The Other McCain

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

Feminism’s Rhetorical Abracadabra

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | 2 Comments

You have to study rhetoric and logic and the techniques of propaganda if you are to understand how feminism succeeds. Having read all the major works of feminist theory, and having also read many other lesser-known but influential works (including popular Women’s Studies textbooks), I am not deceived by their obfuscation. “Oh, we don’t hate men,” the feminists will protest, when called out for their anti-male rhetoric, insisting that it is only “misogyny” or “patriarchy” or “rape culture” that is the object of their criticism. Yet all of these jargon phrases are merely synonyms for male evil. The very foundation of feminist theory is that males are perpetrators and beneficiaries of an unjust system of oppression of which all women are victims. The male is to feminism what the Jew is to anti-Semitism and, like the Jew-hater who recycles Hamas propaganda about the plight of Palestinians while pretending not to endorse Islamic terrorism, the feminist promotes atrocity narratives that demonize males, while pretending not to be a man-hater. Read more

Category: Education, Gays, Sex Trouble

If I Didn’t Have Such Sterling Confidence In Press Integrity, I Could Begin To See Anti-Trump Bias In The Reporting

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | Comments Off on If I Didn’t Have Such Sterling Confidence In Press Integrity, I Could Begin To See Anti-Trump Bias In The Reporting

by Smitty

Oh, and, by the way: this is awesome:

Category: Uncategorized

In The Mailbox: 02.15.17

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.15.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


As you may have heard via Sarah Hoyt on Instapundit, Kim du Toit’s wife Connie has died from cancer, and Kim is trying to put his life back together. There’s a GoFundMe if you want to help.


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Asshat Of The Day – Bill Kristol
Michelle Malkin: Bumps In The Road – Trump Vs. Obama
Twitchy: Wegmans Gives Awesome Response To Calls For Boycott Over Trump Wine
Louder With Crowder: Canada’s Kathleen Wynne Visits Mosque To Preach Tolerance, Gets Put In Corner


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: There Is No Such Thing As An Alpha Female
American Power: Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism Of The American Revolution
American Thinker: The Muslim Face Of The New Democratic Party
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BLACKFIVE: Kelly Crigger’s The Comfort Station
Bring The HEAT: World Of Warships – Kitwar’s Ranked Battle
Da Tech Guy: Mike Flynn – The Deep State Establishment Fights Back
Don Surber: Bill Kristol Lets His Fascism Slip
Dustbury: Meet The Invalid
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Lock Them Up – Anti-Trump Lunatics Vow Not To Pay Taxes
Joe For America: IRS Kills Obamacare Mandate Requirement
Power Line: Is The New York Times A Serious News Source?, also, Democrat Comeback On Hold In Minnesota
Shark Tank: Florida Lawmakers Consider Forbidding Teachers From Withholding Recess
Shot In The Dark: Focus
STUMP: Mortality Monday – How Many People Will Die In The U.S. In 2017?
The Geller Report: Orban – Hungary Will Welcome “European Refugees” Fleeing Multicultural West
The Political Hat: The Latest In Social Justice – Anti-Miscegenation
The Quinton Report: Valentine’s Day – From Russia With Love
This Ain’t Hell: Another One Bites The Dust
War Is Boring: Trump’s Foreign Policy – Putting America Third?
Weasel Zippers: California Spent On High-Speed Rail And Illegal Immigrants While Ignoring Oroville Dam, also, Former Obama Officials And Loyalists Waged Secret Campaign To Oust Flynn
Megan McArdle: Why Some Consumer Costs Just Grow And Grow


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White People Are ‘Lazy,’ Immigrants ‘Work Hard and Really Want to Succeed’

Posted on | February 15, 2017 | Comments Off on White People Are ‘Lazy,’ Immigrants ‘Work Hard and Really Want to Succeed’

 

Bill Kristol let his open-borders enthusiasm lead him into a swamp of delusion in a recent discussion with Charles Murray:

“Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in…? You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically, if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two, three or four generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever,” Kristol said.
“Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico, who really want to work hard and really want to succeed. They really want their kids to live better lives and aren’t sort of clipping coupons or hoping that they can hang on and meanwhile grew up as spoiled kids and so forth. In that respect, I don’t know how this moment is that different from the early 20th century.”

Here is the video:

 

(Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady.) Kristol is guilty of recycling a misleading liberal myth about American immigration history, where a sentimental view of past immigrants — the Irish, the Italians, etc. — is used to justify our current policy (or lack thereof). According to what we may call the Emma Lazarus School of Immigration Policy, the success of America in assimilating previous influxes of Irish and Italian and Jewish immigrants means that we can just as easily assimilate immigrants from Syria and Somalia. Unfortunately for Kristol (and for America) this is false. To the extent that the Irish, Italians and Jews are actually assimilated, this was quite a tumultuous ordeal of slums, crime, riots, treason, etc. Exactly how “assimilated” were Sacco and Vanzetti? How “assimilated” were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? And as for the Irish, well . . . Ted Kennedy?

Go sell your misty-eyed tales about Ellis Island wherever you can find a market, but it is foolish to make nostalgia the basis of our immigration policy in the 21st century. Stop accusing Americans of bigotry because they suspect (and rightly so) that the influx of illegal immigrants is harmful to their interests. Scott Morefield cites a recent study:

51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native households. . . .
Immigrant households have much higher use of food programs (40 percent vs. 22 percent for natives) and Medicaid (42 percent vs. 23 percent). . . .
Welfare use varies among immigrant groups. Households headed by immigrants from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent) have the highest overall welfare use. Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest.

This is what is omitted from Kristol’s conflation of Ellis Island-era immigration with our current situation — the liberal Welfare State. The immigrant who arrived in America in 1880 or 1920 did not have a “right” to public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security, etc., because those programs did not exist at the time. In point of fact, the Democrat Party from FDR to LBJ owed its political ascendancy to its status as the party of federally funded entitlement programs which were overwhelmingly supported by the so-called “ethnics,” i.e., the Ellis Island immigrants and their descendants. It was not until the 1960s, when urban race riots and a surge in violent crime sparked “white flight” from the cities, that these white “ethnics” reconsidered their political allegiances.

You cannot have a Welfare State and open borders, too, because welfare sabotages the incentive to hard work and, as the data about welfare utilization by immigrants shows, government benefits become a redistribution program, transferring taxpayer money to foreigners. To characterize the taxpayer’s resentment of this as “racism” (as John McCain and other open-borders enthusiasts have done) is a smear that the taxpayer is not too stupid to recognize as an insult.

Finally, Mr. Kristol, can you please stop “white-shaming”?

The other day, I noticed a young feminist of Puerto Rican ancestry make some really obnoxious anti-white statement on Twitter, and it hit me that what she was actually doing was something Jeanne Kirkpatrick correctly analyzed in 1984: “They always blame America first.”

Anti-white rhetoric is a proxy for hating America. Despite all the talk of “diversity,” the majority of Americans are white. Therefore, to hurl insults at white people is a way of insulting America itself. To have a prominent conservative join in on this game, by smearing the white working class as “decadent, lazy, spoiled,” gives credence to the alt-right paranoid chatter about “white genocide” and, we might well wonder, is it really paranoia when we see so many voices uttering these anti-white sentiments even in the Republican Party?

 

 

Our nation is currently teetering on the brink of anarchy because we have too long tolerated divisive hate-mongering by the Left, which exploits ethnic resentments in a cynical identity politics hustle, telling minorities that all their problems are the fault of white people. At the same time, the poor are told to blame their problems on the rich, women are told to blame their problems on men, and gay people are told to blame their problems on heterosexuals. All of these allegedly oppressive forces — racism, sexism, homophobia, greed — are allegedly represented by the Republican Party, and embodied by the demonized villain Donald Trump, so that all of this “social justice” rhetoric adds up to a political idea so simple it can be summarized in two words: “Vote Democrat!”

Your basic problem, Mr. Kristol, is that you are an intellectual, and are guilty of over-thinking everything. Donald Trump, however grievous his faults may be, does not have this particular problem.

Our President is not a man devoted to intellectual abstractions, but is rather more like General Patton: “Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. . . . Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose.” That’s how Donald Trump thinks — maintain the strategic offensive and stop worrying about whether liberals call you a “racist” or whatever. Liberals are always going to sling those accusations at Republicans, no matter what, and if you waste time and energy defending against that stuff, you’ll lose sight of the objective, i.e., winning.

On Oct. 8, when the very worst of the accusations against Donald Trump appeared to have fatally wounded his campaign, I declared he could not possibly win, but a month later, he won anyway. And in achieving this against-all-odds victory, it might be argued, Donald Trump rescued the Republican Party from itself. For too long, Republicans have let themselves be intimidated by those who insist that it would be political suicide to attack head-on the problem of illegal immigration. Trump triumphed by ignoring those fears, and if Bill Kristol is still too attached to his pet intellectual abstractions to recognize the significance of this, well, who is it that has become decadent and lazy?

It is not “anti-immigrant” to enforce our immigration laws, nor is it “racist” to object to anti-white rhetoric, and the conservative movement needs intellectuals who can think clearly about these subjects.



 

 

 

Category: Donald Trump, Immigration, Politics, Racism

In The Mailbox: 02.14.17

Posted on | February 14, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.14.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Michael Flynn Resigns – Government Leakers Trying To Take Trump Down?
Twitchy: Nancy Pelosi Gets Punked By Flynn Parody Account. And It’s On Video
Louder With Crowder: Beyonce Loses Grammy Awards, Whiny Liberals Cry RACISM!


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Australian Conservatism Is Finished
American Power: Playboy Magazine Bringing Back Naked Women
American Thinker: Obama Failed To Transform America, But He Definitely Transformed The Democrats
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Air Traffic News
BLACKFIVE: Garden Of Lamentations by Deborah Crombie
Bring The HEAT: More Climate Change Fraud – “NOAA Cheated And Got Caught”
Da Tech Guy: Christopher Harper – Me And The New York Times
Don Surber: David Duke Endorses Keith Ellison For DNC
Dustbury: Waiting For 222
Hogewash: Footnote Du Jour
Jammie Wearing Fools: After Trash Talking Trump For A Month, California Officials Now Begging For His Help
Joe For America: NYPD Opens Full Can of Whoopass On Illegal Immigration Protesters
JustOneMinute: Out Like Flynn
Power Line: No Vote Fraud, Eh?
Shark Tank: New Bill Would Protect Religious Expression In Public Schools
Shot In The Dark: Parallels
STUMP: Actuarial Assumptions And Professional Ethics
The Geller Report: Al Franken Claims Even Some Republicans Say Trump’s Not Right Mentally
The Jawa Report: Where Is Dr. Rusty Shackleford? Career Change Edition, also, Milo The Fatwa Yiannopoulos
The Political Hat: Culpability By Presence
This Ain’t Hell: Matt Uhrin Honored For Rescuing Flag From Protesters
War Is Boring: This Weird Little Company Wants To Build The Next A-10
Weasel Zippers: The Twenty Cities With The Highest Numbers Of Illegal Immigrants, also, Hezbollah Leader Says “Idiot” President Donald Trump’s Travel Ban “Criminal And Racist”
Megan McArdle: This Valentine’s Day, Have One Last Fight


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Feminists: They Even Hate Love

Posted on | February 14, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Is there anything that feminism can’t destroy? Feminists hate babies. Feminists want your tax money to pay for killing babies. If you disagree with feminists, they will do everything in their power to harm you and your family. Regular readers of this blog know the truth: Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. Feminist ideology is a satanic doctrine, and feminist rhetoric is anti-male hate propaganda. This is a truth that feminists prove anew every day:

More than a decade ago, Lawrence Summers was purged from the presidency of Harvard University after he had the temerity to suggest there are “innate differences” between men and women. Feminists consider all differences between men and women to be socially constructed by the gender binary of the heterosexual matrix, as Professor Judith Butler has declared. Feminism’s goal is to achieve equality through androgyny, eradicating masculinity and femininity so that men and women become exactly identical and, in such an egalitarian post-patriarchal utopia, what basis could there be for romantic love?
None whatsoever, as feminist Carrie Jenkins explains in her new book, What Love Is: And What It Could Be. Professor Jenkins, who teaches philosophy at the University of British Columbia, is an advocate and practitioner of polyamory. Her book has been praised by her fellow feminists as an argument against “traditional, heteronormative, monogamous, pair-bonded, procreative, romantic love.” It is wrong even to imagine that kind of love, Professor Jenkins recently told an interviewer: “This idea that it’s very romantic to be swept off your feet by a Prince Charming figure and rescued from a life of poverty or whatever by a wealthy man, is feeding into these gendered stereotypes. This is built into our ideas of who we find attractive, what it is to have a romantic story attached to your love life.” . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.



 

Category: Abortion, Education, Sex Trouble

‘An Uncomfortable Truth’

Posted on | February 14, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Spain is dying. The total fertility rate — average number of lifetime births per woman — is 1.49 in Spain, and this is nearly 30% below replacement level. In December 2015, demographers noted that Spain had passed a crucial milestone — more deaths than births, a harbinger of population decline. Before a nation dies, it first grows old, and the graying population of Spain creates a heavy burden on the country’s pension and health care system, as there are fewer and fewer younger workers to pay taxes.

What Spain is now facing is demographic winter, and a Spanish businessman named Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe has created an organization called Renacimiento Demografico (Demographic Renaissance) to spread awareness of this looming social problem.

“Demographic winter is an uncomfortable truth for radical feminism,” Macarrón said in an interview with La Contra TV this week. The Google translation of an article about his interview is a bit uneven — e.g., using “majors” where a better translation would be “senior citizens,” and using “bigger” where “older” was intended — but I’ll adjust it a bit and you can still get most of what he was trying to say:

Alejandro Macarrón, director general of the Demographic Renaissance Foundation, gives an interview to La Contra TV in which he describes the causes and consequences of the demographic winter that is living Spain. He defines this situation as a “suicide” of our country since, he says, “we are going to die as a people because we do not want children”.
During the half-hour interview, the director general of the Demographic Renaissance Foundation [says] that the fall in the birth rate in our country will cause a deterioration of pensions, “which will increasingly be worse and more painful to pay for active workers”.
Alejandro warns that movements in favor of euthanasia are going to exert more pressure on our society “because there are more and more [retirees] who are very expensive.” “The [elderly] are going to [become] a great percentage of voters, it is the decisive segment for the vote. When the population is smaller and the people are [older], the economy logically goes down,” he assured. . . .
In addition, Macarrón has denounced that before “the woman worked at home. Most of them now work outside the home and it seems that the one that does not is second, one late. Incentives are now given only to those who work outside the home, and that goes against the birth rate. It is discriminatory, the state must be central.”
“Birth is not only a woman’s thing, it seems that the figure of the father has disappeared, in abortion this is very much. Incentives are being given only to mothers. If we think only of women, it favors the absence of family,” he warned. . . .
Finally, Macarrón has pointed out that this situation “is an uncomfortable truth for radical feminism, which discredits traditional women. Also for the environmentalism, which defends that the human being is the problem, since, the less people, the less pollution.”

If you are fluent in Spanish, you may want to watch the video interview:

 

(Hat-tip: Pete Da Tech Guy on Gab.) Macarrón’s remarks about women working outside the home and the disappearance of the father’s role in families deserve more explanation. This sounds too much like “back-to-the-kitchen” male chauvinism, but motherhood is not incompatible with wage earning. Anyone who looks at demographic data knows that birth rates are actually higher in working-class families than among the affluent college-educated elite. So the idea that careers and motherhood are an “either/or” choice is a false dilemma. More important factors are the decline of marriage, the delay of childbearing, and the rise of the DINK (double income, no kids) lifestyle among upscale professionals. When divorce and unwed motherhood become commonplace, when young couples are discouraged from marrying, when materialism is promoted in popular culture, when young women are led to believe that postponing motherhood until they are past 30 is a good idea — well, these are core factors in the “demographic winter” Macarrón warns about.

Get me started on this topic, and I could go on for thousands of words, but the crucial question is, what kind of messages are young people getting from parents, from schools, from churches and from media?

 

While I don’t know what’s on TV in Spain, popular culture in the United States celebrates the illusion of eternal youth, the idea that everybody can be like the cast of Friends or The Big Bang Theory, eschewing the most important responsibilities of adult life, marriage and parenthood. We can laugh at the character of Sheldon Cooper, a brilliant scientist with the temperament of a petulant toddler, but such entertainment has the effect of idealizing a lifestyle of perpetual adolescence. Similar messages are reinforced by many other TV shows and movies, so that young people exposed to this incessant media bombardment develop beliefs and attitudes that are incompatible with becoming the kind of adults who make good husbands and wives, good fathers and mothers. Only if parents recognize that the cultural sewage spewing out of Hollywood is toxic, and do what they can to limit its impact on their children’s belief system, can there be hope to avert demographic winter. Parents must exercise a counter-cultural influence, or else their children will believe the deadly lies that Hollywood is selling. Public schools are doing nothing about this problem, because the schools are part of the problem. Our government education bureaucracy is now run by left-wing “progressives” who are anti-Christian, anti-capitalism, anti-marriage and anti-motherhood. Schools now teach young people that babies are bad, abortion is good and promiscuity is harmless. The public school curriculum systematically attacks Bible-based moral beliefs, and schools employ atheist teachers who ridicule Christianity in their classrooms.

 

There is a connection between belief and behavior, you see. Parents who allow their children’s beliefs to be scripted by Hollywood (and “educated” by government bureaucrats) should not be surprised when the results are catastrophic not only for their children as individuals, but for society as a whole. More than 15 years ago, Jim Sedlak of the American Life League looked at Europe’s demographic decline and warned:

“The ‘success’ of the population controllers in Europe is now taking its toll,” said Sedlak. “The average number of babies per woman has fallen from 1.95 to 1.65, and there is no end in sight.”
“In order to turn things around, four things are necessary,” Sedlak said. “First, the world has to understand that there is not an overpopulation problem, but a problem of too few children. Second, everyone in our society must accept large families and stop using peer pressure to convince people not to have more children. Third, governments and rich philanthropists must stop giving money to population control programs. Finally, young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children.”
“We have one generation to turn things around,” Sedlak said. “After that, it may be too late.”

That one idea — promoting “four or more children” as the ideal family size — struck me at the time as the only possible basis of hope. It just so happened that my wife and I already had four kids then, and we subsequently had two more. Our youngest is now 14, president of her eighth-grade class at a Christian school, in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. Just this morning I overheard her talking to a friend, explaining that when she has children, she wants to homeschool them.

You can’t beat something with nothing.

That is to say, pro-family Christians cannot hope to prevail against the toxic ideas of the Culture of Death — which celebrates abortion, divorce, promiscuity and homosexuality — if we are unwilling to be specific in describing what the pro-life alternative could look like.

When we behold the desperate situation of countries like Spain, which are far down the road toward demographic winter, we ought to understand how important it is that we act now to counteract this evil.



 

Category: Abortion, Contraceptive Culture, Family, Marriage, Religion, Sex Trouble, Spain

In The Mailbox: 02.13.17

Posted on | February 13, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.13.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Andrew Sullivan And Kathleen parker Pretty Predictable With Their Over-The-Top Trump Tropes
Twitchy: NYT Opinion Piece Tries To Shame LGBT Republicans, Fails Miserably, also, NPR Contributor/Refugee Charged With Assault In DeVos “Protest”
Louder With Crowder: NARRATIVE BUSTED – Joy Villa’s Pro-Trump Grammys Dress? Designed by Immigrant


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Bolt and Blair Don’t Believe In Free Speech After All
American Power: Oroville Spillway Holds For Now
American Thinker: Democrats Made Their Bed With Leftists, Now They Must Lie In It
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
BLACKFIVE: Heather Graham’s Law And Disorder
Bring The HEAT: Major General Hal Moore, Commander Of 1/7 Cav At Ia Drang, Dies At 94
Da Tech Guy: The Kindergarden of Eden’s Revolt Against Trump
Don Surber: ICE Raids Shock Liberals As Trump Keeps His Word
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, Thakoonery
Hogewash: I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Jammie Wearing Fools: Black Lives Matter Clown Calls White “Recessive Genetic Defects”
Joe For America: Punk Thug Picks Fight With State Trooper
JustOneMinute: NOW We Learn This?
Power Line: Remembering Mr. Lincoln
Shark Tank: Jim Webb Says Democrats Have Moved “Very Far To The Left”
Shot In The Dark: Field Recognition Guide
STUMP: Friday Trumpery – Trump And Unions
The Geller Report: Georgetown Islamic Studies Prof Jonathon Brown Says Slavery And Rape Are OK
The Jawa Report: Meanwhile In Fwance, also, Things That Are Haram – Love
The Lonely Conservative: A Question of Color
The Political Hat: California And The Ghost Of John C. Calhoun
The Quinton Report: More Maryland Lottery Politics
This Ain’t Hell: Lieutenant General Hal Moore Passes
War Is Boring: Mexican Marines Kill Cartel Boss With Helicopter Minigun
Weasel Zippers: Obama PACs Busing Protesters To GOP Town Halls, also, Lunatic Sarah Silverman Mistakes Utility Marks For Swastikas
Megan McArdle: We’re Already Struggling To Keep Outrage Alive In The Age Of Trump
Mark Steyn: Mark Returns To The Deranged Dominion!


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