SO, PRETTY MUCH LIKE HIS OTHER DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN POLICIES, THEN? Obama’s immigration train wreck.
Archive for 2014
September 7, 2014
MOVING THE OVERTON WINDOW: Open carry activist acquitted in Texas disorderly conduct trial.
ROTHERHAM’S COLLABORATORS: The helping professionals didn’t help; the caring professionals didn’t care. That’s sadly unsurprising.
IPHONES, ANDROIDS AND MORE: At Amazon, Trade In Your Smartphone. If you’ve got an old iPhone lying around, now’s the time, before the 6 comes out.
Plus, new deals on Fall Coats.
MICHAEL BARONE: Low percentages of ‘nonwhite’ police officers is not a major national problem as New York Times suggests.
The Times’s emphasis on the distinction between “whites” and “non-whites” is, I think, positively unhelpful in considering some of the municipalities in other metropolitan areas. In metro New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, there are municipalities with Asian population majorities — “non-whites” in the Times’s argot — but very few Asian police officers. Is this a problem in Edison Township, N.J.(the nation’s leading Indian-American municipality), Fremont, Calif. (Asians from multiple countries), or Westminster, Calif. (large Vietnamese population)?
Asians tend to have very low crime rates, lower than whites in many areas. I very much doubt that Asian residents in Edison, Fremont and Westminster are simmering with resentment at their treatment by white police, and I would be surprised if even the most assiduous Times reporter, eager to find “whites” mistreating “non-whites,” could find evidence to the contrary.
Thus, the problem is ignored. Anyway, because they’re low-crime and high-achieving, Asians have been turned into “honorary whites.”
WELL, I CAN CERTAINLY GUESS: We still don’t know why Lois Lerner’s Blackberry was wiped clean. “Considering her former role as chief of the IRS’ tax exempt division, and its proximity to the targeting scandal, the decision to wipe her phone after investigators started asking questions is both suspicious and troubling.” At this point, I don’t think even the most credulous can really regard all this data destruction as anything other than a criminal conspiracy to cover up evidence of wrongdoing.
SUDDENLY, WE’RE DISCOVERING THAT SEXUAL ABUSE OF BOYS BY WOMEN IS VASTLY MORE COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT:
Eight to 16% of the male population has been abused sexually in youth. Most at risk are poor, fatherless boys 13 and younger. A significant number of child sex abusers – estimates range between five and twenty percent – are women. According to a 2004 report published in the Children and Youth Services review, “In 1996, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) investigated more than two million reports alleging maltreatment of more than three million children. More than one million of these children were identified as victims of abuse. Of the one million children, 12% were sexually abused. The sexual abuse of children by women, primarily mothers, once thought to be so rare it could be ignored, constituted 25% (approximately 36 000 children) of the sexually abused victims. This statistic is thought to be underestimated due to the tendency of non-disclosure by victims.”
But many people – even professional therapists – resist the very notion that women can harbor such instincts. A 1984 study reported that “pedophilia…does not exist at all in women.” Researching the subject several years ago, I interviewed an Ontario woman whose life, and that of her brother, had been blighted by the chronic sexual abuse they endured at the hands of their mother. As an adult, she sought therapy and was disheartened that she “never found any social service agency willing to acknowledge this or speak about it.”
Her experience is borne out in a 2004 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence by McGill professor Myriam S. Denov, “The Long-Term Effects of Child Sexual Abuse by Female Perpetrators,” in which Denov notes that “professionals working in the area of child welfare perceive sexual abuse by women as relatively harmless as compared to sexual abuse by men.” Denov found that this professional minimization and disbelief of patients’ allegations can exacerbate the original abuse’s negative effects, “ultimately inciting secondary victimization.”
The instinctive discomfort people feel regarding female pedophilia can be located in two sources. One is the universal image of the female as the “nurturing” sex. But even harder to combat is an ideology, currently dominant in our culture, in which men are associated with violence and women with victimhood. Any suggestion that women are as capable of predatory sexual behavior as men is viewed as social heresy. The ramifications of this sex-specific dogma can be seen in the double standards for men and women – notably in cases of domestic violence, but also in cases of child abuse – routinely applied by law enforcement and social services in assessing the veracity of victims.
Yep.
THE PRESS ISN’T ALL EXERCISED ABOUT SEXISM HERE, BECAUSE SHE’S A REPUBLICAN AND REPUBLICAN WOMEN ARE FAIR GAME: Can a single woman enter politics without her dating life being invaded?
In a letter to the Watertown Daily Times, Michael Flynn asks Republican New York congressional candidate Elise Stefanik whether she has “a private relationship” with anyone.
Flynn, who writes that he is a supporter of Stefanik’s Democratic opponent in the 21st Congressional district, Aaron Woolf, argues that candidates should disclose all personal relationships for the voters.
“I don’t think this falls under the heading of prying eyes; it’s an indicator of what you are about as a person and candidate for congressional office,” Flynn wrote.
Flynn chastises Watertown Mayor Jeff Graham for defending Stefanik and seeking to make her personal life a campaign issue. And by “make this a campaign issue,” Flynn means that the mayor is calling the request absurd.
They’d be talking about this on the Sunday shows if the parties were reversed.
September 6, 2014
RESPOND ACCORDINGLY: Isis recruitment moves from online networks to British mosques.
ERIC S. RAYMOND: Reality Is Viciously Sexist. “Firearms changes all this, of course – some of the physiological differences that make them inferior with contact weapons are actual advantages at shooting (again I speak from experience, as I teach women to shoot). So much so that anyone who wants to suppress personal firearams is objectively anti-female and automatically oppressive of women.”
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Women Are Taking Nude Pictures — And They’re Not Stopping Anytime Soon. “89 percent had taken nude photos of themselves at some point. Of that group, only 14 percent regretted doing so, and 82 percent said they’d do it again.”
MANY INSTAPUNDIT READERS ENJOYED LLOYD TACKITT’S A Distant Eden. It’s free on Kindle through midnight tomorrow.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Truth We Won’t Admit: Drinking Is Healthy. “In fact, the evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable—yet this is almost unmentionable in the United States. Even as health bodies like the CDC and Dietary Guidelines for Americans (prepared by Health and Human Services) now recognize the decisive benefits from moderate drinking, each such announcement is met by an onslaught of opposition and criticism, and is always at risk of being reversed.”
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Should Conservatives Start Women’s Magazines? Or buy existing ones. “You see this is the stuff that really isn’t being challenged or debunked on our end. The political left has a quasi-monopoly in this slice of media. This is a serious effort; it’s time conservatives start competing.”
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K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: In Which I Extract My Kid From the Clutches of Traditional Schooling.
So we took the lead from the online lessons that worked so well for Anthony over the summer, and for his new penchant for googling the shit out of animals, battles, and historical figures who catch his interest. Personally, I had ever heard of slave-making ants, but I walked out of my office one day to find that a mention of them in his encyclopedia of animals started him on an online research foray into the nastier sorts of crawling things. This was after he became fascinated by the shifts in Roman military gear from 100 A.D., to 400 A.D., to 1000 A.D. He has become very familiar with the websites where you can track the evolution.
So now he’s enrolled in an online private school. The school promises an individualized approach—we already know from experience that many of the lessons are designed to automatically adjust their pace to the needs of students working through online lessons. He’ll still work with a couple of online teachers, and my wife and I take on larger roles in monitoring his work and coaching him through the offline material. It’s as much a homeschooling effort with organizational and technological backup as it is a private school.
It’s an alternative to what we tried before, which didn’t work. And while there’s no guarantee that this is the “right” approach for Anthony, I have no doubt that it’s an improvement for my kid, whatever may work for others.
It would have been nice to have an option like this back when I was twitching and puking my own way through public schools in New York and Connecticut.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
SHOCKINGLY, IT TURNS OUT TO STINK: Someone actually read Steven Salaita’s scholarship.
University of Illinois’s behavior in this matter seems rather sketchy. But as with Ward Churchill, the scandal is two-fold, and begins with the scandal of his being offered a job in the Native American Studies Department in the first place. Instead of expressing concerns about civility, which I think is at best a poor justification for not rubber-stamping a tenured lateral offer, perhaps the Illinois administration should have, as a commenter on a previous thread suggests, “called the faculty hiring committee to the mat to justify the appointment, demanding that they explain in detail precisely why Salaita was not barely qualified but the best qualified candidate for the position, address concerns about possible classroom bias in the light of his extracurricular rants, and potentially require an extended probationary period before granting him tenure.
Yeah, but if you started requiring quality scholarship in grievance-studies departments, that would threaten the whole feedlot.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Proof of principle for nanoscale assembly line.
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NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Make Magazine Nunchucks.
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Christopher Lansdown, Ordinary Superheroes.
CHANGE: Cable companies want to unbundle broadcast TV, and broadcasters are angry. I’d like to see all of cable unbundled.