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Category Archives: Social Commentary
Sauce For The Goose
…was sauce for Laura Kipnis’s gander:
It’s hard to work up too much sympathy for Kipnis, though. One wonders where she’s been for the past two decades when kangaroo courts were set up at institutions of higher education all over the country.
Has she been rushing to defend all the men convicted by campus courts of sexual assault with no lawyers present?
Kipnis learned (much to her surprise) that, as she wrote, “any Title IX charge that’s filed has to be investigated, which effectively empowers anyone on campus to individually decide, and expand, what Title IX covers. Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention can quite easily leverage the system.”
No kidding. And Title IX is only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone with a political agenda and an ax to grind can get professors reprimanded, students kicked off campus and commencement speakers disinvited.
Did self-described feminist Kipnis rush to the defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Condoleezza Rice when they were told they couldn’t come to Brandeis and Rutgers? (In an essay for Slate, Kipnis referred to Condi as President George W. Bush’s “Stepford Wife.”)
Has she been defending Christina Hoff Sommers when the students at Georgetown and Oberlin tried to prevent her from giving a visiting lecture and then demanding “safe spaces” to be protected from her harsh words?
Somehow, one suspects not.
[Update a few minutes later]
“I pity the fool, for not opening her eyes and seeing what little fascist enclaves universities have become thanks to progressive intolerance and lack of ideological ‘diversity.’ Other than that, as a court of equity would say, Kipnis has “dirty hands,” and her involvement in the progressive cabal diminishes her entitlement to relief.”
Advice For Young Men
…from my neighbor, Kurt Schlichter:
Remember my exceedingly hot wife? You should, because your romantic relationship should be the cornerstone of your life and you want to get it right. Now, in a world of creepy feminists and whiny femboys, you need to understand that biology still trumps stupid social fads. Women want men. Not girly men. Not boys. Not manchildren. Men.
This is true of liberal women too, whether they admit it or not, but you don’t want one of them – well, at least for more than a few hours. Which reminds me – have an alias and use it.
The point is to avoid liberal women. If you see a chick hauling around a mattress, keep moving no matter how open to experimentation you hear she is. Do not become the lead in some daddy issue-plagued hysteric’s personal psychodrama.
You want a conservative woman. Ignore the liberal deniers – science proves that right wing women are hotter and sexier. Hey, conservatives don’t tend to have large families because they’re prudes. With liberal girls, a romantic interlude means a lot of sobbing about patriarchy, plus the vibe gets spoiled when you have to constantly stop to notarize affirmative consent forms.
There’s a lot of pressure on you young men to be passive and, frankly, wussy. Reject it. Call the girl. Don’t freaking text – texting is for the weak. Call her, like a man, and tell her what you want: “Hey, I want to take you out to [Quality Place] Friday. I want to pick you up at 7. You in?”
It’s about life in general, though, not just love life.
“Blue-State Justice”
…is rarer than red:
On Thursday, Virginia Governor and Democratic candidate for president Terry McAuliffe issued a Task Force report on campus sexual assault organized by the state’s Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring. This 107-page report was perhaps most notable for what it did not include. It did not once mention the phrase “false accusations.” It appears being framed does not concern Virginia policymakers. Perhaps for that reason, this report, which discussed how Virginia colleges need to respond to sexual assault allegations didn’t mention the highest-profile rape allegation on a Virginia campus in recent years. Rolling Stone, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, or the false accuser “Jackie” were, it seems, not relevant to a discussion about campus rape claims in Virginia.
If you wanted to destroy academia, it would be harder to come up with better plans than these people have.
[Update a while later]
“We literally can’t afford to let the Title IX inquisition continue.”
Feminists
…are too fragile to read:
My advice to potential faculty hires — or student applicants — at Northwestern: Go somewhere else. As law professor Jonathan Adler notes in The Washington Post, Northwestern threw academic freedom “under the bus.”
The good news is that Kipnis’ experience has generated a national wave of outrage. Even feminist website Jezebel wrote: “As feminist student activists fight to expand their circle of vulnerability in collegiate life, Title IX has gone from a law designed to protect college students from sexual misconduct and discrimination to a means by which professors are put on trial for their tweets.”
In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait observed: “I highly doubt that the inquiry against Kipnis will result in any important formal sanction. … But the slim possibility of actual administrative punishment is not the problem her story reveals. The problem is that a major body of progressive campus thought believes her publication of a dissenting column merits punishment.”
And at Reason,Robby Soave pointed out that bureaucrats whose power comes from an outrageously expansive reading of Title IX have expanded that interpretation to include a claim that “criticizing Title IX violates Title IX.”
Yes, Congress should have very public hearings about this. But they almost certainly won’t.
Democrats
The party of old, fat white people.
Heh.
The Kids Aren’t All Right
Is technology ruining their social skills?
I never even attempt to socially interact via text. For me, texting is something I do rarely, and generally just as a means of requesting or conveying practical information (Where are you?). I’m glad I work at home, because I hate mobile phones for communication in general, whether talking or texting. I’ll often forget to take it with me (in fact I did just yesterday) when running errands. As I’ve often remarked, I don’t think most young people even know what good telephone service (or music reproduction) is like. They think the crap quality they get from cells is normal.
The point about the overuse of exclamation marks is also interesting. I had an email exchange a year or two ago with a twenty-something whose emails were full of them. I gave her some unsolicited advice to be more sparing with the bangs for professional communication, which she took well, but it’s a hard habit to break, I expect, and as the article notes, some people have grown to expect them.
And as a pre-warning to commenters: Get off my lawn. 🙂
The Fastest-Growing Group Of Gun Owners
In late 2012–immediately following the heinous attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School–there was greater support for gun control than for gun rights. In fact, there had been a greater support for gun control over gun rights for more than 20 years. And this held true through January 2013. Then things began to shift.
On parallel with growing female gun ownership, increasing numbers of women applying for concealed carry permits, and burgeoning women involvement in shooting sports, support for gun control has dwindled. Thus, whereas only “45 percent” of the American people supported gun rights in January 2013 while “51 percent” supported gun control, the numbers have now shifted to “52 percent” support for gun rights and only “46 percent” support for gun control.
Interestingly, the shift in women’s attitude in favor of guns has taken place during years when groups like Bloomberg-funded Moms Demand Action have worked their hardest to get moms to vote against the Second Amendment.
To paraphrase the old saying, God created men and women. Sam Colt made them equal.
Neil Stephenson
Discusses his new novel, and the role of science fiction.
He is one of the few authors whose books I always look forward to reading, though I was a little disappointed with Anathem. But this looks like a fun read.
I should also note that one of the points I make in my book (and in op-eds) since, is that our unwillingness to use the hardware we have on hand to get into space is an indicator of how utterly unimportant human spaceflight is (a point that is accentuated by the relatively poor sales of a well-reviewed book). Stephenson describes a scenario in which it suddenly becomes very important to become as spacefaring as possible, as soon as possible, and how society reacts.
Bernie Sanders’ Rape Fantasies
Some thoughts from Ace:
I think it’s pretty stupid to demagogue people over statements like this, honestly. I know where Sanders go this from: He got it from Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, supposedly a book containing all of women’s private fantasies (she says she surveyed women), and rape was indeed a major part of the female sexual imagination, she was surprised to find. (Psychologically, it has been explained to me that women feel guilty about sex, but still enjoy sex; the fantasy of being under someone else’s sexual control allows the woman, in fantasy, to enjoy sex, because she’s not making any of the decisions that she would otherwise feel guilty about.)
I don’t know if I buy any of that; I’m just remarking that this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this.
I do know that if I wrote that paragraph not in response to Bernie Sanders, there’s a pretty good chance that the left would demagogue me and Speechcraft Trial me as a Thought Rapist.
And that’s why we must do the same to Bernie Sanders, and make him defend these So Problematic You Guys words.
The left has drawn us all into its insecure, neurotic, grasping, wanting, stupid, paranoid darkness. They have effectively criminalized it to say anything other than “Women are just terrific” and “everything is awesome!”
They are broken, warped people inflicting their psychic tumult on the rest of society.
Yes, tit for tat is exactly the right strategy. Except maybe we need to (in someone’s words) punch back twice as hard. But they won’t stop this Alinskyite BS until it causes them sufficient pain.