Category: feminism

Eradicating women

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I knew about this swim meet, but I wasn’t aware of the results of the tie. Disgraceful.

‘Equity’ for the wokesters is equal outcome. But when they stack the outcome to favor the advantaged, and it doesn’t go their way – they cheat. They might at least have put a fig leaf on it by asking them both to pick a number between 1 and 10. Or make him wear a fig leaf in the locker room.

Post traumatic press disorder

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Glenn Greenwald’s Tweets on the hissing pussycats at “Robin D’Angelo Junior High — also known as the national desk of The Washington Post” are devastatingly hilarious. It’s a left-on-left tag-team cage-match.

The fighting started when WaPo reporter Dave Weigel retweeted Cam Harless.

No idea who Cam Harless is, but he’s irrelevant after the internecine bombardments commence. Felicia Sonmez is an aggrieved WaPo reporter, who seems unaware that “believe all women” is over since Robby Mook’s implication of Hillary Clinton in the Steele dossier psy-op. Not to mention Amber Heard, for whom I’ve heard a personal “poop emoji” has been created.

Greenwald’s commentary caught my attention because of his victim point scoring comments (below). Because, in a 2019 post – Victimhood competence hierarchies – I attempted to describe the tools needed for sorting out the victimhood pecking order. A slice from that post:

Let’s consider the complexities via example. Rate a black, homosexual male, wealthy actor; vs. a white, trans-female, wealthy former Pentathlon champion; vs. a brown, female, anti-semitic, Islamist congressional member; vs. a white, 1/1024th Amerind, biological female, wealthy United States Senator. It’s not easy, and those are only a few of the factors. The enterprise seems very difficult.

This is the type of analysis intersectionalists demand as a principle of governance. And, that’s just a poor preliminary attempt to begin to capture the variables currently driving the SJW power struggle. It doesn’t include anywhere near the required profile information. I tried filling it in for a couple of people I thought would help refine scoring. Maybe you can guess who they are.

Complicating this further, just when you might think you have a workable algorithm, someone gets offended by something you did not expect. For example, here’s an example of a lesbian, trans, Leftist, female academic in the Humanities you’d expect to score moderately well even if she is white: A concrete example against which to test our calculation of the victim/oppressor ratio.

If you think the Progs would by now have established their own official scoring system, you’re missing the point. They all aspire to be Thomas Wolsey or Torquemada in a quest to adjudicate their own martyrdom. Any reference to a set of rules could inhibit the exercise of power.

E.g., constitutional law.

I noted the victimhood ranking problem 5 other times (now 6) under the tag ‘victimhood competence.’

I do not have a Twitter account, and I had to temporarily drop my browser shields to even see Greenwald’s thread. It is worth reading. It’s not like you have to log in.

Anyway, this is the snippet that caught my eye:

After WPost reporter @Feliciasonmez publicly accused multiple Post reporters and editors — including @jdelreal — of supporting misogyny against her, Del Real retorted that he was the only Mexican American on the national desk and also gay. Experts are tabulating the outcome.
…
For those scoring the various victimhood points at home, among the starring marginalized actors in the WPost oppression drama, 2 are graduates of Harvard University (Sonmez and Del Real) while the other was raised in Greenwich, CT, and educated in Swiss boarding schools (Lorenz).

Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald

Mythinformation

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I have neglected TOC of late. Spring chores have kept me busy, and I’m slower at them than I used to be.

Anyway, here’s a look at some Prog mythology to keep you amused while I plant my tomatoes. (A two day project.)

From Marginal Revolution:
There is No Pink Tax

The so-called pink tax is an alleged tendency for products consumed by women to be more expensive than similar products consumed by men…

[E]conomists Sarah Moshary, Anna Tuchman and Natasha Bhatia have done a much more complete and careful study and they find that once you control for ingredients and compare like-to-like there is no pink tax. Indeed, sometimes men pay a bit more. Overall, there are no big savings from cross-buying. Women and men could save money by buying products primarily marketed to the opposite gender–like 2-in-1 shampoo+conditioner–but only by buying products that they prefer less than the products they choose to buy.

This is right up there with the great Super Bowl hoax, and the “wage gap.” All related to boomer feminism’s big fails.

From Reason:
After 53 Earth Days, Society Still Hasn’t Collapsed

Cassandra in Greek mythology was the Trojan priestess who was cursed to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. Ideological environmentalism features a cohort of reverse Cassandras: They make false prophecies that are widely believed. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 classic, The Population Bomb, prophesied, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

See also Ardnassac.

From Quillette:
Domestic Violence Is Not the Result of Patriarchy

Research consistently finds that women in heterosexual relationships tend to perpetrate violence against intimate partners at least as often as men.

Thank you, Amber Heard.

From Cafe Hayek:
More from Bernard Bailyn on the American Revolutionaries and Slavery

It’s impossible to believe that the same British government that 1619 Project apologists insist was intent on ending slavery in North America would have obstructed efforts by American colonists to end or restrict the slave trade. This fact alone – the fact that officials of the British government obstructed efforts by some of the American colonists to end or diminish the slave trade – is alone practically sufficient to destroy the main thesis of the 1619 Project.

From Cureus, an open access medical journal:
Correlation Between Mask Compliance and COVID-19 Outcomes in Europe

Conclusions
While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission. Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.

From Glenn Greenwald:
Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Board” is Even More Pernicious Than it Seems

Typically, any attempt to apply George Orwell’s warning novel 1984 to U.S. politics is reflexively dismissed as hyperbolic: a free and democratic country like the United States could not possibly fall prey to the dystopian repression Orwell depicts. Yet it is quite difficult to distinguish this “Disinformation Board” from Ingsoc’s Ministry of Truth. The protagonist of Orwell’s novel, Winston Smith, worked in the Ministry of Truth and described at length how its primary function was to create official versions of truth and falsity, which always adhered to the government’s needs of the moment and were subject to radical change as those interests evolved.

That the Board will be run by such a preposterous and laughable figure as Nina Jankowicz — a liberal cartoon, a caricature of a #Resistance Twitter fanatic who spent 2016 posting adolescent partisan tripe such as: “Maybe @HillaryClinton’s most important point so far: ‘A @realDonaldTrump presidency would embolden ISIS.’ #ImWithHer” — has, in some sense, made this board seem more benign and harmless. After all, how nefarious and dangerous can a board be when it is governed by a person as frivolous and banal as this, calling herself “the Mary Poppins of disinformation”?…

Far worse than Jankowicz’s fixation on censoring those with whom she disagrees — now a staple of liberal politics — is the fact that this new Disinformation Czar has herself ratified and helped spread virtually every disinformation campaign concocted by the union of the Democratic Party and corporate media over the last five years. Indeed, the only valid basis for calling her a “disinformation expert” is that she has spread disinformation with such gusto. The most notorious of those was the pre-election lie that the authentic Hunter Biden laptop was “disinformation.” She also decreed falsely that the origins of COVID were definitively proven to be zoonotic and could not have come from a lab leak, was a frequent and vocal advocate of the fraudulent Steele Dossier, and repeatedly pronounced as true all sorts of Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy theories which Robert Mueller, after conducting an intense 18-month investigation, rejected as lacking evidence to establish their truth.

Greenwald wrote this before Jankowicz floated the idea she should be empowered to edit other people’s Tweets.

Her mindlessnes is not the core issue, though. The very idea of idea of a Homeland Security Disinformation Board is a litmus test. Any person who defends the idea is a slaver.

Malinformation

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Hunter Biden’s laptop turns out to be exactly what the New York Post reported it to be. Exactly what presidential candidate Biden denied it to be.

Accurate, well researched reporting got the NYP blocked on Twitter and Facebook.

But that’s just one recent Prog conspiracy identified. Let us not forget these longer running scams:
Wage gap.
Recycling.
Males Pretending to be Females.

A review:

‘Equal Pay Day’ this year is March 15 — the next ‘Equal Occupational Fatality Day’ won’t be until April 23, 2032

America Finally Admits Recycling Doesn’t Work

Aannd… Progs argue that this biological male competing athletically with biological females is the only “fair” thing to do. “Lia” has no advantage from having gone through puberty as a male…

You gonna believe us or your lying eyes?

This is a human with male chomosomes and male genitalia who insists on showering with women. Women he forces to use his anti-scientific pronouns. We used to know this by the term “abuse.”

We should regard the “wage gap” canard, all the Green Ordeal virtue signaling, and the chromosome denialists in the same light as Hunter’s laptop.

A note to feminists on de-platforming

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Perhaps you’ve spent your career arguing for the protection of women from rape, domestic assault, and female genital mutilation. Perhaps you’ve fought to make women’s shelters safe, sex-segregated spaces. I salute you.

Perhaps you were even a speaker at the conference discussing single-sex spaces put on by Woman’s Place UK in Portsmouth, where trans activist protestors waved signs ranging from the benign (“Trans Lives Matter!”), to the acidulous (“Suck My D*ck, You Transphobic C*nts!”). That is, ranging from an attempt to hijack mundane BLM sentiment to a rapist’s summary of why trans activism is not merely incoherent, but deeply misogynist. They want to cancel your entire sex.

This de-platforming ritual was conducted by men pretending to be women for… well, probably for reasons in addition to being able to parade around naked in women’s shower rooms – but that is one of the main outcomes of their passion.

I am all-in on your side in this particular struggle. There are two sexes. Go TERFS!

However.

Perhaps you have uncritically reinforced the hoax of increased violence against women during the Superbowl, perhaps you have recited the utter fallacy that the “rule of thumb” referred to English law allowing men to beat their wives with a stick no greater in diameter than the thumb, perhaps you refuse to acknowledge the gaping holes in the claim that women are paid 73% (or whatever it is today) of what men are paid, perhaps you say “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” in response to anyone questioning BLM/CRT. That means you celebrate ‘misinformation’, practice fake historical revisionism, push equality of outcome, and then combine all of those things to score political points and quash anyone who disgarees. These ideas come from somewhere close to home for you. The trannies are just taking the next logically absurd step.

Perhaps you now have more insight into where promoting such unexamined tribalism leads. And it isn’t protection of women.

Credit when due

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It’s been quite awhile since TOC’s poster child for woke-feminist cluelessness made an appearance here. She first came to my notice in March, 2006, before “woke” was a thing.

There was a controversy at the time over the admittance to Yale of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, who had been a Taliban ‘diplomat’ in the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad in 1998, then a ‘roving ambassador’ in 2000. He apparently did not even possess a GED.

Sentilles found her new extreme affirmative action classmate unremarkable 5 years after 9/11, when we well knew how the Taliban treat women.

One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale’s liberal community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently wrote a piece for the Yale Daily News denouncing such manifestations of rampant misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the presence at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world’s most misogynistic regimes. Her reply: ”As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends.”

No shit, Sherlock, though who is the subject and who the object of the imperialism could be debated. Let’s just say it’s a symbiotic relationship.

So. A “shortage of tenured female professors and poor childcare options” is a result of our horrible misogyny, while any comment on excluding females from education entirely, a national dress code requiring Burqas at pain of severe beating, and mass public execution of women by gun-shot in the back of the head… would be culturally inappropriate?

In June, 2006 I applauded pushback on this from self described radical feminist Phyllis Chesler: An American Jew who had been married to an Afghan and lived in a harem in Afghanistan. Go figure.

Unlike Sentilles, Chesler was able to render an opinion of the culture. It seems her 2005 book, The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom, had not reached Yale.

It looks like Sentilles is now working for the DOJ. Naturally.

Chesler is actually doing something about Afghan women now trapped behind Taliban lines by Feckless Joe. She writes about it here:
Team of Radical Feminists Rescues Thirty Afghan Feminists

Props to Phyllis Chesler! And to those who helped her, even if she’s not sure who all of them are. I say that because I found this a little curious.

“She obtained vital paperwork, helped remotely guide our Afghan women through the streets to the airport, and was perhaps aided by some on-the-ground muscle. Of this, I am not sure.”

I guess there may have been some men involved. And not remotely. They aren’t exactly dismissed, but the word “objectification” comes to mind. I probably wouldn’t have had that reaction if the essay had not been quite so celebratory of radical feminist bona fides.

A nod to the undoubted expertise and courage of such men wouldn’t have been so difficult. Even less difficult would be simply to omit the comment, if you are “not sure.”

There certainly was some of that “muscle” going around in other rescues, and I can’t imagine it would not have been highly appreciated by the evacuees. Maybe critical to their escape.
As Biden Abandoned Afghan Allies, Retired US Special Ops Hatched “Operation Pineapple Express” – Rescuing Over 600 From Taliban Slaughter

In Bari Weiss’ words:

I’ve been thinking a lot these past two weeks about luck. The luck of where we are born. The luck of the parents we are born to. And, right now, the luck of who we know.

Knowing — or having proximity to someone who knows my well-placed friend, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — is a matter of life or death for untold numbers of Afghans…

That’s in an intro to an essay by another woman, Melissa Chen, a classical liberal perhaps less attuned, shall we say, to radical feminism. Bari Weiss introduces Chen:

Melissa co-founded an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders, which digitizes and translates English books and articles into Arabic. And not just any books: Books like Orwell’s ‘“Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now,” and a graphic novel based on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Works that promote reason, pluralism and liberty. Suffice it to say the translators she works with in places like Egypt, Syria and Iraq do so at great risk.

Because of her connections in the Middle East — and because she is the kind of person who lives by her principles — it did not surprise me that she found herself involved in the efforts to save Afghans from the horrors of the Taliban. She shares some of the details of those remarkable efforts in the essay below.

Inside the Underground Railroad Out of Afghanistan

It was at this point that Esther told me she found out about a WhatsApp group with roughly 15 members including a former CIA agent and a former Marine who had connections on the ground. They had successfully extracted other girls from the school and felt they could do the same for Rahima…

As for me, as Esther had been working on getting Rahima out, I had been fretting over a list. On August 17, I was part of a group that was given access to a list of 500 names of Afghan aid workers, human rights activists, and religious and ethnic minorities. When it became clear that the American government wasn’t doing enough, such lists started circulating among various volunteers. My heart sank when the person in charge of flight manifests asked us to split the list into “high priority” and just “priority.”

By Wednesday night, August 25, shortly after receiving a memo from the U.S. military that signed off with a bleak “may God be with you all,” I was asked to cut my evacuation list down to just five people.

Might there have been a shortage of “muscle?” I’m asking you, Joe.

Finally, compare and contrast Chesler and Chen with what passes for feminism among the #METOO wokerati. It’a not just Afghani women abandoned by the corrupt shell of feminism, it’s any inconvenient female.
TIME’S UP FOR TINA TCHEN

Doktor Biden

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Is Mrs. Biden’s insistence on the honorific “Dr.” pretentious. Yes.

Should she cease demanding it? Yes.

Are Democrats calling anyone who suggests these things sexist pigs? That’s rhetorical.

Did Mrs. Biden’s Ed.D dissertation, STUDENT RETENTION AT THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE: MEETING STUDENTS’ NEEDS, meet student needs? Yes, if she’s referring to herself in the plural. Yes, if she’s complaining about class sizes over 100%, and no, if she’s excluding Asians and non-resident aliens entirely:
“Three quarters of the class will be Caucasian; one quarter of the class will be African American…the remaining seats will be filled with students of Asian descent or non-resident aliens.”

The remaining seats are in the hallway.

And also no; if she’s trying to argue for more funding based on the percent of enrollment increase, which is ‘approximately’ double her calculation:
“By 1963, public and private two year headcount enrollment stood at 850,361. By 1980, enrollment had grown to 4,526,287… approximately a 230 percent increase in student attendance.”

Keep her well away from budget discussions.

On the patriarchy contention, a counterexample: President Woodrow Wilson was a PoliSci Ph.D, President of Princeton, and he won a Nobel Prize. He assumed his academic credentials gave him the knowledge and insight to ignore the Constitution and decide how the riff-raff should conduct their lives.

Jill Biden certainly may share those characteristics. One characteristic she does not share with President Wilson is an insistence on being addressed as “Dr.”

Perhaps her insecurity will be assuaged by “FLOTUS?”

Update: 2:40PM
It occurs to me that some people won’t know how Jill Biden’s predilection became an issue, and that the guy who’s been partially cancelled over it could benefit from a plug.

The issue:
Cancel Culture Fights for ‘Dr.’ Jill Biden

Some books:
The author of the now infamous piece is 84, and probably doesn’t much care. Still, here, and here are a couple of his books you could buy to stuff a little capitalism in the cancel crowd’s apertures.

P.S. I bought this one because of the one negative review.