Roosh V Is the Troll Toxic Radfem Deserves

As recently as a few days ago, I had a pretty low opinion of Daryush Valizadeh. The progeny of an Iranian father and an Armenian mother, Valizadeh -- or Roosh V, as he's more commonly known -- has become public enemy number one for radical feminism, or toxic radfem as I call it.

My personal opinion of pick up artists as a general rule is not high. In my personal opinion, they've set out to commonly objectify people in a quest for shallow sexual gratification. The impression I personally have about pick up artists is that they do this with virtually no care for the feelings of the people they objectify.

So even though I was disgusted by the behaviour of a Montreal feminist who led a swarm assault on Roosh V, I also had a very low regard for Roosh himself.

That slowly began to change as I gained a better understanding of who Roosh V is and what he's really about. That eventually culminated in his recent interview with Ezra Levant, and mine is a changed mind.

I've come to realize that Roosh V is a lot of things. But if I had to quantify it, I'd estimate it as follows: he's 50% serious about some serious issues, 20% comedian, 20% satirist, 10% provocateur. And all troll, but a troll in the George Takei vein: a troll with a very specific agenda which he genuinely believes is in the best interests of western civilization, and which he pursues in the most irreverent fashion imaginable. And like Takei he has a horse in the race.

His approach is that of the old-school wrestling heel who gets on the mic and says deliberately-provocative things to get his targets riled up. In pro wrestling, they refer to it as "cheap heat." Roosh V is absolutely swimming in it.

He says that rape should be legal. He says that women should submit to him. Just like Rowdy Roddy Piper always told the people of Tallahassee that the women of Tallahassee are the fattest and ugliest on the whole planet. And told the people of Raleigh the same thing about the women of Raleigh. And of course he always really meant it all of the time, right?

Let me put it to you this way: answer that question in a particular way, and you're a complete mark. That ain't a good thing to be.

The radical feminists of Montreal, the radical feminists of Toronto, and various civic politicians (as well as numerous NDP candidates) have effectively outed themselves as complete marks; people who can be taunted, baited, and insulting into giving someone exactly the reaction they want.

This isn't only how old-school wrestling heels work. It's also how trolls work. Trolls love cheap heat. It's their specialty.

In with the comments designed to be deliberately-provocative, Roosh also sprinkles some truth. Perhaps every bit as important as that, he also draws them out and makes them expose themselves for who they really are.

The Montreal incident is a classic example. A vengeful feminist threw a beer in his face. That's not a big deal, and it wouldn't be if that was all that happened. But it quickly became apparent that throwing a beer in his face wasn't enough. She then had to savagely berate him, which also wouldn't be a big deal if that had been all that happened.

She and a mob of her fellow toxic radfem psychos and their beta male toadies then followed him up the street, attempting to physically attack him all the way. They then sent out a torrent of tweets encouraging other people to also attack him. One Quebec beta even made Facebook comments wishing rape on Roosh's unborn hypothetical daughter. And received applause from self-described feminists for it.

All this over someone who wins if he can do so little as have a meet and great with forty guys in Toronto on Saturday.

Perhaps that in itself is the most revealing thing of all: the tolerance of toxic radfem to opposing ideas is so low that they seek to prohibit something so seemingly insignificant.

Roosh V is the troll toxic radfem deserves.

This is What You'd Call "Salvaging Teh Narrative"

With the cat publicly out of the bag regarding just how insane the plight of Gregory Alan Elliott really is, and with the cat out of the bag regarding just how vicious and vindictive his accusers are, it's been interesting to see how the tables have turned.

Since a recent National Post article written by Christie Blatchford, it's also been remarkable to see the supporters of Steph Guthrie and Heather Reilly flock to try to salvage the narrative. I've previously examined an ethically-questionable Canadaland blogpost by Anne Theriault wherein the author essentially tried to shame Blatchford for publishing details of the case that are certainly portray Guthrie's and Reilly's conduct in a less-than-flattering light.

The general modus operandi of Guthrie's and Reilly's followers can be described quite simply: suppress the facts. They are smart enough to understand that their narrative cannot survive with those facts in the open.

But there was one supporter of Guthrie and Reilly who attempted to adopt a different tactic. National Post Full Comment blogger Alheli Picazo attempted a different tactic. She acknowledged the disturbing conduct of Guthrie and Reilly, but tried to muddy the waters by claiming the case had exposed Guthrie and Reilly to online harassment.

Then there was this:

"Should charges against Elliott be dismissed, Guthrie and Reilly, and their group of vocal public supporters, will be inundated with more misogynistic attacks from angry MRAs, including threats of rape or murder. It’s happened before. It will again."

It essentially amounted to: sure Guthrie (in particular) set out to harass people, and sure Guthrie (in particular) expressed a callous indifference to whether or not she was ruining lives, or even potentially driving someone to suicide. MRAs are bad, and that's somehow become central to this case.

Picazo's blogpost is essentially the kind of intellectual puffery you'd expect from someone attempted to look based without actually being based. While acknowledging the catastrophic damage done to teh narrative she still tries to salvage it by invoking -- often without evidence, or even being able to link the two -- MRAs and harassment.

That became all the more clear when Picazo was deemed by the toxic radfem mob to have not sufficiently dismissed Guthrie's and Reilly's ill conduct, and she rushed to write this blogpost, this time on her own blog. Wherein she twists herself into pretzels trying to still hate on Elliott.

It features gems like the following:

"To those accusing me of seeking to defend Blatchford, as intent to undermine Guthrie/Reilly, or as somehow actively championing an odious twitter persona I’m on the record as having no sympathy for..."

"I am genuinely concerned about the fallout should a verdict not favour the complainants."

"None of this diminishes the complainants’ perceived sense of fear, nor does it excuse Eliiott’s alleged behaviour."

"... Should the judge rule in Elliott’s favour, it ensures the focus remains on the Crown’s potential shortcomings rather than the validity of the complainants’ experience.

One can believe the allegations, even support the complainants, while recognizing evidentiary weaknesses."

These particular passages from Picazo's "explanatory" blogpost raise some serious questions about just how Picazo herself has judged whose side to take.

She makes herself perfectly clear here: she's on the side of Guthrie and Reilly. That's her prerogative. But having claimed to have read the available court documents, there are some clearly-glaring inconsistencies between Picazo's take and the facts of the case, as they've emerged through in-court testimony.

Most key is that Guthrie and Reilly testified to a feeling of being "creeped out," rather than fear. In my mind it's worth noting that "creeped out" is typically a term people use to attack people they don't like, rather than an actual expression of fear. In fact, at specific points in her testimony Guthrie (in particular) seemed tacitly unwilling to testify that she was genuinely afraid of Elliott.

If Bendilin Spurr put on the stand, I wonder if he could honestly say the same of Guthrie?

Picazo stipulates that she is concerned about the fallout from the case, specifically if the outcome doesn't favour Guthrie and Reilly. And of the evidence? Evidence be damned. The evidence is weak, but Picazo has still judged Elliott to be guilty. And she did that all the way back in 2012.

All this while constantly complaining about "harassment" of the complainants. She specifically refers to rape threats and death threats "from MRAs."

Not only does she not provide any evidence of any rape threats or death threats toward Guthrie or Reilly -- although I've seen plenty of common mockery -- that she attributes them to "angry MRAs" is very telling. For the toxic radfem mob there is no dog whistle to which they are more sensitive than that of MRA. Many of them seem to believe that there is an MRA hiding under every rock, behind every tree.

Here's where this takes a really ironic twist. First off, I can't think of any publicly-documented instances of feminists -- or even women, for that matter -- being besieged (literally besieged) by "angry MRAs." But it's a matter of public record that a University of Virgina fraternity spent a period of weeks last year with their home besieged (literally besieged) by angry radical feminists, all over rape allegations that turned out to be false. It's also a matter of public record that attendees of an MRA event at the University of Toronto were forced to first run a gauntlet of abusive radical feminists who berated them, cajoled them and insulted them every step of the way. There were even reports of violent threats.

Secondly, I myself have been threatened with violence by one of Picazo's followers. I'll decline to mention the individual by name, but essentially this amounted to some muscle dummy threatening to break my face because I used the phrase "self-styled," and he didn't know what it meant. (When you consider how often that phrase appears in comic books, that speaks volumes as to his reading level.)

I wasn't particularly intimidated by it, but it's very telling as to just how serious Picazo is about threats and harassment.

Picazo, erstwhile crusader against online threats and harassment, chose to say nothing that day. In fact, she chose to talk some smack about me with the guy who was literally minutes away from making a violent threat. (It also strikes me as a comment on the character of Picazo's online personae that she chose to do that after I'd agreed with her that Moncton shooter Justin Bourque is a domestic terrorist.)

So don't be taken in by Alheli Picazo's talk about harassment and threats. It's not anything that she's genuinely concerned about, it's just her last-ditch effort to salvage teh narrative. And she's utterly transparent.

Joss Whedon Didn't Understand Social Justice Warriors

Joss Whedon must have thought himself very clever. Very clever, indeed.

See, Whedon was a man with a problem: most of the media properties he ever created or adapted had deeply conservative ideas at their core.

But he so desperately wanted to be one of who he thought the cool kids were. So he had to find a way to masquerade as a leftist. So first he made a video suggesting that electing Mitt Romney as President of the United States would result in a zombie apocalypse. (That there have been numerous violent outbreaks which roughly resemble the zombie apocalypse under Barack Obama simply reveals how insightful Whedon's leftist bleatings have been... not very.)

This wasn't enough. So Whedon decided to cozy up to who he -- with his epic lack of insight -- thought was the coolest kid of all: Anita Sarkeesian. He would masquerade as a feminist social justice warrior, even though nearly everything in nearly anything he ever produced was bound to disgust your average SJdub.

For a while, things were good. He helped Sarkeesian -- who despite having establishment feminists pushing her very hard down people's throats, is something of a nonentity within the media which she criticizes -- raise her profile. She at least seemed to be helping him evade criticism for the distinctly-non-social-justicey nature of his work.

Then Avengers Age of Ultron dropped, and Whedon began to receive harassment and threats over Twitter. But not from #Gamergate, who he liked to being like the KKK. Rather, it was all from the SJdub allies he had attempted to cultivate by associating with Sarkeesian.

This included Sarkeesian's producer and writer, Johathon McIntosh, whose attack on Age of Ultron contained eye-roll-inducing phrases such as "toxic hegemonic masculinity."

Somewhere Whedon is reading McIntosh's tweets and declaring "curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

Not-at-all-ironically, The Mary Sue -- a website typically obsessed with online harassment -- simply declined to recognize the virulent harassment of Whedon by radical feminists, who themselves did not understand the film.

(It was his own fault, really, Whedon had the gross misfortune to be born without a vagina, so of course TMS will ignore harassment of him by toxic radical feminists.)

The complaint of the toxic radical feminists in question was that the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansen) described herself as a "monster" after explaining how she was sterilized as part of her assassin training. (The detail that she was sterilized so that having a family would never distract her from being a killing machine somehow managed to elude them.)

Some demanded to know who permitted Whedon to write the Widow character. I can only presume they would have preferred she remain fertile so she could go on to have, like, a hundred abortions.

It's not Whedon's fault that he was targeted for concentrated harassment by toxic radical feminists. That's the fault of those targeting him. But it is his fault that he deluded himself about his place in the grand scheme of what passes for toxic radical feminist "thought."

In future he'll know better.

The Real Rape Culture on Campus, Part Two

 If colleges and universities produce the next wave of a society's leaders, the next wave of toxic radfem's leaders are going to be an amazing ineffectual bunch.

Just how ineffectual are the next generation of toxic radical feminism's leaders going to be? Well, they're going to be so busy insisting that ideas that conflict with their own are "harming" them that they may find themselves far too busy to formulate, define, and defend their own ideas.

For a quick example of this, check out the toxic radfem backlash against a scheduled speech by Christina Hoff-Sommers at Oberlin College.

Apparently radical feminists on the Oberlin campus have taken the impending presence of Hoff-Sommers as some sort of existential threat. They're literally declaring that Hoff-Sommers being permitted to speak on the Oberlin campus is going to "harm" them.

What's Hoff-Sommers going to do that's so dangerous to radical feminists? She's going to give a factual discussion about rape on campus.

One thing has become clear, particularly in recent weeks: the factual foundation of the so-called campus rape epidemic was shaky from the get-go, and the facts of the matter demonstrate that, in fact, there is no such thing as a campus rape epidemic.

That's what seems to be so threatening to these ideologues. After all, they've made out like bandits under the shadow of the campus rape panic, and they intend to keep doing so, so much so that they've congealed into an online mob to try to shame or rhetorically-intimidate event organizers into not permitting Hoff-Sommers to set so much as a foot on campus.

The most sobering thing about it is that all of this is happening in the wake of the University of Virginia rape hoax -- a rape hoax in which toxic radfem transformed into a literally violent mob which may have succeeded not in bringing down a fraternity chapter falsely accused of rape, but Rolling Stone magazine.

These are people who apparently stopped to ponder nothing, question nothing, learn nothing.

This is the real rape culture on campus: an ideological movement that is not above using force and coercion to attain gratification -- as literal a definition of rape as there can be. The difference is that the real rape culture on campus, unlike the fictional (yes, fictional) rape culture on campus, is that the rape culture that is toxic radfem is non-sexual in nature.

But it's a rape culture no less. And unlike the fictional (I say again: yes, fictional) rape culture demanding unfettered access to women's bodies, the real rape culture demands unfettered and exclusive access to people's minds. Or else.

And so I say to the following people on Oberlin college campus -- to Lydia Smith, Sarah MacFadden, Juliana Feline, Stevie Anne, Madalyn Berg, and all the other proponents of the real rape culture on Oberlin College's campus -- no means no. And don't you forget it.

The Real Rape Culture on Campus

The gray lady, she shall never be the same.

She's been violated. Will she survive her victimization? And if so, will she survive intact? Only time will tell.

But what of her victimization? Well, it just so happens that there really is such a thing as a rape culture. But the real rape culture is that of social justice ideologies that exist to force their ideas into the minds of as many people as it can, to colonize as many institutions with its toxicity as it can.

It's not a sexual rape. It's not a rape of the body. It's a rape of the mind, and make no mistake, journalism has been raped.

For evidence of that, one needs look no further than the vile hoax perpetrated by Sabrina Rubin Erdley, whose story entitled "A Rape on Campus" was published by Rolling Stone. The story sparked a firestorm on university campuses across the world. It was also completely false.

Before other outlets began to do the pesky work of actually fact-checking Erdley's article, Erdley spent some time as a media darling. She was treated to slathering praise on such media outlets as MSNBC, wherein she was toasted for helping to crack the case on the "rape epidemic" on American university campuses.

Thankfully, this didn't last.

The story slowly unravelled until today, when the last thread was pulled. After the New York Times published a damning account of Erdley's shoddy journalistic work, Rolling Stone finally retracted her article in full.

But it turns out that there was more to the story than simply Erdley reporting a story she had been told. Rather, Erdley spent months going from campus to campus, "shopping" for the most sensational rape story she could find. Erdley had been to Harvard, Yale and Penn State (yes, that Penn State) before she finally found "Jackie," who claimed she'd been brutally gang raped at a fraternity party.

The story had literally everything Erdley was looking for, including convenient rape villains.

Even now, in the wake of the story's proven falsity, there are signs that the ideological violation of journalism may be harder to shake than it should be. Far, far harder to shake.

In Politico, UVA student Julia Horowitz offers her personal explanation for why the story got so much traction at UVA. The following excerpts offer a stunning revelation: Horowitz has learned nothing.

"The University of Virginia — like most American universities — has a problem with rape. Current estimates, cited earlier this year by Vice President Joe Biden, hold that one in five women will be sexually assaulted while in college. That means that in my 200-person politics lecture, roughly a full row will be filled with survivors. In my 20-person major seminar, there are at least two. That is not a calculus I should have to work out in the margins of my Marx-Engels reader."

"We were frustrated by the repeated use of the 'Rugby Road' song, which appeared to make fun of the rape culture on campus but which most students, in fact, had never heard."

"... from where I sit in Charlottesville, to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake."

"Yes, the story was sensational. But even the most sensational story, it seems, can contain frightening elements of truth."

Clearly, Horowitz continues to staunchly believe that there is a "rape culture" on campus. She invokes the "1 in 5" canard, despite the study on which it's based having been thoroughly discredited. And she actually attempts to sublimate a disdain for fact-checking that she and Erdley share in common, and was in fact the very reason for this entire debacle in the first place.

Hopefully, someone at UVA is making Horowitz an appointment with a dunce cap. Perhaps she'd manage to learn something from that, even if she has learned nothing from the ignominious ending of Erdley's journalistic career.

And it is over, make no mistake about this. It's over as a reporter, and it had damn well better be over as a journalism instructor.

And in a terrifying portent for the future of journalism, it just so happens that Erdley has taught journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, and at Temple University.

Sabrina Rubin Erdley wrote a story based on a false account of gang rape. Rolling Stone published it. A group of young men were terrorized out of their fraternal home by a mob of psychos similarly-indocrinated into social justice ideologies as was Erdley, as was Horowitz. And from the looks of it, the next generation of journalists may be ready to rush out and repeat the injustice all over again with the same disdain for fact checking.

How could they not? Apparently they were taught by Erdley.

And when they do this, large swaths of the journalistic landscape will accept it unquestionably. Because of the narrative. Because of the agenda. Increasingly in journalism it's becoming the narrative, the agenda, that matters.

It's been an institutional rape of terrifying proportions, with horrifying results. Will the gray lady survive this violation? Only time will tell.

Actually, It's About Ethics in Villainous Internal Monologues

So, did Marvel Comics take a cheap shot at #Gamergate?

This appears in the most recent issue of Loki: Agent of Asgard.

Many #Gamergate supporters are not impressed. They feel as if Marvel Comics has taken a shot at them to *ahem* avenge criticism they've faced over the new Thor.

Speaking for myself, I don't buy it.

Perhaps if this quip had come from a character such as Tony Stark that would be one thing. But the quip comes from Loki. Not only a villain, but the single most treacherous and deceitful villain in all of Marvel Comics. A character who, as he is literally the God of Mischief, would likely look at all the chaos and discord social justice warriors have sewn in the world and approve of it.

Taking character motivations into account, even if writer Al Ewing intended to take a shot at #Gamergate, that's not the message that realistically comes through.

As for female Thor: as I understand it, the objection many comic books fans have raised have less to do with the actual change, and more to do with the contrived way in which it was done.

Even then, everyone needs to relax. The idea of Thor as a woman has an interesting novelty. For a time that will drive sales, then when the novelty is gone Marvel will change things back.

Remember, this is the company that couldn't keep 90-year-old May Parker dead (bless her fictional soul).

Azealia Banks & the New Nadir of Social Justice ideology

For an ideology with such lofty goals, social justice ideology certainly manages to stoop to some shocking lows. Every time you think this ideology has reached it's nadir, it manages to stoop even lower.

Enter Azealia Banks.

Azealia Banks would really, really like people to think that she's all about teh social justice. She's openly declared herself a feminist and anti-racist. (Yet she assailed Iggy Azalea under the vaguely-racist guise of "cultural appropriation.") Yet while she quickly built an audience among the LGBTQ community, she's quickly alienated them with her own ignorant behaviour.

She seems to love the word "faggot," and spits it with the zeal of the most stereotypical homophobic redneck you could possibly imagine.

This has led to torrents of criticism from an audience -- gay men -- that Banks seems to think she had locked up. And so in an effort to stave off the criticism, Banks has apparently chosen to shield herself from criticism of her homophobic behaviour with feminism.

"The word 'faggot' came to me from my mother. And it was never a thing about a guy being gay. It was always just a man who hates women. You can be gay or straight. You can be a straight faggot… Faggots are men who want to bring women down, fuck with their heads, control them.

I definitely think a lot of the time with the 'white gay media' – especially with female artists – in order for you to seem successful or seem feminine you have to desire their approval. I feel like a lot of times gay men can be way more misogynistic than even straight men. Even how they come to you picking at your hair, telling you you're fat, telling you all this other shit. Telling you how to be a woman. What the fuck do you know about being a woman?

To be homophobic would imply that I'm, like, 'I can't sit next to a gay man cuz Imma catch the gay, but I already caught the gay. I feel like when I use the word 'faggot,' it comes from, like, a feminist point of view, not a homophobic point of view. It's really just kinda like you feel attacked as a woman."

So to Banks it isn't all gay men she hates. It's just white gay men. The gay white devil. That's supposed to make it all better one imagines, intersectionality and all.

Of course in theory intersectionality is supposed to teach social justice advocates that oppression exists across a wide variety of identities, all of which intersect throughout the population of people who the ideology considers oppressed.

This often also leads to an almost-mathematic tallying of alleged victimhood, wherein people who consider themselves oppressed rank their oppression over the oppression of others. For example, Azealia Banks is a black bisexual woman. Allegedly oppressed as black, bisexual, and a woman. So of course she feels she may disparage those who allegedly not as allegedly-oppressed as she.

But as a general rule, feminists -- even those who believe in intersectionality -- do not accept or tolerate homophobia. So attempting to excuse homophobia by hiding behind feminism shows only how out-of-touch she is with feminism.

Of course feminism isn't the only subvariant of social justice ideology that Banks attempts to hide behind, yet is oddly non-compliant with. In a 2014 feud with Australian rapper Iggy Azalea, Banks accused her, as a white person in hip hop, of "cultural appropriation."

Banks earned any fandom she had in the gay community by absorbing influences from the sub-culture of black gay men into her music. Azealia Banks is not a black, gay, man. Ergo, she herself is guilty of cultural appropriation. You need not believe in the uniquely-bigoted concept of cultural appropriation to realize that Banks is non-compliant.

So should Azealia Banks be excused for her rampant racism and homophobia? Well, I'm not a gay man so it's not up to me to decide. But for any such person who is thinking of forgiving Banks, it seems necessary to remind them that social justice ideologues would suggest that perhaps they've internalized the oppression that is at the root of Banks' behaviour.

Unless social justice ideologues are prepared to expel Banks from under their ideological umbrella this will simply represent a new low these identity zealots have stooped to; a new nadir for social justice ideology.

Anita Sarkeesian, Jonathon McIntosh and the Battle for the New Modernity

I'm sure this thought has occurred to Gamergate supporters from time to time as they ponder the contributions of Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathon McIntosh -- or, more specifically, the ideology they represent -- to the unethical mush that has become video games journalism.

At times some have certainly even wondered: do these two matter at all?

For my part, the answer is yes. But the threat these two pose to reason itself -- yes, to reason itself -- looms far greater than the quality of their academic work justifies. But in order to show this to be true, first the shortcomings of their work must be laid bare.

I'm certain this is another thought that has occurred to Gamergate supporters: just what is their problem, anyway? Why are they doing this?

The answer is both simpler and more complex than you may think: their problem is with modernity.

Just what is modernity? Perhaps most simply described, modernity is the prevailing ideological construct shaping the way in which we see the world around us. It's a combination of the technological, scientific, religious, intellectual and philosophical state of the modern world. Essentially modernity is what is modern.

Under no conditions is it, or should it be, static. In their book Empire, Thomas Hardt and Anthonio Negri explain how modernity evolved through the Renaissance into the Enlightenment, and beyond:

"Modernity is not a unitary concept but rather appears in at least two modes. The first mode is the one we have already defined, a radical revolutionary process. This modernity destroys its relations with the past and declares the immanence ofthe new paradigm of the world and life. It develops knowledge and action as scientific experimentation and defines a tendency toward a democratic politics, posing humanity and desire at the center ofhistory. From the artisan to the astronomer, from the merchant to the politician, in art as in religion, the material of existence is reformed by a new life.

This new emergence, however, created a war. How could such a radical overturning not incite strong antagonism? How could this revolution not determine a counterrevolution? There was indeed a counterrevolution in the proper sense of the term: a cultural, philosophical, social, and political initiative that, since it could neither return to the past nor destroy the new forces, sought to dominate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and dynamics. This is the second mode of modernity, constructed to wage war against the new forces and establish an overarching power to dominate them. It arose within the Renaissance revolution to divert its direction, transplant the new image of humanity to a transcendent plane, relativize the capacities of science to transform the world, and above all oppose the reappropriation of power on the part of the multitude. The second mode of modernity poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire. The Renaissance thus ended in war— religious, social, and civil war."

The counter-revolution prevailed and the vanquished paid the price. Copernicus was forced to recant his heretical claim -- in time proven true -- that the Earth orbits the sun, and was imprisoned regardless.

But though the conflict was over the ultimate result had yet to be decided. An Enlightenment was coming.

The cultural conflicts that marked the Renaissance had to become the Enlightenment somehow. As Negri and Hardt explain, what was needed as a mediatory measure:

"The ontological dualism of the culture of the ancien regime had to be replaced by a functional dualism, and the crisis of modernity had to be resolved by means of adequate mechanisms of mediation.

...Nature and experience are unrecognizable except through the filter of phenomena; human knowledge cannot be achieved except through the reflection of the intellect; and the ethical world is incommunicable except through the schematism of reason. What is at play is a form of mediation, or really a reflexive folding back and a sort of weak transcendence, which relativizes experience and abolishes every instance of the immediate and absolute in human life and history. Why, however, is this relativity necessary? Why cannot knowledge and will be allowed to claim themselves to be absolute? Because every movement of self-constitution of the multitude must yield to a preconstituted order, and because claiming that humans could immediately establish their freedom in being would be a subversive delirium. This is the essential core of the ideological passage in which the hegemonic concept of European modernity was constructed.

The first strategic masterpiece in this construction was accomplished by Rene Descartes. Although Descartes pretended to pursue a new humanistic project of knowledge, he really reestablished transcendent order. When he posed reason as the exclusive terrain of mediation between God and the world, he effectively reaffirmed dualism as the defining feature of experience and thought."

It was with reason acting as the arbiter between science and religion that humanity was able to move beyond the fractious revolutionary/counter-revolutionary conflict of the Renaissance, and adopt what would eventually evolve into contemporary modernity.

That was a wordy paragraph. Allow me to simplify it, if more for my sake if not for yours: ultimately however you may see the world around you, you see it that way because Rene Descartes was successfully able to advance the idea that the best way to settle debate was to think about it rationally.

Centuries later that seems so intuitive. Yet when Descartes originally posed this idea it was threatening to a great many people still.

Descartes was considered to be the definitive figure in how this conflict would be settled. His mode of mediation endured for a very long time indeed.

But with the rise of post-modernity there are those who have sought to cast off the Cartesian intellectual order, so that arguments rooted nigh-entirely in emotion can be advanced over those who prefer rational thought.

The locus of intersectional ideologies which belched Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathon McIntosh represent the tip of the metaphorical spear. They and their academic progenitors have come to see nearly everything about modernity in its current form as intolerable, and so they have done whatever they to portray its very existence as a crisis. Wherever they have found evidence of such a crisis they have exaggerated it. Where they have found no evidence of such a crisis they have fabricated it.

Where Sarkeesian's and McIntosh's generation of activists largely differs from their forebears is in their revolt against reason. To listen to the discourse of third-wave feminism is to be assaulted with a continual barrage of the importance of feelz over realz.

In other words: how they can make people feel about a particular claim is more important about whether or not that claim is actually real.

A specific example: Sarkeesian's claim that video games normalize violence against women. There's no evidence for this whatsoever. In fact, the evidence openly defies this claim, as rates of violent crime have declined precipitously across the board.

But in presenting scenes of violence against women in video games, Sarkeesian wants you to feel as though this is a bad thing, with catastrophic consequences, and be angry about it even if the evidence -- what can be confirmed as real -- contradicts and disproves this.

Another example: the harassment Sarkeesian says she's received. She wants you to feel as though this is real and be angry about it even if she's never managed to produce convincing evidence of credible threats. Indeed, the alleged threats made against Sarkeesian -- particularly prior to a scheduled speech at Utah State University -- were deemed by police to not be credible.

Feelz over realz. Listen and believe. And reason be damned.

Anita Sarkeesian and Jonathon McIntosh are by no means the sole standard bearers for this anti-Cartesian shift, but for the time being they are the ones on whom I shall focus.

Consider this but the introduction. There is a long journey ahead of us.  It's dangerous to go alone.

Thinking the Inadvisable: TV's Newest Most Uncomfortable Moment Ever

What went wrong? First impressions tend to be lasting impressions. Most of the time, anyway.

Barbara Kean seemed so grounded a character. That was the first impression. But that impression began to slip as the series wore on. Within a few episodes, it was gone entirely. Barbara was what you may call a girl with a history: drugs, lesbians, possibly even crime, and the series' writers only know what else.

But last night's episode of Gotham hit a pop fly into left field.

There were plenty of shocking and/or uncomfortable moments in the episode. In case you haven't seen the episode I'll refrain from spoiling most of them. But it's necessary to spoil one in particular: an extremely-uncomfortable exchange between Barbara and Selina Kyle (Camren Bicondova).

Barbara -- still reeling from her discovery that James Gordon has moved on -- tells Kyle she's growing into "such a lovely young woman." She tries to touch Selina, but Selina shies away from contact.

She then takes Selina inside and offers her fancy clothes.

I instantly became a good deal more uncomfortable, but decided to sit on the particular thought that sprung to mind. Until I received a Tweet:

And she's a lesbian,maybe a pedophile too RT“@OutlawTory: Uh, I think I'm as creeped out by Babs right now as Selina is. #Gotham #nerdlife”
— Aѕнα (@ThiaBaybee) February 24, 2015

It turns out I was far from the only one to pick up this particular unwelcome vibe.

Why is this so interesting? Well it turns out that pedophilia isn't something that is associated with lesbians. A quick websearch turned up evidence of only a single study attempted into the subject. The study argued that pedophilia is more common among homosexuals than among heterosexuals, but this particular study strikes me as something not to be taken seriously.

At the risk of committing a genetic fallacy, it was published in the Regent University Law Review. What is the Regent University Law Review? "Regent University Law Review seeks to present academically excellent scholarship on relevant issues facing the legal community today from the perspective of a historic Christian worldview."

I'm not the type of person who is ordinarily dismissive of anything said by a Christian on the grounds that they are a Christian. That being said, socially-conservative Christians have hardly been welcome or accepting of LGBTQ people. So my first impulse is to take anything published in the Regent University Law Review which refers to "the homosexual movement" with a grain of salt.

The study garnered great interest on a number of fringe websites with track records I would consider questionable.

The other focal point of discussion on the subject of lesbians and pedophilia seems to centre around MRA (Men's Rights Activists) websites. While I have limited sympathies with MRAs (although I'd consider "men's studies academia" to be preferable to "men's rights activists"), this is not a discussion that I feel they've approached from a constructive perspective. From what I've seen, discussion of this subject on MRA websites has been more grievance-based than public interest-based.

That's just how I see it.

For their own part, MRAs seem to blame feminism for preventing any discussion of lesbians and pedophilia -- or, for that matter, homosexuality and pedophilia -- as a deliberate means of creating and/or maintaining an association between pedophilia and heterosexual men. In the case of toxic radical feminists, they may even be correct.

In the seeming absence of any serious study into the subject matter, no conclusion can currently be drawn.

A controversial 1999 study by Dr Harris Mirkin ponders, among some deeply objectionable ideas, one that is far more interesting.

The abstract of Dr Mirkin's paper reads as follows:

"There is a two-phase pattern of sexual politics. The first is a battle to prevent the battle, to keep the issue from being seen as political and negotiable. Psychological and moral categories are used to justify ridicule and preclude any discussions of the issue, and standard Constitutional guarantees are seen as irrelevant. The second phase more closely resembles traditional politics as different groups argue over rights and privileges. Feminist and gay/lesbian politics have recently entered the second phase, while pedophilia is in the first."

It stands to reason that in order for such issues to be considered "negotiable" there must be some sense of normalization. Discussion and good faith academic studies of these issues is necessary for that normalization. In the first phase, the battle to prevent the battle is waged by attempting to prevent discussion and study.

Let's make one thing crystal clear: pedophilia should never, ever be normalized. Ever. But key to preventing pedophiles from abusing children -- such as, say, through therapeutic means -- is a thorough understanding of it.

So while the goal cannot be to "normalize" pedophilia, serious study of it is obviously in the public interest, even though the subject alone is revolting and generally discouraging. I'd suggest that a problem that wreaks social and personal damage as deeply as pedophilia befits study through various methodologies, even if from limited perspectives, would be of tremendous societal benefit.

Dr Harris Mirkin credits feminism with the advancement of women's issues and LGBTQ issues from the first phase to the second phase.

In this he's definitely not wrong.

If "The Red Hood" episode of Gotham serves as a jumping off point tor second-phase discussion of pedophilia, an interesting detail is that Erin Richards, the actress who plays Barbara Kean, is a self-professed feminist.

Time, and how far Gotham is willing to take this uncomfortable moment, will tell just where this awkwardness leads.

Bad Company Dispatch #1 - Victor Vargas on Joey Winn's Quest, Gamergate, and Honeydicking

No, Promoting Anita Sarkeesian is NOT Education

The internets are alive with the sound of grumbling, as the Anti-Defamation League has released, for public consumption, a lesson plan entitled "Is Gaming a Boys Club? Women, Video Games, and Sexism."

It's a classical example of so-called "social justice education" in all of its ideology fervour, ruthlessness and factual paucity.

Intended for grade 11 and 12 students, the lesson plan is meant to deliver the message of Anita Sarkeesian into high school halls where it can warp the minds of impressionable youngsters and mold them into fatuous social justice warriors... that is, if it can actually be done within its 60 minute time limit. Which it actually can't. (More on this later.)

Putting it most simply, this lesson plan is an absolute mess.

The lesson plan provides 20 "vocabulary terms" students are to learn, and directs educators toward the ADL glossary in order to define them.

This matters because critical theorists routinely seek to redefine common words in order to suit their agenda. So the definition intended by the progenitors of this lesson plan very much matter. But unfortunately of the 20 vocabulary terms listed by the lesson plan only one -- sexism -- is defined by the ADL glossary.

Their definition reads as follows: "Prejudice and/or discrimination against people based on their real or perceived sex. Sexism is based on a belief (conscious or unconscious) that there is a natural order based on sex."

I have no objection whatsoever to the first portion of this definition. The latter, however, seems designed to implant notions of "patriarchy" into students, and accordingly skews the definition of sexism to apply only to sexism by men against women. It seems intended to preclude sexism by women against men. That's likely not coincidental, as radical feminists constantly declare that there's "no such thing as sexism against men."

It's also not coincidental that those who express these views are some of the most enthusiastic and self-satisfied sexists a person could ever hope to not meet.

Sexism isn't the only term that appears on ADL's vocabulary list that critical theorists have often set out to redefine. Also on the list are the following words:

-Abusive
-Cyberstalking
-Gamer
-Harassment

To leave these key words undefined is a serious issue for this lesson plan, particularly as each of them could be defined -- or re-defined, as is far more likely -- to deliberately create a power dynamic within the lesson plan that is solely to the benefit of the Cult of Sarkeesian.

A case in point is a now-infamous tweet in which Sarkeesian complains about abuse at the hands of "angry YouTubers." As it turns out, those individuals had merely exposed the factual shortcomings of Sarkeesian's work. Yet Sarkeesian chose to mischaracterize this as abusive, solely because it's to her benefit to do so.

So this is a serious problem with the ADL's lesson plan. But it's not by any means the biggest one.

No, the biggest problem with this lesson plan is that it's structured in such a way as to make the voicing of a dissenting view impossible.

The following is a screencap from this PDF:

Notice that there is no option for those who have not witnessed what they would consider sexism in video games, nor is there any option for those who do not think sexist things have been said or done to them through video game interaction.

The message is clear: this lesson plan will not permit you to disagree with the assertions being made at any point. Students are to "listen and believe" and for God's sake, do not allow them to think for themselves.

This lesson plan also proposes a common tactic in so-called "social justice education": dividing students up into smaller groups. As other "social justice education" resources make clear, dividing students into groups is a means by which targeted students -- frequently described as "privileged learners" -- can be isolated from one another, and reduced to a minority among students who are thereafter being agitated against them.

In the case of the ADL lesson plan, this is compounded by the application of peer pressure. As students watch their peers place sticky notes on the "I have witnessed sexism in video games" and "people have said or done sexist things to me through video game interactions" signs, they will feel pressured to do likewise.

The lesson plan eventually moves into force-feeding the students Sarkeesian. This is unsurprising, as Sarkeesian seems to exist as a public figure not on the merits of her work -- her work has been found to be entirely lacking merit by everyone who has actually examined it on a factual basis -- but on the will of high-profile and privileged individuals to stuff her down peoples' throats.

If forcing students to sit through brief unmediated readings of Sarkeesian's work isn't enough, teachers are actually instructed to force her ideas down students' throats.

Apparently the one thing instructors cannot permit is for Sarkeesian's insipid "tropes vs women" to be discarded by students as unimpressive or unconvincing.

And while the lesson plan does theoretically provide for some time for students to discuss these concepts -- and perhaps even how they openly contradict one another -- it's worth pointing out that by the time this portion of the lesson arrives, the instructor has used up no less than 49 minutes of a 60 minute lesson plan. (Yes, I tallied it up, but not by much.)

There's still two more segments of the lesson to go: reading a Pew Research paper about online harassment, then discussion of it afterward.

Interestingly, teachers are pressured to emphasize harassment of women as part of that post-reading discussion, when in fact the study indicates that men experience more online harassment than do women. Of all the modes of online harassment discussed as part of the Pew study, only two -- sexual harassment and stalking -- are experienced more by women. That's of six modes of online harassment mentioned in the study.

It's worth noting that of all the resources used to formulate this lesson plan, the Pew study is the only one that is meaningfully peer reviewed. So the one and only meaningfully peer-reviewed source in the entire plan is misrepresented within it.

That's the kind of "lesson" this is. It's not really meant to educate students at all. It seems to me that the sole purpose of this lesson plan is to promote Anita Sarkeesian and help her settle her grudges by forcing her ideas onto high school students, thus helping to further fill the ranks of her "army."

That's not what classrooms are for. This lesson plan has no place in any classroom anywhere. Any teacher who willingly attempts to teach it is eminently unqualified to be a teacher, and should consider seeking a career better suited to their talents and temperament.

Gawker Feminism

So, let me ask you this: what would a "news" website staffed exclusively by awful people look like if it had any semblance of mainstream credibility?

Why, Gawker. Of course.

And if you took them at their word, you'd suspect that they're into feminism. Like really, really into feminism. Consider for example, Gawker's hilariously-outraged reaction to Wikipedia's decision to bar a number of feminist editors from editing the "Gamergate Controversy" wikipedia page:

"Theoretically, the free encyclopedia is a purely democratic operation—anyone can edit Wikipedia, after all—but there is a byzantine and largely unseen hierarchy that governs disputes among editors, culminating in a Supreme Court-style panel called the Arbitration Committee. The committee's latest decision: to punish a group of five editors who fought to maintain a Gamergate page that presented the 'controversy' largely as an assault on women—that is, who fought to present Gamergate as it actually is."

Gamergate's countless female members -- literally countless, because Gamergate has never been so obsessed with diversity-themed navel-gazing as to actually stop and count --  would certainly disagree with whether or not Gamergate is an "assault on women."

That's been the feminist demagogue take on Gamergate. (Oddly enough these identity zealots don't seem to take much notice of Gamergate's female supporters.)

So Gakwer is into feminism, right? Like really, really into feminism, right?

Well, if you thought so you'd be forgetting that Gawker rose to prominence via a website app that gave people a powerful tool with which to stalk celebrities, and that the 20-something nitwit they sent onto CNN to defend it dismissed concern about it as if it didn't even approach being a big deal.


There were reports of celebrities whose whereabouts were posted to "Gawker Stalker" within minutes -- mere minutes -- of them being there. Many were concerned that "Gawker Stalker" could be used by obsessed fans to beset such celebrities.

It would be foolish to think that female celebrities would be immune from such treatment. Frankly, Gawker was just fortunate that no one was hurt by some dangerous stalker type.

And here's the thing: for a "feminist" website like Gawker to publish such an app does not speak well to how much they do or do not care about the safety of celebrities, especially female celebrities who, it could be said, could be far more vulnerable to that behaviour than male celebrities. At the very least, this is what many feminists would presume.

It's strange to see a "feminist" website care so little for the physical safety of women. It's almost as if they're really, really into feminism until they can make a few bucks off of hanging famous women out to dry. Then, anything resembling a feminist concern for the safety of women is tossed out the window with little more than a smirk to acknowledge whether or not it was ever there at all.

I call it "Gawker feminism." It's a variant of "feminism" that has them espousing feminism when there's rhetorical advantage to be had against people they don't like -- and after Sam Biddle cost Gawker 7 figures of advertising revenue after suggesting people should respond to Gamergate by bringing back bullying, perhaps they have some reason to not like Gamergate -- and dispensing of it when they can earn a few sheckles by doing it.

In other words, they're extremely disingenuous people. That's no surprise. Awful people typically are.

No, Conservatism Isn't Patriarchical

 

Ascension might be one of the more intriguing of recent science fiction offerings. Coming as this film does, late on the heels of Interstellar, it's hard to approach the mini-series without unduly spoiling it.

Essentially, the mini-series centers around the idea that the United States could have launched an interstellar space voyage based on the technology available to them in the early 1960s. The ultimate product of this idea is the USS Ascension: the idea of an intergenerational spaceship designed somewhat loosely as an O'Neil Cylinder -- a massive tubular spaceship which spirals its way through space as a means of generating artificial gravity. The ship is on a 100 voyage to a habitable world, carrying 600 people to establish humanity's first interstellar colony.

Accordingly, everything on board the ship is comparatively low-tech, analog technology. But as with all good sci-fi the technology is not the defining aspect of Ascension.

The micro-society founded aboard the ship is a highly segmented, hierarchical society. The ship's officers and their families live in the "upper decks," a very swanky habitat within the ship. They are charged with the tasks of administrating the ship. The rest of the ship's crew lives on the "lower decks," the USS Ascension's equivalent of steerage.

Between the two is the ship's artificial beach. It's one of the few places shared by people from the ship's two different classes.

The mini-series focuses heavily on one of the necessities of such an endeavour: population control. The USS Ascension requires a crew of 600. No more and no less.

Accordingly, reproduction becomes a privilege, not a right. Each year the ship's girls must apply for eligibility to legally marry and have children. Even upon selection for eligibility they are not permitted to choose their husbands -- their husbands are assigned to them by a calculation of the ship's computer, and based on genetics. Each year the computer selects a number of couples equal to the number of people who have passed away.

That's how the delicate balance aboard the USS Ascension is maintained.

One of the favourite aspersions the left enjoys casting on conservatives is that conservatives allegedly want to turn the clock back to the 1950s; to an era where men were wage earners and women were homemakers. Where men could control women via their income. This is the definition of a patriarchal society.

Yet Ascension confronts such attitudes with an entirely different concept: a patriarchal society that is not a conservative society, but is in fact a collectivist society.

There is no denying that the micro-society born aboard the USS Ascension is patriarchal. Nowhere is that patriarchy more deeply-rooted than in the eligibility process.

In one pivotal scene, the captain's wife, Viondra Deninger (Tricia Helfer) is administering the final selection of the ship's girls for eligibility. The final test is a measurement of body mass index. To describe it most simply if the girls are too fat they can't get married. One girl is denied eligibility because her body weight is considered ideal for a girl all of two inches taller.

Harsh.

It's far from the most exhaustive measure of genetic fitness. It seems that, over time, the USS Ascension's social system has not been selecting the overall most fit for the privilege of reproduction. Instead, the system has effectively evolved not necessarily to facilitate the coupling of those most genetically optimal, but to couple men with women who will maximize male pleasure.

In that sense, it almost resembles the survival plan proposed by Dr Strangelove (Peter Sellers) in the film of the same title.


That's how a feminist critique of the micro-society portrayed in Ascension would have it, and this is one time in which I don't think they'd actually be wrong. Almost as if to make the point, one of the items held in reserve for girls deemed eligible to reproduce is cosmetics.

And while the aesthetics of the society may closely resemble the late 1950s/early 1960s in pretty much all things, there's nothing conservative about this society. At its very core the micro-society of the USS Ascension is collectivist in nature; collectivist to a stunning degree considering the paranoia about communism in the United States at the time the project was launched.

One of the fundamental beliefs of conservatives is that the family is the bedrock of society. There's fierce debate within conservative circles about precisely what form of families should be permitted (I stand with those who contend it should be of any type formed between consenting adults) but one thing stands beyond contention:

If the family is the bedrock of society, then to reserve the creation of a family as a privilege is to make a society fundamentally unfree.

Genuine conservatives won't find much regard for the micro-society of the USS-Ascension. It has more in common with the model societies frequently imagined by those of a more progressive political bent -- including feminists who frequently rail against patriarchy everywhere that it isn't.

If they want to see what a patriarchy looks like, they need look no further than Ascension.

As the mini-series wears on a number of Shayamalan-esque plot twists emerge to tell one of the more nuanced stories in recent sci-fi history. If viewers approach the show expecting anything along the lines of Interstellar they will be very, very surprised.

At three one-hour sittings it certainly becomes a less demanding time investment than Christopher Nolan's space epic and in the end perhaps leaves the viewer with far more to ponder.

It'll also leave you humming "Rocket Man" for days.

Now That I've Been Convinced About Jian Ghomeshi...

Let me start out by noting that Jian Ghomeshi has not yet been charged criminally, nor has he been convicted. I'm told that Lucy DeCouture will press charges, but we'll see about that.

That being said, I think I'd like to see if Jian Ghomeshi would like it if I choked him and slapped him around just a little bit. I'm going to draw the line at pushing him down and groping him, but I will declare myself thusly: if I ever encounter this guy I'm going to fuck him up.

But there's more yet that needs to be said. People who do the things Ghomeshi has been now-convincingly-alleged to have done are half the problem with sexual violence against women. But there's another half of the problem, and I'm going to go ahead and say what it is. Even knowing that I'll face a rhetorical swarming over it, I'll say it:

The other half of the problem is the women who stay quiet about it.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to be callous about this: I feel like I understand that it's not easy for a woman who has been victimized to come forward. They have a lot to worry about. I understand that sometimes their assailant is in a position of power over them. I understand that there are some who blame the victim. I understand it can be painful to recount their experiences. I get all that. I get that coming forward is tough. I understand it, and I sympathize.

But here's what must be said: predators thrive off the silence of their victims. Unstopped, they continue to claim more victims, and it's in no small part because their victims don't speak up.

Whether their victims are intimidated, persuaded, or rationalized into silence there is one thing that is certain: the silence of the victim always, always, always works to the advantage of the predator. Always. Always. Always.

That doesn't make them to blame for future victimizations. The only one to blame is the predator. But in staying silent they become an unwilling enabler to the predator. No one has to like this, but that doesn't mean that it's not true.

I'd hope that Lucy DeCouture -- who may have found her courage late, but found it nonetheless -- would tell women to never stay silent about this kind of an attack. To stop the predator dead in their tracks, and never allow them to victimize again. Just like Jian Ghomeshi should have been stopped.

In closing, Moxy Fruvous was a shitty band.