Ending the War to End All Wars

An essay from Margaret MacMillan, at New York Times:

NOT many people noticed at the time, but World War I ended this year. Well, in a sense it did: on Oct. 3, Germany finally paid off the interest on bonds that had been taken out by the shaky Weimar government in an effort to pay the war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.

While the amount, less than $100 million, was trivial by today’s standards, the payment brought to a close one of the most poisonous chapters of the 20th century. It also, unfortunately, brought back to life an insidious historical myth: that the reparations and other treaty measures were so odious that they made Adolf Hitler’s rise and World War II inevitable.

In truth, the reparations, as the name suggests, were not intended as a punishment. They were meant to repair the damage done, mainly to Belgium and France, by the German invasion and subsequent four years of fighting. They would also help the Allies pay off huge loans they had taken to finance the war, mainly from the United States. At the Paris peace talks of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was very clear that there should be no punitive fines on the losers, only legitimate costs. The other major statesmen in Paris, Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France, reluctantly agreed, and Germany equally reluctantly signed the treaty.

In Weimar Germany, a society deeply divided by class and politics, hatred of the “dictated peace” was widespread, and there was no shame in trying to escape its provisions. The final sum for reparations was not mentioned in the treaty — itself a humiliation in German eyes — but was eventually set in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks (about $442 billion in today’s terms). The fact is that Germany could have managed to pay, but for political reasons chose not to.

Some might recall that I wrote about this at the time: "Germany Pays Off Reparations Imposed at Versailles — 92 Years Later!"

Sex and WikiLeaks

An editorial at LAT.

After an extremely narrow background summary we get this:

These titillating and not-very-nice allegations involving the man who has distributed tens of thousands of secret State Department cables and documents to the news media are being discussed by people across the country and around the world, just as they once discussed the tiniest particulars of President Clinton's Oval Office trysts with Monica Lewinsky. And as they discuss the details, they're also raising serious questions about how sexual misconduct should be dealt with: Should a man be charged with rape for having sex without a condom? For having sex with a woman when she's asleep? In recent decades, Sweden's laws have grown increasingly protective of women's rights; are they too tough, or do they strike the right balance? Does it make sense that Sweden has three degrees of rape, including "less severe," which Assange is charged with and which is generally used when a person uses threats or mild force to have non-consensual sex?

RTWT.

Actually, as progressive feminists point out, the key issue really is consent. But when does that begin and end? What's the contextual nature of the consensual agreement, for example, if a woman changes her mind about intercourse at just about the time a guy's gonna to explode. Recall Cathy Young's essay, "Julian Assange, Feminism, and Rape":

Once, feminist reformers rightly fought against laws that required a rape victim to fight her attacker "to the utmost." But removing any element of actual or threatened force from the crime of rape makes it too easy to criminalize miscommunications and morning-after regrets. Should non-consent require a firm "Stop!" or does it cover a hesitant or coy "Maybe we should stop"—perhaps accompanied by actions that contradict the words? Is the man guilty of rape if the woman says early in the evening that she does not want to have sex, but does not rebuff his overtures later? Is the woman a rapist if the roles are reversed? Writing the "forcible" part out of the definition of rape makes it much more of a two-way street ....

Earlier generations of feminists argued that rape should be treated the same as any other violent crime: The victim should not be subjected to special standards of resistance or chastity. These days, the demand for special treatment is so blatant that some activists openly support abolishing the presumption of innocence for rape cases and requiring the accused to prove consent ... In an ironic twist, these activists actually seem to hold women in very little esteem: in their world, women are too timid to push a man away if he won't take no for an answer and too addled to know that they have been raped.

Sady Doyle dismissed Cathy Young's argument out of hand (feminist intellectual), and in so doing failed to notice the Young's article named the accusers. Doyle deleted her tweet to Young's article after blaming her mistake on the misogynist trolls.

These are bad people, as I always say.

RELATED: "What Line Did Sady Doyle Cross?"

Assange Rape Accuser Launched Lesbian Nightclub in 2007

More information surrounding the allegations: "Tonight Opens "Fever", Gotland's First Queer Club."

And some revealing screencaps here. Also, the "hidden cache of tweets."

And here's this from the comments at Nicholas Mead's thread, "How to Smear a Hero," at 4:40am on August 23:

The militant feminists in Norway and Sweden aren’t about equality – they’re against sex. They write things like ‘heterosexual sex is unnatural and demeaning’. That a woman shouldn’t be ‘penetrated’ because that’s ‘humiliating’. And stuff like that.

And here's an Al Jazeera interview with Karin Rosander, the director of communications for Sweden's prosecutor's office, from August:

RELATED: At The Nation, "The Case of Julian Assange."

Also, at WSJ, "Assange Memoir Sold in U.S., U.K.," and The Guardian, "Julian Assange to use £1m book deals for legal fight" (via Memeorandum). Plus, a dishy piece at New York Magazine, "Julian Assange Inks $1.5 Million WikiLeaks Tell-All Book Deal."

PREVIOUSLY:

* "#MooreandMe Feminists Target Jezebel, The Nation."

* "Get a Grip, Moe Tkacik."

* "Julian Assange Trophy Sex."

#MooreandMe Feminists Target Jezebel, The Nation

Here's the reply from Jessica Coen, Executive Editor of Jezebel, to the #MooreandMe campaign's demands for the removal of Anna Ardin's name and picture.

This is mostly the campaign of Jonathan McIntosh, who went to work on The Nation as well. But note how the Campus Women's Organization at the University of Pittsburgh dissed Coen's response as "childish and unreasonable."

Project much?

And Amadi, who dissed me previously as a "mansplainer," joined the attacks on Ms. Coen:

Jezebel as a feminist space has been questionable for awhile. Now we can be assured that it's not even a *decent* space. #MooreAndMe

Jezebel eventually capitulated.

And Sady Doyle chimes in on The Nation here.

The article's at the link: "The Case of Julian Assange."

PREVIOUSLY: "Get a Grip, Moe Tkacik," and, "Julian Assange Trophy Sex."

A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean

At NYT:

It could be a Zen koan: if everybody in the class gets an A, what does an A mean?

The answer: Not what it should, says Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “An A should mean outstanding work; it should not be the default grade,” Mr. Perrin said. “If everyone gets an A for adequate completion of tasks, it cripples our ability to recognize exemplary scholarship.”

As part of the university’s long effort to clarify what grades really mean, Mr. Perrin now leads a committee that is working with the registrar on plans to add extra information — probably median grades, and perhaps more — to transcripts. In addition, they expect to post further statistics providing context online and give instructors data on how their grading compares with their colleagues’.

“It’s going to be modest and nowhere near enough to correct the problems,” Mr. Perrin said. “But it’s our judgment that it’s the best we can do now.”

RTWT.

The article cites RateMyProfessors, a resource so overrated and prone to abuse it's beyond ridiculous.

And no more than 35 percent A grades at Princeton? I'd be pleased to give 3 percent in most of my American Government classes. Grade inflation is the least of my worries, although I'm not scratching to maintain a teaching gig nor to maintain the enrollment at the college. Students complain, sure, but the sense of entitlement at college is proportionate to the prestige of the institution. Some of the most whiny students I encounter are those who've attended university or who'd been pampered in affluence. Disadvantaged students not only haven't been marinated in entitlement, they haven't been provided an education decent enough to give them voice in the first place. And that's not entirely the fault of the schools. Parents and the popular culture should come in for the bulk of the blame. Basic skills are non-existent for many of my students. They can't compose a decent sentence, much less a paragraph. I don't seem to stress it as much as I used to, in any case, since I've adapted my teaching to accommodate students, for their disinterest and for the academic deficiencies. I'd like to see more students reading books, on their own, and of their own interest.

I should write more on this ... perhaps later?

Stop30Billion-Seattle.org

A Memeorandum thread on the anti-Israel "Seattle Middle East Awareness Campaign," featuring Israpundit.

This is interesting:

If the Arabs succeed in wiping Israel off the map, they will not be punished by any Nuremberg court or any other agency; the only punishment they fear involves the consequences of failure. These consequences were not sufficiently severe in 1948, 1956, or 1967 to act as a deterrent. The other side of this coin is, however, that Israel can probably get away with simply removing the Palestinians in a relatively humane matter.

As an example, Israel could pack the Palestinians onto ships with whatever they can carry on their backs plus some money in the currency of whatever country to which they are to be sent. A “reverse Gaza flotilla” could drop them off in Turkey, which seems to like them and would doubtlessly be happy to accept a couple of hundred thousand of them. Saudi Arabia should be more than willing to extend Arab hospitality to another few hundred thousand fellow Muslims, and so on. This would remove the open sore that Israel’s enemies are currently using to bleed it dry, and are using an excuse for violence against Israel–much as Hitler used the Sudeten Germans to justify his attacks on Czechoslovakia.

The bottom line is that the Athenians’ observation in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue is correct: “You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The fact that everybody knows about Athens while very few know about the Melians is yet another example of Hitler’s observation about the Armenians. Or, as a German proverb puts it, you must be either the hammer or the anvil; if you don’t do the beating, you will be beaten.

It is past time for Israel to become the hammer so it will no longer be the anvil. Israel must use its physical power to do what it can to protect its safety and security; the Palestinians, having chosen collectively to take the path of violence and hatred, will have to suffer what they must. If Israel fails in the basic duty of a sovereign state to protect its citizens and its own existence, a future Adolf Hitler may say, “Who remembers Israel?” and he will be just as correct as the original Hitler was about the Armenians. It is better that future historians say instead, “Who remembers the Palestinians?

And in case you missed it, Dave Swindle has the background on the Stop30Billion-Seattle campaign of hate: "Victory Over the Domestic Allies of Islamic Terror in Seattle!"

Julian Assange Trophy Sex

You can't make this stuff up.

The Australian's Sunday essay includes this summary: "ONE of the women claiming she was sexually assaulted by Julian Assange took a "trophy photo" of him lying naked in her bed, he says."

The article doesn't say which woman took the pic, but I'm guessing Anna Ardin, who threw a victory party for Assange and then made her home available for nearly a week afterwards. And The Australian uses the "Ms. A" identifier, but for the life of me I can't see the feminists' reasoning for not publishing the names except as a matter of power and control. Google it and see what I mean. Here's a story, for example, from last August when the allegations first came to light: "The Strangest Blog Thread Yet on the Swedish Charges, uh - Not Charges - Against Julian Assange." Added: That "blog thread" is found a Nicholas John Mead's blog, and I had to open it in Firefox to get it to load: "How to Smear a Hero." I'm working my way through the 1,240 comments, but so far the line runs heavily against the rape allegations. #MooreandMe has a lot of work to to --- among radical progressives especially!

RELATED: The Other McCain: "You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught."

Americans Have Strayed From Our Core Values of Social Justice?

From the letters to the editor at the Los Angeles Times:.

Thanks to Bilmes for articulating the deep-down challenge for Americans today.

What exactly are the values and priorities that underlie our legislation and voting?

Bilmes reminds us that the "president needs to lead the country in restoring our compassion and sanity." We would all do well to remember that the true values of a country are reflected in how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.

I believe we have strayed from our values of social justice by focusing on tax cuts for the rich and not on the common good.

Claire Marmion

Long Beach

The original Bilmes article is here.No doubt Ms. Marmion speaks for a large percentage of Americans who are either ignorant of our core values or they have abandoned them as "racist" and "hegemonic" vestiges of the "archaic" contstitutional order upon which this nation was founded.

RELATED: "Social Justice: Code for Communism."

Get a Grip, Moe Tkacik

The full post is here: "I don’t care if Moe Tkacik lost her job."

And from the comments:

I realize this is going to make me sound like a heartless bitch, but I think Moe needs to stop writing about the issue of rape. Full stop. Until she works some shit out and can be objective.

Hmm... Rape culture totalitarianism is the new objective (which remember replaces the old objective, the bastion of white hetero-male privilege).

MORE at the Other McCain, "More Assange-Related Feminist Meltdown."

'If Jerusalem falls, Amsterdam and New York will be next...'

Geert Wilders, quoted at Reuters (via New York Times).

Merry Christmas!

I'm seen here once again at The Spectrum Center. My oldest son and I took a quick trip to the mall to pick up some See's Candies for Christmas Day.

On the way back, we cruised through one of the neighborhoods not far from our home. This house in particular built some of the most elaborate Christmas decorations I've ever seen. The display is set to music. If you look over at the left-hand window above the garage, the sign says "104.7 FM," and then when you tune your radio you can listen to the music choreographed with the lightshow. Well done. Stuff like this reminds you that some folks really appreciate Christmas, even if it's a little short of the modesty side:

Richard Dawkins Slams Pope, Christianity on Christmas Eve

At least The Guardian titled the essay for what it is, "A Shameful Thought for the Day." Dawkins slams the Vatican's "obscene indulgences" and then goes after original sin, a foundation of Christian faith:

We've already had what little apology we are going to get (none in most cases) for the raped children, the Aids-sufferers in Africa, the centuries spent attacking Jews, science, women and "heretics", the indulgences and more modern (and tax-deductible) methods of fleecing the gullible to build the Vatican's vast fortune. So, no surprise that these weren't mentioned. But there's something else for which the pope should go to confession, and it's arguably the nastiest of all. I refer to the main doctrine of Christian theology itself, which was the centrepiece of what Ratzinger actually did say in his Thought for the Day.

"Christ destroyed death forever and restored life by means of his shameful death on the Cross."

More shameful than the death itself is the Christian theory that it was necessary. It was necessary because all humans are born in sin. Every tiny baby, too young to have a deed or a thought, is riddled with sin: original sin. Here's Thomas Aquinas:

". . . the original sin of all men was in Adam indeed, as in its principal cause, according to the words of the Apostle (Romans 5:12): "In whom all have sinned": whereas it is in the bodily semen, as in its instrumental cause, since it is by the active power of the semen that original sin together with human nature is transmitted to the child."

Adam (who never existed) bequeathed his "sin" in his bodily semen (charming notion) to all of humanity. That sin, with which every newborn baby is hideously stained (another charming notion), was so terrible that it could be forgiven only through the blood sacrifice of a scapegoat. But no ordinary scapegoat would do. The sin of humanity was so great that the only adequate sacrificial victim was God himself.

That's right. The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn't think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed. For heaven's sake, if he wanted to forgive us, why didn't he just forgive us? Who, after all, needed to be impressed by the blood and the agony? Nobody but himself.

The Pope's Christmas message is here, and at The Telegraph, "Pope Benedict XVI delivers BBC's Thought for the Day." Plus, from a commenter at The Guardian:

What Dawkins says about the abuses committed by the catholic church is true enough, but reading him one cannot help getting the impression that, given access to the levers of political power, and given the right sort of regime or the right sort of period (eg Russia in the 1930s) , he would happily turn churches into warehouses and put priests in labour camps. Just an impression though. I may be wrong...

No, sir, I don't think you're wrong.

RELATED: How atheists celebrate Christmas.

The Nativity of Jesus

The love the classic paintings of The Nativity.

At top, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Nativity at Night (c.1490), and below, Gerard van Honthorst Adoration of the Shepherds (1622).

BONUS: A video for the modern age, "The Digital Story of the Nativity."

Christmas Greetings From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Via Theo Spark:

'Silent Night'

Ronan Tynan, on Fox & Friends earlier this week:

'Feliz Navidad'

From my good friend Megan Barth at JibJab, and also José Feliciano:

Orange County Storms

Orange County bore the brunt of the storm earlier this week. LAT has a report, "Major flooding in Laguna Beach, mudslides in canyons as storm bears down on L.A."

And here's the scene Wednesday afternoon as I was leaving Kohl's in Irvine:

Sady Doyle Bleats Non-Apologies After Getting Moe Tkacik Fired for Speaking Truth to Feminist Hypocrisy

Look, it's not like she had to write a Christmas Eve post declaiming ANY RESPONSIBILITY WHATSOEVER in Moe Tkacik's abrupt unemployment only to come back with an equally abrupt about-face pathetically FEIGNING REMORSE before finally telling her critics to just STFU. I guess this is what feminist progressives do, you know, denounce the purported lies at New York Observer, and then ramble on:

Now that I’m some heroic super-powerful ultrablogger feminist New Hope for Activism For-Ever, and feeling the necessary bite from that — first they call you the Messiah, then they crucify you, because we wanted a better Messiah than this, anyway — and the inevitable weird envy and suspicion around that, I kind of especially don’t love that there is this media narrative around me “getting” “someone” “fired” on Christmas with my feminist superpowers, because see, I wasn’t a good girl, I was a nasty cunt all along, you were right to hate me, I’m a nasty dirty mean evil bitch who can’t possibly have a point, and the victim here isn’t the two women currently getting credible death threats, the victim is Moe Tkacik, the victim here isn’t all the survivors e-mailing me, the victim is Moe Tkacik, the victim here isn’t truth or the protesters dropping out because they’ve been harassed too badly or threatened at their homes, the victim is Moe Tkacik.

Yeah, I don’t love that. I’m not happy about the timing, AT ALL. Because now I get to take all the blame from anyone who agrees with me that, from the outside, firing Moe looks like a huge overreaction to what she did. I was ANGRY AS FUCK about that piece, and I said some MEAN THINGS, but I just wanted her to redact the names. The rest of the blatantly false “it was just bad sex” stuff, well, I didn’t have the energy to even analyze it. I just wanted the names taken down. But there you go. Fired for Christmas “because of me,” and we all have a mean feminist story to tell around the campfire, because clearly what I wanted was for Moe Tkacik to lose her job and never work again ....

I don’t care what she wrote. (Well, I do. Because it was unacceptable. But.) That shit’s fucked up. The men face no lasting consequences, and a woman suffers. That shit is FUCKED UP.

Sexist much? And wasn't it you, Ms. Sady, who led the feminist attack mob? Thus it's very difficult to believe you, much less understand you. But I feel no sympathy for you in your situation. You and the #MooreandMe mob F***** over Moe Tkacik. You can't take it back. Your reputation's written in stone. And your movement looks worse --- so much worse --- than the misandrous bunch of shrieking harpies you indeed reluctantly aknowledge. And you write this?

I was just kicking back with a drink and watching the protest wind down and wondering what I needed to do to facilitate its end, and then I see this article by one of my favorite writers, and I’m like “oh my god, Moe noticed us! Can’t wait to read it” and then I get HIT RIGHT BACK IN THE FACE with EVERYTHING I HAVE BEEN PROTESTING FOR THE PAST WEEK and I have to start RIGHT BACK OVER, and she wanted it to happen on some level because she called our attention to it, she fucking trolled us — even if women do unconscionable shit, they’re always more vulnerable. They get fired. The men don’t. Moore gets his rep rehabilitated for saying basic shit on TV. Olbermann gets a fucking vacay because CIA honeypot spies have invaded his Twitter account, RIIIIIIGHT ....

She did a bad thing, which is fucked up. She faced consequences that were disproportionate (if they were only consequences for the one bad thing), which is fucked up. We’re being made to look like the villains, and the badness of the thing she did is lost; that’s fucked up. We shouldn’t have to choose between caring about rape and caring about Tkacik losing her job.

Well, no, she didn't do "a bad thing."

But let it go, sweetie. Moe's road kill on the superhighway to the feminist utopia. Deal with it. And don't come back with harpie hand-wringing about how you "went from one angry girl to someone who got a beloved writer fired on Christmas." I doubt that makes Moe feel any better, and it just makes you look bloody stupid. You know what you can do, or you wouldn't have mounted a shaming show trial to get folks to stand up for the progressives' beloved rape culture victimology. Face it, #MooreandMe is a totalitarian movement. I've said it. And Cathy Young gets it: "Julian Assange, Feminism, and Rape."

More Sady Doyle bleating here, here, here, and here.

Wonderful World

Have a good day:

Progressives and Net Neutrality

I wrote about this last July: "Al Franken's Keynote Speech at Netroots Nation."

It was freaky then and it's freaky now. This video's awesome, however, and be sure to read John Fund's piece from a few of days ago, "The Net Neutrality Coup" (via Left Coast Rebel):

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

Rape Culture

I've learned a lot this past few days, amazingly. I've definitely gotta better bead on hardline feminism, for which allegations of misogyny are the new racism. The ultimate in misogyny is not to take rape allegations seriously, or even if you do, to be a conservative just "pretending" to take them seriously. And while reflecting earlier, I remembered Miss Olga at STFU Sexists. Perhaps she had something on this? Well no, actually, at least not specifically on the Michael Moore thing. But I wasn't disappointed, considering the ubiquity of the left's "rape culture" meme. Miss Olga links to Melissa McEwan, who last year posted another one of those progressive feminist dissertations, "Rape Culture 101." And to be clear once again, rape is not okay, and rape allegations should be taken seriously, but that becomes difficult when the rape culture itself is defined so comprehensively as to include anything that progressive feminists simply don't like. For example:

Rape culture is encouraging male sexual aggression. Rape culture is regarding violence as sexy and sexuality as violent. Rape culture is treating rape as a compliment, as the unbridled passion stirred in a healthy man by a beautiful woman, making irresistible the urge to rip open her bodice or slam her against a wall, or a wrought-iron fence, or a car hood, or pull her by her hair, or shove her onto a bed, or any one of a million other images of fight-fucking in movies and television shows and on the covers of romance novels that convey violent urges are inextricably linked with (straight) sexuality.

Rape culture is treating straight sexuality as the norm. Rape culture is lumping queer sexuality into nonconsensual sexual practices like pedophilia and bestiality. Rape culture is privileging heterosexuality because ubiquitous imagery of two adults of the same-sex engaging in egalitarian partnerships without gender-based dominance and submission undermines (erroneous) biological rationales for the rape culture's existence ....

Rape culture is the pervasive narrative that a rape victim who reports her rape is readily believed and well-supported, instead of acknowledging that reporting a rape is a huge personal investment, a difficult process that can be embarrassing, shameful, hurtful, frustrating, and too often unfulfilling. Rape culture is ignoring that there is very little incentive to report a rape; it's a terrible experience with a small likelihood of seeing justice served ....

Hmm ...

That last passage sounds eerily familiar. (And reading it again, notice that someone who really does take it seriously doesn't get the benefit of the doubt anyway, i.e., you can't win --- the culture covers every angle, foreclosing avenues of redress even, astonishingly.) Perhaps rape culture is when two women find out they've both been had by the same progressive sleazebag and then getting dicked around about it by the left's top cinematic propagandist? Yep, I'd say those women have been raped.

(Lot's more at the link, FWIW.)

RELATED: "Imagine There's No Rape Culture — It's Easy If You Try!"

Julian Assange Interviewed at The Guardian

He gets more dramatic by the day, "Julian Assange: my fate will rest in Cameron's hands if US charges me":

Julian Assange said today that it would be "politically impossible" for Britain to extradite him to the United States, and that the final word on his fate if he were charged with espionage would rest with David Cameron.

In an interview with the Guardian in Ellingham Hall, the Norfolk country mansion where he is living under virtual house arrest, the founder of WikiLeaks said it would be difficult for the prime minister to hand him over to the Americans if there was strong support for him from the British people.

"It's all a matter of politics. We can presume there will be an attempt to influence UK political opinion, and to influence the perception of our standing as a moral actor," he said.

Assange is currently fighting extradition to Sweden. He strongly denies allegations of sexual misconduct with two Swedish women. But he believes the biggest threat to his freedom and to WikiLeaks, his whistleblowing website, emanates from a wrathful United States.

There is no evidence of any imminent US move to indict him. But according to Assange, the Obama administration is "trying to strike a plea deal" with Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old intelligence officer and alleged source of the more than a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables embarrassingly leaked last month. The US attorney general, Eric Holder, wants to indict Assange as a co-conspirator and is also examining "computer hacking statutes and support for terrorism", Assange claims.

Assange says if he's indeed extradicted, there's "a 'high chance' of him being killed 'Jack Ruby-style' in the US prison system."

Oh brother. Maybe he shoulda thought about some of this stuff earlier.

More at the link.

Zombie Holiday

Pretty cool:

RELATED: "Theories of International Politics and Zombies."

Love Song for F.A. Hayek

A sorta academic change of pace --- and helpful if you know a little french (via Virginia Postrel):

Hey there Freidrich Hayek, ya lookin really nice
Your methodology is oh so precise
You break down social science to the fundamentals
Rules and social order are the essentials

Chorus:
The use of knowledge in society
by each of us we make the economy
It's not magic that somehow our plans all align
The result of human action, not of human design

Tell me your thoughts on resource misallocation
Distorted price signals and misinformation
Interest rates that are made artificially low
Telling producers where resources should go...

Imagine There's No Rape Culture — It's Easy If You Try!

I've spent most of the day fascinated by the residuals from the progressive feminists' #MooreandMe hysteria on Twitter — you know, with stuff like, "Imagine there's no rape culture - it's easy if you try!" I had a couple of exchanges, especially with Elinor Greenberg, who avoided substance and instead attacked my "male privilege. She repeatedly linked to a hilarious blog called "Finally, Feminism 101." It's all been pretty amazing. The news cycle's been pretty mild, however, and I think Sady Doyle's 15 minutes are about up. She does go off on Michelle Bernard, in any case, at the MSNBC clip below, as a "KNOWN RAPE VICTIM SHAMER." Ms. Sady's comments are unreal particularly since Ms. Bernard hits all the right talking points, even calling for Michael Moore to get his money back. But Bernard's an "evil" conservative, so toeing the #RapeCulture line like a good progressive apparatchik doesn't get her off the hook: "That lady's an anti-feminist asshole. MSNBC? Still just assholes." Folks can listen to the clip, but Ms. Bernard's hardly an "asshole." She's decidedly not progressive, so that's pretty much it. Indeed, John Hayward has a piece up tonight that summarizes much of what I've been blogging about these past few days, "A Bunch of Hooey From Michael Moore: Politics Determine Guilt for the Totalitarian":

The latest demonstration of sexual assault politics comes from cinema propagandist Michael Moore, who is a big fan of accused rapist and WikiLeaks saboteur Julian Assange. In an interview with Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, after posting bail for his hacker hero, Moore dismissed the charges against Assange as “a bunch of hooey” about “a broken condom” ....

Moore’s callous dismissal of the Assange accusers recalls the contortions of the Hollywood Left to excuse Roman Polanski, who actually admitted his guilt, obliging his defenders to re-define either the nature or severity of his actions. This led Whoopi Goldberg to give us the famous “rape-rape” concept, as distinguished from the kinda-sorta no-harm-no-foul plain vanilla “rape.” Rape-rape is apparently a crime liberal icons cannot be guilty of.

Feminist blogger Sady Doyle went nuclear after Moore’s appearance on the Olbermann show, and created a Twitter hashtag, #MooreandMe, to batter him into submission ....

Congratulations are due to Doyle for twisting this loathsome man’s arm behind his back, but that doesn’t change what he said in the first place, or why he said it. The details of the allegations against Assange are widely spread across the Internet, where Michael Moore spends a great deal of his time. He deliberately discarded those details, and spoke of hooey and condoms, because the truth would interfere with his rapturous adoration of the WikiLeaks messiah. He only recanted because a prominent and energetic liberal forced him to. He never would have listened to such criticism from a class or political enemy, and if Assange had assaulted a couple of Young Republicans, he wouldn’t have listened to Doyle either.

Perhaps she will spare a moment to reflect how many of her “progressive” friends are no different than Michael Moore, who is a living caricature of a fundamental, and very ugly, truth. Totalitarians demand a monopoly on the distribution of guilt, and truth. Anyone who claims you should “never, ever believe the official story” is demanding a level of faith thinking people never invest in any individual, especially a proven liar like Moore. You’ll notice the biggest liars are the ones who demand that level of faith most stridently.

There's more at the link, but I just love that Sady Doyle smackdown.

PREVIOUSLY:

* "#MooreandMe Feminists Claim Scalp of Moe Tkacik."

* "Naomi Wolf vs. Jaclyn Friedman on Democracy Now!"

* "Michael Moore Rehabilitated."

* "Michael Moore Repudiates 'Hooey' Rape Comments During Rachel Maddow Show Trial — BUMPED AND UPDATED!"

#MooreandMe Feminists Claim Scalp of Moe Tkacik

I saw this developing last night at the #MooreandMe thread. But I forgot about it until a little while ago, since the original essay had been yanked by the time I checked out the story. It turns out the Tkacik published an essay late last night at Washington City Paper. Entitled "Julian Assange, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo And The Swedish Approach To Sex Crimes," the piece identified by name the two women who filed rape charges against Assange. The entry didn't stay up very long, but there's a screencap here: "Should Names of Julian Assange Accusers Be Published?" Plus more background here, and at New York Observer, "Jezebel Alum Moe Tkacik Leaving Washington City Paper." And Fishbowl DC confirms Tkacik's departure as well as publishes the full essay here.

And be sure to read Tkacik's essay in full. It's not just that she published the accusers' names (which are indeed universally available via Google), but that she challenged the entire rape-allegations narrative. It's a snarky, in-the-know kind of piece that obviously rolls off the keyboard of a skilled gossip writer. She royally disses the significance of Julian Assange, for one thing, but it's the dirt on the allegations that's killer. For example:

It turns out that once you get beyond the first nineteen layers of spin, suspicious timing and overall pointlessness, the Julian Assange rape case is an improbably interesting story, and one that’s also as potentially uplifting as a “rape story” could possibly be — but first I should establish that, at least the way the chain of events is laid out here, it doesn’t seem like either of his two accusers termed his misdeeds “rape” at first. Assange’s first accuser, who has been identified as Christian feminist _________, initially described it to multiple friends merely as the “worst sex ever”, and from all the available information it seems like that would have been the last word on it from her had Assange not waited around protesting and then procrastinating after the next girl he fucked a few days later, __________, asked him to get tested for STDs.

But instead, __________ — whose ex-boyfriend told police she had never had unprotected sex — panicked, first confiding in Wikileaks’ Stockholm bureau chief, who told police he responded by asking Assange to get tested, a request Assange allegedly refused. Eventually ______ tracked down ______, who was still letting Assange stay at her apartment (and who had in the meantime hosted a party for him there). It was only when the two women finally met and compared notes, a week after sex with ______ and four days after sex with ______, that they decided to go to the police.

Taken at face value, what happens next seems like a classic case of “Oh no that asshole didn’t pull (so to speak) the same bullshit on you too!!!! OMG that bastard is going to be sorry.” The “mysterious” ripping of a condom some guy very grudgingly agreed to use doubtless seems a lot more deliberate, and creepy, once you meet the girl on whom he pulled the same sort of shit three nights later. And it should; I used to date a guy who once volunteered to me that he had deliberately ripped condoms with a previous girlfriend. We weren’t using them at the time, because he had a smallish penis, which I imagine to be Julian Assange’s problem — that, and an inversely-proportioned ego — but the point is this is definitely something certain dudes do, and I can imagine it would be hugely alarming if you weren’t someone who’d ever had unprotected sex, especially if you suddenly found yourself having unprotected sex with someone who (like Assange) obviously did, especially especially if you were only half-conscious when it all went down, and especially even more upon meeting someone else whose experiences confirmed all your worst fears of the incident ...

I've replaced the accusers' names with underlined spaces, although I won't be surprised if some radical feminists --- like the atheist asshats --- contact my department anyway (these are bad people, remember?). That said, you can see that the issue's not just the naming of names, but the aggressive pushback against the rape allegations storyline. Frankly, this is the best thing I've read on this, and Tkacik makes Naomi Wolf look that much more credible. And I'll confess that some of my previous posts on this have been mostly ribbing the feminists for their rank hypocrisy and their über epistemological closure. But these new developments powerfully confirm my basic thesis that progressive feminists are using the Assange rape case to erect an impenetrable wall of hardline ideological conformity (as if there wasn't one already). Defection from behind that wall is dangerous. And by now it's almost to the point that feminist apostates have more to worry about that potential rape victims themselves.

Seriously chilling.

Check Moe Tkacik's Twitter page for some idea, here, here, here, and here.

PREVIOUSLY:

* "Naomi Wolf vs. Jaclyn Friedman on Democracy Now!"

* "Michael Moore Rehabilitated."

* "Michael Moore Repudiates 'Hooey' Rape Comments During Rachel Maddow Show Trial — BUMPED AND UPDATED!"

RELATED: Huge update on developments at The Other McCain, "Nobody’s Fault But Mine."

Booman Tribune, Progressive Anti-Israel Blog, Declares Obama Best President Since Lincoln, FDR

It's true:

At this point in his presidency I think it is fair to say that Obama is already in the conversation as best president since Abraham Lincoln. His only real competition is FDR and LBJ, and I think it's a safe bet that Obama will neither beat the Nazis nor start an unwinnable war in Vietnam. In other words, he's in a battle with FDR to be the best president since the Civil War.

Maybe some of you think that I am joking. I am not. Maybe some of you think I am damning with faint praise. Maybe I am. But that doesn't mean that I am wrong. I am not wrong.

There you have it.

Folks will remember that these Booman folks are truly diabolical: "Booman Tribune Blood Libels Pamela Geller." And anti-Israel, here, here, here, here, and here, for example.

And the BooMan is wrong about Obama. This lame duck session will not save his disastrous record so far, although the Democratic-Media-Industrial-Complex is now playing up this last week's legislative successes as if it's the coming of a second New Deal. Even the commenters at Booman are running quite badly against the administration. Progressives, readers will recall, are upset by Obama's cooperation with the corporate oligarchs and some are peeved he hasn't cracked down on the "fascist" right. And public opinion isn't helping the president's case. Retrospective approval of George W. Bush now runs ahead of Obama, and recent surveys have seen the president's number decline into "the lowest ever" territory for this administration.

Polls aren't the most reliable indicator of presidential success or legacy, in any case. Objectively, the economic crisis has improved little on Obama's watch, and this administration's foreign policy is weakening America on all fronts. And for all the establishment pooh-poohing, the vaunted New Start treaty will mostly tie American hands and give Moscow an undeserved boost in stature. And all the optimistic claims about the rigorous verification regime will prove unfounded as Russia soon begins to cheat out on its commitments. (More on that here.)

That said, folks like BooMan can be found quite regularly among those of the radical progressive Democratic base. They're the foundation for a obscene cult of personality surrounding this president, and they're dangerous enemies of both American and Israeli interests.

RELATED: "Obama's War on Israel."

Anarchist Bomb Blasts at Swiss and Chilean Embassies in Rome

At Telegraph UK, "'Anarchists' launch bomb attacks on two Rome embassies." (At Memeorandum.)

The Rome prosecutor's office has opened a terrorism inquiry. It's thought that the blasts have roots in the "eco-terrorism movement." Also at NYT, "Parcel Bomb Attacks Strike at Embassies in Rome." And Rome has been rocked by weeks-long student protests. The anarcho-terrorists have their roots in those organizations. I hope I'm wrong, as I always say, but the attacks are likely to escalate and deadly anarcho-violence is coming to America in due time (recall my reporting on the Occupy California movement, for example). Added: From Verum Serum, "Bombs at Embassies in Rome Similar to Attacks in Greece Last Month."

Naomi Wolf vs. Jaclyn Friedman on Democracy Now!

This is the exchange that has sent the #MooreandMe feminist progressives into fits of apocalyptic apoplexy:

House Arrest Doesn't Quiet Julian Assange

At NYT, "Under ‘High-Tech House Arrest,’ WikiLeaks Founder Takes the Offensive":

BUNGAY, England — When Julian Assange wakes these days, he looks out from a three-story Georgian mansion house overlooking a man-made lake. Under a blanket of snow, the 650-acre Ellingham Hall estate, a mile back from the closest public road, is as tranquil a spot as can be found in eastern England.

But Mr. Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who is fighting accusations of sexual misconduct in Sweden, strolls through this bucolic idyll with an electronic tag on his ankle and a required daily 20-minute drive to the part-time police station in the neighboring town of Beccles. There he signs a register and chats “pleasantly” with the officers, according to their account, and returns to his curfew at the hall.

It is what Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, has laconically referred to as “my high-tech house arrest” in interviews since arriving last week from the High Court in London, where he was granted bail of $370,000, much of it provided by wealthy celebrities and friends, including Vaughan Smith, Ellingham Hall’s owner.

From his rural redoubt, Mr. Assange has gone on a media offensive, continuing to charge that he is the victim of a smear campaign led by the United States, which is weighing criminal prosecution for the leaks of nearly 750,000 classified documents.

Yeah, yeah.

The dude's a big baby.

Michael Moore Rehabilitated

But Naomi Wolf --- once one of the left's most vocal critics of the Bush administration, author of, among other things, a widely-cited 2007 article, "Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps" (later released in book form) --- has been thrown under the bus by the feminist commissars of the progressive left.

Amanda Marcotte has it, "Moore and Me: The Aftermath":

The Twitter hashtag #mooreandme decidedly and quickly changed tone last night after Michael Moore’s appearance on “Rachel Maddow”. Now it’s becoming an education and reconciliation kind of place, though troll smacking is still going on and Keith Olbermann can’t help but poking his head in. (I can relate.) I think we have all let go of any hope that Naomi Wolf will continue to be anything but a grade A asshole over this; I think she is still unaware how many people who, probably because they don’t know how far she drifted off the farm years ago, she has run off from liking her forever. Now it’s time to regroup and reassess. With links and comments.

RTWT.

Amanda links to an article she's published at Slate: "The Perils of Charging Rape." Michael Moore, of course, is a much bigger progressive rock star than Naomi Wolf, but feminists were throwing Moore underneath as well. The chunky filmmaker came clean last night during the Rachel Maddow show trial, so the feminist grievance industry is rolling out the red carpet of rehabilitation. And it's important to understand that this is really personal, as Amanda notes:

Moore's change of position is particularly gratifying for the feminist protesters. And because of my personal history dealing with sexual violence, for me the fight against taking on faith badly sourced efforts to discredit Assange's accusers was more than an intellectual exercise. Many of the details in the fleshed-out accounts the women gave, as published in the New York Times and the Guardian, paralleled the rape I experienced in the spring of 1998, when I was a 20-year-old college junior.

It needs to be said again that rape allegations should be taken seriously, and it is never okay for a guy to disregard a woman's wishes or force himself upon her in any way --- no means no. It's the larger festishization of the cult of victimology that's fascinating here, and the drive to exterminate anyone who deviates from the accepted rape victims' narrative. John Hawkins nailed the hypocrisy the other day: "Liberals Progressives and Rape."

But there's more. When Michael Moore pleaded with Rachel Maddow for forgiveness, and suggested that society's gotten "a little better" at taking rape allegations seriously, Sady Doyle would have none of it:

... no, Michael Moore: It is not that much better now. It is, indisputably, not that much better. Naomi Wolf went on TV and told every viewer there that it isn’t rape if the victim is unconscious, that penetrating an unconscious woman is “consensual”: It’s not that much better. Those two women’s names were outed, to over 900,000 people, by you and by Keith Olbermann, and attached to a derogatory smear by a Holocaust denier and WikiLeaks representative on little to no evidence, because you support WikiLeaks and treated those two women as expendable in so doing: It’s not that much better. I got a message from a woman that the pro-Assange group, pro-WikiLeaks group she’s allied with, is posting messages that these women are liars and Assange is innocent, on its Facebook group, and that she’s being attacked for standing up to them: It’s not that much better. I got forwarded a link to an actual product that is being sold, an e-card featuring a drawing of a traumatized-looking woman huddled in a shower, reading “Congratulations! You just got bad touched”: It’s not that much better. A woman who was part of the protest told me that a message reading, in part, that she was “a cum-guzzling super slut wannabe hasbian dyke that is angry with the world because no matter how many times she flashed her uneven nigger breasts no man would ever touch her” was posted to streamofwikileaks.tumblr.com: It is not that much better. A man told me he had to stop protesting, had to stop posting #MooreandMe, because the harassment had gotten too intense, and “they have my home address and have explicitly threatened me and my wife,” and then he was such a goddamned good person that he actually apologized: It’s not that much better. Many of my friends, people I know and have worked with and respect, have come forward to tell me that they, too, are survivors, the absolute epidemic of rape and sexual assault that we face in this society has become that much clearer to me, the list of women I know who are also rape survivors has become much, much longer since I posted it on Saturday: It is not, it is indisputably not, that much better.

But hey, RTWT.

At least he recanted!

And seriously. Michael Moore confessed that rape allegations should be taken seriously --- AND THAT WAS A DEATH DEFYING VICTORY FOR FEMINISM!

Thank God almighty we are free at last!

And there's more, from this lady who admits to using the f-word a lot: "Dear Second and Third Wave Feminists With Publicly Recognizable Names":

“No means no” gave a voice to the abused, the raped, the victimized. It created a phrase to describe a phenomenon that men and women knew existed, but were unable to describe in a way that society as a whole took seriously. But it did not end the war on our bodies. It did not end the terrorism that makes us second-guess our clothing, map out our return home, walk with chaperones. It did not end the lifelong aftershocks of guilt and shame, wondering why we let them in, why we trusted them, why we kissed them. It did not lower the statistics that mock our hope that we have justice, or equality. The enemy adapted. The enemy always has. If no means no, why, then, ways will be found to keep us from speaking. Ways will be found to make it seem as if we have said “yes,” or not said “no” enough, or in the right tone of voice, or with the proper inflection, or at the right time. No means no, but only if you are not afraid to say it. No means no, but only if you keep saying it, for a lifetime, hoping it will work before the situation escalates. No means no, but only if you never give up saying it because you are tired, you are hungry, you are frightened, you are alone, you are intimidated, you are convinced that this will happen anyway, and will only get worse for you the longer you go on saying “no.”

We need more than “no means no.”

Hey, Andrea Dworkin lives! And to think I'd nearly been disabused!

Okay, game-face here. RTWT. We have lots more work to do!

And that's no joke. This is going to be Twit-o-lutionary. See, "How #MooreandMe Worked."

I don't recall seeing a blog post like that, well, ever --- it's like a dissertation! These chicks are freakin' serious!

No wonder conservatives are coming out with posts like this: "Rape: I'm Against It." It's hard out there for a dude!

PREVIOUSLY: "Michael Moore Repudiates 'Hooey' Rape Comments During Rachel Maddow Show Trial — BUMPED AND UPDATED!"

Julian Assange Interviewed on Dylan Ratigan Show

An interview with Cenk Uygur:

It's mostly a bunch of whining about how he isn't being treated like a "journalist." See AFP, "US press should fear being targeted: Assange." And he takes issue with the "shock jocks trying to make a name for themselves," like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin. Business Insider has more: "Julian Assange Thinks Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee Should Be Charged With Incitement to Commit Murder." And CNN, "Assange lashes back at U.S. critics." Assange wraps up by bawling about U.S. treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, moaning about how "human rights organizations" need to look into this. Manning is Assange's fall guy and whatever he says about him is completely unserious and self-serving. Besides, now we've got international organizations on the case. At Fox News, "U.S. Military Pushes Back After U.N. Agrees to Review WikiLeaks Suspect's Treatment."

And more from Michael Lind, "Yes, Julian Assange actually is a criminal."

Now that's what I'm talking about!