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."