Monthly Archives: March 2015
The Campus Rape Epidemic Does Not Exist
From Heather Mac Donald:
Let’s look at these numbers, Howard. The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers.
Detroit is America’s most violent city. Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies—that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery—is 2%. Its rape rate is 0.05%. A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of. Not even in Africa’s most brutal civil wars has anything been experienced in human history like a 20% crime rate. And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in.
The frenzy of college admissions begins earlier and earlier each year. Here in Manhattan, parents are paying $200 an hour for tutoring for prekindergarten, all in the hope of getting their little darlings into Harvard 14 years later.
The White House Council on Women and Girls says that the survivors—and be sure to use the word survivors—of sexual assault on campus suffer lifetimes of post-traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts. What are we seeing in fact? Girls graduate at 23% higher rates than men on campus, and go on to lead highly lucrative careers. If the rape epidemic was going on as claimed, we wouldn’t merely have rape administration Title IX bureaucracy sprouting up on campuses because there would be no more campuses. You would have had a massive exodus of girls from college campuses years ago, and a demand to create actually safe environments for student learning. Why hasn’t that happened? Because the campus rape epidemic does not exist.
Talking Is Not Accomplishment
From Thomas Sowell:
It is amazing how a simple question can cause a complex lie to collapse like a house of cards. The simple question was asked by Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel, and it was addressed to two Democrats. He asked what has Hillary Clinton ever accomplished.
The two Democrats immediately sidestepped the question and started reciting their talking points in favor of Hillary. But O’Reilly kept coming back to the fact that nothing they were talking about was an accomplishment.
For someone who has spent her entire adult life in politics, including being a Senator and then a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has nothing to show for all those years — no significant legislation of hers that she got passed in the Senate, and only an unbroken series of international setbacks for the United States during her time as Secretary of State.
Before Barack Obama entered the White House and appointed Mrs. Clinton Secretary of State, Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq had notified their higher ups, stationed in Pakistan, that their cause was lost in Iraq and that there was no point sending more men there.
Hosni Mubarak was in charge in Egypt. He posed no threat to American or Western interests in the Middle East or to Christians within Egypt or to Israel. But the Obama administration threw its weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over and began terrorizing Christians in Egypt and promoting hostility to Israel.
In Libya next door, the Qaddafi regime had already given up its weapons of mass destruction, after they saw what happened to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But President Obama’s foreign policy, carried out by Secretary of State Clinton, got Qaddafi removed, after which Libya became a terrorist haven where an American ambassador was killed, for the first time in decades.
The rationale for getting rid of Middle East leaders who posed no threat to American interests was that they were undemocratic and their people were restless. But there are no democracies in the Middle East, except for Israel. Moreover, the people were restless in Iran and Syria, and the Obama-Clinton foreign policy did nothing to support those who were trying to overthrow these regimes.
It would be only fair to balance this picture with foreign policy triumphs of the Obama-Clinton team. But there are none. Not in the Middle East, not in Europe, where the Russians have invaded the Crimea, and not in Asia, where both China and North Korea are building up threatening military forces, while the Obama administration has been cutting back on American military forces.
Hillary Clinton became an iconic figure by feeding the media and the left the kind of rhetoric they love. Barack Obama did the same and became president. Neither had any concrete accomplishments besides rhetoric beforehand, and both have had the opposite of accomplishments after taking office.
They have something else in common. They attract the votes of those people who vote for demographic symbolism — “the first black president” to be followed by “the first woman president” — and neither to be criticized, lest you be denounced for racism or sexism.
It is staggering that there are sane adults who can vote for someone to be President of the United States as if they are in school, just voting for “most popular boy” or “most popular girl” — or, worse yet, voting for someone who will give them free stuff.
Whoever holds that office makes decisions involving the life and death of Americans and — especially if Iran gets a nuclear arsenal — the life and death of this nation. It took just two nuclear bombs — neither of them as powerful as those available today — to get a very tough nation like Japan to surrender.
Anyone familiar with World War II battles in the Pacific knows that it was not unusual for 90 percent of the Japanese troops defending Iwo Jima or other islands to fight to the death, even after it was clear that American troops had them beaten.
When people like that surrender after two nuclear bombs, do not imagine that today’s soft Americans — led by the likes of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton — will fight on after New York and Chicago have been reduced to radioactive ashes.
Meanwhile, ISIS and other terrorists are giving us a free demonstration of what surrender would mean. But perhaps we can kick the can down the road, and leave that as a legacy to our children and grandchildren, along with the national debt.
The Asymmetrical Nature of Western Multiculturalism
From Frank Salter:
Now my focus today will be on Western multiculturalism with which I am most familiar. But there is also an Eastern type, and I’m not an expert in that certainly. But as I understand it, multiculturalism as practiced in Singapore and Malaysia, for example, is a different kettle of fish, as we say in Australia. It’s a different matter. One key difference is that Western multiculturalism excludes majorities from the protection of the state. One definition of multiculturalism is that group rights protected by the state, or the state steps in and says, look, we’re going to protect certain groups. And one would imagine they would say all ethnic groups, but it’s not true with multiculturalism.
One authority on American multiculturalism Eric Kaufman observes that it is asymmetrical. So he defines American and Western multiculturalism as asymmetrical. This creed represses majority group ethnic expression. And that is a strong characteristic of Western multiculturalism, that the majority, the core ethnic group of those countries, is not considered to be a protected group.
Now the effect is to leave the ethnic majority vulnerable to subordination. Indeed, Western multiculturalism has as its basis the unilateral demobilization of majorities and the simultaneous mobilization of minority consciousness. It’s asymmetrical. It does different things for minorities and majorities.
Fraud
“Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”
— Barack Obama, January 21, 2009
From Yahoo News:
The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law — but only when it was challenged.
Moral Manipulation
From Jason Riley:
Ferguson, Mo., in 2015 is not Selma, Ala., in 1965. Black people in America today are much more likely to experience racial preferences than racial slights. The violent crime that is driving the black incarceration rate spiked after the civil-rights victories of the 1960s, not before. And if voter-ID laws threaten the black franchise, no one seems to have told the black electorate. According to the Census Bureau, the black voter-turnout rate in 2012 exceeded the white turnout rate, even in states with the strictest voter-ID requirements.
The socioeconomic problems that blacks face today have nothing to do with civil-rights barriers and nearly everything to do with a black subculture that rejects certain attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to upward mobility. Yet Mr. Obama has a political interest—and the civil-rights industry has a vested interest—in pretending that the opposite is true.
“Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs,” writes the Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele in “Shame,” his timely new book on political polarization and race relations in the U.S. This liberalism, he adds, is “not much interested in addressing discrimination case by case; rather, it assumes that all minorities and women are systematically discriminated against so that only government-enforced preferential policies for these groups—across the entire society—can bring us close to equity.”
Not Grandmother-in-Chief Material
From Jonah Goldberg:
In the wake of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s fairly disastrous press conference at the United Nations on Tuesday, there’s only one conclusion shared by all parties: This was not how it was supposed to go.
This was supposed to be the month Clinton led with her chief selling point: her gender. She had put together a whole “I Am Woman, Hear Me Bore” speaking tour in which women’s issues — particularly the women’s issues that poll well among women who care a lot about women’s issues — would be the main subject.
The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation unveiled a big foofaraw over Hillary’s “No Ceilings” campaign. What a wonderfully convenient theme for Mrs. Clinton’s massive and mysterious foundation, given that smashing the “highest glass ceiling” — i.e., the presidency — is the central rationale of her planned presidential bid. It was just a coincidence that the tax-exempt foundation with her name on it happened to be rolling out a big light show on that very subject during the rollout of her presidential campaign.
It was all carefully scripted, because everything Hillary Clinton does is carefully scripted. Normally, that’s a figurative expression. But with Clinton, when things are carefully scripted, they are literally carefully scripted.
On Monday, Hillary had a “No Ceilings” event at the Clinton Foundation. After her opening remarks, the Associated Press reported, she declined to take any questions. “When she sat down to lead more informal conversations with invited speakers, participants appeared to be reading from teleprompters.”
I’ll give the AP reporters a pass on this odd locution, since they at least conveyed the truth to the reader. But for the record, a dialogue between people on a stage in which they read from teleprompters is not an “informal conversation” — it’s a play.
The trouble for Clinton is that, despite all of her preparation, all of her coordination, the world is going off her script. And for a woman who thinks off-the-cuff speaking is switching from her prepared remarks to her prepared notecards, that’s a scary place.
That is surely why she set up her own private Internet server. Four times at the U.N., Clinton said she had created her “home-brew” e-mail system simply for “convenience.”
“I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal e-mails instead of two,” she said.
Never mind that it’s much easier to set up two e-mail systems on one device than it is to set up a whole dark server hidden from the government. And leave aside that a woman who travels with a very large entourage on non-commercial flights could probably manage two devices.
I’m sure she’s right. She set up the server for convenience — but not the convenience of sparing her the load of an additional four-ounce phone. When you want to hide what you’re doing, a private server is definitely the way to go.
Hillary has only two comfort zones: deep in a bunker or high on a pedestal. Drag her out of the former or knock her off the latter and she’s at sea.
In her very brief press conference Tuesday, she essentially admitted to the transgression she’s been accused of for the past week. She admitted to deleting thousands of e-mails. She turned over the public e-mails she deemed safe to give to the public and kept the rest, saying they were private, anointing herself to be the sole arbiter.
“I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by,” she said. And: “I have no doubt that we have done exactly what we should have done.”
This hints at the attitude that binds her and her husband: the belief that they are governed solely by what they choose to be governed by and what they do is right because they have done it.
The problem for Hillary is she can’t sell it. That’s why she prefers everything to be scripted. For example, Mrs. Clinton needed to tell the public not to ever come looking for any more e-mail from her, including the allegedly private ones she chose not to share. So she claimed they no longer exist.
“At the end, I chose not to keep my private, personal e-mails — e-mails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends.”
Clinton’s vast marketing division has been toying with rolling her out as the “Grandmother in Chief.” Well, here’s a tip: Grandmothers save that kind of stuff.
Americans Are Fools If They Accept This
From Mark Steyn:
I’ll be talking about today’s Hillary Clinton press conference later tonight with Sean Hannity on Fox News, but it was an amazing performance. Amazingly wooden and unconvincing, of course, but in a sense that was part of its brazenness. Its sheer implausibility underlined her central message: Yeah, and what are you gonna do about it?
Most political figures would be terrified at having to advance this thin a defense in public:
Oh, well. I didn’t have a government email address because I didn’t want to be forced to carry “two devices”. Who’d she get that one from? Bill? “Aw, honey, you know I couldn’t possibly be arkansashorndog@yahoo.com, and distinguishingcharacteristics@gmail.com, and cigaraficionado@aol.com, and hotmale@hotmail.com, and youmightwanttoputsomeiceonthat@clintonmentoring.com, and all the rest, because I’d have to have 12 different devices. And, if I had 12 different desktops on the desk, there’d be no room for the intern, would there?”
But apparently it’s easier to set up your own email domain on a personal server at your home than ask a State Dept underling if there’s anybody there who can figure out how to get two email addresses on one “device”. And apparently your reluctance to carry two “devices” trumps anything so footling as the law. And, in any case, you said on camera just two weeks ago that you had an iPhone and a Blackberry.
Hillary announced today that she’d deleted everything other than the 55,000 pages of emails she handed over to the government. And, while 55,000 sounds like a lot, it boils down to fewer than 38 a day for a four-year term. The average person in work has over 120 business-related emails a day. So Hillary’s 55,000 sounds a little on the low side. Happily for her, she handed them over to the feds as print copies only, so Trey Gowdy is going to have to wait until some State Dept minion has scanned them all in in a searchable form before he can enter search terms like “Benghazi”.
The risibilty of these defenses is the point. To reprise one of my favorite Theodore Dalrymple quotes:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
That’s why all this stuff is coming out now. If Hillary can get away with something so obviously and uniquely and intentionally wrong, and that compromises national security to boot, and for which she offers nothing but the most laughable explanations, then she will have set the rules for the next 18 months. If she can make the court eunuchs of the media and the Democrats’ own base complicit in this absurd and unconvincing lie, they’re hardly in a position to complain about all the others in the months ahead.
The Leader of the Free World
A Pretense of Oppression
From Heather Mac Donald:
Just when you’d gotten the hang of LGBTQ, they go and triple the number of categories. Wesleyan University is now offering a “safe space” (formerly known as a “dorm”) for students of the LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM persuasions, or, for those who need things spelled out, for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism student acolytes. If you are so heteronormative as to see the word “FAG” in the center of that jumble, you will surely not be allowed into the “safe space,” known as Open House.
At this rate of exponential increase in student gender identities, there will soon not be enough paper in college bureaucrats’ offices to provide official recognition and “safety.” Parents concerned that their little darlings may come home with bruises and abrasion from the whips and leather handcuffs need not worry, though. This proliferation of in-your-face sexual identities is all posturing, just part of the dance between students desperate to find one last means of being transgressive and college bureaucrats eager to show their sensitivity and to justify their six-figure salaries. Students who should be studying European history and the roots of the novel—would that such subjects were still taught—are instead combing the farthest reaches of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual for ways to distinguish themselves. By posing what they hope will be rejected demands on their administrations, they seek only to prove that they are living a life of oppression.
Despite the seemingly all-inclusive aspirations of the LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM acronym, the university recognizes that not every student will feel comfortable in this new “safe space.” To accommodate still further variations in student interest, Wesleyan’s Office of Residential Life offers a variety of unique living options. Farm House provides students “interested in the politics and culture of food production and sustainability a place to cultivate a mutualistic relationship with the earth that provides them with their lunch everyday.” Residents of Earth House can “espouse the values and principles of social ecology, deep ecology, and eco-feminism” while simultaneously “challenging traditional social structures and replacing them with new, creative and egalitarian alternatives.” African-American upperclassmen are welcome to apply to live in Malcolm X House, where they can dedicate themselves to “the exploration and celebration of the cultural heritage of the African Diaspora, both for themselves and for the larger Wesleyan community.” Turath House is for Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim students looking “to articulate their views and express and affirm their culture and religion without fear of harassment and discrimination.”
With so many marginalized groups on campus, one wonders who is left to do the discriminating and oppressing.
Benighted Comment 