The Trevor Bauer case proves again that false accustaions of rape are just as evil as rape itself. False accusers should be treated like rapists. Put them on a False Accuser Registry. Send them to prison. A just society would treat these women as the dangerous criminals they are.
“Whenever you refer to me, even if I am 10 thousand miles away, you must abandon the rules of grammar and parrot whatever nonsense I assign to you.” That’s not only absurd — it’s also arrogant in the extreme.
These days it’s hard to tell where sincerity ends and parody begins. Reality has become nearly indistinguishable from satire. As a case-in-point consider the recent article on Gizmodo complaining that billionaire Jack Ma has donated $14 million to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Author Matt Novak says that this apparently paltry sum is “roughly equivalent to the average American household donating $33.” He concludes, somehow, that Ma’s generosity is proof that the government should “take that obscene wealth through taxes and [spend] it to make the world a healthier place for everyone.”
This is the problem with the whole idea of people claiming their own pronouns. A pronoun, again, is a grammatical construct. It must be deployed according to the laws of grammar, not the fickle whims of the individual to whom it refers. I
Syd Ziegler writing for out sport's comm has declared that the bravest athlete of all time the sports figure who best embodies you know the virtues of courage and heroism is a biological male who beat up a bunch of females in MMA.
In the second sense, it unfairly blames masculinity for bullying or narcissistic behavior that has no gender. If you don’t understand why men might take issue with this approach, just imagine how almost any woman would react if I said that gossipy, materialistic bimbos have “toxic femininity.” That would be, at the very least, an unnecessarily inflammatory way of addressing the problem of materialistic bimbos. But worse than that, it would suggest that femininity, taken to a toxic extreme, results in dumb bimbos who spend their husbands’ money on shoes and purses. It seems to say: “It’s okay to be a woman, but don’t be too womanly.” Of course, nobody ever does talk about toxic femininity. And the reason we don’t talk about it is because we recognize how insulting and demeaning the concept is. We have simply decided that it’s okay to be insulting and demeaning toward men.
The secular Left, on the other hand, has a famously low tolerance for opposing ideas. The Right likes to criticize this characteristic of the Left, especially among college students and millennials, but I think they're criticizing the wrong thing. Hostility to opposing beliefs isn't necessarily a vice. A lack of open-mindedness isn't always a sign of ignorance or arrogance. The problem with snowflake college students isn't they're intolerant of differing views, it's that they're intolerant of the right views.
But the LGBT lobby isn’t asking us to exchange one word for another. Rather, the lobby is asking (demanding) that we pretend to believe in entire new categories of human existence.
Why would they come and sit in the pews? What would be the point? The message of liberal Christianity is: "You’re perfectly fine exactly the way you are. Everything you’re doing is acceptable. Make no changes. Keep up the great work!" A weak person may be happy to hear that message, but they need not hear it twice. They need not come back for it week after week. They need only receive the affirmation and then continue along living just as they were before. Just as lost, just as confused, just as hopeless. The Episcopal Church, like any worldly church, has already given all it has to offer — which is nothing at all.
The love between husband and wife, consecrated by God, serves as the foundation of a properly ordered family. Their love literally gives birth to their children. As the kids grow older, they will depend upon that love and look to it for comfort, security, and direction. Husband and wife were there before the kids existed, and, if they honor their vows and stay alive and healthy, they’ll be there together long after the kids have moved out and started their own families. If spouses put their kids first, what do they do before the kids are born, and what will they do after they leave? And anyway, how can it be proper and right to love a child more than you love the person who gave you that child?
Everything in a family hinges on and depends upon the love between the mother and father. The family lives or dies by it. We may gain some emotional benefit from spoiling our kids, but what they need — what gives them the greatest benefit — is to see a father who honors his wife and a mother who respects her husband. One way or another, whether we like or not, they will learn far more about love from observing us than they will from the hugs and kisses we heap on them.
And here lies the great irony. The people who are the most opposed to free expression are the same people who want to express themselves as freely, outrageously, and disturbingly as imaginable. Self-expression is a right that they want to keep all to themselves. The rest of us must express ourselves in a way that conforms precisely to their wishes. They demand that we adjust our language — adjust our perception of reality itself — to meld with their delusions. "Here is the script you must follow," announces the man who refuses to even follow his own biology.
A husband does not need to earn his wife’s respect any more than a wife needs to earn her husband’s love. A wife ought to respect her husband because he is her husband, just as he ought to love and honor her because she is his wife. Your husband might “deserve” it when you mock him, berate him, belittle him, and nag him, but you don’t marry someone in order to give them what they deserve. In marriage, you give them what you’ve promised.
A man in this situation is called nonetheless to endure, to fight for his family, and never to be unfaithful to his wife or leave her. But if he does wander, it should be noted that he is not the only traitor in the marriage. She betrayed him. She promised him a wife and instead gave him a stepmother. The two have now betrayed each other, each in their own way. There are two sides to every story, as they say. I think this is the side that is not often told.
Years from now, historians will look at our culture's devolution into pet worship and write many volumes attempting to diagnose it. But I think the cause is quite clear, and has already been mentioned above: selfishness. To love another human being is to sacrifice. It is to come out of yourself and put someone else's needs above your own. To love a child or a spouse is to serve, to give. Modern man is not willing or able to forget himself or put anyone higher than himself, so he targets his affections toward his gerbil or his poodle instead. That way he can feel like he's "loving" something without actually having to do anything or change his life in any significant way.
The truth is eternal, not elastic. It is what it is. Once we come to know it, our minds should be absolutely and permanently closed around it. We should be intolerant of Satan's lies and unwilling to "hear him out" or consider his point of view. We should show respect to the people who have been duped by him, and we should love them, but we ought to have no respect or love for their ideas, which are wicked and delusional. We are already accused of being closed-minded. It's time we earn the label.
The "better safe than sorry" principle applies in more than one way. There is another risk inherent in a closed-door rendezvous between a man and woman who aren't married, especially when one of them is a political figure. Feminists tell us that false accusations don't happen, but they do, and it will be harder to defend oneself against those false accusations if there are no witnesses. The latest accusation against President Trump proves this point.
We tend to use the "creep" label only to describe members of the male sex. But, as they say, it takes two to tango. Birds of a feather flock together. Any number of other cliched metaphors. The point is that good men are drawn to good women. Creeps are drawn to creeps. Shallow losers to shallow losers. Opposites attract, but not in the realm of virtue. If you only ever seem to end up with horrible jerks, it's probably because those horrible jerks have identified you as part of their herd.
If you have to go around insisting that something is normal, that's a pretty good indication that it isn't.
Following the sacred traditions of our ancestors, Pronouns Day provides the LGBT crew with yet another opportunity to lecture the world about how we are all supposed to think, speak, and behave. That is a very good thing because they did not get enough of a chance on International Transgender Day of Visibility (March 31), Lesbian Visibility Day (April 26), International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia (May 17), Harvey Milk Day (May 22), Pansexual and Panromantic Visibility Day (May 24), Pride Month (June), Bisexuality Day (September 23), Bisexual Awareness Week (September 23 – September 30), National Coming Out Day (October 11), National LGBT Center Awareness Day (October 19), Spirit Day (October 20), Intersex Awareness Day (October 26), Asexual Awareness Week (October 23 – 29), Transgender Day Of Remembrance (November 20), Pansexual/Panromantic Pride Day (December 8), and Transgender Trisexual Tricyclists on Trampolines Awareness Day (December 19). I only made one of those up. The point is, LGBT folks apparently need a lot of days dedicated to themselves, and that is where Pronouns Day comes in.
Prepositions, nouns, verbs, and pronouns are meant to convey objective facts about reality. If they are not going to perform that function, then they no longer perform any function at all. And meaningful, useful words have been reduced to impotent nonsense.
At bottom, the answer is that we have become a country filled with numb, detached, and desensitized people. Mass shootings are the ultimate manifestation of that detachment. Our reaction to them — rhetorically slinging dead bodies at each other to score points in a political argument — is a slightly less severe but very much related manifestation. A survivor of the El Paso shooting reports that the shooter casually smirked before unloading on a crowd of innocent people. This echoes many other reports from many similar shootings. The killer is always smirking like he's slightly amused, or else he's blank-faced and emotionless. Rarely do you get a picture of someone running around enraged and screaming. We call these acts of "hate," but they are much more acts of brutal, murderous indifference. These are empty, numb, detached people slaughtering their fellow humans because they are bored and frustrated with their meaningless lives.
Mass shooters are simply translating their internet personas into the real world. People on internet forums, social media, YouTube, and other sites routinely wish death and worse on each other. "Kill yourself" and "I hope you get cancer" are almost standard greetings at this point. But what's often lost in all of this mundane vitriol is that actual human beings are saying this stuff to other actual human beings.
In order for two sides to come to an understanding, both must basically acknowledge that reality exists and is knowable.
Of course, the problem with this mantra is the possessive pronoun sandwiched conspicuously in-between "speak" and "truth." Truth is great and speaking it is admirable. It might even be good to stand in it, on occasion, if you're wearing the proper foot attire. But you cannot speak or stand in or do anything at all with "your" truth because there is no such thing. There is only truth and untruth. There is reality and unreality. There is correct and incorrect. Every statement or assertion will fall into one category or the other — or a combination of the two.
The "speak your truth" idiom tries to create a third category in addition to truth and untruth: My truth. But if my truth is the same as the truth, then it isn't mine at all. It isn't my truth that sharks have dorsal fins, even if I assert the truth and express my agreement with it. It isn't even the shark's truth. It is, rather, a universal truth that stands apart from and beyond and over myself, and the shark, and everyone else. It just is, and all a rational person can do is accept it.
However, if my truth contradicts the truth, then it is indeed mine but it isn't actually truth. If I say that my truth is that I have a dorsal fin, I am simply mistaken or lying or hallucinating. It may be my impression or my belief or my conviction or my desire that I have a dorsal fin, but it isn't my truth. It isn't any kind of truth at all. In this case, "my truth" is just another way of saying "falsehood."
It might be argued that "speak your truth" really means something closer to "speak your mind" or "share your story." If that's what's meant, then that's what should be said instead. It's clear, however, that many people who use the phrase do actually mean it literally. We are raising an entire generation to believe that they can invent their own truths, which will be just as legitimate as, if not more legitimate than, the truth.
This is all nonsense, of course, and a symptom of our collective madness. The truth cannot be changed according to our whims and desires. And it cannot be owned by anyone. All we can do with the truth is acknowledge it, deny it, assert it, or allege it. Though I suppose "speak your assertion of alleged truth" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
Prayer does work. Death does not debunk prayer or reveal it as ineffective. That the Christians were slaughtered while at prayer does not mean that their prayers were in vain. Far from it. Heaven is the eternal prayer. It is the completion and fulfillment of every prayer uttered on Earth. The efficacy of prayer is not called into question when a Christian goes from Earthly prayer to the Heavenly, perfected form. Exactly the opposite is true. I'm betting that if we could peek into the next world, we would not see that the prayers of these murdered Christians have gone to waste. Rather, we would see that they have all been finally and eternally and gloriously answered. We were never told, and no Christian believes, that praying will forever inoculate us from suffering and death. Even if we pray all our lives we will still die, just as we will still die even if we eat well and live a healthy lifestyle. But prayer is not meant to save us from death anyway. It is meant to bring us closer to God. In that sense, all prayer "works" and all prayers are answered. Of course, the skeptic demands more than that. He demands proof that God has listened to a specific prayer and answered it in a demonstrative fashion, by causing some miraculous thing to happen or preventing some horrific evil from happening. "Show me that prayer works," he scoffs, "and then I'll believe it." He's lying. He will not believe it, even when he's shown.
Prayer is important and there's never a bad time for it. Suggesting that it's somehow inappropriate or useless to pray in the wake of horror is like saying it's inappropriate and useless for your children to talk to you when they're faced with a personal crisis. Unless you're the worst parent on planet Earth, you would tell them exactly opposite. Come to me, you say. There's never a bad time to confide in me. And God says the same to us. To pray is to enter into intimate conversation with our Father in Heaven. We should always be carrying on this conversation — "pray unceasingly," Scripture commands — but there's a reason why people cling all the more to God when tragedy strikes. It's the same reason our children, especially when they're young, run to us when they're afraid or in pain. We cannot help them if they don't come to us. If they hide, if they refuse our help, if they shut us out, then there isn't much we can do. Again, this is the case with God.
If you make such a radical declaration in front of a liberal these days, they’ll ask you to prove it. And you can prove it. You could tell them to close their eyes and imagine that gasoline is soda pop, and then go to a gas station and spray the nozzle into their mouths to see if their emotions are actually capable of overriding physical realities. Or you could tell them to believe really hard that they can fly, like R. Kelly says, and then jump off the Grand Canyon to test the song’s accuracy. But if you do that, you’ll end up with a lot of liberals choking on gasoline or splattered all over the ground. That doesn’t seem like the most Christian way to win an argument.
That is the great secret that "progressive" and "inclusive" Christian leaders are too high on the fumes of humanism to notice or understand. Religions grow when they expect more of their adherents, not less. Religions thrive when they provide a lifestyle that is radically different from the dull, hollow lifestyle provided by the world. People turn to religion for identity. And if all they find is more of the same, more of what caused them to go looking in the first place, they will not be converted. If a church wants to grow (and, more importantly, if it wants to save souls), it must have the boldness to completely and entirely reject the teachings of the world and preach instead the teachings of Christ.
There’s a reason why nearly every civilization throughout history and across the world has come to remarkably similar conclusions about what men are supposed to do and what role they are supposed to fill. They didn’t all arbitrarily and coincidentally invent the same “social construct.” No, they noticed that men are naturally aggressive, and so they said that men should be warriors. They noticed that men are naturally stronger than woman, and so they said that men should be protectors. They noticed that men have a greater propensity and desire to leave their homes and go out into the wild, and so they said that men should be hunters and providers. They noticed that boys have lots of physical energy, and so they came up with sports for the boys to play.
The point is that societies, until recently, have not invented masculinity but harnessed it. They said to boys: “This is how you naturally are, and that’s good. Now here is how you can best put those tendencies and abilities to use for yourselves, your families, and your communities.”
If boys in school are put in any box, it’s a box for girls. The school system requires students to sit still for long periods of time, remain calm, memorize information, etc. These are all things that girls naturally do well. The problem for boys is not that they are forced to be masculine, but that they are not allowed to be masculine.
The situation for the original scene is not improved much by the fact that the victims are all Westboro racists. First of all, that’s how Hollywood sees all Christians. For Hollywood, there really is no difference between a Westboro church and any other church. Especially in the south. Second, making them bigots was obviously a cheap narrative trick designed to give the viewer permission to take delight in their mass execution. In reality, we would hopefully all agree that it is not okay to randomly mow down racists at church. Or maybe we can’t agree about that. Either way, there is no reason to panic over the meme if you didn’t panic when the movie came out four years ago.
Too many boys are given no instructions on how to be men, no example to follow, no guidance on how to grow and mature in their masculinity. The folks over at A Call To Men seem to think we’re living in the 1940s. They haven’t noticed that the era of the Strong and Stoic Man ended a long time ago. We’re living now in the era of drag queens and feminism, of gender fluidity and fatherless homes. Most boys these days have no clue how to be men, no idea about what to do with their masculine energy, because nobody has ever told them or shown them.
Of course, being so relentlessly stupid and clueless, we still don't understand what's going on around us. We chalk it all up to a "mental health crisis," as if there's some mysterious mental illness spreading like syphilis throughout the land. Or we conclude that we just haven't settled on the right combination of laws and regulations. We seem to ignore the fact that a great many of these mass killers had been on psychotropic medicines, and they either acquired their weapons illegally or they acquired them because the existing laws weren't properly enforced (as was the case in Texas). We are already the most medicated and regulated civilization in human history, yet these things have only increased in frequency.
Laws won't heal the human spirit. Neither will prescription pills. We can't treat moral corruption like we treat headaches. It's not always a "chemical imbalancement" that propels a guy to murder women and children. Often, that desire is rooted much deeper, all the way down in the depths of his depraved and rotten soul.
There is a very troubling combination coming together. We dehumanize each other while medicalizing and politicizing evil. The result is indifference and detachment all the way around. Exactly the atmosphere where Satan thrives. It is the atmosphere of Hell itself, leaking like noxious fumes into our world. And there is only one antidote that really works. His name is Christ.
Leftism is a religion of self-loathing. It teaches white people to hate their race, boys to hate their sex, women to hate their femininity, Americans to hate their country, westerners to hate their history. What a contemptible toxic thing it is.
If you're wondering where all of these killers are coming from — check Twitter. It's filled with future candidates: People who truly do not recognize the humanity in their fellow man. And they're not just on Twitter. They're out there in the "real world," laughing at a guy while he drowns, or torturing a disabled man for fun, or taking selfies with a woman who's just been beaten unconscious, or back on the internet watching a teenager livestream his own suicide. What really separates these people from Devin Kelley? Whatever it is, the wall between them is very thin. The key thing they share — the key thing that so many of us share — is utter and complete indifference.
So, goodbye abortion. For the Ten Commandments clearly forbid the taking of innocent life. Jeremiah 1:5 explicitly affirms the humanity of the unborn, as God declares, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart." And the Incarnation makes the issue as plain as can be. Our Lord became a "fetus" Himself. He was conceived in His mother's womb and He developed through every stage just as every other child in history. Liberal Christians claim that Jesus never said anything about the unborn. Nonsense. He didn't need to say anything about them. He became them. He elevated and sanctified human life at every stage by taking its form. End of discussion.
Think of this like a court of law. If you say that a certain piece of evidence — in this case, the Bible — is inadmissible, then you cannot use it to argue your own case. The moment you pull it out, you have admitted it back into the discussion. Now you must argue for the legalization of baby murder and homosexual "marriage" on Biblical grounds, which, of course, is impossible. What you cannot do — what I won't allow you to do — is fling the Bible around when it suits you, and then start shouting about "theocracies" when it no longer does.
A wife who belittles her husband, cuts him down, nitpicks him relentlessly, holds her affection — both physical and emotional — as a ransom, nags him endlessly, criticizes him constantly, humiliates him in public and to her friends and in front of the children, and will not allow him to take a leadership position in the home, cannot be terribly surprised when he begins to withdraw. And if he cheats — which would be a great and indefensible evil, no matter how cold and domineering his wife may be — it cannot be said that he was the first. She cheated him; she lied to him, by promising to respect him and treat him like a man, only to turn around and treat him like a child.
We all seem to understand that love is supposed to be unconditional, but we struggle to see how respect must be the same. I wonder: how would we respond to a husband who says he is not going to love his wife because she hasn’t earned it? What would we say about a man who chooses to act unlovingly toward his wife because she isn’t doing a good job of keeping the house together, or she doesn’t have dinner ready when he comes home, or she isn’t properly satisfying him in other ways, or she isn’t doing all the things he demands on the timetable that he prefers? Even if it were true that the wife is slacking in her responsibilities, we would consider the man to be a monster for holding that over her head or using it as an excuse to degrade and demean her.
So, why do we accept this approach from women? Why is it considered appropriate for a woman to order her husband around, but not the reverse? Why is it normal in our culture for a woman to assign a list of chores to her husband (the “Honey Do List,” we call it), yet we would think a man tyrannical and possibly abusive if he gave his wife her own list of mandatory assignments for the day? "Headed to work, honey. Your chore list is on the fridge." Why do we think nothing of women who sit around complaining to each other about their husbands, even when those very same women would be devastated if their husbands did the same? Why is it acceptable for a woman to kick a man out of his own bed and banish him to the living room like a scolded puppy, while it would be seen as entirely unacceptable for a man to pull the same stunt with his wife? Imagine a wife saying to her girlfriends, “I’m really in the doghouse, girls. My husband made me sleep on the couch last night.” Her friends would probably tell her to call the police and file for divorce.
Well, I can fathom the thought process. It's called greed. While we lambast the rich for their greed, there are many Americans who already pay little to no taxes, yet insist on paying less. Who is really greedy here? The man who wishes to keep a bit more of his own money, or the man who demands to receive a bit more of his neighbor's money? The first man is greedy if he hoards his wealth and makes no attempt to help the less fortunate. But he is not greedy for wanting to handle his charitable giving on his own, rather than surrendering enormous portions of his income to a wasteful and corrupt government. The second man is greedy from the start. It is not morally justified to feel entitled to another person's possessions. This is called covetousness, and it is a sin. It is among the many sins fostered and encouraged by politicians on the Left. This is where the "taking from the poor and giving to the rich" idea originates. We accuse the successful of "stealing" what is rightfully their own because we believe we are entitled to it. Many people in our culture have no respect for private property, no appreciation for the toil and discipline required to achieve financial success, and no understanding of the fact that every man — even a rich man — has a right and responsibility to care for his own family with the money he has earned before he can be expected to fund elaborate handout schemes. An American who has sipped deeply from the Leftist punchbowl will honestly believe that he is owed a rich man's money, he is owed it even more than the man's children are owed it, and to deprive them of it is to steal it from them. It's madness. Utter, complete madness.
It is pure unadulterated narcissism that leads a man in this direction. He is rejecting the entire human race because the human race requires too much of him. It is not subservient enough. It will not lie down and lick his palms, so he dismisses it outright. And here is the most tragic thing of all: while he protects himself from greater pains by idolizing a lesser being, he has excluded himself from the greater joy that comes from loving a greater being. I'm afraid that one day, when he's dying alone with only his mutt to mourn him, he'll regret that choice.
But it's not really love. Yes, some people do love their pets, and love them in a healthy way, by loving them in accordance with the natural order of things. But people who love their pets more than they love people don't actually love pets at all. They don't love anything. More precisely, what they love about the pet is what it does for them and how it makes them feel. They love themselves through their pets. The animal is a blank slate that the loveless modern man can turn into a little avatar of himself. He worships his dog because his dog worships him.
Of course, a tree or a rock or an orange has never lied to anyone, either. A paper towel has never cut me off in traffic. A pair of shoes has never taken too long ordering food in the drive thru while I'm starving to death a few cars behind. A box of crayons has never texted in a movie theater. A dandelion has never deleted the show I had saved on the DVR. Plants, animals, and inanimate objects have never committed any evil acts at all, because they are not capable of committing evil acts. It is not a mushroom's superior virtue that prevents it from becoming a terrorist; it is the fact that it's a mushroom. Your dog cannot hurt you like your brother can hurt you, because he is a dog. It's not that he's making better moral choices than the humans in your life, it's that he's not making any moral choices at all.
The real crisis begins when Christians, confused on this point, think they need to set a good example by being open-minded and tolerant toward falsehoold just because they want their opponents to be open-minded and tolerant toward truth. They forget that right and wrong should be treated differently, and to treat wrong as if it may be right is extremely disordered.
There is a lot of upside — and, as far as I can tell, no discernible downside — to a policy like the one the Fosters have adopted. It does, in part, guard the integrity of their marriage by guarding the hearts of both spouses. Most adults understand that extramarital trysts usually begin with seemingly innocent interactions. An emotional threshold is crossed at some point, often unnoticed by one or both people, and things can go rapidly downhill from there. The point behind avoiding one-on-one meetings with members of the opposite sex is to avoid getting anywhere near that threshold. Better safe than sorry, after all.
It is difficult to root for people who are self-glorifying and narcissistic. And the self-glorifying narcissism of female athletes is even more annoying because it comes dressed as empowerment. There are plenty of jerks playing male sports. But nobody hesitates to call them jerks, and nobody is tempted to hail their jerkiness as a sign of strength. We all just say, "Wow what a jerk," nod in agreement with each other, and move on. Female jerks, on the other hand, will have a whole chorus of cheerleaders welling up with pride and insisting that boorish, stupid behavior from a woman is actually beautiful. And that just makes the behavior all the more irritating to the sane and reasonable among us.
We are witnessing the medicalization of masculinity. It starts early, when schoolboys are dosed with psychotropic drugs to keep them from acting like boys, and now it continues all the way into adulthood and beyond. The message to men and boys is clear: there is something wrong with you. It is not okay to be the way you naturally want to be. You must be different. You must be more like women.
The first thing you must understand is that gender is a social construct. "Woman" and "man" are concepts arbitrarily invented by society. They have nothing to do with reality. A child is assigned one of these labels randomly at birth by primitive, backward-thinking doctors who, for no good or objective reason, have decided that a human child with a penis must be a boy and a human child with a vagina must be a girl. These words are all interchangeable, as are the body parts. None of it means anything, really.
But doesn’t grammar and language evolve over time? Yes, it does. However, language evolves according to coherent rules and standards. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people making up their own rules individually, which isn’t evolution, but devolution and collapse. Language is being destroyed, not simply changed or modified, by LGBT activists.
Consider also how boys are apt to punch each other when they get angry, whereas girls are more inclined to cut each other down verbally. The verbal attacks often have a psychological impact that vastly outweighs and outlasts the momentary pain of a bloody lip, yet boys who cause bloody lips can get expelled while girls who give each other emotional complexes that last into adulthood are let off with a stern warning — if there is even any punishment at all.
if we really want to help boys, we need to accept them for who they are, as boys, and help them to grow in that identity. Our message to boys should be this: “You are a boy. That is good. That is what you are meant to be. And one day you will be a man. We will tell you how. We will show you the way.” Direction and guidance. That is what our boys need. Not confusion, ambiguity, and self-loathing. Which is all they seem to get from our society these days.
He reminds us that President Obama was far more progressive and race-conscious with the Ebola outbreak in 2014. This lies in stark contrast, he contends, to the unsubtle racist message Trump is sending with the team he assembled. The task force “telegraphs the kinds of people the administration deems worthy of holding power,” Tensley says. And those people are “mostly white men who are mirror images of the President himself.”
It makes even more sense for a team of people tasked with the job of monitoring and containing a deadly virus. If Trump emphasized ethnic and sexual diversity over expertise, I’m not sure I’d be able to find much comfort in the diversity of his failed task force as I take my last gasping breaths. Perhaps Tensley would feel different. If it were up to him, I’m sure he’d fill the team with fashionable ethnic minorities, transgenders, pansexuals, and drag queens, irrespective of their epidemiological backgrounds, and then tell us to take heart as the virus kills our families, knowing that they lay down their lives in service to racial inclusion. Am I exaggerating? I don’t think so. Exaggeration is no longer possible. Satire is dead. And leftists have its blood on their hands.
But if you take the position that the meme is awful, vile, evil, and dangerous, then you must say the same about the scene that made the meme possible. If you claim that the meme encourages violence against the media, then you must claim that the original scene encourages violence against Christians. There is just no way to separate the two.
If it is detachment and desensitization causing these attacks, the next question is, what causes the detachment and desensitization? The culprits here are manifold, but the internet has to be one of the first places we look. ... But it's already fairly clear that our cyber space obsession causes us to be increasingly detached from the physical world and each other. It's a cliche to point out that our connectedness has made us disconnected, yet there's truth to most cliches, and this one is no different.
After a while you get so used to being treated this way, and maybe so used to treating others this way, that you no longer appreciate the dignity and beauty of human life. It is not hard to see how someone who spends hour upon hour and year upon year wallowing in the darkest and vilest corners of cyberspace, treating other humans like filth, wishing violence and death on anyone who crosses them, may eventually become the monsters they already appear to be online.
A man who thinks he can be a despicable, stupid sociopath in cyberspace yet remain a basically decent guy in the "real world" loses sight of the fact that the internet is the real world.
The idea that internet is a morality-free zone where grotesque behavior somehow "doesn't count" not only encourages people to be despicable but numbs them to the impact their behavior has on others.
All of that said, in the eyes of the media and many on the Left, the only evidence needed against Kavanaugh was the fact that he was nominated by a Republican. And the only evidence needed to vindicate Biden is the fact that he is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. All the rest of it — “believe all women,” etc — is a smokescreen. They don’t care about truth and they don’t care about protecting women. That should be obvious now, if it wasn’t already.
Leftist activists can come to your house with bullhorns. Film you in the bathroom. Loot your business. Burn police stations. The FBI does nothing. But if conservative parents raise their voices at a school board meeting, they’re hunted down as terrorists. The law is dead.
This doesn’t mean that a man has a license to be lazy, abusive, or uncaring. Precisely the opposite. He is challenged to live up to the respect his wife has for him. But if his wife parcels out her respect on a reward system, the husband will feel demoralized and empty. He will not feel at home in his home. He will not have the sense of masculine purpose and fulfillment that his family life ought to afford him. After a while, he will dread coming home at night, preferring to remain at work where his contributions are appreciated and his talents are admired. Now the marriage has entered a very dangerous place. If a man feels more like a man when he’s away from his wife than when he’s with her, disaster is right around the corner. The marriage is already half-dead. It won’t take much to finish it off.
If I were starving and a man with 600 sandwiches offered me one, I wouldn’t refuse it on the grounds that one sandwich from a man with 600 sandwiches is like 3 crumbs from a man with one sandwich. I guess Matt Novak would. At least if he has the courage of his profoundly deranged convictions.
At length, CNN writer Brandon Tensley complains that the experts tapped to combat and contain the deadly coronavirus are too white and too male. “Who are these experts?” Tensley asks indignantly. “They’re largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who’ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.”
One wonders if the writer of this CNN article has noticed the CNN TV lineup. I haven’t seen so many white people since my wife dragged me into a HomeGoods. Or maybe since I watched the last Democratic primary debate. But CNN has never seem too concerned with hitting the sort of arbitrary racial quotas it wishes to impose on the Trump Administration. That’s probably because CNN tries to hire the people best suited for the job, regardless of demographic. They appear to fail rather miserably in that regard, but the strategy makes sense in theory.
Truth only seems old fashioned nowadays because we’ve grown so accustomed to deceit and manipulation.
Many parents are given automatic credit for "loving" their kids even as they treat those beloved offspring like accessories to, and burdens on, their self-centered lives. Parents may have moments, even many moments, where they feel a deep affection for their children, but if that affection is not consistently expressed through action and sacrifice, then it isn’t love. Those parents love their kids in about the same way they love the family dog — maybe less.
Men have a deep desire for respect. It is truly a catastrophe that we are not raising our girls to understand and appreciate this fact. Instead they learn, often from their own mothers, from the media, from television, advertisements, academia, and so on, that men are worthless oafs who should be handled accordingly until they prove themselves worthy of better treatment. "My husband will be respected if he earns it," the wife declares. "Let him do the chores I assign to him, let him accomplish everything I require, let him dance to my tune, and then perhaps I’ll reward him like a circus animal with little pellets of respect."
It probably would have been simpler to title the article: “10 Ways Every Intersectional Feminist Can Die Single and Alone.” But I suppose that doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate what Ms. Witt is doing here, and I sincerely hope every feminist takes her advice. This way a man can immediately ask for the check and call it a night the moment his date demands to know whether he has taken active steps to dismantle The Patriarchy. Even better, he doesn’t have to pay for the meal before he leaves. The empowered woman on the other side of the booth would be, I assume, thrilled to take on the masculine role and handle the bill herself. But if a feminist does not helpfully declare herself by forcing her date to take an entrance exam, it may be necessary for the man to ask his own set of questions in order to ensure that he is not about to court a woman who suffers from latent feminism. I’m not really joking about this. I hear from single men all the time who have nearly given up on the dating scene because their girlfriends end up being cold, bitter, unaffectionate man-haters. Here’s a quick survey that should filter them out: