Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 2

Jonah “Goldberg is frustratingly short on specifics. He seems more concerned with tone”

A MUST-READ by Deion Kathawa at American Greatness, on what Kurt Schlichter calls “the new rules”:

That speaks to the deeper problem. Goldberg knows perfectly well that politics is nothing like a youth basketball game. In such a game, there are referees whose job it is to regulate the flow of play and punish those who violate the rules of the game. When someone cheats, the ref—who’s presumed by both sides to be legitimate—has the authority to sort out disputes, decide if there’s been a violation, and, if so, what the punishment should be.

But in politics, particularly American politics, who’s the referee? (…)

When one side in politics plays dirty and violates established rules and norms (which flow from our Constitution and our history as a nation), the solution is not to whine that it’s happening and then get skittish about fighting back—it’s to fight back. Make the other side pay a price for its repellent practices. Impose costs for undesired and dangerous behavior. (…)

Movement conservatism chose for years to be a pliant doormat to the relentless onslaught of the social justice-crazed, progressive Left and its ever-escalating leftward demands. It chose to rehearse an inflexible checklist ideology rather than to be guided by prudential judgments about the common good of the nation in light of natural rights reasoning of the American Founding, respectively. It chose to see politics as bean bag, rather than the inherently scrappy contest for dominance that it truly is.

They have, in short, opted to view the public square as a debating society and the nation as a playground—complete with imaginary judges and recess duty patrol. They imagine they can send up their trial balloons and tout their pet ideas in this idealized “fair” and objective world rather than in a real place inhabited by real persons…

James E. Miller: Say, remember when National Review purged the Birchers…?

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“Ironically, because of this history of distortion, the statue actually does represent the lynching memorial perfectly”“Joseph McCarthy died 60 years ago today”Jim Goad: Revolt of the Involuntary Celibates  

“Ironically, because of this history of distortion, the statue actually does represent the lynching memorial perfectly”

David Cole writes:

The whole thing plays out like a game of telephone. A photo of South African miners at a medical exam became a sculpture of South African miners with their hands raised in surrender, which became a sculpture of inner-city American black men asking cops not to shoot, which became a monument to the lynching of post–Civil War Southern blacks.

And down the chain, not a fuck was given about context.

Rose Parks has a lot to answer for

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“Joseph McCarthy died 60 years ago today”Jim Goad: Revolt of the Involuntary CelibatesDavid Cole: “…here’s what should haunt Josh Howard, and here’s what makes his festival wins so ironic”  

“Joseph McCarthy died 60 years ago today”

Dan Flynn writes:

By the time McCarthy gave his initial speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950, the Cold War already boasted its primary villain. His name was Joe, too. It is to the discredit of so many on the Left that they imagine his last name as McCarthy.

‘Muslims are the new Jews!’ ‘They’re the new communists!’ ‘Muslims are the new Jewish communists!!’

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesJim Goad: Revolt of the Involuntary CelibatesDavid Cole: “…here’s what should haunt Josh Howard, and here’s what makes his festival wins so ironic”“How the New Corporate Elite Sold Same-Sex Marriage to the American Public”  

Jim Goad: Revolt of the Involuntary Celibates

Jim Goad writes:

The most compelling evidence for this is not only the 4chan lingo, but the fact that the timestamp on the post was alleged to be 1:27PM EST. But surveillance footage shows that Minassian’s rampage began a few minutes before that, and it’s hard to believe he’d be able to type a Facebook message while driving a van over crowds of people. (…)

It’s impossible to gauge what quotient of self-identified incels are so cancerously bitter at women that they encourage murderous rampages such as Elliot Rodger’s. But focusing on the ultraviolent freaks only serves to obscure the deeply sad fact that many young men out there feel that there is no place for them in this world—and certainly no empathy. If they dare to make a peep about the fact that many modern women are shallow, hateful, status-seeking, promiscuous whores, they are swatted down as misogynists, facts be damned. They know that there is zero sympathy in this culture for unsuccessful males and that if they dare to complain, they will immediately be slandered as another frightfully creepy Elliot Rodger in the making.

Jim Goad on McEnroe vs. Williams

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesDavid Cole: “…here’s what should haunt Josh Howard, and here’s what makes his festival wins so ironic”“How the New Corporate Elite Sold Same-Sex Marriage to the American Public”Writing and booze: What’s the deal, anyhow?  

David Cole: “…here’s what should haunt Josh Howard, and here’s what makes his festival wins so ironic”

By the way, Cole is right about Breitbart: He smeared Shirley Sherrod. It’s why I can’t get fully onboard with the “Andrew!” worship.

He also sounded and acted like an unrecovered alcoholic/addict and/or untreated manic depressive, and owed a duty to his wife and children to take better care of himself.

Yes, Breitbart’s death was a shocking loss (I cried on Sun TV) but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t subject him to the same scrutiny to which he subjected others…

Anyway, here’s Cole on the guy behind a new documentary (and an old scandal):

As if blaming Acer’s victims for their own deaths wasn’t bad enough, Howard conveniently forgot to inform his viewers that the scientific “expert” who was the linchpin of the segment was dirty as sin. Lionel Resnick, a dermatologist(!), challenged the accuracy of the CDC’s DNA sequencing, which had linked the AIDS virus in Acer’s patients to the virus Acer himself carried. But it turned out that Resnick was a paid shill ($300,000, to be exact) for CIGNA, Acer’s insurance company. Howard not only didn’t mention the CIGNA connection, he also conveniently left out that Resnick’s conclusions had been dismissed by pretty much everyone else who examined the case (shortly after the 60 Minutes piece aired, Resnick was indicted for fraud and fled to the Cayman Islands).

The CDC took the highly unusual step of denouncing the 60 Minutes segment in an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine. That’s how bad Howard’s “journalism” was. It should be added that even though Howard titled the segment “Kimberly’s Story,” he didn’t interview any of her friends or family. The point of the piece was to smear a girl who died a terrible death at the hands of a gay man. Based on Howard’s hit job, The New York Times’ carbuncle-in-residence Frank Rich labeled Bergalis a homophobe, blaming her for hurting the feelings of the poor dentist who killed her. Rich even went so far as to put scare quotes around “victim” when referring to her.

 

“I hate to even suggest it, but what if Andrew [Breitbart] was wrong?”

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“How the New Corporate Elite Sold Same-Sex Marriage to the American Public”Writing and booze: What’s the deal, anyhow?“And cracking down on male-painted female nudes as a means to this end seems pointless…”  

“How the New Corporate Elite Sold Same-Sex Marriage to the American Public”

Scott Yenor reviews a new book on that topic, but I’m not entirely convinced on its main point:

Paul contradicts this liberal narrative. Personal acquaintance with homosexuals, for instance, is more an effect of political opinions than a cause: people have contact with homosexuals because they first admire them. Furthermore, liberals do not consistently tolerate or affirm all of those they come into contact with. Those who come to have favorable views of homosexuality and same-sex marriage continue to have unshakable and deep prejudices against poor whites and Christian fundamentalists, even after they come into contact with them. Such “liberals” are, Paul shows through survey data, among society’s biggest haters, in fact.

I doubt many of those people have truly “come into contact” with “poor whites and Christian fundamentalists” in their daily lives; their opinions on them are acquired through the media.

Pete Vere interviews persecuted Canadian pastor Stephen Boissoin

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesWriting and booze: What’s the deal, anyhow?“And cracking down on male-painted female nudes as a means to this end seems pointless…”Jim Goad: “…gay civil-rights lawyer David Buckel’s life went up in a little gay puff of smoke”  

Writing and booze: What’s the deal, anyhow?

Clancy Martin reviews The Recovering:

If there is one book that rises above all others in The Recovering, it is Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest, with its depictions of the modest heroism of the recovering addict. I loved Jamison’s smart insights and frank reverence for Infinite Jest—her discussion of it is one of the most comforting pieces of criticism on Wallace I have read. But let’s be honest: Wallace’s story does not have a happy ending. He was, we know, wrestling with more demons than just addiction, but this returns me to a point that I think Jamison is not as forthright about as she might be: Sobriety does not always lead to triumph, in art or in life. At the end of the day, she characterizes Carver, Johnson, and Wallace a bit too naively: They are heroes because they used the twelve steps to get clean, and yet even while clean, they remained—or became!—magnificent writers. To my mind, this is a very dangerous kind of idolatry. Whether you’re idolizing booze or you’re idolizing booze-free, you’re still idolizing, and I think that focusing so much on whether these writers were sober or drunk keeps Jamison from offering a complex portrait of their actual struggles. She focuses on the results, not on the whole life. As with Jesus’ Son, she is drawn to the last story, when she could be thinking about the entire collection.

And we should wonder about the very notion of “sobriety”—a notion that is not sufficiently interrogated in Jamison’s book, but really taken for granted. Witness: “I would have loved to hear Amy Winehouse sing sober. Not just two weeks sober, but three years sober, twenty years sober.” I worry that this observation is as much about Jamison and her own anxiety (with which I sympathize) as it is about Amy Winehouse. What if the sober Amy wasn’t all that good three years sober, twenty years sober? Would she be less in Jamison’s eyes?

 

Jim Goad: A World Without Western Civ

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related Stories“And cracking down on male-painted female nudes as a means to this end seems pointless…”Jim Goad: “…gay civil-rights lawyer David Buckel’s life went up in a little gay puff of smoke”Were “Glass Men” the trannies of the Middle Ages?  

“And cracking down on male-painted female nudes as a means to this end seems pointless…”

…at least to Marilyn Minter, a #MeToo supporter who nonetheless says she’s seen a version of this before, when her “Porn Grids” ran afoul of anti-pornography feminists in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “I was a traitor to feminism, but my side won,” she says. “Now it’s the return of all that.” Her larger point? “There are no safe places: This is the world, it’s pretty awful, and it’s pretty great at the same time. But the minute you try to pin down sexuality, it’s going to spit in your face. It’s totally personal, it’s fluid. Trying to make rules is a waste of energy. Progressives can take each other apart — we do it all the time — when the bigger enemy is these neo-Nazis. That’s where the energy should be, not trying to police fucking paintings.”

‘Streisand Effect’ takes on new meaning with 1970s kinky pseudo biker porn pix

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesJim Goad: “…gay civil-rights lawyer David Buckel’s life went up in a little gay puff of smoke”Were “Glass Men” the trannies of the Middle Ages?Black ex-cop on “racist” Starbucks: “White liberals are making us look dumb”  

Jim Goad: “…gay civil-rights lawyer David Buckel’s life went up in a little gay puff of smoke”

Jim Goad writes:

Two years later in an apparent copycat suicide, a 31-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison poured kerosene on himself outside the Pentagon and left his family fatherless because he apparently cared more about suffering Vietnamese children than he cared about his own children. He had mailed a letter to his wife that stated, “Know that I love thee…but I must go to help the children of the priest’s village.” Only a week later, yet another self-hating white American male named Roger Allen LaPorte turned himself into a charcoal briquette outside the UN building.

And yet the Vietnam War raged on for years afterwards, almost as if no one cared about these suicides, almost as if the military-industrial complex’s official attitude was “please spare us these drama queens; we have a war to fight.”

What Tracks Define the Proto-Punk Sound?

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesWere “Glass Men” the trannies of the Middle Ages?Black ex-cop on “racist” Starbucks: “White liberals are making us look dumb”David Cole: Is Donald Trump the first Jewish President?  

Were “Glass Men” the trannies of the Middle Ages?

Strangely, King Charles was far from alone in his glass delusion. He was only the most exalted representative of a rash of Glass Men that appeared throughout Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tales of people afflicted with glass bones, glass heads, glass arms, and glass hearts abound in the medical and literary texts of the time.

One unfortunate man was convinced his buttocks was made of glass, and that sitting down would smash it into flying shards. He was afraid to leave the house, in case a glazier tried to melt him down into a windowpane.

Another Glass Man travelled to Murano, an Italian island famous for its beautiful glass, hoping to fling himself into a kiln and be transformed into a goblet.

Yet another case tells of a scholar who believed that the surface of the world was made of glass, beneath which lurked a tangle of serpents. He did not dare to leave his bed, for fear that he would smash the glass and fall in among the snakes.

 

Gavin McInnes: 10 Things I Like About White People

Kathy Shaidle's NEW book, Confessions of a Failed Slut, is available HERE.

          Related StoriesBlack ex-cop on “racist” Starbucks: “White liberals are making us look dumb”David Cole: Is Donald Trump the first Jewish President?Daniel J. Flynn on Art Bell: ‘Late night listeners lose an American original and storyteller’