RECIPROCITY: Do Boys Lack Empathy? If So, Perhaps It’s Because They Give What They Get. “Society has too much trouble seeing harm to boys even when the harm is there for all to be seen. This pattern holds even in the context of sexual predation. The legal system appears to be significantly less willing to protect boys from sexual predation by adults than it is to protect girls. A study of a decade’s worth of cases in the New Jersey school system concluded that when teachers have sex with minor students, male teachers are more likely to go to jail for that transgression, and of those teachers who go to jail, male teachers are given longer sentences.”
Archive for 2019
August 11, 2019
SUMMER MEMORIES OF A GULLIBLE MOM.
CHANGE: The Race To Replace Viagra.
Interestingly, they’re looking at it as a treatment for Cystic Fibrosis: “Phosphodiesterase type 5 (PDE5) inhibitors reduce inflammation, improve vascular health, increase microvascular O2 delivery and improve skeletal muscle function. Accordingly, our central hypothesis is that treatment with the PDE5 inhibitor, sildenafil, can improve exercise capacity, vascular and cardiac function, and overall quality of life, all of which may contribute to improvement in exercise tolerance in people with CF.”
AT AMAZON, save big on Oakley Sunglasses.
FLASHBACK: Prosecutors who covered up Mass. drug lab scandal now face bar discipline, civil rights lawsuit.
In December 2011, after police in Springfield, Mass., had arrested Renaldo Penate for allegedly selling heroin, the drugs from that case were tested at a state drug lab by technician Sonja Farak. The same day that she did the tests, Farak wrote in a diary that she “tried to resist using [drugs] @ work but ended up failing.”
About two weeks later, Farak subsequently acknowledged, she spent the morning smoking crack in various bathrooms of her lab building, while also testing Penate’s drugs a second time. That same day, she found that police had submitted tablets of LSD. She took it, and “the sensation of colors in the wind left her unable to function for work,” court records show. Her actions would be discovered a year later, and Farak admitted she had been stealing and using drugs from the lab since 2004.
But when Penate’s lawyers asked for any information about Farak’s drug use during the time she was working in the lab, prosecutors with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office repeatedly refused to provide it. And so Penate was convicted and spent more than 5½ years in prison. A judge who investigated in 2016 called the prosecutors’ actions “intentional, repeated, prolonged and deceptive withholding of evidence from the defendants” and wrote that one of the prosecutors had a “lack of a moral compass.”
And yet pundits blame Trump for undermining faith in our institutions.
PETER HITCHENS DIDN’T INTEND FOR THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE: England’s Norwich Cathedral Installs Carnival Slide, Yoga Mats to Attract Visitors.
(Classical reference in headline.)
ROGER KIMBALL ON “WHITE SUPREMACY:” Like Manna to the Left.
Readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four will remember the daily ritual in which the inhabitants Oceania are required to watch a film depicting the hated Emmanuel Goldstein, enemy of the state. In Orwell’s novel, the hate-fest was only two minutes long, whereas the supposed anti-white supremacist fanatics have their propaganda on an endless loop.
Back in May, PJ Media’s Sarah Hoyt put her finger on what the rallies against “white supremacism” are really all about when she noted that “We Don’t Have a Problem with White Supremacy. We Have a Problem with Leftist Supremacy.” Bingo. “The left is obsessed with white supremacists,” Hoyt observed, “the way that children are obsessed with Santa Claus, and for more or less the same reasons.” Santa doesn’t exist, but the presents pile up every December 25 because the right people have a stake in perpetuating the myth of his existence.
Another curious feature of the hysteria over the made-up tort of white supremacism is that its very frenetic quality, instead of highlighting its disingenuousness and absurdity, tends instead to function as a sort of camouflage. Parsing the psychological dynamics of this phenomenon would doubtless take us into deep waters—I’m not at all sure I can explain it—but the Freudians would probably explain in terms of the idea of projection: concealing one’s own unpalatable impulses from oneself by attributing them to another.
Plus: “Pop quiz: who is James T. Hodgkinson? Can you say without Google’s help?”
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Shot: As this NewsBusters post from 2011 highlights, MSNBC went on a jihad against Sarah Palin in January of 2011, attempting to magically connect the dots between her clip art and the Tucson massacre:
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell continued her crusade against Sarah Palin today, reiterating the fallacious contention that the former Alaska governor is at least partly responsible for the shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona that left six dead and a congresswoman critically injured.
On her eponymous afternoon program, Mitchell criticized Palin’s “campaign tactics” in an interview with former Democratic Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick, who was targeted in the 2010 election by SarahPAC, Palin’s political action committee, as a vulnerable incumbent.
“Ann Kirkpatrick was also targeted by Palin’s campaign and lost her reelection bid after also experiencing a number of threats while she was in office,” reported Mitchell, who attempted conflate political opposition to Kirkpatrick with personal threats made by extremists. “Let’s talk, first of all, about what it felt like going through that campaign and what were the specific threats? Was anything ever verified? How did you deal with it?”
Chaser: MSNBC Contributor: ‘I Want Pitchforks And Torches’ Outside Trump Fundraiser’s Home.
Apparently, the recent boycotts of Ross’ businesses didn’t go far enough for [contributor and legal blog editor Elie Mystal]. He said:
People of color are already targets under this administration. I have no problem on shining the light back on the donors who fund this kind of racialized hate. I mean I go further. I want pitchforks and torches outside this man’s house in the Hamptons. I’ve been to the Hamptons, it’s very nice. There’s no reason why it has to be. There’s no reason he should be able to have a nice little party. There’s no reason why people shouldn’t be able to be outside of his house and making their voices peacefully understood.
“Totally. There have been peaceful protests outside Mitch McConnell’s house.” replied Hayes.
Yeah, totally Chris. During the peaceful protest outside of McConnell’s home, a protester is heard saying she wished McConnell had “broken his little, raggedy, wrinkled-ass neck” and that someone should “just stab the motherf—er in the heart.”
Hayes continued:
Your point is how does civil society deal with what we’re seeing, right? How does civil society deal with the most powerful person in the world, like, painting a target on someone’s back and inveighing against the Congresspeople and (inaudible). The peaceful means by which civil society responds is through more free speech and also more protected activity and pressure.
This is surreal. They appear to have no idea of how crazy they sound. In civil society, Chris, people don’t say “someone should stab the mother—ker in the heart.” They don’t show up to protest a private political fundraiser with pitchforks and torches. It’s the symbolism Chris. Even if the protestors refrain from physical violence and damaging Ross’ property, it sounds like hate speech to me.
Protesting a person in front of his home is also straight out of Saul Alinsky’s playbook; yet another of his tactics condoned by the left — right up until it’s used against another leftist.
QUESTIONS ANSWERED: “Bubby then asked what exactly it means to be ‘made to care’ and what that looks like.” And the answer is: “Jessica Yaniv.”
Read the whole thing.
HEH, INDEED. Biden Clarifies: ‘I Like All Races, Even The Bad Ones.’
I’d add my usual “Note to Snopes, it’s the Babylon Bee, so it’s satire” tag, but the fact that it is such dead on satire is what angers Snopes the most: none shall mock the left.
IN THE MAIL: From Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt, Monster Hunter Guardian (Monster Hunters International Book 7)
AFTER TRUMP, THE DELUGE? America Was Sliding Toward Socialism For Over A Century, Will Socialism Restart After Trump?
KAMPUS KANGAROO KOURT UPDATE: UMass violated due process by punishing accused student with no hearing, appeals court rules.
THIS REALLY DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE. Capitalism is Saving the Planet: Minnesota Forests Are Flourishing.
WITH MORE STATES TO FOLLOW: SD Board of Regents passes substantial free speech protections. “Among the policy changes, public universities in South Dakota will no longer be able to discriminate against ‘any student or student organization’ based on viewpoint or ideology. Student organizations will also be able to require members to ‘affirm and adhere to the organization’s sincerely held beliefs.'”
THE ULTIMATE KINSLEY GAFFE: Biden’s gaffe is the left’s truth, Neo writes.
Which gaffe of Biden’s? I’m talking about this one:
Everybody knows who Donald Trump is. Even his supporters know who he is. We got to let him know who we are. We choose unity over division. We choose science over fiction. We choose truth over facts.
Everybody keeps referring to that last sentence of the paragraph as a “gaffe,” and so I called it that in the title of this post. And I suppose it’s possible that it’s some sort of slip or error by Biden. But let me take the whole paragraph, one sentence at a time.
Read the whole thing.
VOTING RIGHTS FOR EX-OFFENDERS: Tell me again why you think this ought to be a priority ….
THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT THE EL PASO SHOOTER:
Who wrote ‘Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country … creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly over-harvesting resources … the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable’?
The answer, if media reports are accurate, is Patrick Crusius, the man accused of the El Paso massacre. The words appeared in his testament, entitled (in homage to Al Gore?) The Inconvenient Truth, which he seems to have put online before decreasing the number of people in America by 22.
Who said, on Twitter, ‘I want socialism, and I’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding’? Connor Betts, the man accused of shooting nine people, including his sister, in Dayton, Ohio.
This week’s reporting of the two atrocities has painted Crusius as a white supremacist. This does not seem to be accurate. In his manifesto, he is against ethnic mingling and mass immigration, but his view that immigrants should be killed is based not on racial superiority theory, but on his sense that too many people pollute the environment of America. He despairs of persuading his fellow Americans to change their consumerist lifestyles, so he decides to attack the ‘invaders’ instead.
Meanwhile, Rod Dreher asks, “Patrick Crusius: On The Spectrum?”
Let me emphasize strongly: I am not in any way saying that all people on the spectrum are at risk of becoming mass killers! What I am saying is that if Patrick Crusius is on the spectrum, and suffered from the torments of sensory processing disorder, then there are treatments that could have helped. Maybe the people in his life — his family — could have known to look for signs of obsession and perseveration on certain topics. Maybe Crusius himself could have found some relief for his suffering. The fact that he couldn’t go to school because his clothes didn’t feel right to him — you might think that this is a sign of fashion anxiety, but for people with SPD, it’s a very serious tactile issue. It is physically painful for them to be in clothes that don’t seem right. Something as minor as a tag in the collar of a shirt can be a kind of torture. It might sound ridiculous to you, but I’m telling you, it’s very real.
If Crusius suffered from this kind of thing, and didn’t know what was happening to him, or how to fix it, well, that might explain some things.
Read the whole thing. Though as with the post-Christchurch “manifestos,” it’s worth remembering Brian Cates’ take from last week: “Mass shootings done for **fun** as the ultimate troll where these shitposters write confusing manifestos and then sit back & watch the fun as both sides claim he belongs to the other.”
FLASHBACK: Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad: “But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.”