able to discern who amongst us is “properly evolved,” must be a total babe magnet, because all the chicks want to swing with the Alpha Male, right? Rather ironically, however, Bob Chipman is a bloated endomorph whose lifetime total number of female partners is zero, as far as anyone on the Internet knows. And, just by the way, Bob has been diagnosed with Type II diabetes, which doesn’t seem like a “superior future” kind of thing.

If “the personal is political,” as feminists say, isn’t it fair to suspect that Bob Chipman is projecting his own manifest inferiority on others? He is obsessed with “societal evolution,” and the idea that people he doesn’t like (i.e., Republicans) are unevolved and therefore unworthy of the “superior future.” Yet whatever the future may be, in 30 or 40 years, will there be any of Bob Chipman’s offspring there? This doesn’t seem likely and so, in the Darwinian sense, it is he who is faced with evolutionary failure, his evident inability to find a mate and reproduce having rendered him unfit for any future, superior or otherwise.

“The future belongs to those who show up for it,” as Mark Steyn says. Strange how the Darwinist fanatics so often prove to be dinosaurs . . .

 

Category: Liberals

A Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg Publishes Dishonest Book

Posted on | September 5, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

Today is the official publication date of a dishonest book by the woman who caused #GamerGate, whose story I explained last year:

“Zoe Quinn” was Patient Zero of the #GamerGate controversy. A tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, Quinn was the creator of a tediously dull game called “Depression Quest.” She broke up with her boyfriend, a software geek named Eron Gjoni, and allegedly became intimate with a videogame journalist named Nathan Grayson. In August 2014, Gjoni published a nearly 10,000-word article exposing Quinn’s alleged misconduct.

It was Quinn’s alleged relationship with Grayson that exposed the dubious ethics of online videogame journalism and, in the process, called attention to the self-described “social justice warriors” (SJWs) who were trying to take over the lucrative videogame industry. After the controversy erupted in August 2014, it awakened gamers — a geek subculture that was not previously active in politics — to the threat to their freedom posed by intolerant advocates of political correctness.

What gamers discovered is that it doesn’t matter what your beliefs about economics or foreign policy may be, all you have to do is to exercise your right to express your own uncensored opinions, and you thereby become a target for the repressive forces of the cultural Left.

Zoe Quinn is not an innocent victim of “harassment.” She deserves everything bad anyone might ever say about her. She is an enemy of the First Amendment, as are her feminist allies, who are intent upon imposing a totalitarian regime in which anyone who disagrees with their ideology can be declared guilty of “hate speech” and silenced.

As Ethan Ralph says, Zoe Quinn is a fraud, who couldn’t program her way out of a wet paper sack, and whose status as a “game developer” is as fictional as the “blame-the-patriarchy” narrative she has created to depict herself as a saintly martyr for the feminist cause. Speaking of phony victims with new books, Hillary Clinton wants to sell you one.

 

Category: Books

‘Too Cute to Be Straight’: Canadian Taxpayers Fund LGBT Message for Kids

Posted on | September 5, 2017 | 4 Comments

 

Heterosexuality is only for ugly people — that’s the message promoted at taxpayer expense in Canadian schools, where “Too Cute to Be Straight” is among the slogans on buttons distributed to students in public schools by the Alberta GSA Network. These anti-heterosexual messages were posted to the Instagram account of the government-backed group that promotes homosexuality and transgenderism to children.

“The network is organized by the Provincial GSA Coordinator, a position within the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services (iSMSS) at the University of Alberta,” according to the group’s web site, which “was funded in part by the Government of Alberta.”

Alberta’s education minister, David Eggen, recently said he “will consider strengthening gender diversity legislation this fall as LGBTQ advocates ask for more support in schools.” Eggen is a member of the socialist New Democratic Party that controls Alberta’s provincial government. In 2015, Eggens imposed “gender diversity guidelines to support LGBTQ youth in Alberta schools,” including secrecy policies that effectively prohibit parents from knowing whether their children are participating in such school-based programs. Parents in Alberta have protested these policies, and have criticized Alberta GSA Network for promoting sexually graphic images to children from a site called “Fruit Loop”:

The Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services (iSMSS) is paid by the Alberta Government to organize the Alberta GSA Network, intended to support a target audience that includes children ages 5 to 17 years old.
Dr. Kristopher Wells, who is a Faculty Director with iSMSS and the “driving force” behind the creation of the Alberta GSA Network, has publicly shared posts from Fruit Loop on his own social media, including a “fast-paced ad” featuring naked young people who “share an erotic kiss on a tennis court” and “are often seen embracing, rolling around on the ground together.”
Clearly he is not ignorant of the sexually graphic content of their posts. . . .
K-12 children who access GSAs are often already struggling and vulnerable. Exposure to the sexually graphic content made available through the Alberta GSA Network website puts these children at further risk of harm and victimization.
It is obvious the Ministry of Education is trusting the wrong people with the role of supporting 5 to 17-year-olds and creating “safe and caring” schools.

Former teacher Theresa Ng’s Informed Albertans blog has accused Wells of using “his social media to compare Christians to Nazis, share pictures of naked youth and publicly post private messages from concerned parents so they can be mocked by his Facebook friends.”

(Hat-tip: @jpaulson49 on Twitter.)



 

Category: Canada, Education, Gays

Unintended Consequences or Not?

Posted on | September 5, 2017 | Comments Off on Unintended Consequences or Not?

The media’s relentless promotion of feminist propaganda has deleterious results, and the “girls in tech” crusade is no exception:

A professor at Georgetown University has found that STEM recruitment efforts actually “backfire” when targeted at women.
Adriana Kugler, who teaches economics at Georgetown, recently published her research on the gender-gap in STEM fields. She found that STEM recruitment efforts that stress the gender-gap in STEM actually serves to discourage women.
“Society keeps telling us that STEM fields are masculine fields, that we need to increase the participation of women in STEM fields, but that kind of sends a signal that it’s not a field for women, and it kind of works against keeping women in these fields,” Kugler says.
Many of the common explanations for the lack of women in STEM don’t hold up under investigation, Kugler explained to Campus Reform. While previous research suggests women are less “resilient,” or more negatively impacted by “bad grades,” Kugler says there’s “no evidence” to support that.
Likewise, the claim that women do poorly in STEM solely because it’s male dominated isn’t supported by evidence either, Kugler says, noting that an aspiring female computer scientist won’t necessarily be turned away from knowing that the field is male dominated.
The trouble begins when the media and recruitment efforts capitalize on that preponderance of men, since it “sends an additional message to women that they don’t fit into those fields, and that they don’t belong there.”
“With the media, women are getting multiple signals that they don’t belong in the STEM field, that they won’t fit into the field. That’s what we find,” Kugler told Campus Reform. “It’s very well intentioned, but it may be backfiring.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) This is by no means the only way women are harmed by the media’s mindless parroting of feminist rhetoric, teaching women that (a) all women are victims of oppression, (b) all males participate in and benefit from oppression, and therefore (c) men are the enemy, to be treated with contempt and hatred. Feminist rhetoric demonizes males as undeserving of respect, trust or admiration. This fosters an irrational attitude of paranoid hostility which makes it impossible for feminists to have happy relationships with men.

We may infer the intentions of feminist leaders from the results of their “success.” A woman who wishes to exemplify feminist ideals should never have any relationship with a man, as the movement’s radical ideology rests on the belief that heterosexuality is “a cornerstone of male supremacy,” as Professor Charlotte Bunch declared: “Therefore, women interested in destroying male supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism must, equally with lesbians, fight heterosexual domination — or we will never end female oppression.” Once we recognize that the basic goals of feminism are entirely destructive, it follows that every ostensibly “positive” goal advocated by the movement (e.g., encouraging more women to pursue STEM careers) is calculated as a step toward that ultimate destruction. It does not matter, to the leaders of the feminist movement, whether your daughter is successful in her career or happy in her life; what matters to feminists is that your daughter learns to hate men, and to do all in her power to harm men, since whatever success a man might achieve in life is the unjust product of “patriarchy.”

More hatred, less happiness — that’s the goal of feminism.

 

Category: Sex Trouble

Taking Out The Laundry

Posted on | September 5, 2017 | Comments Off on Taking Out The Laundry

— by Wombat-socho

Welcome to another all-too-infrequent book post at The Other McCain. As you might have guessed from the post title, this post is mostly going to be about Charles Stross’ Laundry novels, which are about the adventures of “Bob Howard”, a rising star in the British agency tasked with defending Her Majesty’s realms against occult and extradimensional threats. An obscure survival of the Second World War’s Special Operations Executive, the Laundry is forever contending with not just horrors from beyond time and space, but the bureaucratic regulations afflicting the civil servants of Her Majesty’s Government, and as Bob rises in rank, it seems that he’s been spending almost as much time fighting the waves of paperwork as he has been dealing with things like the Sleeper in the Pyramid.

With The Rhesus Chart, Stross takes the focus off Howard and also stops writing pastiches of famous British spy novels, and in my arrogant opinion, the next four Laundry novels are a lot better for it. Most of the focus of The Rhesus Chart is on Bob’s former girlfriend Mhari and the unfortunate mathematical discovery that puts her and her (surviving) fellow bankers on the Laundry’s org chart, to say nothing of a duel that has lethal consequences for quite a few Laundry staffers we’ve come to know. This is followed by The Annihilation Score, wherein Bob has to pick up the workload of a certain Deputy Senior Secretary (or is it Deeply Scary Sorcerer?) and is mostly out of the picture; the protagonist of The Annihilation Score is his now-estranged wife and Laundry comrade Dr. Dominique (“Mo”) O’Brien, keeper of a certain very lethal violin – and new head of an office tasked with dealing with a sudden increase in superheroes (and supervillians) in England’s green and pleasant land. Just to add to her stress levels, the aforementioned Mhari is assigned as her executive assistant, and Ramona Random (formerly of the U.S. Black Chamber, last seen in The Jennifer Morgue), shows up as her liaison to the Deep Ones, and as if all that weren’t enough, her violin seems to be developing a nasty habit of showing up in her dreams…

Which brings us to The Nightmare Stacks. The Laundry’s senior staff has been decimated, their headquarters destroyed, and so it falls to new recruits Alex Schwartz and Dr. Peter Russell, D. Theology (the latter guiltily worrying about his parish while he’s on Laundry duty) to scope out a new location in Leeds, which unfortunately for poor Alex, is his hometown that he’s been avoiding like the plague. Little does he know that he’s about to meet a girl who finds his condition fascinating, because she’s not from around here…and from “around here”, I mean Earth. Great for Alex. Not so great for Leeds. Everything comes to a head in the latest book, The Delirium Brief, and we’re reunited with all our favorite characters from the previous books (to say nothing of a few villains) as the unthinkable happens – having survived PLAN RED RABBIT, Her Majesty’s Government needs a scapegoat, and what better way to sweep everything under the rug than by firing everyone at the Laundry and privatising the remains? Unfortunately, the PM and his crew haven’t realized that the Laundry is responsible to a higher authority, and with people like Bob, Mo, Mhari, Alex, Cassie, and the legendary BASHFUL INCENDIARY against them, HMG has definitely bitten off more than they can chew.

All in all, I like the last four Laundry novels a lot. They’re very different than the first four, and while they’re operating in the same urban fantasy space as Delta Green, the Dresden Files, and the Monster Hunter International series, having them set in the UK instead of the US gives them a very different flavor, quite aside from the middle-aged punk aesthetic that helps bring Bob and Mo together. Very much worth reading, all of them.

Also on my Kindle was Mark Wandrey’s Cartwright’s Cavaliers, a coming-of-age novel in which the protagonist has to rebuild the legendary mercenary company is mother drove into the ground. Fortunately, young Jim Cartwright has a few friends with some old but useful hardware, and with a little guts, a little moxie, and a lot of luck, he just might make a go of things. Nominated for a Dragon Award this year, and definitely recommended.

Also also, The LawDog Files comes recommended by The International Lord Of Hate himself, and rightly so, because this collection of tales about enforcing the law in the West Texas town of Bugscuffle is full of weirdness and hilarity, including the famous Case of the Pink Gorilla Suit. Well worth your time if borrowed through Kindle Unlimited or your money if you buy it straight up.


Category: Books

Rule 5 Sunday: Butts! Boobs! The Final OUTRAGE!!!

Posted on | September 3, 2017 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

A few years ago, before completely succumbing to a severe social justice infection, Marvel Comics hired Italian artist Milo Manara to do an alternate cover for Spider-Woman #1. Inevitably, Manara’s cover sparked OUTRAGE! from critics who deemed the character excessively sexualized, and Marvel backed down in a hurry. Not so Frank Cho, mischievous champion of hot chicks in comics, especially hot chicks with huge racks. Cho did a number of “sample” comic covers for fans at comic conventions, which were extremely popular among everyone but the usual “feminist” scolds, who Cho made sure to further provoke with the inclusion of a hooded Spider-Gwen head announcing her “Outrage!” in the corner of every cover.
As usual, the following links are to pics generally considered NSFW. The management is not responsible for any OUTRAGE!!! you may be afflicted by as a result in failing to exercise discretion in your clicking. Roll Tide.

Milo Manara’s Spider-Woman #1 variant cover art.

Spider-Gwen reprise by Frank Cho

The continuing OUTRAGE!!!

Ninety Miles from Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Morning Mistress, Girls With Guns, and The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1. No Goodstuff this week (hopefully the Thai junta hasn’t cut off his intertubes), but Animal Magnetism contributes Rule Five Windy Day Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s contributions this week include Epic Boat Sex, Bethany Woodruff, Forbidden Planet, Burning Man 2017, White After Labor Day, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Jackie De Shannon.

A View From The Beach brings us Marlow’s Horse, Fish Pic Friday – Tilefish, Reason #5668 That Trump Was Elected, Tanlines Thursday, Way Back Wednesday, I Think It’s Going to Rain Today, Reason #5661 – #5666 That Trump Was Elected, Persian Risks Beheading to Bring You Boobs, How Much Is that Gas Anyway? and Are the Cute a Constitutionally Protected Class?

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Kelly Giddish, his Vintage Babe is Glynis Johns, Sex in Advertising is covered by Victoria’s Secret, and we have a late score from the 10th century: Vikings 49, Equal Opportunity 3. At Dustbury, it’s Frederique van der Wal and Janet Mock.

Thanks to everyone for their links!


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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: The One You Love To Hate

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: OUTRAGE!! (Parte Dos)
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

‘We Will Not Set Arbitrary Timelines’: Kellogg Has Skin in Afghanistan Game
Proof Positive
EBL

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

More ‘Antifa’ Violence in Berkeley
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
EBL

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 08.28.17
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.29.17
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Democrats: The Atheist Anti-American Feminist Gun-Grabber Man-Hating Party
EBL

Professor Fired After Claiming ‘Evil’ Texas Deserved Deadly Hurricane as ‘Karma’
EBL

‘Antifa’ Professor Facing 40 Years in Prison for Assault Claims … Victimhood?
A View From The Beach
EBL
Adam Piggott

In The Mailbox Leftovers: 08.30.17
Proof Positive
EBL

Dry-Humping the Patriarchy, Because @LaurenJauregui Is a Feminist Like That
Welcome To My Playpen
EBL

In The Mailbox: 08.31.17
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 09.01.17
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers this week:

  1. EBL (13)
  2. (tied) A View From The Beach and Proof Positive (7 each)

Thanks to everyone for the linkagery!

Also, thanks to everyone who bought stuff through our Amazon links last month!

Today’s Digital Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals
Amazon Outlet Deals

Category: FMJRA Award

The New New Left and The Great Twerking Meltdown of 2013

Posted on | September 2, 2017 | Comments Off on The New New Left and The Great Twerking Meltdown of 2013

by Smitty

Instapundit points to Charles R. Kesler in the Clairmont Review of Books, The Old New Left and the New New Left. He resonated with a book I’ve nearly finished. Note this passage (emphasis mine), in addition to reading the whole thing:

It hasn’t disappeared entirely, but the theory embraced by today’s campus Left is far different from that of the ’60s New Left. The Port Huron Statement reflected deep intellectual engagement, if not exactly seriousness. Its contemporary influences included Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (1956). Marcuse, a student of Martin Heidegger’s, had perhaps the primary philosophical influence on the movement, and along with other writers helped to connect it, however tendentiously, to Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and Rousseau.
The new New Left has no comparable philosophical grounding or intellectual foundation. A widely adopted primer of its thought (used in the Claremont Colleges, for instance), Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, now in its third edition, nods in the direction of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, but these are dusty portraits on the wall rather than active intellectual interests. The book presumes the truth of an easy-going and politically convenient postmodernism without ever establishing it, or reflecting on the alternative. But that’s what’s so handy about postmodernism, isn’t it? It lets you get on with it—skip past the questions of truth and justice, and get right to the delicious matter of power.

The slippery snowflake slope resembles what’s occurred in the culture. Consider Camille Paglia’s critique of Miley Cyrus and the Great Twerking Meltdown of 2013 (emphasis also mine):

The Cyrus fiasco, however, is symptomatic of the still heavy influence of Madonna, who sprang to world fame in the 1980s with sophisticated videos that were suffused with a daring European art-film eroticism and that were arguably among the best artworks of the decade. Madonna’s provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl’s keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.
Young performers will probably never equal or surpass the genuine shocks delivered by the young Madonna, as when she sensually rolled around in a lacy wedding dress and thumped her chest with the mic while singing “Like a Virgin” at the first MTV awards show in 1984. Her influence was massive and profound, on a global scale.
But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality — above all, Marlene Dietrich’s glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse’s stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today’s aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove.
Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

Morally, mentally, and physically (as one’s understanding of the crotch damage goes) the Left looks nihilistic. It feeds virally off its American cultural host, trying to destroy it. Fortunately for god-fearing Americans, the only thing the Left can eradicate is itself.

I just don’t see how the Left (Democrats/media/universities) recover. Their success thus far, as in all asymmetric warfare, has been predicated upon not getting caught out in the open. This Commie strategy has gone a long way on passive aggression. With Her Majesty’s loss, they seem to be trying a more active approach. But it has a stench of desperation about it. Because, in contrast to the Lefty degeneration alluded to in the two quotations above, conservative intelligence has been on the increase (I think).

Ultimately, the lesson of the Book of Exodus beckons. People who’ve been reduced to slaves, and their children, are unfit for the mission. We have to understand that reversing Gramsci’s Long March is going to take a couple of generations. We have to focus on building actual knowledge in the next generations, and protecting their Precious Bodily Fluids from Lefty poisoning.

Category: Culture
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