RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/gender-quotas-merit-faux-equality/

To reflect the world as it is, let’s put the ratio of women who pursue careers with the uninterrupted vigour that mostly characterises men at, say, four to one. To insist, therefore, on equal representation at each level of management amounts to a demand that women be not equal but privileged.

Since the outbreak of #metoo hashtagging in the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, Peta Credlin (among others) has been promoting targets for Liberal women in Parliament. Simultaneously, she decries quotas as endorsed by, for example, the Labor Party. Women, she says, don’t want a handicapping system for men; women want to win entirely on their own merits. More than that, women don’t want to walk into the party room aware that there were better candidates whose shoes they are not quite filling. Women who are like Ms Credlin only want to get into Parliament by their own honest and honourable efforts.

What’s the difference between a quota and a target? A target has a handbrake. That’s it. The rationale of each is identical. It starts with the unchallengeable premise: the country must have equal numbers of women in the Federal Parliament (and just about everywhere else, to boot.) A target is designed to achieve the same result, but more slowly, and with a little bit of wiggle room.

If the aim is the same, what’s the logic of claiming that targets are better? Your guess is as good as this one of mine. A quota forces the pace, and the women who are injected into Parliament suffer all of the detriments to self-esteem that Ms Credlin has sketched (although they seem to manage it bravely.) A target, on the other hand, can be accompanied by a development program, which will bolster the skills, the confidence, and the network of the participating women. By the time the target dates roll around, they won’t be needed, because the women will be competing on an equal footing with the men.

I don’t know whether the thinking about targets actually ascends to the level of some such theory – any such theory – but looming behind this theory is an out-of-focus vision of the restored state of nature, with the elimination of all the handicaps that have been clamped onto women like so many electronic ankle bracelets to confine them to house arrest. In that wonderful day to come, women will realise their full potential and compete, unimpeded and uninhibited, with men. And if restored womanhood finds that its natural level is to have greater representation than men, well, let the lines fall in such pleasant places. It’s Rousseau in a pantsuit.

Even hardened leftists occasionally stumble on a truth: Jonathan Saul Freedland is a leftist British journalist, who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and the New York Review of Books. His latest column bashes Kavanaugh and “the insidious force in global politics: toxic masculinity.”

On this he is right:

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what ‘s racism; women can define sexism (and harassment); Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something anti-Semitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong, that they are exaggerating or lying or using it as a decoy tactic-and to treat them to a long lecture on what anti-Jewish racism really is.

Jonathan Freeland (The Guardian- April 29th, 2016)

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/30

The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and their endless sequelae have ended up as an epitaph for a spent culture for which its remedies are felt to be worse than its diseases. Think 338 B.C., A.D. 476, 1453, or 1939.

The coordinated effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court required the systematic refutation of the entire notion of Western jurisprudence by senators and much of the American legal establishment. And there was no hesitation in doing just that on the part of Senate Democrats, the #MeToo movement, and the press. And I write this at a moment in which conservatives and Republicans still control the majority of governorships, state legislatures, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court and the presidency—a reminder that culture so often is far more powerful than politics.

So, here we were to be left with a new legal and cultural standard in adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western standard quite befitting for our new relativist age:

The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.
Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that the action in the accusation took place.
Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will destroy lives.
Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes; individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or innocence trump those of individual cases.
The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda, once said, if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes truth. The anti-Trump crowd has mastered Goebbels’ advice. We have been told repeatedly, in increasingly shrill voices, that Mr. Trump is incompetent, self-obsessed, destructive, toxic, impulsive, petty, adversarial, ineffective. One U.S. Senator, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a woman who lied about her heritage, has urged Congress to remove him by invoking the 25thAmendment. Another, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), a man who lied about his experience in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, called him “an unindicted co-conspirator,” questioning the legitimacy of his presidency. Two reporters from the Financial Times, in an article on Brazil, compared Mr. Trump to Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte, claiming him to be anti-gay, anti-women and anti-Black. So, the question is:given his successes:the 2017 tax bill, reducing regulation, lowering unemployment, returning the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, rendering ISIS less dangerous, bringing North Korea to the table, and getting European nations to up their payments for NATO. What would his achievements have been if he had been thoughtful, constructive and competent?

Increasingly, Democrats rely on hate. Hate needs a menace, as Shelby Steele noted in a recent Wall Street Journalop-ed. What started out by Democrats sixty years ago as a fight against injustice – especially racism and segregation – has morphed into fictional enemies, ones necessary for the Left to obtain and retain power. Like Machiavelli, means, no matter how insidious or dishonest, are justified because of the “noble” end sought. Mr. Steele suggests (optimistically?)that “the source of its angst and hatefulness is its own encroaching obsolescence.” I hope so. The use of personal smears to gain political advantage has become endemic to the Left, making imperative the need for at least one prominent Democrat to stand up, using words like those uttered by Joseph Welch in 1954, in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) attacking Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?Have you left no sense of decency?” Democrats are not alone in the willful destruction of people’s character, but they have taken the practice to new levels. Character assassination comes directly from the playbook of Joseph Goebbels.

Partisanship grows deeper. Every time Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) opens his mouth, the gulf widens. In his farewell address to the nation, George Washington warned against what he called the “…baneful effects of the spirit of party…” rooted in “the strongest passions of the human mind.” But, could he have envisioned the priggish hyperbole of those like Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-NY), as they interviewed Judge Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the Supreme Court, or the sullying of his character by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) who withheld until the last minute a letter from a woman alleging Judge Kavanaugh assaulted her as a teenager? Could President Washington have predicted the publication of a letter published in The New York Timesby “Anonymous,” disparaging the White House as an out-of-control fraternity house and the President as an impetuous, tempestuous idiot? Could the man who spoke the words, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports” have predicted a society where religion is disparaged, morality considered relative and students instructed to find their “own” truths? Could the Father of our Country have envisioned a time when his descendants would create a dystopian world where concepts of dignity and respect have become subordinated to victimization and identity politics? Have we fallen so far that rising again is not possible? Has partisanship made our legislative bodies dysfunctional? Do we no longer elect individuals who can think and act independently of party? Have we reached the end of civilization? I don’t think so, but it is easy to become discouraged.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/help-ive-been-chained-to-a-hundred-and-fifty-million-lunatics/

Sophocles is reported to have said that the male libido was like being chained to a lunatic.

I can honestly say, being a woman in 21st-century America, that I have him beat cold. I have somehow been chained to over a hundred and fifty million lunatics.

Okay, not every woman is a lunatic. I even have women friends. But making friends with women is like making friends in the science fiction field. I start by assuming they will be part of a strange form of Marxist victim-group and I look for signs they might, just might, be safe.

Then there’s a whole dance as you reveal yourself to the other as not-a-standard-woman.

At first, I thought American women had a chip on their shoulder, but I didn’t realize it was nearly this bad.

First, so you can understand where I’m coming from – because I have been told the reason I’m not hot for “feminism” is that women won the fight for me. The country I grew up in gave women the vote in the seventies. Further, when I was a child, getting a private passport for a married woman was difficult, and my mom had a “family passport,” which meant dad had to affidavit her every time she wanted to go to Spain to shop. Married women needed to have permission from their husbands to get a job. (Which meant many women worked under the table.) When I was in fifth and sixth grade, both of which were in mixed classes, it was assumed as a matter of course that girls couldn’t outperform boys, and when I did – routinely – the teachers acted like a wondrous thing had happened.

There were a lot of other restrictions, like the fact that no sane woman would go out after dark because there was a very high chance you’d be confused with a prostitute.

But here’s the thing: I don’t remember ever attributing any actual reverses in my life to being a woman. I managed to enter college. Heck, my cousin, who is 14 years older than me, is a chemical engineer. I don’t think she ever attributed any reversals in her life to being a woman either.

My mother ran her own business and out-earned my father for most of her marriage.

Sure, men discriminated against women. But women could still manage to be successful. And didn’t waste their time attributing their failures or their issues to men’s plotting.

Sure as a young woman I snapped off a lot of noses — and hands and… never mind. At fourteen grandma gave me a hat pin with which to discourage men rubbing against me in the bus. It worked too. And sure, I wished I could have more freedom and that people didn’t assume I was an idiot because I was a woman. But very few of them assumed I was an idiot after I had a chance to open my mouth.

And it truly never occurred to me to think that men were sabotaging me. Once you proved yourself, most men treated you fine.

I didn’t hear the phrase “he’s afraid of a strong woman” until I came to the States.

This was the eighties. To me, the U.S. was a wonderful place. No one acted like I was obviously less smart than boys. And no one treated me like I was a child.

And yet, I soon found that women about ten years older than me attributed all my issues or problems to “men are afraid of strong women.”

I’ve had bad bosses of both sexes, with a slight lead for women, mostly because I’ve had more female bosses. But none of those older women ever said, “Your female boss is afraid of strong women,” even though in my experience females are more likely to be afraid of women who are supposed to be their subordinates and whom they can neither intimidate nor control.

In fact, it was always a mystery to me how these male bosses were supposed to know that I was a “strong woman,” since in my twenties I was shy to the point of incoherence and polite to the point of self-effacement.

After a while that started annoying me, but even then, I don’t think I could possibly have guessed how crazy things were going to go.

Nowadays it seems to be an actual crime to be male. From schools to colleges, we are doing our best to make every boy behave like a girl and every man become just like a woman.

And even then, until this year I couldn’t have imagined the spectacle the Kavanaugh hearings have turned into.

How is it possible that Christina Blasey Ford has been asked to testify before the most august body in the land on a ridiculous, unproven and unprovable charge, which – should it prove true – amounts to the fact that a seventeen-year-old boy might have been uncouth and somewhat ridiculous at a drunken party, something that is neither a crime nor, to be fair, unusual. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/trump-derangement-syndrome-spreads-intensifies/

The furious, unhinged and ongoing reaction to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat reveals the extent to which leftist poison has penetrated not just Washington but the whole Western political class. Trump’s task is to lance the abscess while there are healthy parts remaining.

When President Barack Obama began packing the United States of America’s courts, senior appointments in the armed forces and a host of other positions, it looked to the extreme Left as if their long-cherished dream of seizing power—which would in fact mean controlling the world—was coming true at last.

Donald Trump’s election was shattering for them. Trump Derangement Syndrome persists even though, or rather because, he has had both economic and foreign policy successes, which appear to stand a chance of crippling the Left’s project, and which seem to have given Middle America new confidence and purpose.

The intensity of this derangement is fairly new. Even recently, Americans of both parties respected their presidents once elected, and in general did not doubt their presidents’ patriotism and public-spiritedness. Further, politicians’ families were off-limits for attacks.

It was a commonplace amongst journalists that you could not get an ordinary American to criticise his or her country or president when travelling abroad. Election results were respected as an expression of the democratic process. The idea that anyone’s career would have been in danger as a result of voting for the candidate of a mainstream party would have been a scandal. Now, some commentators predict that leftist rhetoric may evolve into a shooting war. In one of his famous paintings celebrating American freedom—in this case free speech—Norman Rockwell depicted a dissenter at a political meeting being heard by the others present with respect and politeness.

It is dismaying for friends of American democracy that the Democrat senators in 2018 were prepared to vote against President Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court no matter who that nominee was, or how qualified and suitable that nominee might be. This showed a willingness to wreck the processes of government without consideration of the national interest—a plain abrogation of the duty attached to the high positions to which they had been elected. Edmund Burke said: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it.” It is a principle of representative democracy so basic that one is taken aback by the need to repeat it. In the twenty-four hours after President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared Kavanaugh would be “a destructive tool on a generation of progress for workers, women, LGBTQ people, communities of color [and] families” and that he would “radically reverse the course of American justice [and] democracy”.

There is nothing in his previous career to suggest people would die because of Kavanaugh. NBC News journalists spread, as news, a false rumour that Anthony Kennedy had negotiated his retirement contingent on Kavanaugh’s appointment. One report noted:

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/26/the-emerging-transnational

Forget Brett Kavanaugh, Michael Avenatti, and Dianne Feinstein and the rest of the Erinyes females shrieking hysterically about their literal impotence in the face of old/white/male/Republican privilege. It’s a clown show, willingly orchestrated and televised by the ringmasters of the Democrat-Media Complex, whose own emasculation is now so graphically exposed with every new fantastic accusation.

Having gone from promoting a culture of complete sexual license to wimpled membership in an anchorite nunnery, the Left is now being consumed, to put it in terms they can understand, by the internal contradictions of their own satanic principles. So the hell with them.

Concentrate instead on what’s really important: the burgeoning moral and political alliance between the president of the United States and the leaders of four formerly captive nations in central Europe; Hungary, Poland, and the two halves of what used to be Czechoslovakia, aka the Visegrad Group. In a curious accident—or perhaps not so curious—the arc of history has not just bent but pretzled, uniting the late Soviet Union’s foremost antagonist with a quartet of the USSR’s most notable victims against a decadent, suicidal, and morally flaccid European Union (France and Germany, mainly) that is hell-bent on the destruction of Old Europe. It’s the Cold War all over again, but with the sides reversed.

Or maybe not. Germany’s Lumpenkanzlerin, Angela Merkel, is entirely a product of the German Democratic Republic, a bred if not born Communist with little or no love for the country she purports to lead. I’ve been watching German chancellors since Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt and, whether Left or Right, at least they pretended to love their country. As I recall, Helmut Kohl used often to end his speeches with the German equivalent of “God bless Germany,” but if Merkel has ever said that and meant it, I’m not aware of it. And as for the French, surrender has been their prophylactic substitute for even the l’esprit d’escalier of a nation that hasn’t won a war since Napoleon.

Opposing Merkel and the millions of cultural aliens she had imported into her country are the states of Eastern Europe, which remember both Soviet and Islamic occupation and don’t want to see the return of either. Having had their freedom forcibly stripped from them over the centuries, they refuse any “immigration,” and wish to preserve their countries—even if that means (gasp!) staying “white.” And they don’t care who knows it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/surviving_our_survivors.html

According to the feminist mantra, a veritable epidemic of male violence against women is sweeping the country. Women in every walk of life are apparently prey to a wave of male sexual harassment, assault, and rape; they are victims of a nefarious consortium called “the patriarchy,” which has been oppressing women in the home, the workplace, and the professions from time immemorial. Women who bring forth allegations of male sexual misconduct, whether proven or not and no matter how frivolous or innocuous, are now classified as “survivors” who must be believed and afforded remedial counseling and legal recourse. Accused men are regarded as bearers of a pathology known as “toxic masculinity” and must be prosecuted as undoubted perpetrators.

I have observed and recorded innumerable examples of the phenomenon. The litany of dodgy #MeToo grievances is common knowledge – the preposterous allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is only the most currently prominent such episode – and even women who have not entered the hashtag world are primed and provoked to join the vendetta. Four more such instances have just now come to my attention, a grouping that, in effect, constitutes a full data set.

Marcus Knight, a student at Saddleback College in the California Community College system, who suffers from dysphasia, autism, and cerebral palsy and is fitted with a drainage shunt to relieve pressure on the brain, has been the target of two Title IX complaints. His transgression? Asking for a fist bump and a selfie with a presumably friendly co-ed. Knight was not allowed to defend himself against the allegations. The “survivor” of a fist bump and a selfie must be protected at all costs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/meuse-argonne-americas-biggest-battle-100-later/

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive of 1918 was the largest battle ever fought by Americans.

One hundred years ago this morning, at 5:30 a.m. Central European Time, the 1.2 million–man American Expeditionary Force launched all of its available combat strength into the largest and arguably the bloodiest battle in American history: the six-week Meuse-Argonne offensive that continued through the armistice at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The horrific and protracted battle brought a decisive end to the first war in which Americans fought on European soil. Though it was filled with then-famous incidents and notable Americans, the ordeal of the Meuse-Argonne is far less remembered today than Gettysburg, Normandy, Yorktown, Okinawa, or New Orleans. We should keep that memory alive, as it tells us a lot about the America of 1918 and the century that followed.

Amateurs at War
Even the name, “American Expeditionary Force,” speaks to a different era. The armies of America’s wars before 1941 came into being to fight a specific war, and disbanded at the end, leaving their names behind as monuments: the Continental Army, the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the Tennessee. The professionalized, permanent army and Marine Corps were tiny then; the Army in 1917 was less than 150,000 men, compared to some 11 million Germans under arms and 8 million Frenchmen, and ranked as the world’s 17th-largest army. Only after the Second World War would the United States develop what Dwight Eisenhower termed our “military-industrial complex.” Americans had put the world’s most formidable fighting forces in the field against each other in the 1860s but had mostly forgotten the arts of war by 1917, when about 14,000 Americans (two-thirds the size of the Continental Army in mid 1776) were all that could be put in the field in France.

The Marine Corps would do much to build its legend at Belleau Wood in June 1918, and would fight again at St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne under the command of Major General John Lejeune (namesake of North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune), but a small, elite force like the Marines cannot alone conquer a battlefield as vast and densely soldiered as the Western Front. And America’s industrial might was not the decisive factor it would be in the 1940s, when mechanized warfare ruled the battlefield; the American Army Air Service was not a notably effective factor in the battle, and many of the American tanks were borrowed from the French. It was the freshly recruited, still-amateur “Doughboys” of the Army, manning rifles, machine guns, and artillery, who made up the bulk of the estimated 600,000 men committed to the initial assault at H-hour on September 26. The six-week struggle would be the first and, as it turned out, the last time the AEF was fully committed to battle.