Kathy Shaidle's Blog, page 4

David Cole’s ‘Memo to Laura Ingraham’

There was absolutely nothing incorrect about Ingraham’s tweet. The kid genuinely did whine about the rejections. But we live in a time in which The New Yorker has compared Parkland “survivor” Emma Gonzalez to Joan of Arc, a time in which a politician’s career was ruined by calling Gonzalez a “skinhead lesbian” (Gonzalez is a self-described lesbian with a shaved head, but, to the faithful, truth can’t be a defense against blasphemy), and a time in which smug atheist comedian David Cross, who loves bragging about how he holds nothing sacred, damns the critics of the Parkland kids to a hell he doesn’t even believe in. (…)

Ingraham should have known better than to apologize. Honestly, if she thought she could somehow save herself by groveling, she’s too stupid to deserve a show in the first place.

I know about these matters from experience…

David Cole: Shit gays say (then and now)

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Published on April 03, 2018 05:20

Lionel Shriver: “…it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’”

Today’s “Thanks for coming out!”, over at the US Speccie:

A sole review of my last novel — amid perhaps a hundred — characterised The Mandibles (hence also its author) as ‘racist’. The evidence: my Latino US president of 2029 speaks ‘with a lisp’, a description of the reviewer’s invention. The review also took a snapshot out of context. A secondary character — who married into a white family and happens to be black, but is more pertinently suffering from advanced early-onset dementia — is part of a midnight trek to a refugee encampment. To prevent the confused, often violent woman from wandering off in a dangerous city, the family leads her by a leash. (How else would they control her?) By inference, Shriver wants to bring back slavery. Great. (…)

We’re well on our way to the label becoming a perverse badge of pride; if you’re outside the far-left faithful, your first charge of racism constitutes a losing of your political cherry, inoculating against any further sense of injury. This commonplace code for ‘not one of us’ is morphing into a meaningless playground taunt, just as forgettable as ‘stupid’.

Niger Innis: Cliven Bundy ‘Clumsily’ Stated an Important Point

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Published on April 02, 2018 04:30

Dear Transwhatevers: Being Who You Really Are Shouldn’t Be This Difficult

Jim Goad writes:

I would have no sane reason to deny someone the right to be who they really are. What’s suspicious about our transgendered allies, however, is how much effort it takes them to be who they really are. I would think that being who you really are requires no effort at all.

What’s so odd about trannies is that in order to simply be who they really are, they must endure a rigorous and expensive process of becoming who they really are.

Dear Muslims: This is why people hate you.

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Published on April 02, 2018 04:18

I’m torn: Taki’s shuts down its comments section

I hate to see publications do this, but Taki’s was the exception to my rule that, to find out what’s really going on, you should “read the newspaper upside down.”

Gavin McInnes actually wrote a whole Taki’s column about the commenters, and longtime 5FF readers know that when I was a columnist there, the comments were wall-to-wall, “Ew! A GIRL!!!” and “You’re a Jew!” and then, when it finally clicked that I wasn’t, “You’re an agent of ZOG!”

I had fun back, telling them to go get their Filipino mail order bride to go make ’em a sammich; inviting them to note that I was the one with the byline for a reason; and explaining that bragging about how stupid you are (“I don’t own a TV! Who cares about music & stuff??”) doesn’t, in fact, make you sound smart…

Anyway, here you go:

Some of you will not be happy to know that the President, in his nepotistic fashion, supports this decision. Nor that this decision has little to do with The Donald, The Left, the SPLC, the NAACP, DACA, NAFTA, BREXIT, The Russians, Harvey Weinstein, Muslims, Mexicans, Wakanda, or (((the Rothschilds))), who many believe, judging from the tiresome and banal commentary on our website, are omnipotent masters of the universe who are to blame for absolutely everything including every last spoiled little rich girl temper tantrum. (…)

At this point, we would be ever so grateful if you would kindly give the steady stream of childish threats to abandon Takimag forever a rest and be grateful we provide this platform for you and our writers, and that they have something intelligent to say week after week.

In August, J-Pod called Sailer “racist filth” for making a joke about Harvey Weinstein

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Published on March 30, 2018 06:16

Sailer: “The brilliant Harvard geneticist David Reich has published a bombshell scientific book, ‘Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past’…”

Oooooohhhhh booooyyyyy…

Countless articles about how unscientifically racist old WASPs were begin by quoting the scene early in The Great Gatsby in which Daisy’s oafish husband, Tom, recommends a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires.

Ironically, F. Scott Fitzgerald was parodying his own regrettable views on race. For instance, in 1921 the great novelist wrote to critic Edmund Wilson of his disgust engendered by a visit to Europe in language that sounds like Tom Buchanan waxing poetic: “The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors.”

Since about the stock market crash of 1929, this kind of thinking has been terribly out of fashion.

Since then, an endless stream of anthropologists have assured us that race is just a social construct, that ancient peoples made pots not war, that Aryan conquests in India and Europe were Nazi delusions, that the caste system was imposed on the egalitarian Indians by British colonialists, and many other agreeable suppositions.

As Fitzgerald’s friend Hemingway ended The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Mad Men Creator: Nothing To Laugh At By The Time You’re In The Late ‘60s

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Published on March 28, 2018 06:56

Childhood Sexual Abuse, Gender Dysphoria, and Transition Regret: Billy’s Story

Walt Heyer writes:

Billy B.’s story is not exceptional or unique. Childhood sexual abuse is an experience common to many of those who write me with regret about changing genders. Stories like his have filled my email inbox for the last ten years. That’s precisely why I asked him if I could share it. (…)

When Billy first emailed me, his subject line was “I’m another,” meaning another of the growing number of people, young and old, who formerly identified as transgender and who have detransitioned back to living as their original sex. He is also “another” of the people diagnosed with gender dysphoria who were sexually abused at a young age and falsely assured by medical practitioners that their problems would go away with cross-sex hormones and surgery.

It’s commendable to see the recent media attention on the “me too” movement for women who were sexually abused, but that’s only half the story. Boys like Billy who were sexually abused by older males need to be included, too. Perhaps it is time for a new movement—“I’m another”—for people who suffered the double harm of being sexually abused and then surgically mutilated. They learn the hard way, as Billy puts it, that it was “all for naught,” after convincing everyone else to use the right names and pronouns and getting access to cross-gender bathrooms.

Julie Burchill on Bruce Jenner: Changing sex is vain, not brave

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Published on March 27, 2018 05:27

David Cole: “For White Girls Who Have Considered (Career) Suicide”

David Cole writes:

Having been surrounded by actresses my entire life, I can tell you that if one word describes them, it’s needy. Very, very needy. White starlets are more likely to get the attention that all actors crave, and it’s sincere attention. It’s not like when a production company is forced by prevailing social justice winds to hire dark-skinned black actresses (the sort my high school chums used to describe as “blue-black bitches”), and you have a roomful of male execs condescendingly going on about what a “stunning beauty” she is. I’m not saying black can’t be beautiful, but around these parts, it’s not the ideal, and I’ve always felt certain that a lot of black actresses sense the patronizingly insincere compliments that get thrown their way. (…)

When The Sum of All Fears replaced the book’s Arab villains with neo-Nazis (thanks to a lobbying campaign by CAIR), white actors got work. When Children of Men deviated from the novel by inventing a subplot involving thuggish skinheads, more work for white guys. Every time the TV show Law & Order changes a black villain to white in its “ripped from the headlines” episodes, white actors profit handsomely (in the second half of season 13 alone, Law & Order switched races from black to white in dramatizations of the Beltway snipers, the Michael Jackson molestation trial, and the Bison Dele murder case). Sure, from a political point of view, such race-swapping is vile. But from the POV of white actors, it’s a boon.

David Cole: “Remembering Hollywood’s Favorite White Black Man”

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Published on March 27, 2018 05:25

Jim Goad really, really hates John Bolton

Here‘s Jim Goad.

Meanwhile, Roger Kimball says “Bolton is no warmonger.”

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Published on March 26, 2018 04:04

Rick McGinnis: The Gospel of Jordan Peterson (in which I make a cameo appearance)

Rick McGinnis writes:

On the surface, Peterson’s edicts for a good life are self-evident: Stand straight; Obey the Golden Rule; Choose your friends wisely; Set yourself reasonable expectations; Raise your children well; Don’t be a hypocrite; Cherish meaning; Don’t lie; Listen before you speak; Choose your words carefully; Let children fail so they learn to succeed; Be kind to animals.

But lest you think that short paragraph should save anyone the price of the book, it has to be understood that we are at least a generation, perhaps several, from the point where these commonsensical statements were known, understood or accepted by any sane adult. We are, at the end of a century of phenomenal technological advances and cataclysmic history, sorely in need of a book-length exposition on phrases that you’d once expect to find on needlework samplers.

Mark Steyn and Jordan Peterson in conversation: Need I say more?

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Published on March 24, 2018 13:37

Even “the world that made Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment'” has something to do with Trump

Because, hey, this is The Nation, right?

Had this woman (and I’m sorry, but I can’t take an “intellectual” named “Jennifer” quite seriously…) read these two new translations during the Obama administration, what would her review have been like then?

Isn’t voting for a man merely because he is black, or for Clinton merely because she’s female and has a famous last name, no less “tribalist” and “emotional” and “irrational” and even “self-destructive” than others’ (presumed) motives for voting for Trump?

Alas, such impertinent questions flail impotently in the air, no sound purchase in view save this tiny blog, because I do not write for The Nation, and she does…

“Floating in the air” were a set of ideas, imported from Western Europe, that would come to define the tenets of Russian radical thought in the 1860s. Russian students like Crime and Punishment’s antihero, the 23-year-old Raskolnikov, were bombarded with somewhat distorted and jumbled versions of English utilitarianism, French utopian socialism, and Darwinism. Taken together, they created an intellectual climate that, in Dostoyevsky’s estimation, put too much stock in the ability of science and scientific reasoning to explain human behavior. (…)

With this new translation of Crime and Punishment by Michael Katz (who has also translated What Is to Be Done?), today’s readers have renewed cause to reflect on the novel’s resonance with the social problems facing our own society. Some would argue that, with the election of Donald Trump, the American public made the most self-destructive and irrational decision in our nation’s history. And yet, despite this overwhelming evidence that rational choice plays little to no part in political decision-making, those who advocate for liberal causes continue to build arguments around logic, facts, statistics, and science, rather than reckoning with the seemingly impenetrable potency of emotions like hate, shame, and fear that lead people to make unreasonable choices and form baseless opinions about one another. Reading Crime and Punishment in 2018, we are reminded of the need to take irrationality and willful self-destruction seriously. They are not only born out of individual choice; they are social forces that can play a much larger role in our politics than we might care to admit.

‘5 Critical Things You Must Do with New Media’