The Other McCain

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

Blame @CNN: Liberals Becoming Unhinged as Trump Inauguration Nears

Posted on | January 18, 2017 | 1 Comment

Let’s face it: The typical liberal’s grasp on reality is always a tenuous matter, but subjected to 24/7 anti-Trump propaganda by CNN and other liberal media organizations, some Democrat voters have completely lost their grip as the President-elect’s inauguration approaches:

A protester set himself on fire outside Trump International Hotel in Washington DC on Tuesday.
The 45-year-old man, who has not yet been identified, said the act was in protest of the President-elect’s looming inauguration.
Witnesses described how he yelled ‘Trump’ several times as ‘flames ran up his back’ before lying down in the street.
He suffered non-life-threatening burns and was taken to hospital shortly after the incident at around 9.30pm. . . .
‘(I’m protesting) the fact that we’ve elected somebody who is completely incapable of respecting the Constitution of the United States.’
The man, who said he was from California, suffered third-degree burns on 10 percent of his body, according to the Washington Post.
He had used a lighter and accelerant to start the fire.

Typical Democrat voter — a pathetic loser who can’t even succeed at burning himself to death. Meanwhile, in Miami:

A South Florida man has been charged with threatening to kill President-elect Donald Trump in a video posted online.
A Miami Beach police report released Wednesday identified the suspect as 51-year-old Dominic Puopolo. Jail records show Puopolo is being held without bail on state charges of threatening harm against a public servant. Court records do not list a lawyer for him.
The police report says Puopolo on Monday posted a video on his Twitter account stating that he would “be at the review/inauguration and I will kill President Trump, President-elect Trump” while in Washington.
The report says he was arrested a short time later at a Miami Beach Subway restaurant and admitted to officers he had posted the threatening video. Police say Puopolo told them he is homeless.

He’s homeless, so he’s got plenty of time to record anti-Trump videos and post them to Twitter. Are police sure this guy’s name isn’t Jim Acosta?

 

Category: Democrats, Media Bias

In the Mailbox: 01.18.17

Posted on | January 18, 2017 | Comments Off on In the Mailbox: 01.18.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Stay Classy! Bitter Elizabeth Warren Shows Her Lack of Manners
Michelle Malkin: Sponsors Of Anarchy
Twitchy: Bernie Sanders Tries To School Tom Price With “Access” Comparison, Steps On Rake Instead
Louder With Crowder: Debunking The Top Liberal Crusades Myths


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Russians Are Coming
American Power: Protester Sets Himself On Fire Outside Washington D.C. Trump Hotel
American Thinker: Black History (a/k/a Demonize White America) Month
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Bring The HEAT: World Of Warships – Friendly Death Match, And A New-Formed Clan
Da Tech Guy: James O’Keefe Is Producing Real News On Inaugural Violence Plans While The MSM Yawns
Don Surber: Dear Press Corps – We Don’t Believe You
Dustbury: Bolts For Dolts
Hogewash: Blue Blobs – M81 And M82
Jammie Wearing Fools: Good News! Running Over Protesters On Highways Could Soon Be Legal In North Dakota
Joe For America: Obama Pardons 64 More Criminals, Commutes Sentences For 209
JustOneMinute: Send In The Clowns
Power Line: Freeing A Terrorist Mastermind
Shark Tank: Rubio Tears Into Obama’s Pardon Of U.S. Traitor
Shot In The Dark: In The Footsteps Of Stalin, The Shadow Hecklers Stagger Through The Winter
STUMP: Never Forget – Thoughts On How To Build A Castle, by Vladimir Bukovsky
The Geller Report: Hamas/CAIR Demands Trump Remove Franklin Graham From Inaugural Lineup
The Jawa Report: Obama 48 Hours!
The Political Hat: Salon, The Alt-Right, And Conservatism
This Ain’t Hell: Is Obamacare Being Scammed?
War Is Boring: The United States And Turkey Can’t Agree On Iraq & Syria
Weasel Zippers: Trump Eyes 10% Spending Cuts, 20% Slash Of Federal Workers, also, Michael Moore And Hollywood Celebs Drape Themselves In American Flag For Magazine Cover While Dragging It On The Ground
Megan McArdle: The Once And Future Obamacare Death Spiral
Mark Steyn: Pallies On The Potomac


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Category: Linkagery

Why Lindsay Lohan Is a Muslim Now: Understanding 21st-Century ‘Oikophobia’

Posted on | January 18, 2017 | Comments Off on Why Lindsay Lohan Is a Muslim Now: Understanding 21st-Century ‘Oikophobia’

Lindsay Lohan in 2010 DUI mugshot (left) and in Turkey, October 2016 (right).

Lindsay Lohan has made many bad decisions in her life, but her apparent conversion to Islam may be her worst ever, Robert Spencer explains:

Lindsay Lohan has sparked widespread speculation that she has converted to Islam by deleting everything on her Instagram account except for the Arabic greeting “Alaikum salam” . . . .
Lohan has fueled this kind of speculation in the past, saying in 2015: “My very close friends, who have been there for me a lot, in London are Saudi and they gave me the Qur’an and I brought it to New York because I was learning. It opened doors for me to experience spiritually, to find another true meaning. This is who I am.”
She didn’t say what “true meaning” she found in Qur’anic injunctions sanctioning wife-beating (Qur’an 4:34), devaluing of women’s testimony (Qur’an 2:282) and inheritance rights (Qur’an 4:11), allowance for polygamy (Qur’an 4:3), or mandate of warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers (Qur’an 9:29), but that’s just the beginning of the absurdity.
Is Lindsay Lohan prepared to venture out in public with everything covered except her face and hands, as per Muhammad’s injunction (Abu Dawud 4092)? Is she willing not to go out at all unless accompanied by a male guardian, as per Islamic law? Is she happy with being judged deficient in intelligence and religious commitment, as Muhammad said of women (Bukhari 304)?
Lindsay Lohan likely doesn’t know that any of this is in Islamic teaching. She probably knows about Islam only the things she has been told by her friends in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, who are no doubt anxious to add her to the list of celebrity converts to Islam.

Lindsay Lohan is a drug-addled celebrity dimwit from a broken home who was pushed into show business as a child. Like so many other former child stars produced by the Disney movie/cable-TV fame factory — including Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus — Lohan’s young adulthood seemed to be a constant trainwreck of public shame, played out in tabloid headlines.

Lots of teenagers who aren’t rich, famous and beautiful struggle with similar problems — drugs, alcohol, sexual promiscuity, mental illness — but we never read headlines about those troubled youth unless and until they commit some horrible crime. Ordinary adolescent trauma cases don’t fascinate us the way the Troubled Starlet does, because the celebrity trainwreck is so ostentatiously blessed with everything our popular culture values — youth, wealth, beauty and fame.

 

Here was Lindsay Lohan, who had captured America’s hearts as a wholesome freckle-faced girl in Disney’s 1998 remake of The Parent Trap and who, at age 18, became one of the most promising young actresses in Hollywood when she starred in the hit comedy Mean Girls. She had everything in the world going for her, it seemed, but by the time she was 21, her career and personal life were in disarray. She broke up with her boyfriend, That ’70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama, her movies flopped, and her substance-abuse problems escalated to the point that directors were no longer willing to work with her. Eventually, as it became obvious that she would probably never work again as an actress, the tabloids lost interest in Lindsay Lohan, and her brief stint in a “reality TV” show on Oprah’s network fizzled out in 2014, inspiring me to comment:

It’s wrong to say that Lindsay Lohan ever had a drug and alcohol problem. No, Lindsay Lohan had a Lindsay Lohan problem.

And so, in 2015, somebody gave her a Koran and she moved to Dubai and now, evidently, Lindsay Lohan is an adherent of Islam. Why? That is to say, why Islam, and not some other belief system? Why didn’t Lindsay Lohan move to Lynchburg, Va., and become a Southern Baptist? Or why didn’t she move to Dublin and return to her Irish-Catholic roots?

Oikophobia — a term that Roger Scruton has popularized to describe “the repudiation of inheritance and home”:

He argued that it is “a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes,” but that it is a feature of some, typically leftist, political impulses and ideologies which espouse xenophilia, i.e. preference for alien cultures.
Scruton uses the term as the antithesis of xenophobia. . . . Mark Dooley describes oikophobia as centered within the Western academic establishment on “both the common culture of the West, and the old educational curriculum that sought to transmit its humane values.” This disposition has grown out of, for example, the writings of Jacques Derrida and of Michel Foucault’s “assault on ‘bourgeois’ society result[ing] in an ‘anti-culture’ that took direct aim at holy and sacred things, condemning and repudiating them as oppressive and power-ridden.”

This rejection of our own cultural inheritance has become widespread among the decadent elite in Western societies, where affluence fosters an alienation from the simple values of ordinary people. Oikophobia expresses itself in an attitude which, for example, considers the vile traitor Bradley “Chelsea” Manning deserving of presidential favor, but which disparages the loyal soldier who courageously does his duty.

 

The same liberal media that celebrates the cowardly traitor Manning, despises the genuine war hero Chris Kyle. Liberals hate real heroes because liberals hate America — this is oikophobia.

Likewise, after Lindsay Lohan destroyed her own show-business career, we could not expect that she would seek recovery by returning to any form of Christianity, especially not the traditional Catholicism of her Irish-American ancestors. Why not? Because to do so would be for Lindsay to admit that she was the source of her own problems.

Oikophobia is highly correlated to what Christopher Lasch called The Culture of Narcissism, a phenomenon I discussed in 2014:

What the narcissistic personality lacks more than anything else is an objectivity about the relationship between the Self and others. The narcissist is unrealistic about himself because he cannot step outside himself and view his own flaws and failures as they actually are. The gap between who he thinks he is and who he really is, and perhaps more importantly, the gap between how others see him and how he sees himself, creates an existential crisis which he attempts to evade through various rationalizations and psychological defense mechanisms. . . .
The narcissist’s devotion to self-image — what he thinks of himself, and what he wishes others to think of him — blinds him to his own faults and errors, so that he must always find scapegoats to blame for his failures. . . .
Feelings of entitlement and unrealistic expectations based on an inflated sense of superiority — this is classic narcissism. And when narcissists fail, their reaction is always predictably to engage in evasive blame-shifting and scapegoating.

The celebrity like Lindsay Lohan who wrecks her career through substance abuse has failed not only by the standards of show business, but she has also failed in terms of basic moral values. To return to Catholicism would require Lindsay Lohan to admit that she is the problem — “Mea culpa” — and because the narcissist is psychologically incapable of such an admission, instead she must turn to another belief system. Under the influence of oikophobia, the belief system she chooses must be exotic and foreign. Madonna turned to the Kabbalah, and some people turn to Buddhism, but Lindsay Lohan (who never seems to do anything in a moderate way) turns to Islam. If she continues down this path according to her usual immoderate habits, we may expect Lindsay Lohan to become a Islamic extremist. Comparing her to Bradley “Chelsea” Manning may be apt in another sense, i.e., the destruction of one’s own identity.

Because they are obsessed with their own self-image, narcissists tend to react badly when their self-image — their sense of identity — becomes associated in their own minds with failure. The narcissist’s typical grandiosity, a belief that he is an extraordinary personality, leads to cognitive dissonance when the negative feedback from reality does not match the narcissist’s overblown self-image of superiority. Transgenderism can be seen as the ultimate attempt to resolve this cognitive dissonance by destroying one’s own original identity. For example, after a rich white boy named John Walker Flynt drops out of college and squanders a small fortune in a failed business venture, he decides to destroy his identity and become “Brianna Wu.” (With typical narcissistic hubris, John/“Brianna” is now running for Congress.)

John Walker Flynt as a failed male (left) and after becoming ‘Brianna Wu’ (right).

One reason people like John Flynt/“Brianna Wu” become so enraged when their original identity is referenced is because they do not want anyone to discover any of the wrongdoing or failures of their past. By declaring themselves to be a new person of the opposite sex, transgender people claim that the person they once were never really existed. “Brianna Wu” claims to be an entirely different person, who cannot be held responsible for anything done by John Walker Flynt.

Not coincidentally, Westerners who convert to Islam also usually change their names: “Esteban Santiago, who opened fire in the baggage claim area of the Fort Lauderdale Airport on January 6, murdering five people, was a convert to Islam who took the name Aashiq Hammad.”

Narcissism, oikophobia, self-destruction, transgenderism — all of these are symptomatic of pervasive decadence in 21st-century America.



 

 

Category: Celebrities, Islam

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 01.17.17

Posted on | January 18, 2017 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Harry Reid’s Legacy
EBL: Making Decimation Great Again
Twitchy: Protest Group Scales Back Plans To Block DC Traffic After Project Veritas Releases Undercover Videos
Louder With Crowder: CNN Tries To Force MLK III To Disavow Trump – He Refuses


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Obama Commutes Sentences of Bradley Manning and Puerto Rican Terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera
American Thinker: The Left Is Thoroughly Bamboozled
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily News
BLACKFIVE: Small Admissions by Amy Poeppel
Bring The HEAT: Desert Storm
Da Tech Guy: Baldilocks – Marc Lamont Hill Shows Us His Wits
Don Surber: Bill Gates Made No One Poor
Dustbury: Why There Will Be No TrumpCare
Hogewash: I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Jammie Wearing Fools: RIP Gene Cernan, Last Man On The Moon
Joe For America: Bikers For Trump To Build “Wall of Meat” To Block Anti-Trump Rioters
Power Line: Return Of The Leftover Left
Shark Tank: Republicans Expedite Obamacare Repeal, Democrats Plan Protests
Shot In The Dark: Fake Economic News
STUMP: Kentucky – A Flurry Of Anti-Union Legislation As Republicans Take Control
The Geller Report: Left Wing Paying People Huge Amounts To Protest Trump
The Lonely Conservative: Gravity, Black Holes, And Washington DC
The Political Hat: Abortion Wrongthink Verboten
This Ain’t Hell: About Jonn
War Is Boring: Russian Paratroopers Could Totally Mess Up The Baltic States
Weasel Zippers: Guns Found Stashed At Several Locations Along Potomac In DC, also, Maxine Waters Struggles To Explain Why Trump Should Be Impeached
Megan McArdle: The Myth Of The Medical Bankruptcy
Mark Steyn: Tribulations, But No Trials


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Category: Linkagery

The #WomensMarch on Washington: Like ‘Seinfeld,’ It’s a Show About Nothing

Posted on | January 17, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

The organizers of Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington are Democrats who are protesting that a Republican won the election. Period.

However, admitting their crudely partisan motives would sort of undercut their claim to speak on behalf of all women (e.g., a majority of white women voted for Trump) and they have had difficulty explaining what their march is actually about. The person who skewers them most effectively, I must say, is Canadian radical feminist Meghan Murphy:

Since the March was announced, many feminists have wanted to know more: What is the purpose of the March? Is there an agenda? It is called a “Women’s March,” but is it for women only? (No.) Is the March “anti-Trump? (No.) Or even a protest? (Also no.) For a short while, though enthusiastic, many wondered how and if organizers would even be able to pull it off. But a permit was issued and the event is not only going to happen this Saturday, but is expected to be one of America’s biggest demonstrations.
But claims that the March is a radical one don’t exactly mesh with the message put forth by organizers.
“It’s an affirmative message to the new administration that ‘women’s rights are human rights,’” Vox reported, adding that “the event is being promoted as a ‘march’ or a ‘rally,’ but emphatically not a ‘protest.’”
Organizers’ insistence that the March doesn’t protest anything in particular could be interpreted as an effort to bring together as many people as possible. . . .
It’s odd to call something a “Women’s March” when it’s not really just for women, but the problems with the event extend far beyond that. Saying a thing is “woman-centered” is one thing, but actually centering women is another. The Women’s March, in their efforts to be “as inclusive as possible” have avoided naming the problem, leaving feminists to wonder how exactly the problem will be addressed, if we can’t even speak it out loud.

According to Ms. Murphy, the problem is simply men or, rather, “male violence,” but this just tips you off to the fact that Ms. Murphy is Canadian, because if she was American — and prone to dig around a bit in federal crime statistics — she’d realize why a bunch of Democrat protesters don’t want to get too specific about this problem. To put it bluntly, “male violence” in the United States is disproportionately caused by men who vote Democrat. Or at least, they probably would vote Democrat, if they weren’t so busy killing each other over drug turf in places like Chicago, where 10 people were gunned down over the MLK holiday weekend. Well, “intersectionality,” as the feminists say, but it’s not Trump voters who are terrorizing the streets of Chicago and — call it a hunch — I’m pretty sure this guy isn’t a Republican, either:

A Worcester, Massachusetts man faced a judge for human trafficking and rape charges after police say he paid $5,000 to smuggle a 14-year-old girl into the country, held her captive and sexually assaulted her.
Twenty-two-year-old Luis Santos was ordered to be held without bail pending a dangerousness hearing by a judge on Tuesday following his arrest last week.
Police say the girl apparently began talking with Santos on Facebook from El Salvador. She arrived in Worcester last month.
Police say she was forced to live in Santos’ apartment and share his bed. The girl accused Santos of touching her on multiple occasions.
Police say she was locked in a room and wasn’t allowed to use a phone or attend school most of the time.

Meanwhile, a “Black Lives Matter” protester is under arrest:

 

Javier Tra Dunn, 25, 4362 Hollywood St., was charged by an East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury Thursday with two counts of aggravated rape and one count of first-degree rape.
The indictment, filed into the court record Friday, accuses Dunn of raping the same alleged victim during three different time periods, beginning in 2012 when she was 5 and ending in late June when she was 9.
Dunn was arrested July 10 near Baton Rouge police headquarters on Goodwood Boulevard in July while protesting the fatal July 5 police shooting of Sterling. He was booked on counts of obstruction of a highway and resisting arrest.

Elsewhere in Louisiana:

 

A Shreveport man accused of raping a 5-year-old girl has been arrested.
The Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office says 20-year-old Jaquayveon Malik McGee was arrested Tuesday on a charge of first-degree rape. Bond was set at $75,000. It was unknown if he’s represented by an attorney.
Sheriff Steve Prator, in a news release Friday, said McGee’s arrest followed an investigation by Detective Larry Pierce into an incident that allegedly occurred Dec. 30 at the victim’s home in north Caddo Parish.
A family member of the child learned of the alleged sexual assault, took the child to a local hospital and reported the matter to the sheriff’s office.

Meanwhile, in California:

 

A man wanted for kidnapping, raping, and selling a 12-year-old Watsonville girl into prostitution was captured in Mexico.
In October, William Ortiz Ruiz took the girl to a motel in Watsonville, raped her, and then sold her as a prostitute, according to police.
Ruiz forced the girl to stay at the motel under threats of violence, Watsonville police said.
Mexican authorities and FBI agents found and arrested 21-year-old Ruiz in San Bartolomé Coro, Michoacán, Mexico last week.

Probably not a Trump voter.

Maybe because she’s from Canada, this isn’t obvious to Meghan Murphy, but here in America, there’s an awful lot of “male violence” Democrats never complain about, because Democrats are committing most of it.



 

 

Category: Crime, Sex Trouble

Shameless Lesbian Misquotes Bannon

Posted on | January 17, 2017 | 1 Comment

In a 2011 radio interview, when Steve Bannon was promoting his documentary Fire From the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, he pointed out that women like Sarah Palin exemplified a type of “women’s liberation” feminists never imagined:

“That, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England. That drives the left insane and that’s why they hate these women.”

After Bannon joined the Trump campaign, his 2011 remark was spun into an expression of ignorant bigotry, which obviously it is not. The radical feminist movement indeed included a lot of lesbians from the elite “Seven Sisters” schools, e.g., Mount Holyoke College alumnae Joan Biren (Class of ’66) and Ginny Berson (Class of ’67), both founding members of the Furies collective. As a matter of fact, by the early 1990s, the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, was believed to have the highest per-capita concentration of lesbians in America, in part because it was home to Smith College, a Seven Sisters school, and only 15 miles from Mount Holyoke.  There certainly was a historical basis for Bannon’s description of New England “dykes” as prominent in radical feminism, but the distortions created by the liberal spin machine have a way of leaving a stain behind. And so “shameless lesbian” Jocelyn MacDonald, after quoting Andrea Dworkin, took this cheap shot at Bannon:

This is precisely why Steve Bannon, the neo-Nazi altar boy of our newly elected president, ridiculed women like Hillary Clinton — powerful, self-determining women — as a “bunch of dykes.”

That is such a complete misreading of what Bannon actually said as to be an almost 180-degree reversal of what he said. First, Bannon was praising the “powerful, self-determining women” of the conservative movement. Secondly, Bannon obviously wasn’t referring to Hillary Clinton in that 2011 interview. Although she attended a Seven Sisters school (Wellesley), Clinton had made her marriage to Bill Clinton the vehicle of her own ambition, and was perhaps in some sense less “self-determining” than Sarah Palin. The smear of Bannon as a “neo-Nazi” is just gratuitous character assassination, but the main point — which Jocelyn MacDonald for some reason wishes to ignore — is the extent to which “a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools” actually were influential in the feminist movement. It is remarkable that nothing makes feminists angrier than when someone tells the truth about feminism.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Academics Protest Trump With Public Reading of French Homosexual’s Book

Posted on | January 17, 2017 | 1 Comment

This makes perfect sense at a certain level:

Many groups of scholars and writers are planning teach-ins or readings for Friday, the day Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as president of the United States. Others are organizing teach-ins to focus on Trump’s policies.
Some anthropologists are taking a different approach. They are planning events that day in which people — together at locations across the country or virtually connected — will read and discuss a lecture presented by Michel Foucault, the late philosopher, as part of a series he gave at the Collège de France. The lectures have been published as a book, Society Must Be Defended. . . .
“This lecture strikes us as very good to think with at this present point: it demands we simultaneously consider the interplay of sovereign power, discipline, biopolitics and concepts of security, and race. In light of the current sociopolitical situation where the reaction to activism against persistent racism has been to more overtly perpetuate racism as political discourse, we need to remember and rethink the role of racism as central to, rather than incidental to, the political and economic activities of the state,” wrote the two scholars who organized the effort in a blog post at Savage Minds. The scholars are Paige West, the Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University, and JC Salyer, term professor of practice at Barnard.

Foucault was a gay French philosopher who died of AIDS in 1984. His postmodern (or poststructural) philosophy was typical of the French Left in the decadent political and intellectual aftermath of World War II. The Communist Party was so powerful in France that, when the Kremlin wished to signal a change in the party line in 1945, the chosen messenger was Jacques Duclos, the Stalinist leader of the French Communist Party. It was the infamous “Duclos letter” that spelled the doom of CPUSA Chairman Earl Browder (who had sought to maintain the old Popular Front line) and ushered in the anti-American stance of Cold War Communism. The extraordinary influence of Communism in post-WWII France helps to explain why French intellectuals like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were so consistently anti-American, a tradition to which Foucault was an heir, and which made him a darling of American academics, whose hatred of America is their intellectual raison d’etre.

Michel Foucault and his 1976 book, ‘The History of Sexuality.’

Foucault is perhaps best known to American students for The History of Sexuality which is one of the main sources cited by Professor Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (see pp. 23-24, 31-33, 124-127). Foucault’s idea of sexuality as regulated by “discourses” of power in turn influenced another of Professor Butler’s main sources, radical lesbian Monique Wittig (see “These Discourses of Heterosexuality Which Particularly Oppress All of Us”). The prevalence of Third Wave feminist “gender theory” in American universities has given Foucault a sort of academic immortality, and it is therefore a cliché that these Barnard College professors would choose this French homosexual as their Inauguration Day protest reading.

You may ask, “Who are these professors at Barnard?” Professor West is an anthropologist whose specialty is the natives of Papua New Guinea, while her colleague John C. Salyer is a staff attorney for the Arab American Family Support Center. Two years ago, West and Salyer gave a “Distinguished Lecture” at the American Museum of Natural History about — wait for it — the anthropology of climate change.

What are we to make of the claim by West and Salyer that “the reaction to activism against persistent racism has been to more overtly perpetuate racism as political discourse”? Are they talking about the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which provoked riots and murders of police? Are they perhaps talking about the Islamic terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, or the terrorist attacks in France and Germany? Do Americans “perpetuate racism as political discourse” simply by stating the self-evident fact that radical Muslims want to kill us all? Are we not permitted to say or do anything in defense of our own lives? And since we’re asking questions that these Barnard professors have never asked, let’s ask this: Why do parents pay $50,394 annual tuition for their daughters to attend Barnard College? Is it mainly because Barnard tuition is cheaper than having their daughters committed to an insane asylum?

(Via Memeorandum.)



 

Category: Education, Intellectuals

How Leftists ‘Think’

Posted on | January 16, 2017 | 2 Comments

Among the dishonest tactics of rhetoric routinely employed by the Left is the False Analogy, “Trump is Hitler” being the latest variation. Scarcely a year ago, the esteemed voices of liberal media were assuring us that Donald Trump was a bumbling idiot who could not possibly win the Republican nomination. Once he did win it, however, the same esteemed voices assured us that the bumbling idiot Trump was doomed to be defeated by the Glorious Leader of the Democratic People’s Party. As soon as this prediction was proven false, and Trump was elected president, the esteemed voices of liberal media hit the panic button: “TRUMP IS HITLER! FASCISM IS ON THE MARCH!”

In what sense is Donald Trump comparable to Hitler? Or why is Trump — who was supposed to be such an incompetent dimwit that he couldn’t be taken seriously — now suddenly analogous to the totalitarian who rose to power in Germany after he spent 12 years turning the once-obscure Nazi Party into a disciplined instrument of his will? Trump has not organized a mass movement with Stormtroopers and goosestep marches, he has merely run a winning campaign for a president, being elected to chief executive of a constitutional republic. Only because the Left has been so eager to expand the power of the federal government, and has spent the past eight years building a Cult of Personality around President Obama, whom liberals praised for his habit of governing by executive orders, can Trump’s presidency be imagined as anything like a dictatorship.

It is simple work to point out how Trump is nothing like Hitler, and therefore no serious person could believe such a thing, but this does not prevent liberals from suggesting it, and why? Because the bogus Trump-is-Hitler analogy helps inspire fear of the Republican president.

The circularity of liberal logic makes it fun trying to distill their arguments to the form of a syllogism. Who can’t spot the error in this?

Premise A: Vote Democrat because
Premise B: Trump is Hitler;

and therefore

Conclusion: Vote Democrat!

At some level, liberal ideology is simply partisan prejudice, and any expectation of logical coherence is doomed to be disappointed, as liberals will defend anything Democrats do while condemning Republicans for doing the same thing. It isn’t even necessary for a Republican to do anything in order for liberals to condemn him; the mere fact of his being a Republican means that whatever he does is wrong, ergo, vote Democrat!

Donald Trump has not even taken office yet, and has therefore committed no official act as president for which he can be condemned, but liberals aren’t letting that get in their way, are they? Because it is so easy to show what’s wrong with the Left’s modus operandi, the Left seeks to avoid any situation where they might be find themselves compelled to defend their claims against informed criticism. Their preferred venues are academia (where leftists get paid to lecture ignorant teenagers) and the broadcast media, where the message is controlled by editors and producers whose job is to make every story conform to the approved political narrative.

We are not supposed to notice this, just like we aren’t supposed to notice the word games involved. Try to pin down the Left, and you’ll find them doing a variation on the “clown nose on/clown nose off” trick, by which they avoid responsibility for their own ideas:

So the tautology

  • “as we can only think in words, we think in words”

becomes, clown nose on,

  • “as we can only think in words, words mediate our interaction with reality”

which with the addition of some baggy pants, floppy shoes, and a seltzer horn, becomes

  • “as words mediate our interaction with reality, words create our reality.”

which of course is logically equivalent to

  • “reality itself is nothing but words.”

And boom, you’re a Social Justice Warrior.

You should read the whole thing at Rotten Chestnuts.

 

Category: Intellectuals
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