Whiskey Fire

Andy Sullivan Laments He's Unable to PC Today

In 2015, Jonathan Chait sure can crank out Must-Read troll-shit from the year 1991, nobody ever said he couldn't.

And it is all very absorbing, but I fear that even our more astute commentators are missing a Key Fact: As so often occurs, it is Andrew Sullivan who is being the most colossal asshole here. To witless:

To say I stood up and cheered as I finished reading Jon Chait’s new essay on the resurgence of a toxic political correctness on the left would be an understatement.

More correctly, he came in his pants? Who knows!

Chait's brilliance, Sullivan informs us, is that he tells the story of some young anti-abortion protestors who carried around signs showing deliberately provocative images. These images then deliberately provoked someone, and a thoroughly banal and asinine bit of small-town/gown weirdness occurred.

You'd think, putting on your Scholar Cap, that you'd have a fuck of a lot of work to do if you wanted to use this one kind of batty anecdote out there as proving any sort of New Normal -- but wait!

Here's something that may be worth mentioning! Neither Chait nor Sullivan are academics! So they feel just peachy about the procedure of sucking up largely unconnected anecdotal data and positing from it the existence of an Illiberal Leftist Conscious Overbrain, as opposed to things being done by scattered young people gifted with admirable principles and poor social skills.

Sullivan stresses two remarkably dumb points.

The few brave enough to take on these language and culture police – I think of Emily Yoffe’s superb piece on campus rape in Slate – will get slimed and ostracized or ignored. Once you commit a heresy, you cannot recover. You must, in fact, be air-brushed out of the debate entirely.

Emily Yoffe still has a job. Also, journalists writing touchy stories and getting grief -- this is new? A phenomenon of the new sex feminist identialists?

This is swell:

The right has its own version of this, of course. Many of us dissenters were purged and rendered anathema years ago. But look where that has actually left today’s GOP. It’s turned into this. And the left’s new absolutism on identity politics – now taken to an absurd degree – should, in my view, worry liberals more. Because it is a direct attack on basic liberal principles.

Ha ha ha I'm so old I remember Sullivan and his 5th Columnists bullshit, fuck him. But that aside. The right's ideological cohesion exists from dumb crazed emails to paranoid racist internet memes straight through talk radio to fucking Louie Gohmert and Sm Alito. The Left's is some random shit at different campuses. Stop with the bullshit false equivalence, dummy.

Next, just FUCKING STOP, Sully & Chait. You are insanely wrong about how power works, particularly discursive power.

We didn't win the gay marriage fight by playing nice: we won because we (rightly) pointed out that if you oppose gay marriage, you are a disgusting bigot.

And we will win the violence against women argument when we convince everyone that sex without consent is a revolting crime deserving of the full wrath of the state.

Establishing a monopoly over the legitimate terms of linguistic expression is the whole point. Identify your goals, choose your language tools. That's how it works. Picking your ass on Bill Maher shows just makes you look like an ineffectual twerp.

Here: this is just flat wrong:

If you want to argue that no social progress can come without coercion or suppression of free speech, you have to deal with the empirical fact that old-fashioned liberalism brought gay equality to America far, far faster than identity politics leftism. It was liberalism – not leftism – that gave us this breakthrough.

Citations completely omitted.

The record I believe will show that this is fucking astoundingly wrong, and also besides, that the "liberalism" v "leftism" dichotomy Sully is yammering about is all my balls from an analytic or historic perspective.

Chicks Dig Free Markets

At the end of this perfectly batty/banal, batnal? banty? right-wing dismissal of Emma Watson for her public suggestion that women have to put up with a lot of stupid shit, a nondescript apparatchik at a thoroughly pointless wingnut make-work propaganda rag drops this snide little comment:

You can understand that free markets have lifted more women out of poverty across the world than any government program.

I can understand this...?

Women organizing and demanding that governments recognize, codify, and enforce their rights did more for women than the fucking Nestle corportion ever did. Or ever would have done.

The "free market" is not free, nor is it a market. Discuss. Use the word "fuck" a lot. Reference the entire fucking history of the free-market advertising industry as regards women, rights, and poverty. Then say "fuck" nine times more!

The Teacher's Union Fight Song

O Jon Chait, O Jon Chait,

Are you too contrarian for Slate?

I lament, it is my fate,

To sorrow as you pule and prate,

You asshole.

That is an Original Poem, one of many available for a low, low price of $450 and a winged mule, available upon inquiry, please contact Whiskey Fire Industries, LTD, via the standard method. Handcraft-printed on the finest virgin whelk vellum, and we're assured by counsel that it stops the godawful smell after a fortnight or seven, maybe. Also it's "curated," because now everything's "curated," because that is a verb now in common use among preposterous dickheads.

Oh right, sorry, got carried away. I'm irked at Jon Chait. For this. FOR THIS.

Paul Farhi profiles Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor turned education-reform activist, who is working to end strict teacher tenure protections. Naturally, this enrages teacher-union evangelist Diane Ravitch, who not only disagrees with Brown’s position, but expresses offense that anybody should listen to Brown at all:

“I have trouble with this issue because it’s so totally illogical,” says Diane Ravitch, an education historian. “It’s hard to understand why anyone thinks taking away teachers’ due-process rights will lead to great teachers in every classroom.”

As for Brown, Ravitch is dismissive: “She is a good media figure because of her looks, but she doesn’t seem to know or understand anything about teaching and why tenure matters ... I know it sounds sexist to say that she is pretty, but that makes her telegenic, even if what she has to say is total nonsense.”

Why, yes, that does sound rather sexist.

All right.

Ravitch probably shouldn't have gone there, fine.

But Chait is invoking the right-wing neener-neener nyah-nyah version of feminism, or racism, or homophobia, or what have you; it's a smug rule-invoking, not a principled defense of any particular position. If Chait wants to make a feminist argument about what Ravitch said, he can go ahead and do that. But he doesn't. Instead, apparently, he jumps right to Twitter:

Yeah, that's point-scoring, not outrage about how women who happen to be media figures often have their opinions treated.

And, and, why shouldn't Ravitch be pissed off? I would be -- Ravitch is a serious, accomplished, scholar of educational policy. Brown... isn't.

If you want to drive a scholar up the wall, tell her she's got to enter the lists against a rich, famous person engaged in an ideological jihad crusade. Ravitch behaved a lot better than I would have.

Anyway, Chait gets right to the mansplaining, because he's a dick:

Why, Ravitch wonders, would the elimination of a job protection help attract better teachers? Let me reveal, via the power of logic, how this can work.

If you want to get all feminist, telling Diane Ravitch that she needs to appreciate "the power of logic"? Fuck you you sneery fuck! Whee!

Chait is all sorts of wrong on the issue of teacher tenure, have at him on this, but let's hone in:

Now, education-reform advocates come in conservative and liberal flavors. The conservative ones tend to believe ending tenure alone will improve classroom outcomes. Liberal ones tend to favor an end to tenure along with other reforms, such as higher pay. The liberal education-reform theory is that the public will be more open to higher taxes to support higher levels of teacher pay if teachers are accountable for their performance. Likewise, those dollars will be spent more effectively if they are related to performance rather than to years on the job.

Listen, you fucking asshole. Whenever you have "two flavors," in AMERICA, the "compromise" that emerges as the concrete reality is the conservative one.

Chait and the "liberal educational reformers" will end up with low pay for teachers, no teacher labor protections, and horrendous consequences for children.

You'd think these fucking assholes would have caught on to the real game after how humiliated they were by cheering on the Iraq debacle, but since all they really want to do is play "Policy" like it's fucking Risk, they don't give a shit, and then they all got swell jobs anyhow! Hooray!

Fuck.

MAS. And then there is this from Chait:

In most fields, your pay is based on your perceived value rather than on the number of years you have spent on the job. Value-based pay does not work perfectly in any field. It certainly doesn’t work perfectly in my field, which explains, for instance, Howard Kurtz’s rumored extravagant wealth. Yet if we stopped paying journalists on the basis of their perceived value and started paying them on the basis of time served, I'd argue it would reduce the quality of journalism.

Jon Chait does "journalism"?

If we had a dedicated, nationally funded corps of "just the facts" journalists, we'd all be better off, and far more in line with the Founders' vision.

Chait is paid to offer his glib opinions about issues he has no time to study in any real depth. As an educator, I suggest he fuck off and get a real job, like, say, teaching.

Well Then!

So Katie Pavlich, whatever, has emanated a book. This book says that Feminsm is bad because it is bad.

Here is a glowing review.

Come this fall, students at universities across the United States will be starting their new school year. They’ll attend classes with names like “The Evolution of American Women’s Studies,” “Women & Gender Studies,” or “Feminism and the Fate of the Planet.” In fact, most universities now offer multiple fields of study in feminism, gender, and women’s studies. They have more loony course options about sex and sexuality than math and science.

This is all Cast-Iron Fact.

And in almost every case, those students will be lied to.

Shudder.

About the victimization of women at the hands of Republicans.

"We would kindly like you to refrain from contemplating our nuanced and not insulting policy position, namely, 'You can't have contraceptives, you slut.'"

About the God-given differences between men and women.

Jesus wants you to give him all due kudos for the gift of correct genetalia. Masturbate respectfully. Genuflect, or something. "Oh Jesus!"

This is where conservative women in America today have a higher calling to educate society. And most importantly, it’s where women of a younger generation have an especially crucial role in debunking this false history, in advancing the truth about the Left and how the real culprits in the War on Women are Democrats and liberals. Boldly stepping up to the plate is one of the Conservative movement’s most well known ladies, Katie Pavlich, and her new book Assault and Flattery.

OK. Good luck!

Like Katie herself, the book title and the words within are sharp, factual, and hard-hitting but with a gloss of feminine polish.

The book title is sharp, factual, and hard-hiting, and so are the words inside the book title. However, the title and the words inside it also have a gloss of feminine polish, which is a thing, and it at the same time hits hard. This book contains words and descriptions of these words! Pretty words!

Just as important, Assault and Flattery gives specific examples of how hypocritical the left is and where Democrat leaders like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are actually the ones most guilty of limiting the role of women in society by treating them as sex-crazed sluts in urgent need of free birth control and government-subsidized abortions. It downgrades the most sacred role of society—that of mother, that of child-rearing -- by making women cheap political props.

Women are sluts if they are not child-rearing mothers!

Right.

Golly, leftists. They're onto us. We want to have great sex and make our own intimate, conscious, and deeply personal reproductive decisions!

You can see why this stance is so unpopular!!!!

GUEST POST! Or, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, The Sluttish Radical Feminists Particularly

Farming out today's post to a prominent American of immense distinction and influence, speaking Deep Truths to the issues relevant American Cultural Morality in the 21st Century and what the Feminists are really all about. Very deep stuff crucial to a proper perspective on today's Holly Lobby/contraception/feminism/immigration bother.

The speaker's identity is revealed in the first comment, but try to figure out who it is all on your own. No cheating! Cheating is even more immoraler than birth control, you no doubt disease-ridden immigrant swine.

THROUGHOUT the nation there is growing concern as to  whether or not our moral fiber is permanently threatened. This is an hour of moral laxity, but the concern is largely for what the example of our present day morals will mean to the young people who will be the men and women of tomorrow. Such concern is, of course, natural. The young person may be said to have moral balance when he or she has developed a controlling sense of what is right and wrong. However, this distinguishing sense cannot come except with training, and this training must be largely through precept and example....

There is a growing group of radical feminists, women who are openly antagonistic to men and "man-made" laws and conventions. As yet these women are very much in the minority, but they are  shrewd, and one finds them writing insidious and widely read books on the freedom of the modern woman, and advocating even greater sex freedom. If these radical women were to head a separate party and become a real power in women's councils, they would, without a doubt, openly advocate and endeavor to propagate a "single standard"; meaning the standard of moral laxity commonly attributed to men. In the Scandanavian countries there are laws legitimizing the child born out of wedlock. Such laws practically advance the theory that women need not marry, or that once married, she is free to love as she may wish, and legitimately bring promiscuous children into the world. What such laws would mean to the morals of tomorrow, can be readily understood. They would not only undermine our entire religious belief, but they would break up that unit upon which nations are built -- the home....

One of the ailments of the country is racial indigestion. There has been a great influx of immigration in the past ten years, but we have never made the proper effort to use the melting-pot and instill in these immigrants true American ideals. People in great numbers have come from countries where moral laxness is notorious, and if they are not curbed and informed, their habits and practices must undoubtedly gradually lower the average of our standards of decency....

Every word a golden sermon.

The Lords of Permissible Fucking

I'm sort of hesitant to say this because it sounds too much like a standup comedy line, but what I want to know is, as a heterosexual male, how the hell is women having universal access to quality contraception bad?

I mean, speaking from the perspective of a man who is sexually attracted to women, and who likes having sex with women, for over two decades with my wife solely but with whom I even now (can we right now?) very much want to have sex: HOW THE HELL IS WOMEN HAVING AS MUCH ACCESS AS POSSIBLE TO HAVING CHEAP CONTRACEPTION EVEN REMOTELY A BAD THING, FROM A MALE HETEROSEXUAL POINT OF VIEW?

I'm not saying this in any sort of way a lecher's art can rob. What I mean is, contraception is very much a men's issue, if you define it in terms of how -- based upon my Objective Reporting as an Adult Straight Male -- having sex with a woman you find alluring and companionable is kind of terrific, and if you're not worrying about producing any small humans, that's a great relief! 

Here is a Crazy Hunch -- some subset of powerful men just may be more invested in controlling women than in being friends and lovers with women or even in having non-coercive sex with women even though sex with women is fantastic when you both dig it.

I'm not saying it's inexplicable, but I am saying it's marvelous, how these five weirdo ancient Catholic judges of the Supreme Court are now somehow the Lords of Permissible Fucking, even though everyone now and always will mostly obey the Laws of Enjoyable Fucking.

....

I kind of think "we like fucking, they don't" would be a Democratic Winner in '14, but nobody ever listens to me.

High Dumbgeon

Here is what I do not get.

If you really truly sincerely believe that abortion kills babies... why are you NOT a terrorist?

But let’s assume that Davis actually knew what he was talking about, and that some forms of birth control that destroys a fertilized egg is killing a human life. If he actually believes this, then the exemption won by Hobby Lobby from its friends at the Supreme Court is almost comically inadequate. “You can murder — but do it on your own dime!” Davis’s boss (correctly) believes that birth control, including birth control the scientifically illiterate believe to cause abortions, should be available over-the-counter. Does Davis think that Dommenech is a supporter of legalized murder? If he believes his own rhetoric, he must.

I do not sincerely believe that genocide occurs daily in the western world.

If I did believe that babies were being regularly murdered, I would become righteously murderous.

But nobody really believes this.

Except murderers. Who shoot up clinics.

Kind of a fun moral calculus, right there.

Something Else

I have not much to say about the absurd and disgusting and cruel Hobby Lobby decision that has not already been said, except perhaps "Samuel Alito is total fuckboogers," which is admittedly not constructive, but is a deeply felt, closely held religious subsidiary viewpoint of Whiskey Fire Global Industries Fuckyoucorp Ltd., and thus is legally privileged and indeed immune from all criticism.

What I find grimly amusing is the extent to which this decision resembles provincial Irish Catholic social teaching, and Irish Free State jurisprudence, such as it was, of the 1930s. I'm not remotely kidding. I'm immediately put in mind of the intensity of the late 1920s campaign in Ireland to ban not simply contraception, but any mention of contraception. (It was called "race suicide," and mentioning it in public was in fact made illegal.)

I could get into details if anyone wants (lots of them are hilarious), but what strikes me most about Ireland then and SCOTUS now is the febrile social hysteria lurking right behind the jihadery.

What I mean is that the Irish Catholic hierarchy in the 1920s & 30s was in what looked like a position of complete cultural dominance; over 90% of the population attended mass regularly. But on the charitable end they were spooked by the violence of 16-22, and on the blunter end were terrified about what would happen to their own dominance if their small island were to sail merrily off into the secular modern world & leave them stranded alone with their fear and empty plates and ghosts and weeping effigies.

They were terrified. It was all panic. So they clamped down. Hard.

It worked for a few decades. Then it didn't.

Twenty years ago I was a grad student looking up old Studies articles, The Leader oddities, and Catholic Bulletin crackpot lunacy.

I never imagined this sort of shite arguing was in my nation's future.

Be that as it may. I don't see the wingnuts enjoying anything like the strategic social advantages held by the Irish Hierarchy in the 20s and 30s; it's not like we haven't fought this fight before and won it. It's a drag that it has to be fought again, but you can't look at the life of someone like Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington -- one of my own goddamn heroes -- and bitch too much. (Wikipedia doesn't acknowledge nearly enough her disgust with the failure of the Irish state to acknowledge women's emancipation, but whatever.)

This ruling is shitbarf, and it harms real people, but it's also a call to arms. And it's stupid. Let's kill it. Let's go win elections.

MAS. Yes, I know who is a Catholic on the SC. That's the point, redsnouts.

On a Disused Septic Tank in Co. Galway

Nobody who has ever undertaken any serious study of 20th century Ireland will be surprised by this story, though they will be horrified and grief-stricken.

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there’s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of “fallen women” and their “illegitimate” children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam.

Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate.

More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed — where a housing development and children’s playground now stands — what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.

1920s -- 1960s Ireland is my area of study. I'd be willing to bet that this is not the only site of such horrors -- not all of them in Ireland itself, either.

But also, look, this outrage is what you ought to expect from a culture that grounded its claim for moral autonomy on angry and intense misogyny, as Ireland surely did from the 1920s onward.

You will never more easily find a more ostentatiously pious, conscientiously male-dominated culture than Irish Catholicism of the period.

But you will have to go searching for the hidden bones of the dead children in the septic tank.

And we must go searching:

From Derek Mahon's brilliant, heartrending "A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford":

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naïve labours have been in vain!'

Or else:

“The bones are still there,” local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. “The children who died in the Home, this was them.”

All the Dumb Dudes

Dr Helen Smith, writing in "PJ Media," which is some sort of work-release program for the incurably smarmy, or else like the pennysaver Washington Post editorial page, or else just Highlights for Wire-Monkey Children, surprisingly has something sensible to say about the Santa Barbara killings:

Perhaps it is the feminists and their supporters who block funding and education going to boys’ and men’s issues that are to blame....

As a psychologist who has worked with men and boys for over 20 years, I can say that our society is devoid of programs and help for mental health issues for men or we try to give help that is not helpful. We focus on women and forget that boys and men have problems too.

Yep, boys and men sure do seem to have problems too. I deduced that from the fact that boys and men seem to every so often go around shooting people for no reason.

And sure -- everyone knows that feminists are fully in charge of public "funding and eduatation."

So it should be pretty easy to get agreement that anyone who even glances at the "Men's Rights" nonsense and doesn't burst out in derisive laughter ought to be immediately thrown into some sort of facility where they're educated up to the point where they can, at minimum, listen to 5 minutes of Adam Corolla without getting a stiffie.