Friday, February 12, 2016



Feminist aggression

One of my  Australian correspondents who works as a counsellor shares the following experience:

Over many years of working amongst severe feminists I have occasionally had false accusations or insinuations made of me, and seen other men accused too, some having their careers ruined.

Most accusations occur after a disagreement or having to correct or reprimand a feminist, to which her common response is to falsely claim she was physically intimidated or threated. Men prefer to be corrected privately, and so do sensible women, and I always do that, but I have learnt to always correct feminists and hung-up women in front of sensible women. Of course then the feminist complains she is being humiliated in front of others, but that's better than me being accused of threatening violence.

The most comical incident was once when reaching out to a clock-on-card and a nurse beside me leapt in front of me and ran her neck straight into my extended arm, pushing her throat into the crook of my elbow and instantly grabbing my arm and wrapping it around her neck as if she was being choked. She even made choking noises. I freed my arm and stepped back.

She pretended to stagger a bit, clutched her throat and gave me a filthy look as if I had just tried to kill her. Then just as suddenly she straightened up and strutted off down the corridor doing her best assertive feminist walk and went off to work her shift. I never heard anything further about the incident, and although I recorded it for my own record, I did not report it. It was as if an irresistible impulse had momentarily overcome her.

Needless to say I was very careful around her after that. As an amusing follow up, a year or two later I was coming out of an Art Gallery having just seen a historical military display.   She was standing outside looking very uptight and sour indeed. I said hello and asked her if she was here to see the display. With a sneer she said her husband was viewing the display, then with an air of snotty superiority added that she was "not into violence".   

Via email






Feminist correctness

The intolerant Left, once again.  A young feminist reports:

Young progressive women are being targeted and insulted in this election, and not by the men, the pro-lifers, or the Republicans. Over and over again, older women who have fought hard for our rights are shaming young women who disagree with them.

The women’s movement taught us to do our homework, form opinions, and stick up for our beliefs. We learned to feel capable, intelligent, and confident in our convictions. Yet if our conclusions lead us to be critical of Hillary Clinton, we are dismissed or demeaned by these same women who taught us to be independent thinkers.

Young women are struggling with this election. We are discussing the issues, policies, and politics of it all, and we are landing in different camps. We will not tolerate being insulted by the same women who claim that we are equals. The last thing the women’s movement needs is to alienate young women by shaming us into doing what we’re told, instead of empowering us to do what we feel is right. We respect and appreciate all that older members of the women’s movement have done for us, and ask them to please speak to us as the educated and engaged young women they’ve raised us to be.

SOURCE






Identity Politics Is Causing a War Among Feminists

Old-school feminists are not happy with young women these days. Seemingly commenting on why some young women favor Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton, feminist icon Gloria Steinem explained it is because they were thinking, “Where are the boys?”

Clinton supporter Madeleine Albright also is none too happy with “women who don’t help out other women” (presumably those who do not support Clinton), suggesting there’s a “special place in hell” waiting for them if they don’t.

What’s going on here? One explanation is that younger women are tired of their Baby Boom parents (and grandparents) scolding them for being ideologically impure. Most millennials are socially liberal, but they also don’t like being lectured constantly about how to think and behave.

They have been told for a very long time that feminism is defined by a very strict set of rules, and if they fall short, well, there’s Albright’s special place waiting for them.

Talk about sounding like an old fire and brimstone preacher!

But there’s something else going on as well. There’s a civil war brewing inside the church of radical multiculturalism. The proliferation of specially protected groups is getting awfully confusing, and battles are breaking out over power and privilege in the ranks.

As I explain in my upcoming book, “The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left,” it has to do with a complete misunderstanding of equality:

    "In practice, identity and equality work against each other. The more the former is pushed, the more the doctrine of equality is Balkanized. It becomes a contest between competing demands for recognition and privilege. For example, when feminist-lesbian activists take umbrage at a transgender man trying to transform himself into a woman (as a feminist did in The New York Times op-ed), they reveal they are more concerned about who gets to decide what those identities are than about the principle of equality.

Even Germaine Greer, the Australian-born icon and inspiration for many of America’s most ardent feminists, is being called “transphobic” for questioning transgenderism. The lesbian feminist wants full equality with men, but only for those who are actually born female. For all the talk of equality defined by identity, in the face of transgenderism some feminists are forced into a separatist position—i.e., to defend what makes them distinct. Separatism is the only line of defense left against transgender men who are encroaching on their territory.

The same thing is happening in black identity politics. At the University of Missouri and elsewhere, black activist students are demanding a “black only healing space” devoid of white people. In other words, diametrically contrary to the once civil rights dream of racial integration, they are demanding racial separation.

This appeal to separatism is no accident. It’s built into the logic of radical multiculturalism, especially in its offshoot, identity politics. The claim is not about the equality of identical things, like, for example, that a woman or black person should be treated equally because they are equal human beings (as opposed to being merely black or female).

Rather, it is about pretending that things that are fundamentally different should be treated by society as if they were exactly the same. For example, gay activists lobby to change our perceptions of marriage precisely because the same-sex relationship is not the same thing as a traditional marriage. We must pretend as if it were the same for the sake of “equality,” but gay marriage is not about two similar things being unfairly treated as different. It’s about relabeling dissimilar things as identical.

Ultimately, the casualty of such thinking is not only the corruption of the concept of equality, at least as it has been understood for centuries by liberal thinkers. It is also the abolition of humanity as a commonly shared identity.

Civil rights used to be about striving for a common humanity. Radical multiculturalism is the opposite. It means to break humanity down into competing gender, racial, and sexual preference groups and then to pretend that our humanity is defined only by our membership in that singular group. Nothing could be farther from how civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. viewed equality. To him, black people were deserving of equality because they were human beings, not because they were black.

In order to make this new social fiction work, we need to use the power of law and the administrative state to force the new social reality on society. And it is precisely in that action that the competition for power and privilege becomes a source not of liberation, but of coercion.

As I further explain in The Closing of the Liberal Mind:

    "Without a respect for all human beings, regardless of their place in the identity pecking order, it is fairly easy, even necessary, to separate people into winners and losers in a power game. The next step is obvious and even inevitable: a prison for the losers"

SOURCE






Sexist Australian Labor party female gets a good reply

The spectre of the gender wars has been invoked in Senate estimates this morning after a line of questioning by new Labor senator Katy Gallagher resulted in a spat between her and government minister Mitch Fifield in which she accused him of "mansplaining".

Senator Gallagher was asking about the status of social security legislation the day after Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister and whether there was any change to the introduction of bills, with Senator Fifield explaining that these were matters for the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

The argument went on, with Senator Gallagher rephrasing the question a number of times.

"Thanks for the mansplaining," she said toward the end of the first session of Community Affairs estimates.

"Imagine if I said you were womansplaining," Senator Fifield said, before adding she was being "sexist".

Senator Gallagher said his answers had been "patronising and condescending".

"I thought we were having a good-hearted exchange, I just find it extraordinary that you or any senator at this table would seek to invoke gender in impugning how a senator is responding," Senator Fifield said.  "Let the record show that Senator Gallagher thinks it is appropriate to refer to a senator as mansplaining.

"I am appalled, quite frankly. I am not endeavouring here to give a cabinet handbook description of the legislative process. Take a good look at yourself.

"If I said to a female senator you are womansplaining, stop being a hypocrite, conduct yourself appropriately for this place.  Hypocrisy, thy name is Labor."

Senator Gallagher responded: "I think you need to settle down, really."

"Welcome to federal parliament," Senator Fifield said.

Senator Gallagher, incensed, said: "Oh, where the big people play? I'm not the one having a breakdown."

The session was called to order and the senators moved on to more sedate questions

SOURCE





Black Leftist hate


Perp Clifford Durand

A CONFRONTATION over a Donald Trump sticker on a US university campus erupted after a student threatened to smash a classmate’s computer over her allegiance to The Donald.

A physical fightbroke out on the Queens campus of St John’s University yesterday after the student posted a photo to Twitter of a woman with a “Trump Make America Great Again” sticker on her laptop and asked his followers to share the image.  “7000 retweets and i’ll smash this b---h’s computer,” the student wrote in the post, which ended up being almost 16,000 times.

The Trump supporter in the picture complained to the school’s public safety office, according to another student, the New York Daily News reported.

A short time later the two ran into one another in a hallway and a fight broke out over the tweet, students told the paper..

The tweeter, who uses the name OCK PAPI on the site, then punched the woman in the chest, one student alleged. Friends reported that the woman tossed a cup of coffee at him during the heated exchange.

It was unclear if there were any injuries related to the confrontation.  “It was just a Trump sticker,” the sophomore said.

St John’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the school did post a statement on Twitter.  It is understood assault charges against the student, whose Twitter account has since been suspended, may be pursued.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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