BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Despair of Feminism By David Solway

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/10/17/the-despair-of-feminism-n1066231

“The relationship between men and women,” writes Megan Fox in her recent book Believe Evidence: The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo, “is a mysterious and beautiful thing. When each is acting within their boundaries, there is no end to the joy that comes from male and female love, familial or romantic.” The weakening of men and the empowerment of women, as “women claw their way to ever increasing power and fix men (especially young, white men), in their crosshairs,” destroy the sexual, romantic and institutional bond between the sexes. Similarly, the common preachment that men should jettison their manhood and become more like women is to distort the gender relationship and introduce a schism into the culture that can lead only to turmoil and unhappiness for both men and women. Male feminist Michael Kimmel ludicrously claims in Angry White Men that “abandoning that sense of masculine entitlement actually enables us to live happier lives.” On the contrary, the upshot is social misery.

“Radical androgyny,” writes Stephen Baskerville in The New Politics of Sex, is the consequence of the effort to control and punish men for their natural sexuality and to deny that “relationships between men and women should be regulated by social conventions that recognize the differences between men and women.” When nature is violated, domestic anarchy becomes the rule, not the exception, the feature, not the bug. This may partly explain why marriage is in decline and the MGTOW movement (Men Going Their Own Way) is gathering momentum.

Feminists have sold their birthright for a messy cottage, and will come increasingly to suffer for it in the coin of regret, loneliness and despair. In The Sickness unto Death, Danish philosopher and master ironist Soren Kierkegaard discussed the source of feminine despair, which he sensed gradually taking hold of the feminine psyche. Women, he felt, were being encouraged to file, so to speak, for self-divorce, to violate their own essential nature, which he understood as the capacity for devotion. “In devotion she loses herself, and only then is happy, only then is she herself…Take this devotion away, then her self is also gone.” “Devotedness” is her essential nature. Kierkegaard, a devout Christian, clearly had Matthew 16:26 in mind: For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? The word “man,” of course, is intended generically. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Belarus: More Human Rights Violations by Judith Bergman

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16623/belarus-human-rights

Belarusians want an end to Lukashenko’s 26-year long rule of Soviet-style authoritarianism with unfree elections, a censored media and widespread repression of political dissent. Both the US and the EU have described the recent election as neither free nor fair.

Lukashenko, however, clinging onto power, has framed the protests as “foreign interference”. The claim serves both as an excuse to crack down on the protests and to ensure the support of Russia.

Since the election [on August 9], more than 10,000 people have been detained and at least 244 people have been implicated in criminal cases on various charges related to the protests, according to Viasna human rights center leader Ales Bialiatski.

Now that Lukashenko is being pressured both internationally and at home, he is completely beholden to Putin, who is likely to take full advantage of this position by conditioning his help and support on Lukashenko’s acceptance of further “integration” with Russia. Ultimately, this could lead to a “soft” power grab by Putin – no need for military invasions — in which Putin could finally bring about the close “integration” from Belarus — “coming closer together” socially and economically — that Putin has previously sought.

For two months, Belarusians have turned out in force every Sunday, drawing up to 200,000 protesters against the August 9 presidential election, which gave President Alexander Lukashenko, a crushing if highly dubious victory.

Belarusians want an end to Lukashenko’s 26-year long rule of Soviet-style authoritarianism with unfree elections, a censored media and widespread repression of political dissent. Both the US and the EU have described the recent election as neither free nor fair.

Lukashenko’s main challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who received nearly 10% of the vote, was detained after contesting the election results and fled to Lithuania, She had said that she was ready to serve as a temporary “national leader” and hold new free and fair elections. For that purpose, she and other members of the opposition formed an opposition council, a move that prompted prosecutors to open a criminal case against the council with the claim that it had been set up as an illegal attempt to seize power. Since the council’s creation in mid-August, most of its leaders have been detained, several of them abducted and then expelled from the country. One of the last free members of the council, Maxim Znak, was dragged out of his office by masked men on September 9, detained and charged with “incitement to undermine national security”.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Who Is Responsible for the ‘Crisis’ in Islam? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16660/islam-crisis

Other Arabs said that Muslims have only themselves to blame for the “crisis” in their religion. They are referring to the use of Islam, by many Muslims, to carry out terrorist attacks and other atrocities against Muslims and non-Muslims.

The message these Arabs and Muslims are sending is: We created the crisis in our religion by allowing terrorists and extremists to use Islam as a pretext for their crimes.

The views expressed by these Arabs and Muslims are reminiscent of those by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi. In 2014, he called for a “religious revolution” in Islam and appealed to leading Muslim groups to “confront the misleading ideologies harming Islam and Muslims worldwide.”

“The fact is that the biggest conspirators against Islam are the Muslims themselves, specifically those who reproduce the discourse of closed-mindedness and hatred. In this context, there is no difference between those who create, finance or carry out terrorism and those who are silent about it or justify it.” — Mohammad Maghouti, Moroccan writer, Hespress, October 13, 2020.

“[W]e have to call on France to place the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations.” — Nervana Mahmoud, prominent Egyptian commentator and blogger, Al Hurrah, October 11, 2020.

“The crisis that Islam is suffering from was made by Muslims with their own hands when they allowed a handful of them to adopt violence as a language for dialogue with the other. Macron was right in everything he said. His message should be considered a wake-up call. Muslims have greatly offended Islam when they showed it to be a religion that incites violence and spreads chaos in stable societies that received them as refugees and provided them with protection. Muslims made a mistake when they used their religion as a justification for attacking others. This does not give us the right to condemn others and accuse them of being hostile to Islam. Islam is in crisis because it has been distorted, mutilated, and destroyed from within. We should have said thank you to Macron rather than curse him.” — Farouk Yousef, Egyptian writer, Middle East Online, October 13, 2020.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Unapologetic Bias of the American Left by Victor Davis Hanson *****

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/18/the-unapologetic-bias-of-the-american-left/

Today’s Left sees their efforts bending in a preordained historical arc that ends with ultimate progressive justice—and retributions.

Some yearn for the ancient monopolistic days of network news, the adolescent years of public radio and TV, and the still reputable New York Times—when once upon a time the Left at least tried to mask their progressivism in sober and judicious liberal façades. 

An avuncular Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Jim Lehrer, or Abe Rosenthal at least went through the motions of reporting news that was awkward or even embarrassing to the Left. Their agenda was 1960s-vintage Great Society liberalism, seen as the natural evolution from the New Deal and post-war internationalism. Edward R. Murrow, the ACLU of old, and Free Speech Movement at Berkeley—these were their liberal referents. Those days are gone.

Yet even during the Obama years, when studies showed the president had received the most slanted media honeymoon in news history, overt media bias was, at least, as hotly denied as it intensified. There were still a few ossified, quarter-hearted efforts now and then to mention the IRS scandal, the surveillance of Associated Press reporters, the various scandals embroiling the Veterans Administration, General Service Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Secret Service. But even that thin pretense is over now, too.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Racism, Cancel Culture, and Hypocrisy At Harvard Witnessing the ruthless dismantling of free thought.

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/racism-cancel-culture-and-hypocrisy-harvard-richard-l-cravatts/

As racism continues to engulf campuses in paroxysms of aggrievement and perceived oppression by black students, Harvard University has become another in the growing list of universities where professors found themselves victims of the cancel culture. At UCLA, University of Chicago, Cornell, and Skidmore, faculty members were maligned and threatened with termination for purportedly critiquing Black Lives Matter, defending the police against attacks for perceived racist brutality, and even questioning the extent and reality of anti-black racism at their respective institutions and outside the campus walls.

At Harvard one of the current faculty targets is David Kane, Preceptor in Statistical Methods and Mathematics in the university’s Department of Government, who first made the apparently unforgivable error of inviting Charles Murray to speak to his Gov 50 class. Murray, of course, is a political scientist, libertarian, and the author of the still-controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, in which the authors demonstrate, in the most inflammatory section, genetic differences in intelligence between whites and blacks. Although Murray was going to discuss his new book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class in Kane’s class, it was Murray’s reputation as an alleged racist white supremacist that was on students’ minds when they learned of the upcoming speech.

To make matters worse for Kane, some of his assiduous students uncovered racist posts he had allegedly written on his website EphBlog. over the course of several years under the pseudonym “David Dudley Field ’25.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

China is Using Companies like Twitter to Interfere in the Election Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter’s businesses are tethered to the Communist regime. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/china-using-companies-twitter-interfere-election-daniel-greenfield/

Last year, Amazon was forced to shut down its marketplace business in the People’s Republic of China. Amazon’s defeat followed that of a long line of Big Tech players who had tried to make a go of it in China and failed miserably. China’s economy is built to boost domestic businesses and foreign exports, with some needed imports, by companies linked to the Communist Party.

And no matter how politically correct Amazon may try to be, it can never join that club.

But Amazon’s business in China isn’t done. To a large degree, Amazon’s business is China. Behind the smiling logo, the massive array of businesses covering everything from running the CIA’s cloud to spending $500 million to make a Lord of the Rings streaming series, are a bunch of grim offices, apartments, and warehouses in Chinese cities that make up its real business.

Three years ago, third-party sellers topped Amazon’s own sales. They now make up 58%. Who are they? If, like most Americans, you shop at the giant dot com retail monopoly, you’ve already waded through a stream of random shop names, fake misspelled reviews, and counterfeit products while searching for just about anything. What happened? China happened.

Between 40% to 48% of top third-party sellers on Amazon are operating out of China. The massive growth in Chinese third-party sellers has been fairly recent and transformative.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Muslim Beheads Man on French Street, and Here We Go Again Once again we get the same mind-numbing denial and willful ignorance we always see after jihad attacks. Robert Spencer

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/muslim-beheads-man-french-street-and-here-we-go-robert-spencer/

It happened again on Friday: a Muslim migrant from Chechnya, screaming “Allahu akbar,” beheaded a schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, on a street in a Paris suburb for the crime of showing cartoons of Muhammad to his students. The response to this gruesome jihad murder has been as predictable, and dreary, and drearily predictable, as one might expect.

In response to the murder, French President Emmanuel Macron said: “This battle is ours and it is existential. They will not pass. Obscurantism and the violence that goes with it will not win. They will not divide us. That’s what they seek and we must stand together.”

This sounds great on the first hearing. That’s the idea. But in reality, “They will not divide us” is a statement that is designed to reassure Muslims in France. Macron is saying that he will do nothing to “divide” the supposedly happily united French people. What would “divide” them? Well, something like scrutinizing the Islamic death penalty for blasphemy and challenging Muslim leaders in France to repudiate it explicitly and declare their support for the freedom of speech, and to demonstrate their sincerity by instituting programs in mosques and Islamic schools in France to teach against Sharia blasphemy laws and emphasize the importance of the freedom of speech. That would “divide us.” Macron is saying it won’t happen, as expected.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Biden Emails Prove Impeachment Was A Sham The New York Post story shows once and for all that Trump’s impeachment was all based on a lie.By David Marcus

Posted By on October 19th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/17/the-biden-emails-prove-impeachment-was-a-sham/

Remember January? I know it feels like several lifetimes ago, the before times of life as we used to know it. But think back to the biggest story of those chilly days. It wasn’t the Chinese virus slowly spreading to our shores or the Democratic presidential primary. No, it was the impeachment of the president of the United States. This week’s bombshell New York Post story on Hunter Biden now shows what many of us suspected: The impeachment was a ridiculous sham.

The basis for the impeachment, for those whose recollections are understandably shaky, was that President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to launch investigations into the energy company Burisma for the purely political purpose of hurting Joe Biden. Central to that allegation was the argument that Trump and the United States had no legitimate interest in seeing Burisma investigated. If the trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop are accurate, and they have not been disputed, then this argument falls to pieces.

Pam Bondi, working for the Trump defense team, said this back during the national ordeal about the Democratic House managers’ constant attempts to call allegations against the Bidens “baseless”:

In their trial memorandum, the House managers describe this as baseless. Now, why did they say that? Why did they invoke Biden or Burisma over 400 times? The reason they needed to do that is because they’re here saying that the president must be impeached and removed from office for raising a concern. And that’s why we have to talk about this today. They say ‘sham.’ They say ‘baseless.’ They say this because if it’s OK for someone to say, ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe there’s something here worth raising,’ then their case crumbles.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Joe Biden, the father of ‘Borking’ By George Neumayr,

Posted By on October 18th, 2020

Supreme Court nomination hearings have gone from serene to savage, thanks largely to Joe Biden.

As head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over the infamous Robert Bork hearings. His smearing of Bork for his original-intent judicial philosophy transformed hearings for Supreme Court nominees into bloody ideological battles. Henceforth, all conservative nominees were subjected to “Borking.”

Brutal to Bork from the start, Biden treated him not as a serious judge but as a stooge for what Biden called the “Reagan-Meese” agenda. Biden’s transparently unfair treatment of Bork was so bad even The Washington Post editorialized against Biden at the time:

While claiming that Judge Bork will have a full and fair hearing, Senator Joseph Biden this week has pledged to civil rights groups that he will lead the opposition to the confirmation. As the Queen of Hearts said to Alice, “Sentence first—Verdict Afterward.”

How can he possibly get a fair hearing from Biden, who has already cast himself as the role of prosecutor instead of a juror in the Judiciary Committee? If there is a strong, serious case to be argued against Judge Bork, why do so many Democrats seem unwilling to make it and afraid to listen to the other side?

In a forecast of what his own judiciary would look like, Biden opposed Bork not because he lacked the legal credentials to be on the court – Bork was considered one of the leading legal scholars in the country – but because Bork didn’t conform to Biden’s view of a good judge as a leftwing legislator from the bench.

Biden lectured Bork: “Will we retreat from our tradition of progress or will we move forward, continuing to expand and envelop the rights of individuals in a changing world which is bound to have an impact upon those individuals’ sense of who they are and what they can do?…In passing on this nomination to the Supreme Court, we must also pass judgment on whether or not your particular philosophy is an appropriate one at this time in history.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Restitution, reparations and sins of the fathers Diane Bederman

Posted By on October 18th, 2020

https://dianebederman.com/restitution-reparations-and-sins-of-the-fathers/

Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin. (Deut 24: 16)

Deuteronomy refers to human justice as administered in a court of law. How can mere mortals decide the extent to which one person’s crime was induced by the influence of others? Clearly the judicial process must limit itself to the observable facts. The person who committed the crime is guilty. Those who may have shaped his character are not.

The guilt of previous generations would not be attached to them.

So how did we devolve into blaming the people of today, for the sins of their fathers, and then suggest reparations from generations far removed from the event?

A movement supporting reparations as a way to make amends for the atrocities of slavery and to reduce the persistent wealth gap is gaining momentum. One hundred and forty-two members of Congress support H.R. 40, the bill to study reparations. William Darity, professor of public policy at Duke University  and his wife, Kirsten Mullen, made the most comprehensive case for a reparations program in their latest book “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.” They argue a meaningful program to eliminate the existing Black-White wealth gap requires an allocation of between $10 trillion and $12 trillion, or about $800,000 to each eligible Black household.