THE INSTA-WIFE: The Cosby Trial: A Sign of Justice or Mob Rule?
Archive for 2018
April 29, 2018
NEWS I HOPE YOU NEVER HAVE TO USE: Today is the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of Dachau. In honor of that here’s a counterintuitive fact: Never give a starving person a lot* to eat. If you thought that was a myth, you should know that it’s not. It’s called re-feeding syndrome, and it can be fatal.
*No, I have no idea how much is too much, except that it’s not very much. I’m just a law professor. You would be wise to re-check anything I say about dealing with the physical world.
PELOSI: TRUMP MIGHT QUALIFY FOR NOBEL PEACE PRIZE; ‘LET’S SEE HOW IT GOES.’
Expecting results before awarding the Nobel Prize? That’s extremist wacko crazy talk. To paraphrase Woody Allen, for the right person, 100 percent of success was just showing up.
I WONDER IF THERE WERE ANY IRANIANS OR RUSSIAN MERCENARIES PRESENT? BREAKING. Huge Mother Of All Explosions Hits Syrian City Of Hama. Early reports yet. Stay tuned.
OPEN THREAD: Make it threadelicious.
SARAH HOYT: Of Refugees, Borders, and Invaders.
“MY CULTURE IS NOT YOUR GODDAMN PROM DRESS:” White girl in Chinese prom dress triggers SJW Twitter.
And from right around this time in 2016, Video Game Director David Jaffe Plays The KKK Card As He Ruins Superhero Prom Picture:
Most of what I wrote back then applies to this year’s lefty freakout over prom-going teenagers, with just minor touchups.
As John Nolte wrote at Big Hollywood in 2015 when the Onion’s otherwise often enjoyable AV Club Website attacked a Michigan restaurateur for symbolically “banning” Hollywood’s Michael Moore and Seth Rogan when the two smeared the late Chris Kyle after Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper proved to be a surprise box office smash:
And how does the AV Club respond to this symbolic but righteous protest? By using no fewer than 7 paragraphs to relentlessly mock the Little Guy and his business.
[Restaurant owner Tommy] Brann has come up with the equally deadly revenge of denying him “decent, better than average, but nothing to rave about” fare delivered through “terrible service” amid “dated and kinda dirty” decor, of the sort that Americans must consume daily to live. Rogen and Moore are hereby condemned to slowly starve to death in the Brann’s parking lot, yearning fruitlessly for Brann’s Classic Onion Straw Loaf, the lights of the sign that illuminates their fatal mistake growing dim in their eyes.
Is anyone else old enough to remember when speaking truth to and defying power was the in-thing?
When the American Left reveals who they are really for and against, it is chilling.
Know your place and shut your mouth, little man.
And now you too, girls in Asian-style dresses, as well as teenage boys with geeky but harmless superhero T-shirts and the prom dates who love them. As Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s.‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.’”
And if that means smearing high school kids as crypto-racists as part of the PC cleanup, hey, at least you can feel proud knowing you fought the good fight by Speaking Truth to Prom.
UPDATE: “The entire corpus of Identity-politics ideology is just a new way to bully,” Jordan Peterson tweets, with “the additional twist of simultaneously claiming higher moral ground.”
Found via John Sexton at Hot Air, who notes the whiplash factor of this train wreck: “Haven’t we seen the entire media recently defend the honor of the Parkland teens on the grounds that, Hey, they’re just kids? It’s amazing how fast the left goes from ‘don’t attack these poor kids’ to a mean girl army ready to destroy someone the same age over their choice of prom dress. Even more incredible, you can bet they all feel proud of themselves for this shameful behavior.”
Of course — it reminds them that they’re the anointed, as Thomas Sowell would say.
I THINK “IT STILL MOVES” WOULD PROBABLY COUNT AS HATE SPEECH TODAY: The Scientific Importance of Free Speech.
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Plus, save in Seasonal Decor.
IOWAHAWK EXPLAINS THINGS:
HERE ARE THREE SCARY FACTORS YOU MUST UNDERSTAND IN FBI SCANDAL: It all makes sense once you understand this trio. Well, everything but those two chatty FBI lovebirds.
NIALL FERGUSON: Trump’s “Madman Diplomacy” Seems To Be Working.
#METOO FEMINISTS MAY NOT REALIZE IT, BUT THEIR OTHER TARGET IS SEX AND DRUGS AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL:
Last fall, as the first #MeToo scandals scrolled across the cable news chyron, I happened to be reading “Sticky Fingers,” Joe Horgan’s [sic – Ed] biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. As Horgan describes the magazine’s early years in the 1960s, just about everyone on the staff was having sex with everyone else.
Did the women of Rolling Stone consent to the goings-on at what today would be regarded as an illegal den of harassment? It seems they did. In the ladies’ room, they scribbled graffiti ranking male staffers for their sexual performance — not, as girls do on college campuses today, the names of rapists in their midst. Jane Wenner, Jann’s wife, was known to judge job seekers by “whether a candidate was attracted to her” and, in some cases, to test the depth of their ardor personally. Photographer Annie Leibovitz, who made her name at Rolling Stone, routinely slept with her subjects.
Different as those days seem, there’s a direct line between then and now. Today’s clear-cut protest against workplace harassment is mutating into a far-reaching counterrevolution against the combustible contradictions set in motion 50-odd years ago. But as in the 1960s, this sexual rebellion is utopian and deeply naïve about the tangled knot of human motivation. Don’t expect the young women who are building the #MeToo barricades to succeed.
It’s fair to say ’60s-style liberation endorsed the value of female sexual desire, autonomy and consent. This was a genuine moral achievement, and we can be thankful it is a settled part of modern life. But the sexual revolution also helped midwife the soaring number of single-parent families and the related ills of inequality, poverty, achievement gaps, and men MIA from family life. And all these many years later, younger feminists are exposing new flaws in the sexual deregulation bequeathed to them by their elders.
First and foremost is the revolution’s blindness to la difference.
Read the whole thing; I wonder how Kay Hymowitz’s column in the L.A. Times is playing amongst its core readers, given the chief industries of that company town.
Flashback to some related links in a post I wrote back in October, at the height of Weinstein-mania:
THE SEXUAL PREDATORS EVERYONE STILL WORSHIPS:” “What do we do about predators we actually think are cool?…What is the point at which it becomes necessary for us to channel our inner Savonarolas and just start burning? Is one confirmed incident enough? How many Station to Stations or Physical Graffitis are worth the assault of a single woman or child? Are we affirming or materially contributing to their crimes when we watch films or listen to music made by abusers?”
Earlier: Hugh Hefner, Gangsta Rap & the Emerging Moral Majority: “Slowly, however, the elite of our culture seem to be drifting toward a new, far-more jaundiced and suspicious view of popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s.”
And for my own thoughts on Joe Hagan’s biography of Wenner, click here: Sticky Fingers: A New Biography Explores the Seedier Side of Jann Wenner.
FLASHBACK: How the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Gave Us the Trump Campaign.
On the night of the dinner, Trump took his seat at the center of the ballroom, perfectly situated so that all 2,500 lawmakers, movie stars, journalists, and politicos in attendance could see him….But as soon as the plates were cleared and the program began, it became agonizingly clear that Trump was not royalty in this room: He was the court jester.
The president used his speech to pummel Trump with one punchline after another…When host Seth Meyers took the mic, he piled on with his own rat-a-tat of jokes, many of which seemed designed deliberately to inflame Trump’s outer-borough insecurities: “His whole life is models and gold leaf and marble columns, but he still sounds like a know-it-all down at the OTB.”
The longer the night went on, the more conspicuous Trump’s glower became. He didn’t offer a self-deprecating chuckle, or wave warmly at the cameras, or smile with the practiced good humor of the aristocrats and A-listers who know they must never allow themselves to appear threatened by a joke at their expense. Instead, Trump just sat there, stone-faced, stunned, simmering — Carrie at the prom covered in pig’s blood.
Choose the form of your destructor.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Americans Have Little Confidence in Grads’ Readiness for Work, College, according to Gallop poll.
Who could have seen this one coming?
SCIENCE AND PERCEPTION: “Research consistently shows that men believe women are more sexually interested in them than women actually are (Levesque et al., 2006; Perrilloux et al., 2012; Treat et al., 2015). Interestingly, women also believe men are less sexually interested in them than men actually are (Levesque et al. 2006; Perrilloux et al., 2012).”
BUT OF COURSE. TEXANS WANT TEXAS-SIZE PETS: Tigers are endangered in Asia, but in Texas they’re backyard pets.
HEADLINES FROM 1972: Film and TV workers take aim at Nixon for criticizing tax breaks.
Cynthia Nixon’s platform for governor is a show stopper to these furious film and TV industry workers who used to share a set with her.
The “Sex and the City” actress and Democratic candidate for guv was blasted by production crew and small businesses after she bashed a big film industry tax break that helped earn her fat paychecks.
“If you had your way you would bring production to a halt, causing long term damage to the New York economy, and more personally, you would take away our livelihoods,” 40 vendors and crew workers with New Yorkers for TV & Film Jobs wrote in an open letter to Nixon defending the $420 million program.
On the one hand, it’s fascinating to watch a mass of Hillary supporting leftists rally to support a tax break.* On the other, it’s good to see Glenn’s “Repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts” mantra finding “unexpected” east coast support.
* As Robert Conquest stated in his First Law of Politics, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH THE NEW YORK METROPOLITAN OPERA: James Levine wiped off Sirius-XM’s Met Opera Radio channel.
This means the 40 years of broadcasts while Levine was music director has been silenced.
The Levine operas have been replaced with full-length broadcast recordings from the 1930s, 1940s, and especially 1950s with often dubious technical quality despite great singers.
Now everyone knows that Levine and the Met are only speaking through lawyers these day, but this vindictive editing of institutional history is reminiscent of Stalin at his worst, when Trotsky and other undesirables were whited out of party pictures.
The Met fired Levine last month, the L.A. Times reported, “after finding ‘credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in sexually abusive and harassing conduct.’”
By that standard, a whole lot of Hollywood’s back catalog of both movies and TV shows will soon be tossed down the Memory Hole, no matter how big the resulting bonfire’s carbon footprint will be.
(Via Terry Teachout.)
DIPLOMACY: Saudi Crown Prince: Palestinians should take what the U.S. offers. “In a closed-door meeting with heads of Jewish organizations in New York on March 27th, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) gave harsh criticism of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), according to an Israeli foreign ministry cable sent by a diplomat from the Israeli consulate in New York, as well three sources — Israeli and American — who were briefed about the meeting. The bottom line of the crown prince’s criticism: Palestinian leadership needs to finally take the proposals it gets from the U.S. or stop complaining.”
Plus: “He made clear the Palestinian issue was not a top priority for the Saudi government or Saudi public opinion. MBS said Saudi Arabia ‘has much more urgent and important issues to deal with’ like confronting Iran’s influence in the region. . . . A source who was briefed on the meeting told me the attendees were stunned when they heard the Saudi Crown Prince comments on the Palestinian issue. ‘People literally fell off their chairs,’ the source said.”
Amazing that this took a month to leak, but it says volumes about how America’s mideast diplomacy has changed things. And reportedly it was Jared Kushner who got the Crown Prince on board.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Pansexual Is Not The Same As Bisexual.