The Other McCain

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

Look for the ‘Hate’ Label (or, Why Everybody’s a ‘Far-Right’ Extremist Now)

Posted on | June 25, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Who is Kevin Panetta? He is the writer behind a comic book called Zodiac Starforce, which looks a lot like a ripoff of Sailor Moon, but that’s irrelevant to his role as a volunteer with the Thought Police. Panetta got more than 45,000 retweets and more than 80,000 likes for his assertion that disagreeing with SJWs is “just hate.” Notice his all-inclusive laundry list of Thought Crimes which, he declares, are not “political views” and therefore need to be silenced. Now ask, “What do these words mean?”

What is “racism,” and how is it to be distinguished from “white supremacy”? Or what is “sexism”? Is it “islamophobia” to point out that Islamic doctrine is both sexist and homophobic? And considering the conflict between transgender activists and feminists (e.g., Julie Bindel and Meghan Murphy), how do we unravel the separate strands of “just hate” to distinguish between “sexism,” “homophobia” and “transphobia”?

Is it even permissible to ask such questions? Are we allowed to question the SJW Thought Police about the definitions of “just hate” or (as I rather suspect) will we be condemned as guilty merely for questioning their authority to define these terms to suit their own purposes?

George Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language:

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. . . . Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

Allowing an explosive term like “white supremacy” to be redefined in such a way that anyone who criticized, e.g., the Black Lives Matter protests could be accused of it, is a very dangerous practice.

The progressive Left is using “hate” labels to prohibit rational argument about important issues of public policy. Go read Ryan Anderson’s critique of the transgender agenda, for example, and then tell me that his argument is “just hate.” SJWs are liars, trying to silence the truth.

Ryan Broderick’s Buzzfeed headline about “far-right activists” on YouTube focuses in the lead on Lauren Southern, a 22-year-old who is described by Broderick as “part of a sprawling new universe of far-right internet personalities who have aligned themselves with a ‘new right’ or ‘alt-right’ or ‘new far-right’ political youth movement.” Broderick’s article uses some not-very-subtle guilt-by-association to link Lauren Southern to personalities like Richard Spencer with whom she has no known association. Southern gained Internet fame a couple of years ago for declaring that the feminist movement doesn’t speak for her. She has since spoken out against unrestricted immigration, but is it necessarily “far-right” to oppose open-borders policies? Aren’t there legitimate social and economic issues involved in immigration policy that justify such opposition? Never mind such questions, Broderick declares Lauren Southern “dangerous,” more or less implying she’s a neo-Nazi, and at the end of his article, includes this paragraph:

Despite all of this, Southern still believes approaching far-right activism as a social media influencer is the way to go. She’s excited about recent controversies, like YouTube and Disney’s Maker Studios dropping video game YouTuber PewDiePie over anti-Semitic jokes, YouTube comedian JonTron doing interviews with Breitbart and far-right YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, or sexual education vlogger Laci Green making videos playing with alt-right themes. To Southern, these are signs that she’s on the right side of things.

You see the ransom-note method of links-and-ties Broderick is employing here. Lauren Southern is “alt-right” and is therefore “linked” to every other person who can be labeled “alt-right,” so that when Laci Green begins to have second thoughts about her SJW allegiances, this is portrayed as signifying that she is linked, for example, to the Etayyim Brothers whose shtick was to “take a camera into predominantly black communities in Brooklyn and antagonize residents.” This is a complete non sequitur, which Broderick throws into his article as part of his sloppy guilt-by-association smear. There is no reason to believe Laci Green would ever do such a thing, nor do we have any reason to think of the Etayyim Brothers as part of an “alt-right” to which Green (or Lauren Southern) belongs. But of course, Broderick is a hypocrite, throwing stones from a glass house, because a few years ago, as Ian Miles Cheong points out, Broderick produced YouTube videos in which “the BuzzFeed writer wore a Nazi uniform while brandishing a swastika on his arm alongside a man dressed as a Jewish prisoner.”

Well, nobody has ever accused Laci Green or Lauren Southern of brandishing swastikas in their videos, so maybe this “far-right” thing isn’t as dangerous as Buzzfeed would have us believe. However, by using the term “far-right” so haphazardly as to include anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat, left-wingers like Ryan Broderick are actually arguing for censorship. Lauren Southern is “dangerous” and she is “going to get people hurt,” Buzzfeed readers are led to believe, and isn’t Broderick suggesting that YouTube suppress her “far-right” videos? Isn’t he arguing that crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and GoFundMe should exclude anyone labeled “far-right” by the Thought Police? Banishing their opponents from online discourse, depriving conservatives of access to platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, is very much a part of the SJW agenda, and they’re doing this the same way the Left has abolished free speech on campus, by making “hate” a synonym for “Republican”:

Anything that is not liberal is labeled “hate,” and anything which is not about promoting the Democrat Party is “right-wing” or “far right.” Any appearance on a college campus by anyone associated with conservative or Republican (i.e., “far right”) political ideas is funded by “right-wing billionaires,” and this “hate” is “putting students in danger.”
The Left deliberately encourages this simple-minded intolerance, demonizing their political opponents, even while they accuse Republicans of “extremism,” “hate” and being “ideologically driven.”

Because I have been exposing left-wing totalitarianism for years (and have, of course, been labeled a “white supremacist,” etc., for doing so), I am glad to see others finally becoming aware of the Thought Police tactics the Left employs to suppress online dissent. We’re all “far-right” now. Readers are invited to hit the freaking tip jar, while it’s still legal.



 

 

FMJRA 2.0: Cords

Posted on | June 24, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Tuesday: EDC Girls
Animal Magnetism
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL
Ninety Miles From Tyranny

FMJRA 2.0: EDC 2017 – All EDM, All The Time
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

Terrorism, Et Cetera
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.19.17
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.20.17
Proof Positive
EBL

GA-6: ‘The Big Short’ and the Establishment Media Bubble
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.21.17
Proof Positive
EBL

‘Lone Wolf’ Shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Stabbing Police Officer in Flint Airport
EBL

Feminist Professor: ‘Trumpism’ Is About ‘Discourses of Masculinized Dominance’
EBL

Further Thoughts on ‘The Big Short’
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.22.17
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 06.23.17
Proof Positive
A View From The Beach

Top linkers this week:

  1. EBL (11)
  2. Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!

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In The Mailbox: 06.23.17

Posted on | June 23, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.23.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: McConnellCare Is Coming?
Twitchy: Jenna Jameson Blasts Pro-Aborts After Tweeting To Defund Planned Parenthood
Louder With Crowder: LWC #189 – Everyone’s Wrong On Healthcare, With Mark Levin
According To Hoyt: Usaians
Vox Popoli: Portrait Of A Bad Shoot


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: First From Europe – The Friday Links & Hawt Chicks Thread
American Power: Left-Wing Politics Will be The Demise Of Democrats, also, Out In Paper – J. Kael Weston, The Mirror Test
American Thinker: Mueller Adopts Stalinist Tactics
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five I, Claudius Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For June 23
BLACKFIVE: Today In U.S. Military History
Da Tech Guy: Health Law Uncertainties Starting To Hurt Millions
Don Surber: CNN, MSNBC Boycott Trump, Hilarity Ensues
Dustbury: As Dry As We Wanna Be
The Geller Report: Germany Admits 75% Of Refugees Will Be On The Dole For Life
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: Texas Pastors Reject LGBT Curriculum – “This Is Houston, Not San Francisco”
JustOneMinute: Health Care That’s Always A Scare
Power Line: Free Speech? Not In Minneapolis!, also, Democrat Inspired By Hodgkinson Threatens Assassination
Shark Tank: Crist, Cruz, Oppose New Senate Healthcare Bill
Shot In The Dark: I Don’t Think That Word Means What They Think It Means
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Taunting Secret Service A Very, Very Bad Idea
The Political Hat: Decolonizing The Scalp
This Ain’t Hell: BGEN Wayne Grigsby Busted For Inappropriate Relationship, also, Elizabeth Honig Admits To Defrauding The VA
Weasel Zippers: Wasserman-Schultz Accuses Jeh Johnson Of Lying About DNC Servers, also, Grassley Says Schumer Knew Trump Wasn’t Under Investigation, Lied About It Anyway
Megan McArdle: GOP Healthcare Bill Boils Down To…More Obamacare
Mark Steyn: A Tale Of Two Johnsons


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The Catastrophe at Evergreen State

Posted on | June 23, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

A state college has surrendered to the totalitarian mob:

Students at Evergreen State College are doubling down on their effort to silence speech that, in their view, endangers the lives of “black, trans, fems, and [other] students on this campus.”
The students, some of whom have actively demanded the ousting of biology professor Bret Weinstein after he questioned the propriety of asking white students and faculty to leave campus for a “Day of Absence,” accused the educator of “validating” white supremacists and Nazis.
“Although Bret has not personally said, you know, ‘go out and attack the students,’ that has been the result of his actions,” Hadley, a student at the college, proclaimed in an interview with Vice News. “He has incited white supremacists and he has validated white supremacists and Nazis in our community and in the nation. And I don’t think that should be protected by free speech.” . . .
“So at this point, we would like Bret to be fired. But that isn’t happening…I don’t care what happens to Bret anymore,” Hadley declared. “He can go and be racist and be a piece of sh– wherever he wants to do that. Hopefully, long-term, we can just weed out people like Bret.”

As has been pointed out, Professor Weinstein “supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement” and calls himself “deeply progressive,” but that’s not enough for the thugs at Evergreen.

 

Watching that 7-minute video report by Michael Moynihan, you get a very clear idea of what kind of “students” are now effectively running Evergreen College in the absence of real leadership by the college’s administration and faculty. “Social justice” is the province of a bunch of spoiled-rotten brats with the emotional maturity of 4-year-olds.

Enrollment at Evergreen has been sagging in recent years because of the school’s left-wing reputation. The environment on the campus in Olympia is perceived as “too weird and freaky for people who want a normal education,” one student said in 2014. Certainly the anti-Weinstein protests have done nothing to repair Evergreen’s bad reputation, and it is likely enrollment will decline even further. Can any parent imagine sending their child to such a lunatic asylum? If the object of a college education is to prepare students for careers, what sort of careers are Evergreen students being prepared for? Do you think major corporations are eager to hire young people who are in the habit of slinging accusations of “white supremacy” at anyone who disagrees with them?

As Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection points out, liberals are arguing that “Weinstein should have just kept his mouth shut and suffered in silence.” Why is this faculty silence necessary? Because when the general public becomes aware of the totalitarian climate on college campuses, they don’t like it, and public reaction has a negative impact on enrollment and budgets:

Enrollment on the University of Missouri’s Columbia campus is expected to decline more than 7 percent in the fall and budget cuts will require the elimination of up to 400 jobs, interim Chancellor Garnett Stokes said [May 15] at a budget forum.
The enrollment decline estimate is the first provided by MU officials for overall fall numbers. The university has already said it expects first-time freshman enrollment to decline by almost 18 percent.
For the school year that ended last week, enrollment at MU was 33,266, down 6.1 percent from the previous year’s record. If Stokes’ projection of a 7.4 percent decline is accurate, enrollment in the fall will be about 30,800, the lowest in nine years. . . .
Overall, the university is planning to cut 12 percent from the academic and administrative operations budget, or about $55 million. . . .

Why is this happening? Why has enrollment declined at the University of Missouri? Because in 2015, the faculty and administration allowed the campus to be taken over by Black Lives Matter protesters. The University of Missouri became a national symbol of this anti-white hate movement and threats from the angry black mobs “left many students, faculty, and parents feeling fearful of violence and concerned about their safety.”

We might reasonably expect enrollment at Evergreen State to decline sharply in the fall, and the impact on the school’s budget will probably be quite shocking to radical students who think they can intimidate anyone who disagrees with them. The progressive thug mob at Evergreen State needs to be reminded that parents have a choice about what kind of education they provide their children, and you can’t expect parents to pay money to send their kids to a lunatic asylum like Evergreen State.



 

Deranged Feminist Attacks Church, Police, ‘Patriarchy’ in Florida

Posted on | June 23, 2017 | Comments Off on Deranged Feminist Attacks Church, Police, ‘Patriarchy’ in Florida

Barbara J. Phillips was arrested in Gainesville.

A mentally ill homeless woman in Florida is accused of vandalizing a policeman’s patrol car and smearing feces on a church where she left the walls defaced with nonsensical writings against “patriarchy.”

Barbara J. Phillips, 40, was charged with charged with stalking, criminal mischief and damaging church property, the Gainesville Sun reported June 19. An arrest report listed Phillips as homeless and said she “appears to be suffering from some mental health problems”:

On June 13, a Gainesville Police Department officer reported his patrol car had a broken passenger mirror and a flat tire, after nails had been placed around the car overnight. His air-conditioning unit was broken and a welcome post from his yard flung into the street, the report said.
About the same time, St. Andrews Church’s leader and his wife reported two similar acts of vandalism, including their power being turned off and nails — that appeared to match the ones placed near the officer’s car — being placed around one of their cars, according to the Alachua County sheriff’s office.
On June 12, two people arrived at the church at 2715 NW 39th Ave., and found feces in front of its front door and smeared on door handles, what appeared to be glue dripping from keyholes, and a number of windows, all cracked in the bottom left corner. They initially saw a gray Prius, later determined to belong to Phillips, in front of the church, driven away as they arrived.
The air-conditioning unit had been tampered with, and nonsensical writings were made in permanent marker on church pillars and doors, which the report described as “rants” about “patriarchy,” “misogyny and sexism” and “bad spirits toward me.”
Phillips . . . had attended some church gatherings at the home of Rev. Ronald Kuykendall, who leads St. Andrew’s Church, he told police.
Phillips told police she believes the reverend had been “attacking her mind” via “the spirit realm,” the report said.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

 

In The Mailbox: 06.22.17

Posted on | June 22, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.22.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Rebecca Burger, RIP
Twitchy: Ben Shapiro Uses Nancy Pelosi’s Own Whiny #HealthcareBill Tweet Against Her
Louder With Crowder: Sussex Police Brag About Facebook “Hate Speech” Arrest As Terrorists Continue To Run Free


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Australia Is Still My Country
American Power: Time For Nancy Pelosi To Step Down?, also, Bryan Burrough, Days Of Rage
American Thinker: The Forgotten War That Changed American History
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Nork Nutbar News
BattleSwarm: Waco Biker Shootout Update
Da Tech Guy: Democrats In GA-06 – Mission Accomplished
Don Surber: Judge Boots Saint Preet
Dustbury: Always Be Closing
Fred On Everything: GIGO And The Intelligence of Countries – Disordered Thoughts
The Geller Report: Minneapolis Installs Sharia Hotlines For Muslims To Report “Islamophobia”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Hillary Told Then-FBI Director Mueller To Deliver Uranium To Russians In 2009 Tarmac Meeting
JustOneMinute: They All Died Serving Their Country, Even The White Ones
Power Line: Harvard’s “Black Only” Commencement, also, Senator Cotton Does The Times In Ten Tweets
Shot In The Dark: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Mental Illness And You, also, Sandcrawler PSA – Helicopter Parenting Is Fascist
The Political Hat: The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed
This Ain’t Hell: Cameo Williams Convicted Of Defrauding VA, also, Canadian Sniper’s Longest Shot
Weasel Zippers: Study Supports Trump – 5.7 Million Illegals May Have Voted, also, Congressional Black Caucus Refuses To Meet With Trump Because Omarosa Invited Them
Megan McArdle: Uber Had The CEO It Needed
Mark Steyn: Fifteen Lawyers In Search Of A Crime


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Further Thoughts on ‘The Big Short’

Posted on | June 22, 2017 | Comments Off on Further Thoughts on ‘The Big Short’

My reference to The Big Short and the housing bubble in my post about Tuesday’s special election prompted an email from a reader:

I was reading your discussion of the Big Short and you are exactly right about the people who got mortgages they could not pay being just as “guilty”, however you define it, as the people who gave them the mortgages. There are two things that infuriate me about the housing bubble. First, once people start getting loans they can’t pay back and don’t figure they ever will, they will always outbid honest people or if they don’t force honest people to pay more than they should have had to for a home. If I go out and get a loan I can afford to pay back, I can’t outbid the jackass who will borrow anything on the bet that he can flip the house. And that sucks. And as someone who was unable to buy a house during the boom, I resent the hell out of those people. The second thing about the situation is when those bets were paying off and people were flipping houses and making money, no one gave me any of that money. Those were their gains, not mine. But when the whole thing went tits up, I was supposed to feel sorry for them and view their having to give the house back to the bank and rent, something I had done my entire adult life as some kind of tragedy worthy of my aid. Yeah well screw them. Bubbles and speculation happen. But so do contractions. The fact that I ended up paying taxes to bail out a bunch of people who basically got rich at my expense is something I will never forgive.

Government intervention in the economy hurts real people in real ways. Democrats always talk of the way these interventions “help” people, but there is always a cost to be offset for every benefit. The costs in the case of subsidized cheap mortgages — including the notorious NINJA (“no income, no job”) mortgages that emerged during the housing bubble — included artificially bidding up home prices, in such a way that the honest would-be buyer was often priced out of the market. This also created an incentive for developers to build grotesque McMansions rather than more affordable family homes. Insofar as subsidizing mortgages function, as do most subsidies, as a form of deliberate economic redistribution, these programs amount to government picking winners and losers in the economy, which tends to create resentments and conflicts. The losers in such a redistribution scheme may not be correct in their choice of scapegoats to blame for their misfortune, but they are certainly justified in their belief that they’re getting screwed over.

Why do you think Hillary lost the election, huh? Here was a wealthy insider telling the “little people” about what she was going to do to “help” them, and the little people took a look at all those millions in the Clinton Foundation and realized that she really only cares about helping herself.

In 2014 Peter Wallison’s book Hidden in Plain Sight examined the role of “nontraditional mortgages” in causing the housing bubble. Here’s a US News & World Report article about the book:

Two decades ago, the major lenders employed mortgage underwriting requirements for collateral, capacity and credit history – the three Cs. Collateral meant that the home buyer made a down payment, preferably of 20 percent or more of the value of the house, never less than 10 percent. Capacity referred to the maximum share of a borrower’s income that could be devoted to mortgage payments and other debt service. Credit history meant that the borrower demonstrated an ability to manage credit responsibly, an ability which has come to be summarized in a credit score.
Nontraditional mortgages are those in which the lender deliberately waives one or more of the three Cs. Over a very short span of time, beginning in the late 1990s and culminating in 2007, the U.S. housing market came to be dominated by such mortgages. . . .
Government encouraged the growth in nontraditional mortgages. In the decades leading up to the crisis, government officials produced reports and statements criticizing lenders for sticking to the three Cs. They issued lending quotas to Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and large commercial banks. To meet those quotas, those lenders had to turn to nontraditional mortgages.
The high volume and low quality of nontraditional mortgages was never disclosed properly. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac instead reported that their portfolios included only one or two percent of “subprime” loans. . . .

People who want to blame “Wall Street” for what went wrong are simply ignoring the role played by government in causing the crisis.



 

 

Feminist Professor: ‘Trumpism’ Is About ‘Discourses of Masculinized Dominance’

Posted on | June 22, 2017 | 1 Comment

University of Oregon Professor C.J. Pascoe

You may think that elections are decided over issues of public policy, but that’s only because you’re a stupid Republican who doesn’t have a Ph.D. in sociology like Professor C.J. Pascoe:

The rise of Trumpism exemplifies a contest over masculinity, over who qualifies as a “real man.” . . . Both the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist movements exemplify similar discourses of masculinized dominance in which social actors claim masculinity through discourses and symbols of “compulsive heterosexuality” and divest others of it through the emasculating practices of a “fag discourse.” . . .
The election of President Trump is, in many ways, the story of American white, heterosexual masculinity, of a particularly noxious combination of racism, sexism and nationalism. Definitions of masculinity are culturally bound and “lives of particular groups of men are shaped by globally acting economic and political forces.” (Connell, 2011, p. 9). As global economic relations are reordered, so are masculinities (Salzinger, 2016). This means that the trend of western economic and social decline increasingly noted by scholars (Hoang, 2015; Carlson, 2015) has specific ramifications for white western men and definitions of masculinity. This decline is a particularly masculinized one, both in effects and response. . . .
Not surprisingly, given the association of American masculinity with workplace success, whiteness, heterosexuality and social and economic self-sufficiency, this decline has been particularly felt by working class white men who have responded with both rage and mourning . . .
Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” was in many ways a promise to “Make men ‘great again’ too, both fist-pounding, gun-toting guy-guys and high-flying entrepreneurs. To white, native born, heterosexual men he offered a solution to the dilemma they had long faced as the ‘left-behinds’ of the 1960s and 1970s celebration of other identities” (Hochschild 2016, p. 229). . . .
The story of Trumpism and movements against it is an example of the tenacity of inequality in gendered discourses. . . .

You can read the whole thing, if you’re into brain-numbing gender-theory explanations, complete with citations to such radical feminist sources as Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich, Angela Davis, Catharine MacKinnon, Alison Jaggar, and Sheila Jeffreys. This is the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology I expose in my book Sex Trouble, and this ideology is now taught as gospel in university Women’s Studies programs everywhere.

The fact that the American education system is controlled by Democrats, employed at taxpayer expense to indoctrinate students with “progressive” ideology, is one of those public-policy issues that Professor Pascoe doesn’t consider as relevant to Trump’s election as her explanations about “definitions of masculinity” and “gendered discourses.” However, our universities are being funded by a massive bubble of student-loan debt — “$1.3 trillion in federal student debt owed by 42.4 million Americans,” and a recent study found that “millions of people had not made a payment on $137 billion in federal student loans for at least nine months in 2016, a 14 percent increase in defaults from a year earlier.”

What Professor Glenn Reynolds calls The Higher Education Bubble is a major public issue. When you see academic careerists like Professor Pascoe attacking “Trumpism,” you have to realize it’s because Trump represents a threat to their interests. Academia is failing, and the professors responsible for this failure want a student-loan bailout, to keep the federal subsidies rolling in to continue paying for their failures.



 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

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