Madness

Stand up, and do what exactly?

Remember #BringBackOurGirls? The short-lived social awareness campaign to rescue hundreds of abducted girls in Nigeria has long petered out. For a brief moment earlier this year, the world focused on the plight of innocent girls kidnapped by the Islamic radical group Boko Haram. Even the First Lady joined in the crusade. Millions of Facebook and Twitter messages later, and we’re nowhere close to bringing back our girls. The campaign was high on emotion and low on substance; the perfect reflection of our tech-obsessed, low attention span culture.

Mollie Hemingway should understand this. Normally, The Federalist contributor is a thoughtful writer with an agreeable view on culture, politics, and personal relations. In the post-Christian era where traditional distinctions are blurred more than ever, she provides some sanity to combat the forces of relativism.

But in a recent piece, Hemingway displays an angry frustration with the feminist cyberwarriors that have been hogging so much of the media spotlight. Topic of her disgust: the radical feminine vitriol aimed at shabby dresser Dr. Matt Taylor. After successfully landing a spacecraft on a comet 310 million miles from Earth, Taylor was chastised for wearing a bowling-style shirt embellished with scantily-clad women. A slur of insults and death threats followed. Even science-loving women were offended by the apparel.

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The casual, everyday Marxism that is all too often ignored

The Daily Caller was good enough to let me publish a piece on why #Shirtstorm is a symptom of fashionable neo-Marxism in our culture. Here’s an excerpt:

The Verge, a tech site that tipped its hand as unethical and agenda-pushing during GamerGate, ran a headline reading, “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” They are literally convinced that fashion, in both the clothing and radical chic senses, is so important that they don’t even care about forward leaps in science. Think I am mischaracterizing them? The subtitle reads “That’s one small step for man, three steps back for humankind.” Wearing a shirt that the groovy people at The Verge don’t like is three times as bad as making a breakthrough in space exploration is good.

The feminism that we have making noise right now isn’t the feminism that fought for equality and against discrimination. Rather than being based in enlightenment values of humanism and equality under the law, it is grounded in neo-Marxist theory of power and oppression. You know when people say that only women can be victims of sexism because of some non-falsifiable, abstract, aggregate definition of power? You were hearing neo-Marxist critical theory.

Escalating this kind of outrage is a pretty dangerous gambit, I think. As with all anti-rationalist narratives, this bizarre campaign is eventually going to buckle under the weight of its own accumulated contradictions.

Occam and Me on JFK and 9/11

(Thank you very much to J. Arthur Bloom, Prop. for the opportunity to write for The Mitrailleuse. My personal blog is Neoreaction in the Diamond Age)

The first reference to Occam’s Razor I ever saw, age 12, was in Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, which sent me to the encyclopedia (and yes, I’m that old), because who could read the mysterious words “Occam’s Razor” and not be dying to know what it was?

I began reading about the assassination of President  Kennedy when I was 14, my interest sparked by Josiah Thompson‘s book Six Seconds in Dallas, which I found through the proven technique of a random walk through the public library stacks, scanning spines for anything that caught my eye and grabbing it. Who knows why or how these fascinations begin, but by the time I finished Thompson’s well-written and reasonable book I was hooked, leaning toward the “second gun” theory, and on the prowl for more of the seemingly endless supply of fact (and especially, fancy) on the events of November 22, 1963. (more…)

Not that kind of bonfire of the vanities

Hoo boy, is that Lena Dunham a laugh riot or what? The lifelong paragon of wholesome living has upped the ante of revealing Millennial self-expression with her latest round of oversharing buried within the pages of her latest offering, Not That Kind of Girl.

The novel at first appeared to underwhelm expectations and strain the sweet $3.7 million deal extended by its proud publisher, Random House. Dulled—but encouraging!—reviews floated with little fanfare upon its September release before some good old-fashioned class war redirected observers’ attentions to the more pressing injustice of Dunham’s mercilessly exploitative book tour labor practices. But the favorable comparisons to fellow Great New Yorker Woody Allen quickly proved unfortunate.

Somehow, the celebrated cultural critics of the New York literary world missed the learned Dunham’s candid confessions of bawdry youthful predation. While her trendy regret-sex-cum-“rape” by a mustachioed Oberlin College Republican detailed in Chapter 6 stimulated a flurry of vicarious clucking from the sisters of perpetual grievance, disturbing passages in which Dunham describes a strange, manipulative obsession with her six-year-younger sister, Grace, received no mention in the mainstream press.  It took the muckracking of unsavory radical right-wing fringe outfits like the National Review to bring these intimate disclosures to public light.

Lest the Dunham family lawyer sees fit to threaten this humble blogger with a taste of Yankee justice, as is apparently the proper practice of the day, I’ll let the self-appointed voice of our generation speak for herself:

“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.

“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.”

I looked at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Web, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.

“Does her vagina look like mine?”

“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”

One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist, and when I saw what was inside I shrieked. “My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”

My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things that I did. She just got on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been such a success.

Don’t act like you didn’t regularly plan elaborate pranks by inserting fun surprises into your precious cavities at the tender age of one, you Judgy Judys. Their mother was supervising, it’s cool.

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