The Other McCain

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

The Rhetoric of ‘Social Justice’

Posted on | April 28, 2018 | Comments Off on The Rhetoric of ‘Social Justice’

Feminist students at the University of Southern California.

When did “oppression” become a synonym for failure or unhappiness? How did “privilege” become a synonym for success? And why do so many people now conflate criticism or disagreement with “hate”?

During the past five years — since President Obama was re-elected in 2012, basically — the rhetoric of progressive “social justice” ideology has made its way from elite universities into the cultural mainstream:

The term “social justice warrior” (SJW) was coined nearly 10 years ago by Will Shetterly. The son of civil-rights activists who were threatened by the Klan during his childhood, Shetterly became an award-winning science-fiction writer. It was in the context of his writing career that he encountered the indignant Internet mobs of virtue-signallers and identity-politics activists who inspired the epithet. By the time the #GamerGate controversy arose in August 2014, “SJW” was a popular label for this increasingly familiar type, and Shetterly’s coinage was made famous by Vox Day in the title of a 2015 book, SJWs Always Lie.

That the SJW mentality — a fixated obsession with victimhood — emerged from academia can be demonstrated by examining, e.g., Gender Studies curricula and the identity-politics rhetoric of student activism. “Intersectionality” (a jargon term coined by a law professor and proponent of “critical race theory”) became a mantra among campus feminists at elite universities who were taught that their “oppression” was part of an interlocking system of social injustice. No matter how rich her parents may be, or whatever social and economic advantages she may obtain, “intersectionality” means that the feminist student always considers herself as a victim of an unjust society, and thus obligated to destroy the system that oppresses her. Thus, in 2016, Vanessa Diaz — a student at the University of Southern California, a prestigious private school where the annual cost of attendance is now $69,144 including room and board — described her mission as executive director of the USC Women’s Student Assembly as “the dismantling of our capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy.”

Such rhetoric does not simply materialize out of thin air. Words like “cisheteronormative” and phrases like “white supremacist” are taught to students by university professors who view their jobs as training young people for careers as left-wing political activists. Indoctrinated with this radical ideology, the SJW sees “oppression” everywhere and is therefore permanently at war with society. Because paranoid rage is incompatible with happiness, the SJW is also permanently miserable, and believes that her misery is further proof of her “oppression.” Her implacable hostility to capitalism leads the SJW to eschew employment opportunities in the for-profit private sector and, unless she can find a job in academia, she is likely to be found at a tax-exempt non-profit advocacy organization. USC alumna Vanessa Diaz, for example, who describes herself in her LinkedIn profile as a “grassroots community organizer with a passion for intersectional advocacy,” is currently employed as a development assistant for a 501(c)3 “youth center” in South Central L.A. Such work is neither lucrative nor prestigious, but the SJW’s ideology teaches her to sneer at those who succeed in high-paying fields — law, medicine, management, engineering, etc. — as beneficiaries of unjust “privilege.”

Because the structure of American society is inherently unjust — a “capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy” — the SJW believes that success and happiness in America is wrong.

“We are living in a volatile political environment. . . . You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables . . . racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”
— Hillary Clinton, Sept. 9, 2016

During the Obama era, with a self-described “community organizer” as president, this bizarre worldview became mainstream. After he was re-elected in 2012, the Democrat Party and its media apparatus immediately began ramping up for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The fix was in at the DNC, and the liberal media machinery began promoting feminist themes in anticipation of electing the nation’s first woman president.

Hillary’s defeat in November 2016 unleashed a tsunami of rage and fear in large measure because her campaign was organized around a “social justice” ideology that demonizes and scapegoats opposition. During the campaign, Hillary denounced Republican voters as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” and her defeat was therefore interpreted as proof that these evil people had conspired with sinister forces to take over the U.S. government. This not only gave rise to the phony “Russian collusion” narrative, but also inspired a paranoid search for “hate” allegedly inspired by Trump’s victory:

In late March, the [Southern Poverty Law Center] included a piece about the best-selling author [Sam Harris] in its daily Hatewatch Headlines, a compilation of media reports on bigots, thugs, and other assorted creeps. Why was the neuroscientist and prominent atheist thrown in together with Mark Anthony Conditt, the Austin bomber who had murdered two black men, and Nazi war criminal Jakiw Palij? Because Harris defended Charles Murray, a political scientist best-known for arguing that genetic differences may account for varying levels of intelligence between races. The assertion drove many in academia and journalism to label Murray a racist; he was famously shouted out of an appearance at Middlebury College last March, and was labeled a “White Nationalist” and an “extremist” by the SPLC. But when the prominent Harvard geneticist David Reich echoed Murray’s ideas in a New York Times op-ed last month — arguing that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’” — Harris took several of Murray’s critics to task on Twitter, including Vox’s Ezra Klein. Klein responded in his typically obfuscating fashion, doing little to discuss the ideas at hand and a lot to strangle them with potent ideological terms. White men discussing the possibility of genetic differences between blacks and whites wasn’t science, Klein thundered — it was racism pure and simple, facts and findings be damned. The SPLC was quick to mirror this sentiment, placing Harris on its HateWatch list.
Harris’s co-author, Majid Nawaaz, experienced the organization’s wrath as well. A former radical Islamist who spent four years in an Egyptian prison, Nawaaz abandoned his zealotry and committed his life to promoting a pluralistic and non-violent version of Islam, a mission that led him to serve as an advisor to three British Prime Ministers. In the fall of 2016, however, Nawaaz was placed on the SPLC’s list of “anti-Muslim extremists,” widely disseminated with the header “a journalist’s manual.” His sins, according to the list, included sharing a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad on Twitter and visiting a London strip club. You hardly have to be a scholar to realize that neither is particularly convincing evidence that Nawaaz, himself a practicing Muslim, is some sort of bigot. Joining him on the list was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a victim of female genital mutilation in her native Somalia and an outspoken campaigner against the practice, as well as others, like child marriage and honor killings, common throughout the Islamic world. . . .

You can read the rest of that, but the point is that the SPLC witch-hunt for “hate” is slapping pejorative labels on previously respectable intellectuals — who are not “right-wing” by any rational standard — because such demonized enemies are necessary to the “social justice” ideology that now controls the Democrat Party.

This worldview expresses itself in a binary rhetoric that divides people according to identity-politics categories, denoting certain categories (black, female, immigrants, homosexuals, Muslim, etc.) as heroic victims of “oppression,” while classifying others (white people, males, Christians, etc.) as demonized enemies, possessors of unjust “privilege” who exercise oppressive power and are therefore to blame for inflicting suffering on the members of victim groups. This rigid binary mentality — oppressed victims vs. privileged enemies — enables Democrats to imagine themselves as heroic crusaders against evil, while portraying their opponents as evil incarnate. Anyone public figure who expresses doubt about this ideology (e.g., Sam Harris, who dared to disagree with Ezra Klein) is immediately targeted for character assassination, smeared as a proponent of “hate,” in an effort to discredit and silence them.

It is useless for Sam Harris’s defenders to point to his past service to the “progressive” cause. Whatever political advantage the Left derived from Harris’s atheist campaign against Christianity 10 or 15 years ago, leftists now count this as their rightful property, and they recognize no debt to the man who helped them obtain it. Harris was once useful to them, but this does not grant him authority to criticize the Left now.

Criticism is hate, because “social justice” does not permit dissent.



 

Category: Democrats, Education, Hillary Clinton, Politics, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 04.27.18

Posted on | April 27, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Red Day At RedState
Twitchy: Candace Owens Scores Apology From @Jack After Twitter Labeled Her “Far Right”
Louder With Crowder: Another David Hogg Fail – Blackrock/Vanguard Boycott Ineffective
According To Hoyt: Slouching Into Shackles
Monster Hunter Nation: Now Out In Paperback – Monster Hunter: Siege
Vox Popoli: A Nobel For The God-Emperor


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The King’s Day Edition
American Thinker: Alfie Evans – Another Child Sacrifice On Britain’s NHS Altar
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Loony Ideas Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For April 27
CDR Salamander: LCS – My White Whale, also, Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: Some Synthetic Hormones Are More Equal Than Others, also, Collaborative Robots
Don Surber: Photo Made Possible By Electing Donald Trump
Dustbury: Shellfishness
Fausta: Still Recovering
Fred On Everything: A Most Sordid Profession
The Geller Report: London Homicides Up 44%, Robberies 38%… also, Women’s Rights Activist & anti-Hijab Protester Arrested, Beaten
Hogewash: Blognet, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: NY Judge Rules Bar Patrons Can Be Removed For Supporting President Trump
JustOneMinute: DNA, Horrible Criminals, Privacy, And Less
Legal Insurrection: Texas Voter ID Law Gets The Go-Ahead, also, Rule Change Advances In Senate, Will Help Trump Fill As Many Judicial Vacancies As Possible Before November
Power Line: Voters Want FBI Investigated, also, Today In Green Energy Fail
Shark Tank: Florida Dems Use Breitbart Website To Bash GOP Gubernatorial Race
Shot In The Dark: When Making Your Plans For Tomorrow
STUMP: Around The Pension-O-Sphere
The Political Hat: Light Posting & Polka Cat
This Ain’t Hell: The Koreas Agree To End The War, also, Teacher Allegedly Called Kyle Kashuv “The Next Hitler”
Victory Girls: Diamond & Silk v. Sheila Jackson Lee – Cue Head Smack
Weasel Zippers: Retailer Cuts Ties With Yeti For Ditching NRA, also, Vampire Hillary Is Now Sucking The Cash-Strapped DNC Dry
Mark Steyn: A Tale Of Two Bills, also, Kanye Hear The People Sing


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Amazon Warehouse Deals
Certified Refurbs On Amazon Renewed

Category: Linkagery

Killer Incest Dad’s Lawyer: ‘He Was Head Over Heels in Love With’ His Daughter

Posted on | April 27, 2018 | 1 Comment

Steven Pladl (left) and his daughter/wife Katie Fusco (right).

Earlier this month, shocking headlines announced an atrocious crime: Steven Pladl, 43, had killed his infant son, and then killed the child’s mother, Katie Fusco, 20 — who was also Pladl’s daughter — before committing suicide. Katie had been put up for adoption when she was 8 months old. When she turned 18, however, she contacted her biological parents, who were still married and had two children of their own. Katie, who had been raised in upstate New York, decided in August 2016 to move in with Steven and Alyssa Pladl in Henrico County, Virginia:

All was not well in the Pladl home. Steven and Alyssa had already decided to separate and were sleeping in separate rooms. Alyssa Pladl said she had suffered emotional and verbal abuse by her husband for years.
“I was always on eggshells, whatever his mood was, everybody knew, and that mood was often not happy, a lot of yelling, a lot of things smashed in the house, in front of our kids,” she said. . . .
Alyssa Pladl finally moved out in November 2016, and she shared custody of the two children with Steven Pladl.
In May 2017, she learned from her 11-year-old daughter’s journal of the incestuous relationship and Katie’s pregnancy. Her daughter wrote that she and her sister were told by Steven Pladl to refer to Katie as their stepmother.
“I started to become hysterical, and I called him,” she said. “I said, ‘Is Katie pregnant with your baby?’ He just said, ‘I thought you knew. We’re in love.’
“I started screaming,” she said. “I was just cursing him out: ‘How could you? You’re sick. She’s a child.'”
Then she called the police. . . .

Prosecuting incest between “consenting adults” is apparently difficult. It was not until January 2018 that police arrested the couple. Meanwhile . . .

On July 20, 2017, two months after his divorce from Alyssa was finalized and amid the police investigation, Steven Pladl married Katie in Parkton, Maryland. They lied on their application, saying they were unrelated, according to records.
Katie’s adoptive parents posed for a photo on the wedding day along with Steven, Katie and Steven’s mother. Katie wears a short black dress.
Tony and Kelly Fusco thought there was nothing they could do and had decided it was best to support Katie, [Kelly Fusco’s brother] said.
Katie gave birth to Bennett on Sept. 1. She and Steven moved to a house on a cul-de-sac in Knightdale, North Carolina . . . They were arrested on incest charges in January. A judge ordered them to not contact each other, and Steven Pladl’s mother has custody.
Steven Pladl’s lawyer, Rick Friedman II, said there was never an allegation that Steven Pladl pressured Katie into a relationship.
“This case is an 18-year-old girl who shows up at the doorstep of a 40-year-old man who’s going through difficult times with his wife,” Friedman said. “They have a bond because they’re biologically related, but they never knew each other before they had a sexual relationship. He was head over heels in love with her, so much so that that outweighed the issue of them being biologically related.” . . .

“Love is love!” How often have we heard this from the LGBT lobby? If the emotional impulse of “love” can justify overturning the marriage laws of dozens of states for the sake of “equality,” can we be confident it will remain illegal for a 20-year-old to marry her own father? Perhaps the 5-4 majority that decided the Obergefell case will someday rule that brothers and sisters can marry, too, because “love is love,” right?

Well, we wouldn’t want to offend our gay friends — or risk being accused of “hate” — by comparing homosexuality to incest, but the logic of moral relativism and the rhetoric of radical “equality,” if unopposed, must ultimately destroy all limits of sexual behavior. Even if we believe that adult incest could never gain legal sanction, it is certain that some people will not wait for the Supreme Court’s approval before they go sliding down that slippery slope of “progress.” With no clear standard of right and wrong to impede their hedonistic pursuits, people will do whatever they want, justifying their wickedness by whatever relativistic arguments occur to their depraved minds, and you’ll be condemned as a bigot if you express your disapproval. Warner Todd Huston was suspended from Twitter for saying that transgenderism is a mental illness.

 

Can anyone argue that Zachary Antolak, a/k/a “Zinnia Jones,” a/k/a “Satana Kennedy,” a/k/a “Lauren McNamara” is not mentally ill? The insanity is self-evident, but you’re not allowed to describe it as such without risking the deletion of your social-media accounts, and why? Because “love is love” and “love trumps hate,” and any criticism of or disagreement with an LGBT activist is “hate.” How did we get here? You can trace the history of this Cultural Revolution back to Alfred Kinsey and then, having done that, ask yourself: What’s next?

What direction will the “emerging awareness” take in the future? Look where we are now: Katie Fusco’s adoptive parents felt obliged to participate in her incestuous “wedding” to her biological father because they “decided it was best to support Katie.” Right — “support Katie,” because she’s no crazier than the porn-addled transgender freaks who insist they have a “right” to silence criticism of their perversity.

Crazy People Are Dangerous, in case you haven’t noticed lately.



 

 

Category: Crime, Sex Trouble

Former NBC News Anchor Tom Brokaw Accused of Sexual Harassment

Posted on | April 27, 2018 | Comments Off on Former NBC News Anchor Tom Brokaw Accused of Sexual Harassment

 

Linda Vester was a 28-year-old NBC News correspondent — the youngest at the network — when she said she was first targeted for sexual harassment by the man who was NBC’s prime-time anchor for decades:

In a series of interviews with Variety conducted over several months, Vester alleged that Brokaw physically tried to force her to kiss him on two separate occasions, groped her in a NBC conference room and showed up at her hotel room uninvited. Two friends who Vester told at the time corroborated her story with Variety, and she shared her journal entries from the time period. Brokaw, who has been married to Meredith Auld since 1962, has never before been publicly accused of sexual harassment.
In a statement from him supplied by a NBC News spokesman, Brokaw said of the allegations, “I met with Linda Vester on two occasions, both at her request, 23 years ago because she wanted advice with respect to her career at NBC. The meetings were brief, cordial and appropriate, and despite Linda’s allegations, I made no romantic overtures towards her at that time or any other.” . . .

You can read the whole thing. When the Sexual Harassment Apocalypse began in October 2017, I remarked:

A witch-hunt has no statute of limitations, nor any standard of due process and, as for evidence, who needs evidence? If a woman says her ex-boyfriend did awful things to her in 2007 or 1997, feminists will applaud her for her “courage” in “breaking the silence,” and nothing that the targeted scapegoat says in his own defense will save him.

In the case of Vester’s accusations against Brokaw, we are talking about alleged incidents that happened more than 20 years ago. Vester left NBC News in 1999. Tom Brokaw is now 78 years old and has been married to the same woman since 1962. While no one can condone the behavior that Vester alleges, what is accomplished by dragging Brokaw’s name through the mud now? After NBC’s Matt Lauer was destroyed by sexual harassment allegations, I remarked that “the reason this is happening is because Hillary lost and Trump won”:

The zero-tolerance no-mercy attitude toward male misconduct is a product of feminist rage over Trump’s victory; they cannot destroy him, so they’ll destroy any man within range. The only way to save yourself? Avoid feminists.

This is about revenge, and NBC’s effort to enact policies to prevent future harassment scandals are being met with skepticism because who can reason with an angry lynch-mob? Far be it from me to complain when liberal media types like Brokaw and Lauer are being hoisted by their own petards, but we cannot cast aside our concern for justice simply because a specific injustice may advance our political interests.

Here’s a question: Do you think maybe the #MeToo mob mentality had something to do with Kanye West’s outspoken support of Donald Trump? Do you think a celebrity hiphop mogul has nothing to fear from this vindictive feminist crusade? If respected public figures — including elderly white liberal journalists — can be destroyed over incidents that happened 20 years ago, do you think a young black man is safe?

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.



 

Category: NBC

In The Mailbox: 04.26.18

Posted on | April 26, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.26.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Cosby Jury Verdict
Twitchy: John Legend Lectures Kanye About his “Legacy”, And Kanye Dials It Up To Eleven
Louder With Crowder: Dear “Compassionate Leftists” – Your Complicit Silence On Alfie Evans Is Deafening


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: 100% Of Australians Believe That Immigration Is Too High
American Thinker: Sean Hannity Owns $90 Million In Real Estate. So What?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Addadicktame News
BattleSwarm: Alfie Must Die So The Glorious Dream Of Socialism Might Live
BLACKFIVE: Christina Dodd, Dead Girl Running
CDR Salamander: Could You Fight Like It’s 1990?
Da Tech Guy: Which One Of These UK Responses To The #AlfieEvans Case Is Real, And Which One Parody? also, Telling The Story
Don Surber: CNN Can Dish It Out But Can’t Take It
Dustbury: Getting The Shaft
The Geller Report: New Play In Czech Republic Depicts Jesus Raping A Muslima, And It’s Sold Out, also, Mike Pompeo Confirmed As SecState
Hogewash: I’m Not Making This Up, You Know, also, Bonus I’m Not Making This Up, You Know, also also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Why Do Christians Praying In Public Seem To Enrage People?
JustOneMinute: Defensive Gun Use, The CDC, And The Media Cone Of Silence
Legal Insurrection: Sen. Gillibrand Wants Your Post Office To Offer A Public Option For Banking, also, Dr. Ronny Jackson Withdraws As VA Secretary Nominee
Michelle Malkin: Meet Michelle Malkin At The Manhattan Film Festival
Power Line: Annals Of Government Arrogance, also, Chance The Rapper Weighs In
Shark Tank: Liberal Trump-Hater Gets Defensive Over Rubio’s Twitter Backhand
Shot In The Dark: The Eighteen Month Tantrum
STUMP: Illinois Roundup
The Political Hat: Decolonize Academic Rigor, Decolonize Laziness, Decolonize Physics
This Ain’t Hell: Thursday Morning Feelgood Stories, also, Ronny Jackson Withdraws From VA Director Nomination
Victory Girls: Trump, Kanye, Chance The Rapper, & Dragon Energy
Weasel Zippers: 18-Month Sentence For PI Who Tried To Get Trump’s Tax Data, also, New Study – Global Warming “Not As Bad As We Thought”
Megan McArdle: A Farewell To Free Journalism
Mark Steyn: Pictures From An Exhibitionist, also, The Bollardization Of The West


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Amazon Warehouse Deals
Mother’s Day Gift Shop

Category: Linkagery

No, ‘Incel’ Is Not an ‘Ideology’

Posted on | April 26, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

After it emerged that Toronto mass murderer Alek Minassian referred to himself as an “incel” (involuntary celibate), my natural instinct was to make a joke: If Canadian guys who can’t get laid are a terrorist threat, there could be millions of them! The guy was a pathetic loser, and I find it impossible to take such people seriously.

The internet is enabling a community
of men who want to kill women.
They need to be stopped

That’s the headline on a fear-mongering column by Laura Hudson, a former colleague of Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist who who made herself notorious by her attempts to destroy the videogame industry with dubious charges of sexism. Ms. Hudson tells a twisted counterfactual narrative in which the “most insulated and privileged opponents” of feminism have formed “an online network,” a dangerous “movement”:

Loosely termed the manosphere, the movement has transformed the unquestionable cultural dominance of men into an identity based on a delusion of oppression, and even as they whine inconsolably about the identity politics they claim are ruining their lives. . . .
Some of them kill us. Even more of them say they want to. Both in the most pedestrian of ways, through the casual and regular practice of domestic violence, or simply by assaulting or murdering any woman who does not immediately acquiesce to their sexual demands. More recently, the festering online wound of the incel community has begun to express itself in the form of mass murder. Online platforms have long been more concerned with free speech than the literal lives of women, and the vicious, lethal misogyny of incels has flourished in these spaces accordingly. Misogyny is water, and we are all swimming. . . .
We are complicit in these massacres insofar as we have facilitated them; enabling the mass murder of women under the flag of “free speech” is perhaps the most irresponsible and stupid thing that the men at the helm of the internet could do.

Notice that “free speech” (in scare-quotes) is her target. Disagreement with feminism should be silenced, is the sum of Ms. Hudson’s argument. She justifies this totalitarian policy by invoking the crimes committed by a handful of kooks like Alek Minassian. This style of argument is what I’ve called the “Atrocity Narrative” method of propaganda.

In a populous nation (there are 36 million people in Canada) it is always possible to find a few examples of almost any phenomenon. Police brutality, for example. From time to time, innocent people are killed by police and, if the media are willing to be manipulated by activists, you get protest movements like “Black Lives Matter” promoting the idea that such killings are so routine as to constitute a crisis. Heather Mac Donald has pointed out that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black man than the other way around, but during the height of the “Black Lives Matter” riots, a counterfactual narrative was promoted by CNN and other liberal media, inciting a paranoid anti-police rage.

Do you want stories about people arrested for having sex with dogs? You can find enough stories like that to make it seem like a “crisis,” but there’s no political angle to bestiality, so CNN doesn’t go into 24/7 coverage mode the way they do when a cop shoots a black suspect.

OK, so what about pathetic losers who can’t get laid? Does the murderous rampage by Alek Minassian represent a “crisis” that justifies banning the forums where these losers gather online?

After the Toronto attack don’t
explain Incel ideology, ban it

That’s the headline on another fear-mongering column by Wired contributor Nicole Kobie who, I suspect, would not argue for banning Muslim from the Internet in the wake of an Islamic terrorist attack. Oh, but she has found experts who argue that “incels” must be banned:

“Online forums are another way of expressing that violence,” says Kalwinder Sandhu, researcher in violence against women at Coventry University. “What social media does is enable the spread of that misogyny to be a lot faster. It’s not locker room talk.” . . .
If Minassian’s goal was to spread the incel ideology, he has succeeded. If it wasn’t, it’s happening all the same. . . .
María Rún Bjarnadóttir, doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex, warns against merely descriptive coverage. “They report it without challenging it and I think that is a mistake,” she says. “It must be challenged… the mainstream media should be aware of what they are implying by reporting this without any critique.” . . .
The only time most of us would share a link to the sites that helped radicalise such terrorists would be to demand that authorities take it down.
Instead, because violence against women inexplicably isn’t seen as terrorism, such sites and their messages are viewed as mere curiosities, as though we don’t know the danger of allowing hate speech. Indeed, in the UK misogyny is not considered a hate crime, a fact debated by MPs in parliament only last month. If it were, tackling such sites under existing hate crime legislation would be easier, notes Bjarnadóttir. “If this doesn’t spark the debate and take further, I seriously question what would,” she adds.
If these extremist websites are to be blamed for inciting Minassian or Rodgers, they should be banned just like Isis propaganda. “Isis is obviously a terrorist organisation, and women represent half the world,” says Sandhu. “Why wouldn’t we ban this too?”

Look: There are many tens of thousands of men who read or contribute to online “manosphere” forums, and exactly two — Minassian and his alleged “hero,” 2014 Santa Barbara killer Elliot Rodger — who have committed atrocities. However offensive the discussion on these forums may be, they don’t produce much real-world violence, and the arguments for banning “incel” discussion on the Internet are no more plausible than the arguments for banning violent movies and videogames.

Insofar as the Toronto massacre calls attention to a legitimate social problem, it is a problem that the “manosphere” is actually trying to solve, a problem that feminists like Ms. Hudson and Ms. Kobie want us to pretend doesn’t exist. There are a lot of self-conscious, insecure, awkward young men who lack the social skills necessary to attract romantic partners. Some of these young men may be afflicted with serious mental problems — e.g., autism spectrum disorder — but whether or not they fit any diagnostic category, their problems are very real. Because misery loves company, these losers tend to aggregate online. If you ban “incel” forums, they’ll just find someplace else on the Internet to gather. You cannot solve a social problem by forbidding discussion of it, but this is what feminists advocate in seeking to silence the “manosphere.”

What was Alek Minassian’s problem?

Mr. Minassian attended Seneca College where he was known as an expert in computer chips before completing his course in the past month. He focused on graphics processing units, which have re-emerged in prominence in recent years as a cornerstone of artificial-intelligence technology. . . .
Friends, classmates and a former teacher said he had a form of autism along with social anxiety and mental-health issues.
His own mother described her son as having Asperger syndrome — but that terminology is no longer used in medicine. Rather, people who were said to have Asperger are now diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder and deemed high-functioning.
“He was afraid of girls and very shy in general,” said Nikki Feinstein, a former high school classmate who is now a teacher. “He didn’t say much, but when he did he was difficult to understand because of his cognitive disabilities.”

That article quotes a psychologist, Dr. Robin Holloway, who specializes in treating autistic youth and says there are “rare cases” like Minassian who  “over the years have built up a list of grievances based on being scorned, rejected, bullied, including sexually”:

“They have built up a tremendous volume of internal anger … and want others to experience their suffering and mental agony in the way they experienced it. . . . Vengeful fantasies can turn into horrible reality.”

Part of the “incel” problem, of course, is that awkward nerds are spending so much time online as a way to avoid real life and, in doing so, they also avoid the kind of personal encounters that could enable them to develop the social skills they actually need. Unless a guy is naturally extroverted and unusually attractive, he’s going to need a lot of practice to learn how to communicate effectively with women. The loser is going to get rejected 9 times out of 10, at least, and he has to develop the mental fortitude necessary to withstand this painful humiliation and keep smiling.

No feminist has ever offered men helpful advice for such a problem, because feminists hate men and never do anything to help men.

This is why feminists like Laura Hudson and Nicole Kobie want to ban online forums where men gather to discuss their problems. Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It.



 

Category: Crime, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 04.25.18

Posted on | April 25, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.25.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #236
EBL: Republican Debbie Lesko Wins In AZ-8 Special Election
Twitchy: We Can’t Wait For Joy Ann Reid To Explain THESE
Louder With Crowder: UK Police Warn People Not To Speak Out Against Alfie Evans’ Terrible Treatment


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #81 – The Faggot Episode
American Power: The Nation’s Broken Probation System, also, Jonah Goldberg, Suicide Of The West
American Thinker: Was The Starbucks Incident A Setup?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: Scott Adams On Kanye West & The Coming Golden Age, also, Great Moments In Mail Fraud
CDR Salamander: No Balkan Holiday
Da Tech Guy: For The NHS Reputation, Alfie Evans Must Die, also, Donors Keep The SPLC Out Of Poverty
Don Surber: Trump’s Incompetence, also, Republican Wins In AZ-8, Press Says Trump Is Doomed
Dustbury: Not On Your Diet
The Geller Report: Iran Threatens To Sink American Ships If US Reneges On Nuke Deal, also, Google Search Manipulation Reportedly Can Swing 80% Of Undecided Voters
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Queer Feminism: Doing It Wrong

Posted on | April 25, 2018 | 2 Comments

‘Lara Americo’ (left) and Joanne Spataro (right) at DragCon in New York.

“I have found some lesbians to be the worst, most binary, most intolerant of them all. Some of them have no concept of another identity. They have this lesbian code of never having sex with another man and they have no idea of what pansexuality is or anything like that.”
— Joanne Spataro, August 2015

There is a right way to do things, and then there is the Queer Feminist way of doing things, and Joanne Spataro is a queer feminist. She claims to be a “cisgender lesbian,” but she is engaged to marry a man, albeit a man who thinks he’s a woman and calls himself “Lara Americo.”

“Don’t be a weirdo,” I tell my kids. “And don’t hang around weirdos.”

Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of “normal” as an achievement, but amid the proliferation of 21st-century weirdness, it takes a tremendous effort to be ordinary and boring.

 

Feminism Is Queer, to quote the title of a textbook by Professor Mimi Marinucci, who teaches Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Washington University. To be a feminist in the 21st century means you cannot be normal. Perversion is now obligatory for feminists, and relationships like Joanne Spataro’s engagement to “Lara Americo” are what we can can expect as typical consequences of this ideology.

 

It is no surprise that Ms. Spataro’s attempts to become pregnant — “trying to have a baby the old-fashioned way” — are “complicated.” To begin with, both she and her, uh, partner had to stop taking synthetic hormones. Yes, in case you didn’t realize it, birth-control pills are synthetic hormones which prevent pregnancy by obstructing a woman’s normal hormone production. It is a well-known scientific fact that hormones influence mood and behavior, and it is therefore perhaps no coincidence that Queer Feminism flourishes among a generation of young women raised on “safe sex” ideology, many of whom began taking contraceptive pills as teenagers. What are the possible long-term consequences of deliberately causing an abnormal hormone-induced state of sterility in adolescent girls and young women?

 

Ms. Spataro evidently wasn’t contemplating questions like that when she was rallying in support of taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, nor did she wonder why Planned Parenthood should be such an important cause for a homosexual man like Tad Mack. “Intersectionality” is the buzzword by which Queer Feminism rationalizes every puzzling contradiction and non sequitur of the movement. And her efforts to become pregnant are quite puzzling indeed:

Over the last several months, I’ve spent evenings watching my fiancée, Lara, inject herself with smaller and smaller doses of estrogen. I’ve watched her stand in front of a mirror, singeing each hair out of her face with a secondhand electrolysis machine.
The return of her testosterone hasn’t resulted in just the resurgence of facial hair; her pants now fit differently, too. My own skin has been plagued by acne since I got off the pill six months ago, and my default states are angry, hungry or sleeping. Such are the perils of trying to have a child the way Lara and I are trying, without in vitro fertilization, or cryogenically frozen sperm. The way fertile cisgender people do: They simply couple up, and boom — a child is born. . . .

(This is so strange to Queer Feminists. Normal people doing normal things the normal way — where’s the “intersectionality” in that?)

Not long after we met, Lara, who transitioned at the wise old age of 30, told me that with each year she takes estrogen injections, her fertility declines. Like many trans people, Lara wasn’t interested in having children when she transitioned. We got together in May 2015; last fall, she told me it was, essentially, now or never, as she wanted her transition to continue moving forward. By then, the thought of not being able to have my own biological child could make me tear up in front of my happily childless friends, who encouraged me to try if it was something I really wanted.
Here we are, over seven months later: she’s off her hormones; I’m off the pill; we’re engaged and enraged from our respective hormonal shifts. The early stages of this process make me wish for more time; we didn’t realize we wanted children together until we fell in love. . . .

You can read the rest of that, if you’re not concerned weirdness might be contagious, transmitted by New York Times op-ed columns.

Ms. Spataro’s lack of curiosity and caution about long-term consequences (e.g., the loss of normal emotional range as a result of ingesting synthetic hormones) is typical of feminists and other “progressive” ideologues. Discontinuing her contraceptive regimen leaves her dysfunctional, so that her “default states are angry, hungry or sleeping,” and yet this doesn’t arouse Ms. Spataro’s curiosity about what other abnormalities she might have experienced as side-effects of these drugs. In the same way that socialists don’t concern themselves with the consequences of market distortions produced by their policies — the continuing disaster in Venezuela, for example — feminists don’t worry about how their idolatrous devotion to “choice” might ultimately hurt women.

A concern for long-term consequences is necessary for those of us normal people who “simply couple up, and boom — a child is born.” In becoming parents, we are not only responsible for the short-term safety of our children, but also acquire a sense of responsibility for the society in which our children are raised. Our babies will one day become adults, and what kind of world will they inherit? My oldest three children are now married with children of their own, and it is to be hoped that my grandchildren will grow up, get married and have their own children. Certainly, I would not want my descendants to associate with the misbegotten offspring of weirdos like Joanne Spataro and “Lara Americo.” Perhaps the madness of Queer Feminism is not so contagious that it can be transmitted through New York Times columns, but we cannot disregard the possibility that Queer Feminism is a hereditary disease. Recall the case of Tobias “Tobi” Hill-Meyer, the “turkey-baster” offspring of lesbian feminists Jennifer Meyer and Kate Hill, who grew up to be a “Queer Trans Multiracial Sex-Positive Activist” and also, a producer of pornography. Of course, as a statistical proposition, Queer Feminist motherhood is rather rare. Being a fanatic for “choice” isn’t very compatible with high birth rates, after all.

 

Even if a feminist is not adamantly opposed to heterosexual intercourse (“PIV is always rape, OK?”), she still faces the problem of attracting a male partner in order to reproduce “the old-fashioned way.” How many men are so desperate (or utterly lacking in self-respect) that they would voluntarily have sex with a feminist? Well, there’s Jessica Valenti’s Harvard-educated husband, and also Bill Clinton, but most normal men avoid feminists for the same reason that Jews avoid Nazis.

It is no coincidence that Joanne Spataro’s only prospect for becoming a mother “the old-fashioned way” involves a relationship with a self-described “activist . . . for social justice and LGBTQ rights.” She could not have randomly ended up with someone like “Lara Americo.”

 

You see that it is partisan politics — the prevailing “social justice” ideology of the Democrat Party — which explains this weird relationship. To be a Democrat in the 21st century is to be alienated from and hostile to everything that is decent, honest and wholesome in life. The only people invited to the 2016 United States of Women Summit were Democrats like “Lara Americo.” Transgender “women” with penises were welcome at this White House event, but Republican women were not. According to Democrats, “woman” is no longer defined by biology, but by politics.

Therefore, Joanne Spataro is a “lesbian” in a relationship with a “woman” with a penis, which is feminism, because they’re Democrats.

And they still can’t understand why Hillary lost . . .



 

Category: Sex Trouble, The Transgender Cult
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