Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Yazidi Child Soldiers

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…take revenge on ISIS:

Their support of youth participation in the YBŞ—especially for women and girls—is made all the more striking by the fact Yazidis in rural Sinjar are often part of traditional patriarchal families. So-called honor killings of Yazidi women believed to have shamed their families have even survived into the present. A gruesome video that drew headlines and condemnation in 2007 showed a 17-year-old Yazidi girl named Dua Khalil Aswad being stoned to death by her own people on suspicion she converted to Islam to elope with a Muslim.

But the PKK/YPG model preaches equality of the sexes, something gaining ground among the Yazidis rescued by the militias.

Vian, the teenage PKK commander and drill instructor, claims for her part that the threat to ISIS fighters they’ll be killed by women gives coed units a psychological edge. “We have heard ISIS is afraid of fighting women,” she says. “We think ISIS is saying ‘if not for women, we’d control all the world.’”

“They don’t want to be killed by us,” she adds smugly.

It’s appalling that they have to rely on groups like the PKK for help.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

P. J. O’Rourke On Democrats

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#ProTip: They hate your guts:

Democrats need your vote and they’ll do anything—no matter how low and degrading—to get it. They hate you the way a whore hates a john.

…political rulers need the acquiescence of the ruled to slake the craving for power. Politicians hate you the way a junkie hates junk.

Politicians gain power by means of empty promises or threats, or both when they’re on their game. Should you vote for people who are good at politics? No. You should vote for Republicans. We’re lousy.

Sure seems that way to me. As he once said, politicians are interested in people in the same sense that a flea is interested in a dog. Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Political Correctness And SJWs

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A long but useful essay:

Academic freedom is viscerally important: it guarantees the individual liberty to say what you want; and assumes your agency to hear what you don’t, or, choose to ignore. Censorship and self-censorship only disempower. In universities, it disempowers an individual from saying what they want in a place that should be a crucible for experimentation and discovery. More critically, it disempowers the people it wants to empower; assuming minorities can’t manage the condition that accompanies a free and open society – being offended by something. Political correctness is anathema to the values that constitute a free society. What’s more, it visibly undermines these values in places that should cherish them most – universities and academia.

Another distinctive feature of political correctness is the hodgepodge of critical race theory and identity politics. Discrimination is excused under the banner of liberation. Discrimination is not only being excused, but also conferred an attractive righteousness. Thus, individuals can say “kill all white men”, or declare white people are trash, or argue white people should be banned from events, without anything resembling compunction. Their justification is simple: their prejudice against whites isn’t racist, and doesn’t carry the peculiar stigma of racism, because racism is prejudice married with power. With an ugly sleight of hand, they pollute the conventional meaning of a term to absolve themselves from the scrutiny this term rightly merits. It doesn’t actually redress power balance, but reverses it. By suggesting power is an inherent feature of whiteness, where it ultimately resides, political correctness removes the possibility of non-white people exercising power and being fully responsible for their own actions: the concept of moral autonomy is undermined. This means that the non-white advocates of political correctness are free to act however they please without the moral scrutiny that attends white people – and should, in fact, attend every human.

The power-powerless concept is toxic because power is more fluid than assuming to be brown is too be powerless; a brown Islamist may be more powerless than a Jew because his skin is visibly darker, but when he murderously re-enacts the oldest hatred of our civilisation on the streets of Europe, who dares dilute the significance of his racism?

This power-powerless concept is faulty because it enables someone like Bahar Mustafa to assert she can’t be racist, after saying and endorsing perfectly racist things. It enables articles after articles after articles to be written that invert reality and reproduce something that should be consigned to history: one set of standards for one group of people, another set for another. The way to challenge inequality is not by reproducing the conditions of inequality – but, rather, by proceeding from an egalitarian basis: viewing each individual as deserving of equal dignity. The identity politics of Bahar Mustafa are a consequential challenge to this premise because they separate rather than stress our common humanity. Political correctness is a fundamentally anti-egalitarian movement.

The term ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ captures an important truth: an effective way to leverage power is by assuming the status of a victim. A culture of victimhood is inherent to political correctness. It is through this victimhood, ultimately, that the tribal hatred of its advocates are nourished, and the dignity of its opponents are undermined.

Yep. Don’t let them get away with it. As someone once said, punch back twice as hard.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The “Black Lives Matter” Movement

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It should be protesting Planned Parenthood.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

New York City

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…goes backward:

The heart sinks. It took so much effort by so many people to clear up the human wreckage that so many years of liberal ‘compassion’ had created in a dying New York. And to see it all—I can’t put it any better than the esteemed New York Post—’pissed away’ by a mayor not smart or perceptive enough to have learned one thing from the experience of the last 20 years, since his own personal demons have left him stuck in the politics of the 1950s and 1960s, is tragic. It is so hard to build; so easy to destroy.”

Morons with no cultural memory electing morons.

Education, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Live In NH, NV, NY Or MO?

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Give your senators hell:

The first panel features four senators — Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Dean Heller, R-Nev.; and Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H. All four were original sponsors of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act introduced in 2014, and all four are sponsors on the updated version introduced earlier this year.

CASA will surely be the focus of their panel, which is a shame because the bill is devoid of due process protections for accused students. When the bill was first introduced in 2014, I sent six questions to each of the original sponsors. Of the four sitting on the panel this Wednesday, only Ayotte’s office responded — and the response ignored a question about due process. A series of follow-up questions were never answered.

Neither Heller nor McCaskill’s office ever responded to the original questions. A staffer from Gillibrand’s office called me back but was uninterested in answering questions; instead, the staffer merely gave me an overview of the bill. . . .

Those are the eight people who will be addressing campus sexual assault on Wednesday. It is highly unlikely that even one of them will suggest that the draconian measures being thrust upon universities are fundamentally unfair and biased. Not one person is there to suggest that maybe colleges shouldn’t be adjudicating felonies. Not one person is there to suggest that if colleges do continue to adjudicate felonies, then they need to provide students the same protections an actual court of law would provide.

If you wanted to destroy academia, you couldn’t do a better job of what these people are doing. I expect this kind of thing from the Democrats, but it’s sad to see that, apparently, neither party gives a damn about actual justice or due process.