Rhinocrisy

Having heard the phrase for the six hundred and fifteenth time today, I now proclaim the official slogan of the 2008 campaign season to be:
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

A bit late, as usual, I finally got around to watching some of the “Winter Soldier” hearings, testimony by anti-war Iraq veterans about their war-time and post-war experiences. For the unlettered, the hearings were conducted by Iraq Veterans Against the War and mimic the eponymous hearings of yesteryear held by Vietnam veterans. As expected, the testimony is sometimes nauseating and sometimes heartbreaking, and quite often insightful. The sort of thing you should show to your mom. Check it out, if you have ten minutes to spare.

1. Spam.

2. Logging in to random websites to post comments.

There is no reason why I should have to register on your dickhead blog or news site if I want to make a casual remark. Other than to allow you to sell my email address to spammers.

3. ‘Social networking’ sites.

Probably this is because I don’t have any friends. Nevertheless it strikes me as criminal to call the sort of activity that occurs on such websites as ’social’.

4. Attention span.

The fundamental unit of entertainment has been broken down further by the advent of the video clip, now averaging less than ten minutes. (Adult Swim demonstrates that this breakdown is creeping back into other media). The half-life of memory is now probably less than a week.

5. Invisibility.

In the internet, our solopsistic nightmare grows deeper and more pervasive. Here you can be anyone, and so you are no one. Are you shouting into the void? Into a hollow bag? Into a packed amphitheater, or an empty box canyon? Does your voice have reach, and influence? Does it move anyone or anything? Are you whispering in your own ear? Who knows? But watch that hit counter go up!

6. Pretension.

On the heels of the former comes the latter - I might be anyone, and therefore I am Siegfried and Enoch and Nestor in one body. And we, collectively, are an invincible army - our words and deeds will change the fabric of history, both past and present.

7. Isolation.

It’s actually just me and my keyboard alone, here, and this unseeing eye that glares back at me.

One of my all-time favorites.

We are (as of this posting) apparently still only the #5 google hit for “dinosaurs with lasers“. There is much to do.

Barack Obama gave what we are told was an important speech on race last night, wherein he addressed the claptrap surrounding his former preacher, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The speech is a mixed affair, reflecting Obama’s fine and dark qualities. He defends his preacher as a friend and as a good man, despite their disagreements, a brave stand to make, I think. But he also is clear in divorcing himself from the man’s statements and placing himself firmly in the consensus of the American political class:

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

I gather it’s unnecessary for me to outline the many ways in which I disagree with this paragraph, the core of Obama’s speech, and the most important statement he made yesterday with respect to his candidacy. I’ve always felt that Obama, since his first appearance on the national stage, has given short shrift to the oppression of black people, of the impact that institutional and otherwise racism has on the lives of many - most - black Americans today. And in the end, after outlining all the ways that racism divides America, Obama’s speech, in demanding unity, in demanding transcendence of race, denies the specific problems plaguing the black community. After stripping away his eloquence and his acknowledgment of their difficulties, Obama’s recommendations are kin to those of any white conservative - mend your own house, and stop thinking about race.

He’s right - many of our problems do transcend race. But many do not, and Obama has made these largely invisible. For example, I’ve been dismayed that no one in this presidential election has raised the subject of prisons, and that Obama ignored the opportunity to discuss it. Right now, 3% of all black people in this country are behind bars, and many more will end up there over the course of their lifetimes. More black men will end up in prison than will go to college. This is not an accidental difference - it is the product of specific policies which, whether or not they were made to victimize black people, nevertheless end up disproportionately affecting them. A similar comparison might be made of urban public schools - again, disproportionately black, and overwhelmingly in worse shape due to our negligence. And let’s not forget the most egregious example of public aid failure in the past few years, the sad treatment of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. America consistently fails to guard the futures of black Americans.

It’s sad to see America’s first black president ignore these failures, or gloss over them to advance some mythical notion of unity. It throws black anger back into their faces. We all know who will be remembered and who will be forgotten in a ‘unified’ America.

Just keeping you up-to-date in the very latest on some people’s quest to replace women with animatronic equivalents.

Of course, a reasonable question is, are they really aiming for fem-bots, or for flaming fag-bots?

Strangely enough, boredom was never an issue, because he always had something to think about. In fact, his urge to ponder the question became terrifying at times, and he would emerge after a five-hour binge of scribbling in his notebooks sweating, his mind still buzzing with prospects, with outlandish visions for the future.
Read the rest of this entry »

In this article in the LA Times, one Heather MacDonald contends that there is no “rape crisis” on college campuses and the idea that a significant number of young women in college are raped every year is a ridiculous myth advanced by crazy feminists. Her evidence for this claim is that college rape crisis centers don’t receive many calls. Using similar logic, I have deduced that no one actually uses this new-fangled “Internet” contraption because our blog readership still hovers in the low single digits.^*

MacDonald spends a good deal of time critiquing the methodology of one Mary Koss, who did some pioneering work in the late 1980s on the subject of date rape on college campuses. MacDonald finds Koss’s methodology suspect and concludes it is designed to inflate the numbers and manufacture a “rape crisis” so that feminists can get on with the program of reducing men to castrated tote-bag holders and baby-nappy changers. Rah rah rah!

It may surprise you to learn, however, that Koss’s paper was not the only one on the subject! Using my favorite methodology, “a few minutes of careless searching”, I found one of these papers, which you can read here (but only with a JSTOR subscription). The authors are quite careful about their methodology (which is relatively unambiguous in its manner of questioning), and they find 20% of women reporting unwanted attempted intercourse and 10% reporting unwanted intercourse (rape - 71% said “no” explicitly) out of a sample of 518 college women. Female alcohol use was present in the majority of cases (65% in the third category), but even if this puts rape in a “gray area” (as MacDonald suggests), this only eliminates 65% of incidents, still leaving a substantial number of rape incidents going on every year. Criticisms could be made of this methodology, of course, but we shouldn’t expect the numbers to change by an order of magnitude. Shockingly, MacDonald presents no studies that manage to knock down the basic claim.

Most interesting to me, however, was who the women described unwanted incidents to:

Saaaayy… do you think that might explain why no one is ringing up rape crisis centers? Because talking to a stranger is like, the hardest possible way to deal with a rape? Surely no…

The real problem, as Heather MacDonald tells us, is that women are tarting it up instead of keeping their chastity belts on:

Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: “When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act … and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me’ or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.”

And that, my friends, is evidence you can take to the fucking bank.

^* Hi Bob!

From yesterday’s Hawaii primaries:

One would-be vote at Kawananakoa Middle School said he and his wife turned around after being unable to find a parking space and seeing police ticket illegally parked cars near the school.

Yes, an orderly parking regimen clearly outweighs the import of the democratic process.