Maureen Dowd's "evolving" view of how feminism was affected by Bill Clinton's sexual escapades

2003/10/05 - NY Times - Win One for the Groper

Certainly, the bodybuilder-turned-phenom has had moments of being, to use David Letterman's word, a lunkhead. But I find the selective outrage of feminists just as offensive.

Feminism died in 1998 when Hillary allowed henchlings and Democrats to demonize Monica as an unbalanced stalker, and when Gloria Steinem defended Mr. Clinton against Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones by saying he had merely made clumsy passes, then accepted rejection, so there was no sexual harassment involved. As to his dallying with an emotionally immature 21-year-old, Ms. Steinem noted, ''Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.''

Surely what's good for the Comeback Kid is good for the Terminator. 

2016/02/14 - NY Times - "When Hillary Clinton Killed Feminism"

The interesting thing about the spectacle of older women trying to shame younger ones on behalf of Hillary is that Hillary and Bill killed the integrity of institutional feminism back in the ’90s — with the help of Albright and Steinem. 

2016/10/03 - Daily Caller - "Feminism died a little bit when the feminists had to help Bill Clinton" (video, interviewed by Katie Couric)

“I do think that feminism died a little bit when the feminists had to help Bill Clinton when Monica was actually telling the truth,” Dowd continued. “They had to support Bill Clinton just because they wanted his progressive policies on women.”

Feminism: an exchange of yokes?

Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies by Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, chapter 8, "Cults, Communes, and Clicks", p. 195: 

As the us-versus-them opposition is replicated within the original grouping, policing actions get under way. This is a form of behavior that, in addition to allowing some people to be censorious and aggressive toward others, reflects a presumption of rights and wrongs: We are right. You are wrong.

Many feminists have trouble swallowing this. As a political science professor from Texas (who has a bumper sticker on her pickup truck saying FEMINIST REDNECK wrote to us: "I have not thrown off the yoke of one master to have it replaced by another, even if its name is feminism." 

"Imbecile bourgeoisie"

From The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, chapter 2. Verloc is an inept anarchist agent and Vladimir is his superior. It's interesting that, in the present day, the left wants to do what Vladimir accuses the ruling classes of that day of wanting.

Mr Vladimir bore the look of heavy inquiry with perfect serenity.

"What we want is to administer a tonic to the Conference in Milan," he said airily. "Its deliberations upon international action for the suppression of political crime don't seem to get anywhere. England lags. This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty. It's intolerable to think that all your friends have got only to come over to - "

"In that way I have them all under my eye," Mr Verloc interrupted huskily.

"It would be much more to the point to have them all under lock and key. England must be brought into line. The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches. And they have the political power still, if they only had the sense to use it for their preservation. I suppose you agree that the middle classes are stupid?"

Mr Verloc agreed hoarsely.

"They are."

"They have no imagination. They are blinded by an idiotic vanity. What they want just now is a jolly good scare. This is the psychological moment to set your friends to work. I have had you called here to develop to you my idea."

"Since there is no god, it is our job to do His work."

Howard Bloom:

I realized I was an atheist at thirteen years old and it wasn't a choice, it just happened. But no benevolent God would be so cruel. No benevolent God would create a cosmos with such pain. Any God so vicious would be one that we, as humans, would be obliged to oppose with every muscle and every cell.

And, in fact, whether there is a god or not it is our obligation to oppose the outrages and pains of this planet. Here's something I wrote a while back.

Since there is no god, it is our job to do His work. God is not a being, he is an aspiration, a gift, a vision, a goal to seek. Ours is the responsibility of making a cruel universe turn just, of turning pains to understandings and new insights into joy, of creating ways to soar the skies for generations yet to come, of fashioning wings with which our children's children shall overcome, of making worlds of fantasy materialize as reality, of mining and transforming our greatest gifts--our passions, our imaginings, our pains, our insecurities, and our lusts.

This is the work of deity, and deity is a power that resides in us.

A blogger's view on reporters

Blogger Marco Arment:

Almost every time I’ve talked to a reporter has gone this way: they had already decided the narrative beforehand. I’m never being asked for information — I’m being used for quotes to back up their predetermined story, regardless of whether it’s true. (Consider this when you read the news.) Misquotes usually aren’t mistakes — they’re edited, consciously or not, to say what the reporter needs them to say.

Talking to reporters is like talking to the police: ideally, don’t. You have little to gain and a lot to lose, their incentives often conflict with yours, and they have all of the power.

https://marco.org/2014/11/16/why-podcasts-are-suddenly-back

How Nazis viewed the USA

We would not say anything if the U.S.A. were aware of its intellectual and moral defects and was trying to grow up. But it is too much when it behaves in an impudent manner toward a part of the earth with a few thousands years of glorious history behind it, attempting to teach it moral and intellectual lessons, whether out of innocence or a complete lack of genuine culture and learning. We can forgive the mistakes of youth, but this degree of arrogance gets on one’s nerves.

Joseph Goebbels, 9 August 1942 “Aus Gottes eigenem Land” ("God's Country"), Das eherne Herz (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943), pp. 421-427.

A law professor's views on reporters

Speaking as a lawprof who used to take calls from reporters, I eventually figured out that the reporter always had the idea of what I was going to say and would keep talking one way or another at me to try to get me to say it. When I realized that all my effort explaining things in a service-oriented way was wasted and the only quote that was used was the thing I could see, in retrospect, the reporter was taking up my time trying to get me to say, I stopped taking calls — to save time and to protect myself from distortion and exploitation.

Law professor Ann Althouse,  2/4/17, 12:11 PM

Journalism

Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits -- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "13. End of the Road...Death of the Whale...Soaking Sweats in the Airport".

"The virtue of their victims"

 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (part 3, ch. 1), Dr. Hendricks to Dagny Taggart:

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward.

“I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards — never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy.

“I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind — yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it — and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

What the Obama adminstration really thought about the media

Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. "All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus," he said. "Now they don't. They call us to explain to them what's happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change. They literally know nothing." 

Ben Rhodes, advisor to President Obama. From "The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign-Policy Guru" by David Samuels. New York Times, May 5, 2016.

The gullibility of the intellectual community

Simon Karlinsky wrote in his introduction to Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971:

...the groundswell of enthusiasm for Soviet Russia among America’s intellectuals which came just as Stalin was consolidating his power and plunging the country into the worst nightmare in its history. What amazes a person even minimally acquainted with Soviet realities about the intellectual climate of America in the thirties is the almost inconceivable gullibility of the intellectual community, its lack of any meaningful criteria for comparing the situations in the two countries.

Muggeridge's Law

From Tom Wolfe's "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast:  A literary manifesto for the new social novel," Harpers, November, 1989. 

While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

A full Moon can occur on Easter Sunday.

The rule for finding the date of Easter is usually stated as follows:

1. Determine the date of first full Moon on or after the first day of Spring.
2. Easter is the Sunday after that.

This eliminates the possibility of the Moon being full on Easter Sunday.

Except that it doesn't. A lunar eclipse can occur only when the Moon is full, and there was a nearly total lunar eclipse which was seen in most of Europe on Easter Sunday, April 12, 1903 (pdf).

There are two factors in the rule for Easter that contribute to this situation.

1. The first day of Spring is always assumed to be March 21. This is not exactly true. The vernal equinox (determined astronomically) can occur on March 19, 20 or 21.
2. The full Moon used is not the astronomical full Moon, but an ecclesiastical full Moon, i.e., one that is used for ease of determination.

The second factor is responsible for 1903, because the ecclesiastical full moon was on April 11.

The date of Easter is actually determined by the Roman Catholic Church using tables that were set up by Johannes Kepler when the Gregorian Calendar was established in 1582.

For further information: United States Naval Observatory, The Date of Easter.

"[We academics are] the most useless people in the world" --Germaine Greer, 2014

Germaine Greer, FemiFest radical feminist conference, London, August 31, 2014 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7b59mFyREY
https://vimeo.com/105476725 [timing in brackets]

4:01 [3:34] "So I really think we've gone about as far as we can go with this equality nonsense. It was always a fraud. It always placed women in a position of having to adapt to a pre-existing reality that they didn't approve of anyway."

4:37 [4:10] "[The corporate world] is a completely sclerotic, phalliform organizational system, and everything travels vertically. All orders come down from the top. Everybody's in authority over everybody else. It's not the way we do things. It's not the way we can go on doing things because we know that those systems depend upon oppression and cruelty, downright cruelty, and--'unmanning people', I almost said. Making people feel inferior, making them apologize for their existence, making them strive to be more like whatever the thing is you want them to be, and I think we have to do something."

7:07 [6:40] " ...the abominable Guardian, which is probably the most treacherous newspaper the women's movement has ever had...and their treatment of their female staff, with a few exceptions, is usually a pretty good example of what they're like at base level."

9:26 [8:52] "How do we form ourselves into an activity--a force to improve the situation? I don't have the answers. I'm an academic--[we're] the most useless people in the world."

Islam and Nazism

Oriana Fallaci, The New Yorker, June 5, 2006, "The Agitator":

“Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West. […]

“I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose its ‘Mein Kampf,’ its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one thousand and four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other religion, slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently.”

The rest of this post is from http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2008/08/fundamentalism-and-fascism

Michael Potemra tells us that in Bernard-Henri Levy’s forthcoming book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism , there is an interesting line from the journals of Paul Claudel. On May 21, 1935, Claudel wrote, “Hitler’s speech: a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe . . . ”

The Catholic poet and diplomat Claudel wasn’t alone in linking National Socialism to Islam. Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian who was the principal author (with Bonhoffer) of the Barmen Declaration against the Nazis, had this to say:

Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet. 

(Church and the Political Problem of Our Day , 1939, p. 43)

Cato the Elder on women

Woman is a violent and uncontrolled animal, and it is useless to let go the reins and then expect her not to kick over the traces. You must keep her on a tight rein [...] Women want total freedom or rather - to call things by their names - total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be easier to live with? Not at all. Once they have achieved equality, they will be your masters ...

I post this quote solely to provide its exact source and the context. It's attributed to Cato the Elder in many places on the Web, and it's composed of excerpts (with some paraphrasing) from a speech of Cato reported in Livy's History of Rome, book 34, sections 2-4:

Give the reins to a headstrong nature, to a creature that has not been tamed, and then hope that they will themselves set bounds to their licence if you do not do it yourselves. This is the smallest of those restrictions which have been imposed upon women by ancestral custom or by laws, and which they submit to with such impatience. What they really want is unrestricted freedom, or to speak the truth, licence, and if they win on this occasion what is there that they will not attempt? 

Call to mind all the regulations respecting women by which our ancestors curbed their licence and made them obedient to their husbands, and yet in spite of all those restrictions you can scarcely hold them in. If you allow them to pull away these restraints and wrench them out one after another, and finally put themselves on an equality with their husbands, do you imagine that you will be able to tolerate them? From the moment that they become your fellows they will become your masters. [...]  

You have often heard me complain of the expensive habits of women and often, too, of those of men, not only private citizens but even magistrates, and I have often said that the community suffers from two opposite vices - avarice and luxury - pestilential diseases which have proved the ruin of all great empires. [...] The very last things to be ashamed of are thriftiness and poverty, but this law relieves you of both since you do not possess what it forbids you to possess. The wealthy woman says, 'This levelling down is just what I do not tolerate. Why am I not to be admired and looked at for my gold and purple? Why is the poverty of others disguised under this appearance of law so that they may be thought to have possessed, had the law allowed it, what it was quite out of their power to possess? 

Do you want, Quirites, to plunge your wives into a rivalry of this nature, where the rich desire to have what no one else can afford, and the poor, that they may not be despised for their poverty, stretch their expenses beyond their means? Depend upon it, as soon as a woman begins to be ashamed of what she ought not to be ashamed of she will cease to feel shame at what she ought to be ashamed of. She who is in a position to do so will get what she wants with her own money, she who cannot do this will ask her husband. The husband is in a pitiable plight whether he yields or refuses; in the latter case he will see another giving what he refused to give. Now they are soliciting other women's husbands, and what is worse they are soliciting votes for the repeal of a law, and are getting them from some, against the interest of you and your property and your children. When once the law has ceased to fix a limit to your wife's expenses, you will never fix one. Do not imagine that things will be the same as they were before the law was made. It is safer for an evil-doer not to be prosecuted than for him to be tried and then acquitted, and luxury and extravagance would have been more tolerable had they never been interfered with than they will be now, just like wild beasts which have been irritated by their chains and then released. 

Edward Gibbon, Charles Martel, and Islam

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter LII.

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

In actual fact, today Arabic studies are taught in Oxford.

From such calamities Christendom was delivered by the genius and fortune of one man. Charles, the illegitimate son of the elder Pepin, was content with the titles of mayor or duke of the Franks, but he deserved to become the father of a line of kings.

In 732, around October 10 (exact dates uncertain), Charles battled the Muslim armies between the cities of Tours and Poitiers and finally defeated them.

...the Arabs never resumed the conquest of Gaul, and they were soon driven beyond the Pyrenees by Charles Martel and his valiant race.

Charles Martel was the grandfather of Charlemagne.

"Answer" by Fredric Brown (1954) (complete short-short story)

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- ninety-six billion planets -- into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."

"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."

He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

"Yes, now there is a God."

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

Loyalty and lying

https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/05/ol4-dr-johnsons-hypothesis/

For example, in many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. 

Obama and Saruman

The Two Towers, “The Voice of Saruman”:

Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard  [Obama's “racism” speech]; and if they did, they wondered for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell [...] But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it.

Return of the King, “Many Partings”: 

[Gandalf said,] “I fancy [Saruman] could do some mischief still in a small mean way.” 

Return of the King, “The Scouring of the Shire”:

[Saruman said,] “ ‘One ill turn deserves another.’ It would have been a sharper lesson, if only you had given me a little more time and more Men. Still I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives. And it will be pleasant to think of that and set it against my injuries.”...  

But Frodo said, “...He has lost all power, save his voice that can still daunt you and deceive you, if you let it. ...”