Category Archives: Politics on the left

Toxic femininity

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Not quite at random, not random at all. Each from Instapundit.

First

NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We Progressives Are Going to ‘Run Train.’

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) used a vulgar sexual term in an interview with the Washington Post published Wednesday, threatening conservatives that Democrats would “run train on the progressive agenda.”

The term “run train” refers to a gang rape. According to UrbanDictionary.com, the “top definition” for the term “run train” is “to ‘gangbang’ a girl with several friends.”

The last time such a phrase was mentioned in regards to DC was via Creepy Porn Lawyer™ Michael Avenatti and his client Julie Swetnick during the Kavanaugh hearings, as this typo-filled article from September at Heavy.com notes:

Swetncik [sic] signed a sworn affidavit that Kavanaugh and Judge were part of a groups [sic] of teenagers who, in the early 1980s, perpetrated gang rapes by drugging girls with grain alcohol spiked with Quaaludes and the[n] “ran trains.” And Swetnick said she herself was raped. She does not say Kavanaugh raped her but was present.

(The following month, The Hill reported, Chuck Grassley (R-IA) referred Swetnick and Avenatti to the Justice Dept. for investigation.)

Flash-forward to January, and as Peter D’Abrosca of Big League Politics writes, “Ocasio-Cortez Normalizes Rape Culture With ‘Run Train’ Comments:”

AOC mentioned nothing about whether she’ll ask for the consent of the Republican Party before she gangbangs them into submission. What if they’re just not that into her? Is she literally threatening to rape 60 million plus Republican Americans?

As James Bovard of the Mises Institute wrote in November, We Need a #MeToo Movement for Political Consent.

UPDATE: “Why attack [AOC] for using a term that means she’s going to gang rape America with progressivism? I applaud her honesty,” Andrew Klavan tweets.

Second

SHOCKER: Surprise: Genius behind man-hating Gillette ad is a radical feminist.

Carpentered by Grey Advertising for Proctor and Gamble’s razors company, it does not detail product attributes, encourage brand loyalty, instill warm feelings in buyers, or even show basic respect for consumers. Instead, the grimly lecturing spot declares masculinity itself toxic, a peril to decent society.

“Is this the best a man can get? Is it?” asks the painfully serious narrator, as a wrongdoing slideshow passes by. “We can’t hide from it. It’s been going on far too long. We can’t laugh it off, making the same old excuses.”

“I guess the guy at the ad agency missed the lesson about not taking a dump on the people you want to buy your stuff,” cracked comedian Steven Crowder.

“The guy at the ad agency” is actually philosophically unpleasant feminist Kim Gehrig. Hiring her to court the male market is like expecting to accrue impressive rainbow flag sale numbers with spiels from Farrakhan.

Harsh but fair. Plus:

Gehrig’s new Gillette effort states her bias boldly by intercutting allusions to abusive acts with images of romantic heterosexuality.

A black-and-white cartoon scene that flashes past shows men whistling at a woman. In another scant bit, a guy sees a pretty female pedestrian. He steps after her but is restrained by a companion. “Not cool,” the restrainer admonishes.

Expressions of attraction and related pursuits are natural. They lead to humans reproducing – which is how Gehrig got here, though she might be horrified to learn that.

Adweek pronounced Gehrig’s group libel the “Ad of the Week.” Gehrig’s efforts were also recognized by Best Ads on TV.

Therein lies an issue worth note. Fox News host Greg Gutfeld tweeted: “the only ones lauding the Gillette ad work in media/advertising. everyone else sees it for what it is: a smarmy, condescending virtue signal aimed at the hardworking decent men they have been price-gouging for years.”

At this writing, Gillette’s YouTube posting of “We Believe” has received 40,000 “thumbs down” votes and only 4,300 positive ratings.

As I said yesterday, this is another example of how the people running American institutions now tend to perform for an audience of their peers rather than focus on doing their jobs.

Third

PHILIP CARL SALZMAN: The Toxic Mission To Re-Engineer Men.

The communists in the USSR and Cuba tried to invent a “new man,” a “socialist man” who would give up his individuality in order to advance the interests of “the people.” But the population never bought it, and oppressive security agencies were imposed to coerce people to live according to socialist ideals. That is why the “beneficiaries” of communism were delighted when their totalitarian societies fell.

Today, with the freeing of females from traditional role constraints, it is still primarily men who do the dangerous and dirty jobs, who make up most of the first responders and the military who defend us, and who, as scientists and engineers, continue to address the natural world for understanding and to serve our needs. These are some of the ways that the characteristics and qualities of men benefit society. And it is the job of socialization to direct the traits of men into constructive channels, a more realistic and productive strategy than trying to turn males into females.

Yes, being a man is not stress-free, and sometimes we have inner struggles. But do women not also have inner struggles, and is that not in our nature as human beings? Feminists who simplistically argue that women’s psychological and other problems are all and always the fault of “toxic” men, are doing a very human thing: blaming others for their problems. That such sad naivete has been adopted by our governments, scientific organizations, and schools and universities does not reflect a very sound understanding of people or the world. Even more so for psychologists, who should know better.

True.

Fourth

PRETTY LATE TO THE #METOO PARTY: Female Economists Push Their Field Toward A #MeToo Reckoning.

One more reason the shutdown may be unlikely to end anytime soon

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The article is about Trump’s shutdown trap? – how after 30 days of “furlough” Federal employees can be reassigned or even sacked. We shall see, but what I found more interesting is the depiction of the way the public “service” operates. These are depictions from someone who has been frustrated by the actions of the public service in frustrating Trump’s agenda. The quotes are taken from this: I’M A SENIOR TRUMP OFFICIAL, AND I HOPE A LONG SHUTDOWN SMOKES OUT THE RESISTANCE.

On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. I wish I could give competitive salaries to them and no one else. But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.

Why would they? We can’t fire them. They avoid attention, plan their weekend, schedule vacation, their second job, their next position — some do this in the same position for more than a decade.

They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. “Process is your friend” is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores….

Most of my career colleagues actively work against the president’s agenda. This means I typically spend about 15 percent of my time on the president’s agenda and 85 percent of my time trying to stop sabotage, and we have no power to get rid of them. Until the shutdown….

Due to the lack of funding, many federal agencies are now operating more effectively from the top down on a fraction of their workforce, with only select essential personnel serving national security tasks. (snip)

President Trump can end this abuse. Senior officials can reprioritize during an extended shutdown, focus on valuable results and weed out the saboteurs. We do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them.

You should read the entire article at the second link above.

Environmental Venezuelanisation of the economies of the West

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This is Steve Hayward at Powerline discussing THE GREEN NEW DEAL. He thinks it’s funny, and I suppose in its own way it is, but I find it both tragic and frightening. How does this ever end other than going through the Venezuelanisation of our economies first?

Environmentalists are making clear what they don’t want, and it turns out to be just about anything that might actually work as scale to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. From Grist:

Congress is currently preoccupied with a fight over Trump’s plan for a $5.7 billion border wall, but hundreds of environmental organizations are laser-focused on defining the Green New Deal. And they think it’s time Capitol Hill got on board with their plan.

On Thursday, 600-plus groups including 350.org, Greenpeace, and the Sunrise Movement sent members of the U.S. House a letter with a list of carbon-cutting steps. . .

Wait—stop the tape! Did you say “600-plus [environmental] groups”? (Actually the letter lists 626 in all.) I didn’t even know there were that many environmental groups. Isn’t that a hugely wasteful and duplicative use of scarce resources? (Swap out “recycled” for “duplicative” and problem solved—ed.)

But that’s not the most amazing part. This is, from the actual letter itself:

We will vigorously oppose any legislation that: (1) rolls back existing environmental, health, and other protections, (2) protects fossil fuel and other dirty energy polluters from liability, or (3) promotes corporate schemes that place profits over community burdens and benefits, including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, waste-to-energy and biomass energy.

As Roger Pielke Jr. comments, this is like wanting action on disease but opposing vaccines.

In fact, this and other features of the letter went too far for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which did not sign it.  So make that 628 environmental groups, if you’re keeping count.

By the way, if you want to get a good laugh, read the whole letter. It’s bonkers. And savor the complete list of the 626 environmental groups at the end. They’d fit in well at the Mos Eisley cantina.

Poll position

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Rush Limbaugh discussed the dog that didn’t bark in the night: Rush Limbaugh notices something glaringly missing from border wall discussion.

He specifically noted that no meaningful polls were published after President Donald Trump delivered an Oval Office address Tuesday in which he explained the ongoing battles to the public and implored Democrat to end them by agreeing to secure the southern U.S. border.

“There has been no polling data that we could find anywhere following Trump’s speech,” Limbaugh said Friday. “There weren’t any Frank Luntz focus groups with any undecideds out there.”

“They didn’t gather any Trump voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and ask them if they’re still behind Trump. The media didn’t do any of the stuff they usually do. We have no idea what the valued and very wise independents thought of Trump’s speech.”

But polling has been done and the data are as you would expect: Polling Data Shows Nearly 80% Of Americans Consider Illegal Immigration A Serious Problem/Crisis

As it says at the link:

It’s the data most responsible for the sudden shift in Democrats’ tone this week as more and more in Congress give the media hints that they are willing to allocate funding for at least some of the border protection measures being pushed by President Trump. You see, it’s not that these Democrats in Congress think it’s the right thing to do but rather that the vast majority of Americans (nearly 80%) think it’s the right thing to do and so the hands of Democrats are now being forced to do something or face a serious political backlash heading into 2020.

And you know what? You’d get the same results in Australia if we did the same polling here.

The most serious problem of our time

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Polling Data Shows Nearly 80% Of Americans Consider Illegal Immigration A Serious Problem/Crisis

As it says at the link:

It’s the data most responsible for the sudden shift in Democrats’ tone this week as more and more in Congress give the media hints that they are willing to allocate funding for at least some of the border protection measures being pushed by President Trump. You see, it’s not that these Democrats in Congress think it’s the right thing to do but rather that the vast majority of Americans (nearly 80%) think it’s the right thing to do and so the hands of Democrats are now being forced to do something or face a serious political backlash heading into 2020.

Up against the wall

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There really should be no issue about border protection. You either have a nation state or you don’t. Even without denying welfare to non-citizens, a nation is not a nation unless it controls its borders. That the Democrats, and the left generally, sees advantage in bringing in new welfare-dependent hordes to maintain their share of the vote is the only reason this is ongoing. Increasing the numbers of those who vote for a living is the sole reason the left supports open borders. Madness everywhere – Germany, France, Sweden, the UK – but those at the top on the left will take their graft and be gone behind their walls and gated communities by the time the full costs are being paid, just not paid by them.

If you would like to understand the view from the right, there is no one who may have put it better than John Hinderaker at Powerline: Trump Kills It. Here’s the final para:

Our country is being invaded, as President Trump and most Americans understand. It is far past time to defend ourselves. President Trump wins this one, hands down.

The local press is all left and far left, alas including The Oz. It has columnists on both sides, but the editorial line on things like this might as well be Fairfax. Start with its Froeign Affairs editor: Sense and nonsense in Trump’s Mexican stand-off.

Donald Trump gave a frankly weird speech, his first prime-time television address to the nation as President, about illegal immigration and the need for a wall along the US’s southern border with Mexico.

And then this from its Washington Correspondent: Donald Trump address: Heavy-handed tactic to fix his own crisis. The Turnbull Daily Non-News. From his story begins:

Donald Trump has a right to try to exert greater control over the US border with Mexico but his claims today of a national security and humanitarian crisis are overblown.

For an accurate assessment, this from Slate, as standard left as you can find.

And for more memes, you can go here: MID-WEEK IN PICTURES: IT’S THE CHUCK & NANCY SHOW!. This is the best addition to the ones already posted.

No pasaran

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“A choice between right and wrong.”

Speech begins at 6:00.

THE CHUCK ‘N NANCY (I.E. CNN) RESPONSE Via Powerline but everyone (on our side) is saying the same. They have no answer, and everyone knows they have no answer, including them.

The Democrats’ response was delivered by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. They came off poorly, I thought. First, they looked ridiculous:

Schumer and Pelosi totally missed the mark, talking not about the border crisis, but about the partial “shutdown” which hardly anyone cares about. They came across as petty and partisan.

Our country is being invaded, as President Trump and most Americans understand. It is far past time to defend ourselves. President Trump wins this one, hands down.