Thursday, June 08, 2017


Yes, I'm a Feminist. Yes, I Enjoyed "Wonder Woman."

Eileen L. Wittig destroys liberal "Wonder Woman" whiners

I’ll be honest: I went to see Wonder Woman with zero expectations. I was aware that some extreme feminists were already angry about it because she doesn’t have hairy armpits or something, but all I wanted was a couple hours of entertainment. I hadn’t done much research on the movie or even seen many trailers. Actually, leading up to the movie, most of my attention was on the pre-movie dinner.

I did, however, hope that this first modern woman-centric superhero movie wasn’t going to mess it up. I’m not boycotting Marvel for all their man-centric movies, but I do wish they’d make one about Black Widow. Besides finally being about a woman, that movie would be awesome. You know it would.

I don’t get mad when a more qualified man beats a woman to some position or role or what have you. Roles should be filled with the best possible candidate, regardless of sex. I do wish more qualified woman would be recognized, though. And Wonder Woman is definitely qualified for a movie. I was also excited to see the movie was directed and written by women, at a time when women only make up about 17 percent of the Hollywood workforce in elite roles like these.

But that was as far as my feminism took it. I wasn’t at the movie to critique her look, I was there to critique her character.

So I don’t care that Wonder Woman/Diana’s hair was always perfectly curled, even though she should’ve had hat hair. And there’s no way those trenches weren’t humid. But she’s literally a god – maybe they have god-like hair at all times. Steve Trevor’s hair wasn’t very trench-like either.

I don’t care that Diana had eyeliner. Maybe gods are born with eyeliner.

I don’t care that her facial skin was too perfect to be makeup free. Again, she’s literally a god. Gods don’t get acne.

I don’t care that her thighs were probably photoshopped to look thinner – if we wanted the film to be physically accurate, she wouldn’t be able to flip tanks even if she did have thicker thighs. Plus there’s that whole god thing.

I don’t care that she wore heels the entire time. They looked very supportive, and are probably better weapons for spin kicks than sneakers. And maybe she just likes wearing heels. Maybe they make her feel powerful. They have that effect on me.

Beyond Her Looks

I do care about how Diana managed to walk that thin, thin line between literally being a weapon, and having empathy.

I care that she saw an unknown life and saved it, because she could, and because she cared.

I care that she was moved to tears when she heard about the suffering of millions of people she’d never even met, and then took that sorrow and turned it into motivation to save the rest.

I care that she was willing to sacrifice her own future life of peace among her family to save strangers.

I care that she threw savage shade at the old men trying to tell her how to live her life while they stayed behind desks, deciding the fates of others, and greasing their mustaches. They probably spent more time on their hair than she did.

I care that she had a clear, devoted sense of duty but wasn’t blind to things outside that duty, and that she knew that being on a mission meant helping those along the way as well.

I care that she could literally be walking to fight on the front lines of the worst war the world had ever seen, in a world she’d never been in, yet stop to see a baby.

There’s an idea in our culture that you have to sacrifice strength for empathy, but the opposite is true. Empathy makes you stronger.

So yes, you can be a strong, powerful woman while wearing heels and an evening gown.

Yes, you can be moved to tears by the suffering of others without giving up any strength.

And yes, you can stop to smile at an adorable baby on the street even while you are heading out on your mission to save the people you love. Even if you’re just going to the office and not a literal war.

Free to Save the World As You

I left the movie feeling pretty pumped up. Turns out that was a good thing, because a sketchy thing happened as I got home. Thanks to my movie-inspired energy, I was more alert than usual, and saw it developing before I was in any danger.

The world isn’t a terribly great place. Steve Trevor was right when he said there’s good and bad in everyone, that we can’t just find one person to blame for all the bad things. Even though that would be very, very convenient and very, very flattering to the rest of us. Sketchy things – and outright evil things – will continue to happen until the end of time. But that doesn’t mean it has to stay as bad as it is.

When we’re free to do what we truly think is good, right, and just, and are held back neither by groups nor individuals, with or without curling mustaches, then we can make the world a better place than it is.

When we feel free to pursue the good, right, and just as we are – whether that’s a mustache-curling old man behind a desk, a young man in the thick of the issue, an older woman overseeing operations from behind a desk, a young woman in heels with a mission, or whatever you are – then we can uniquely improve the world.

We all have our own way of making the world better, and our own ways shape the ends, and we can’t do it with restrictions on our freedom or on who we are.

So the next time I stop to gush over a puppy, while wearing heels, while on my way to work as one of the few women in the economic nonprofit world, do not accuse me of faking femininity, giving into patriarchal society, or giving up my liberated woman strength. I will call Wonder Woman down upon your head, eyeliner and all. This is who I am, and I am trying to use it all for the good. Just like you.

SOURCE





YouTube Banned Me, but Not the Hate

Michelle Malkin

One of the many maddening takeaways from the London Bridge jihad attack is this: If you post videos on YouTube radicalizing Muslim viewers to kill innocent people, YouTube will leave you alone.  But if you post a video on YouTube honoring innocent people murdered by barbaric jihadists, your video will get banned.

    I know. It happened to me in 2006. Eleven years later, the selective censors at Google-YouTube still can’t competently distinguish terrorist hate speech from political free speech. Islamic hate preachers such as Ahmad Musa Jibril, whose bloodthirsty rants against non-Muslims reportedly inspired the London Bridge ringleader, have flourished.

    Meanwhile, other anti-jihad and conservative content creators have been throttled, flagged, demonetized and kicked off the site since the PC hammer first came down on me.

    My two-minute clip, which I titled “First, They Came,” spotlighted authors, editors, politicians, and other targets of Islamic intolerance and violence. Among those featured in the video on radical Islam’s war on Western free speech: Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker murdered by jihadist Mohammed Bouyeri for his outspoken criticism of Muslim misogyny; Salman Rushdie, whom the Ayatollah Khomeini cast a fatwa upon after he published the “blasphemous” The Satanic Verses; Oriana Fallaci, the fiery journalist put on trial in Italy for “defaming Islam;” and the editors of the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper, who faced death threats for publishing cartoons of Mohammed, which prompted violent riots and terror plots around the world.

    I contrasted the plight of those killed with the hordes of Muslim protesters in London’s safe spaces fearlessly waving their signs demanding that the faithful “Behead all those who insult Islam” and “Exterminate those who slander Islam.”

    Several months later, YouTube yanked the innocuous, harmless, nonviolent, nonprofane, nonhateful, and nonthreatening mini-film. The company informed me that the video contained “inappropriate content.” I complained across social media — posting additional YouTube videos calling attention to the ban. But “First, They Came” stayed deep-sixed on my YouTube channel. Other bloggers and video consumers tried to subvert the censors by posting the clip on their sites; it became a game of whack-a-mole as the YouTube police hunted it down.

    Counterjihad activists nicknamed YouTube “JihadTube” or “Dhimmitube” to mock the censors’ acquiescence to Islamist restrictions on acceptable speech by infidels — as Islamic radicalization videos festered on the site.

    Three pieces in the New York Times covered my skirmish over the little video. Reporter Tom Zeller Jr. reported that YouTube had emailed him a statement suggesting that my video “violated the company’s terms of service.” YouTube also told the newspaper, “Our customer support team reviews all flagged videos before removing them.”

    The statement “specifically referred to the part of the YouTube user agreement that forbids users from submitting material that is ‘unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, violate any law, or is otherwise inappropriate.’”

    George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen wrote in a New York Times magazine article on “Google’s Gatekeepers” that he “watched the ‘First, They Came’ video, which struck me as powerful political commentary that contains neither hate speech nor graphic violence, and I asked why it was taken down. According to a YouTube spokesman, the takedown was a routine one that hadn’t been reviewed by higher-ups.”

    Rancid rants encouraging jihad by the sword and murder of non-Muslims have racked up millions of views over the past five years.

    Only after receiving fair exposure in the New York Times (my, how times and the Times have changed) did the video magically reappear on my channel.

    Now, contrast Google/YouTube’s ridiculous stifling of “First, They Came” with its hands-off treatment of murder-inciting videos of hate imams Ahmad Musa Jibril and Abu Haleema.

    Their rancid rants encouraging jihad by the sword and murder of non-Muslims have racked up millions of views over the past five years. Millions. Counterterrorism officials in multiple countries have tied their social media poison to jihad plots. The company told Conservative Review’s Jordan Schachtel that it had reviewed the hate imams’ channels and “found that they do not violate YouTube’s guidelines on extremist or hateful content.”

    The enlightened peace-and-love progressives of Silicon Valley don’t just have egg on their faces. They have blood on their hands.

SOURCE





UN Agency Uses Misleading Photo in Solicitation for Palestinian Refugees

The U.N.’s agency for Palestinian refugees has amended a Ramadan donation appeal after critics pointed out that it featured a child in a bombed-out area near Damascus and not – as the agency claimed – a Palestinian girl in Gaza supposedly victimized by the Israelis.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said in a statement Saturday that as soon as the matter was drawn to its attention it investigated and found that it “had mistakenly posted an image from our archive of a child in Syria and had said that the child was in Gaza.”

“The image has been replaced,” it said, then added that, whether in Gaza or Syria, the Palestinian refugee children it served were in urgent need of help.

The issue, however, may have gone beyond the use of the wrong photo to illustrate the Ramadan appeal. UNRWA originally claimed that the child in the photo was a girl in Gaza named “Aya” for whom it provided a brief biography:

“The blockade of Gaza began when she was a baby, the occupation in the West Bank before her parents were born. Now she is eleven, and the blockade goes on,” it said. “Aya’s childhood memories are of conflict and hardship, walls she cannot escape, and the fear that the only home she knows, however tiny, could be gone when she returns from school.”

The photo and blurb about “Aya” originally appeared prominently on UNRWA’s Twitter and Facebook pages.

When the “mistakenly” used photo was removed, it was not replaced by a photo of the real Aya (if she exists), but simply with the words, “Stand With Palestine Refugees” against a black background, along with a link to a donation page.

The wording was also edited: All references to “Aya” were removed, and the blurb spoke instead about “children in Gaza.”

“The blockade of Gaza began when they were babies, the occupation of the West Bank before their parents were born. And the blockade goes on,” it said. “Their childhood memories are of conflict and hardship, walls they cannot escape, and the fear that the only home they know could be gone when they return from school.”

An UNRWA official said Monday there was “nothing to add to the statement we put out which makes clear that this was a mistake.”

The agency had been asked whether “Aya” exists or was concocted for the fundraising appeal. It was also asked whether any action been taken against the person or persons responsible for the alleged deception.

The U.S. is UNRWA’s number one donor ($380.59 million in 2015); American taxpayers have provided more than $4 billion to the agency since 1950.

SOURCE





Australia: Political violence against conservative broadcaster backfires when "protesters" get some of their own back

CONTROVERSIAL columnist and TV personality Andrew Bolt has “clobbered” a group of masked protesters who set upon him in Melbourne yesterday.

On his TV program last night, Bolt explained how he was about to launch a book on US President Donald Trump at a restaurant in Carlton, in the city’s inner north, when a woman asked to take a selfie with him.

Before they could take the photo, two masked protesters set upon Bolt, spraying his face and suit with what he described as “sticky liquid with glitter and dye”.

The protesters may have got more than they bargained for because Bolt quickly retaliated, punching one of the attackers repeatedly.

“Bad luck for them, of course; I don’t do running and hiding,” he told his viewers on his Sky News program The Bolt Report on Tuesday night.

The conservative columnist screened security camera footage of the altercation on his show, freezing on the faces of each of his attackers as well as a third man who filmed the ambush.

“Police are now looking for this young man, who will have a big bruise on the left side of his face and another bruise between his legs, for which I apologise, I guess, but I don’t really fight nice if I’m pushed too far.”

On his popular blog, Bolt described the protesters as members of the “fascist Left”.

“Watch the fascist Left attack me and get clobbered. Luckily the cameras do not capture me kicking one between the legs. I cannot have my children see me acting like a thug,” he wrote.

Bolt was at Il Gambero restaurant in Lygon St to launch the book The Art of the Impossible: A Blog History of the Election of Donald J Trump by economics academic Steve Kates.

Bolt encouraged anyone who recognised the attackers to phone North Melbourne police on 03 8379 0800.

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.

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