Precious Petals And Devils Incarnate

"Z" For Female Zombie Sounds About Right

The NZ Herald now unofficially opposes free speech.  It does not do so officially, of course, but to all intents and purposes it now must be slammed as an opponent of free speech--and, therefore, of basic freedoms like liberty of conscience.  

Columnist Rachel Stewart has resigned from the NZ Herald because they refused to run a column by Stewart.  The subject?  Massey University's decision to shut down a fringe feminist group from using Massey University's campus as a venue for a planned event. 

Here are the opening lines of Stewart's article which was rejected by the prejudiced NZ Herald:

It seems far-fetched that the mere hiring of a Massey University venue by a feminist organisation could cause so much indignation and rage, but these are not typical times.

A bunch of females getting together within a public space to discuss the issues currently affecting them is far from new, and very far from radical.

Yet, the idea that ‘Feminism 2020’ would dare to congregate at a venue on Massey’s Wellington campus saw a number of students stage a sit-in, which culminated in the handing over of a petition calling on the university to cancel the event.

What is so threatening about women coming together and talking? According to the protestors and petitioners, the organisers of the event – Speak Up for Women – are essentially devil incarnates.

Feminism is now being repeatedly re-defined as the "movement" splinters.

Part III: The Plaintives' Cases Analyzed

A Balrog of Morgoth

In our triptych the first Plaintive insisted that members of the male "class" were destroying members of the female "class".  The goal in view (apparently) was that the female class needed to rise up and destroy the male "class".  The author insisted further that "woke" men--males like her husband who knew what was going on--join the females in this fight to the end.  Quick smart!

The counter case argued by Paglia is that such a view is destructive of human life and culture per se.  It called for a return to "classic feminism" where women were free to imitate male accomplishments, not reduce them to bad tempered, whimpering, screeching children. 

This clash between old-style and new-style feminism, however, sets forth a deeper and broader concern.  The clash is symptomatic of the centre of Western civilization having been lost.  This loss manifests itself firstly in an insistent demand that people be left free to do and be as they want.  They are to create their own truth, as seems good to them.  The second manifestation is the inevitable, perpetual clashes of different centres and different truths.  The end game is only apparent when one "truth" or one perspective manages to become dominant and suppress all others.  In the meantime, we live amidst the struggle--a struggle not about truth, but power.  There is a fight going on as to who will find and seize control of the One Ring:   

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them.

The struggle is not engaged by deploying reason, proofs, or deductions, but by silencing opponents via the infliction of violent rage upon them.

Paul Gosselin captures both stages when he writes:

Part II: The Plaintiff's Case Rejected

"An Absolute Lie"

The second piece in our triptych is a summary of an address by an"old-style" feminist.  Written by Dr Susan Berry, it presents first generation feminist, Camille Paglia  arguing that second generation feminism (as represented in Part I: The Plaintive's Case) is "absolute poison" to our culture.

Camille Paglia: Feminism Based on Destroying Men Is ‘Absolute Poison’ to Culture

Dr Susan Berry
BeitbartNews

Cultural commentator Camille Paglia said in a recently published video that second-wave feminism – in its attempt to destroy men – is also destroying women and our culture.

[A video of Paglia’s discussion at the Battle of Ideas festival in London in October 2016 has been made available on YouTube and was recently linked to on the Drudge Report. The video is released with the launch of Paglia’s new book, Provocations: Collected Essays.]

The feminist icon – who prefers the original brand of feminism that won women the right to vote and raised up heroines such as Katharine Hepburn, Amelia Earhart, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh – said the more recent second wave of feminism is “an absolute poison that has spread worldwide.”

Paglia said the original feminists “admired what men had done – there was no male-bashing – as became systemic to second-wave feminism.”  The brand of feminism recreated by Betty Friedan in the 1960s, Paglia said, is now based on “denigrating men” and “defining men as oppressors and tyrants through history.”

“It is an absolute lie,” she said, “an extrapolation of neuroticism on the part of these fanatics.”

Terrible College Case

The High Cost of ‘Believe Women’ Mantra


By David French
National Review Online


There is no substitute for evidence and due process.

Through much of the last month, the American people have been treated to a version of the emotional and ideological argument that’s dominated the American academy for much of the last ten years. The argument goes something like this: Women rarely lie about rape. Thus, the failure of criminal or civil justice systems to achieve overwhelming rates of conviction or impose liability at the rates of predation means that fundamental reform is mandatory.

Consequently, we must make it easier for women to bring claims, protect them from the rigors of proving claims, and utilize decision-makers trained to understand and respond to the unique trauma of victims. Moreover, when considering sexual-assault claims outside of courts, understand that due process is less important when a man’s liberty isn’t at stake. After all, a campus court isn’t a criminal trial. It’s an evaluation of academic suitability.

The result of this argument has been wholesale national reform — part of it mandated by the Obama administration’s Department of Education, and part of it willingly undertaken by colleges themselves — that has caused universities to lower burdens of proof, channel serious claims into summary proceedings, restrict the ability to cross-examine witnesses, and even limit access to evidence in an effort to streamline the process of punishing sex offenders.

It’s been a disaster.

Part I: The Plaintive's Case

Flood of Rage Through Women's Brains

Over the next three days we will be publishing a triptych consisting of three articles penned by radically different authors.  The first is by a "second generation" feminist.  The next piece is by a "first generation" feminist, commenting upon "second generation" feminism.  The second article offers a description of how feminism has radically changed to the point where it is unrecognizable to "first generation" feministas.  

The transformation from first to second feminism implies the need for a deeper, philosophical, cosmological analysis.  The third piece of our triptych will cover that off.

So, let's move to the first piece--written by a second generation feminista.  Now, we need to introduce this with a disclaimer.  This piece is not a send-up.  It is not a piece of hyperbolic sarcasm.  It is not ironic.  It is a genuine torrent of apoplectic rage.  It is written by Victoria Bissell Brown, a retired history professor at Grinnell College.  It has been published by the Washington Post as authentically representing feminism Mark II.

Feminist Justice an Oxymoron of Oxymorons

Lies, Damned Lies, and Police Policy

"Feminist justice" is an oxymoron.  In fact, whenever it has been applied the results have been profound miscarriages of justice.  Those who advocate for it should be thrown in the clink, or something similar.  

Here is an example of the injustice of feminism at work in the UK.

A national police policy, backed by the National College of Policing, says rape accusers should always be “believed”, echoing the language of far-left radical feminists who believe we all live in a “rape culture”.  [Breitbart London]

Because the far-left radical feminist doctrines have been adopted by the police and applied to policing in the UK, gross miscarriages of justice have resulted.  Now, given the manifest injustices that have come to light, the National Police Chiefs Council has called for this feminist horror to be rescinded and the national police policy in the UK to be changed accordingly.

The Ghost of Jo McCarthy Rides Again

A Small Matter

We once watched actress Zoe Wanamaker describe the acute travail suffered by her father and family during the Joe McCarthy "Reds under beds" allegations and "investigations" in the fifties.  Eventually the Wanamaker family decamped from the United States to the UK.  America's loss was the UK's gain.

We are now left wondering whether a new form of McCarthyism is presently sweeping across the United States.  A Guardian writer has been lamenting the summary firing of NBC's Matt Lauer over sexual misconduct allegations.  We wonder whether columnist Jill Filopovic's mind was properly engaged when she wrote lines such as:

We must deal with complexity of admiring a man – and accepting that he may have done something awful

. . . . the latest in a string of high-profile men brought down by accusations of handsiness or inappropriate behavior toward female colleagues.

This is new. And it’s a feminist victory.

Ah, but is it true?

Inane Identity Propaganda

"Maoridom" Is A Meaningless Construct

David Garrett has written a guest post in Kiwiblog which is worth a read.  It is about "Maoridom"--which is to say, it is about identity politics.  What Garrett describes and rejects is the same mindset that equally applies to feminists who both claim and assert that there is a "woman's perspective" or ideology.  The most egregious example in recent times is Michelle Obama ridiculously claiming that women who vote Republican are not really voting according to their "true selves".  

Another topical example is "African Americanism" in the United States.  For the reasons Garrett finds Maori identity politics to be stupid and meaningless, so with all forms of identity politics and propaganda. 

Following the shock defeat of all Maori Party candidates at the recent election, there were lots of comments – from all sides of the commentariat – about how “Maoridom” were affected, and how this mythical beast would feel about what had happened. I have often wondered about this odd construct, which implies that all Maori think alike, and all Maori view all issues – including political issues – in the same way. That surely makes no more sense than referring to “pakehadom”. Grant Robertson and I are both middle aged white men, but other than that,  I have  about as much in common with him as I have with Kim Jong -Un.

Pushback

Trump’s Education Department Takes on the Campus-Rape Lie

Will it have the will to restore due process for the accused?

By David French
National Review Online

Last week, while the most in the media fixed their eyes on Donald Trump Jr., far-left activists geared up for a different kind of assault on the Trump administration: a full-court press to maintain a series of unlawful Obama-era policies that have stripped young men of their constitutional rights, ruined lives, and fostered politically correct (but factually challenged) hysteria on campuses from coast to coast. At issue is the Obama administration’s April 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, a document that skipped the legally mandated regulatory rulemaking process to require colleges to adjudicate campus sexual-assault cases under a “preponderance of the evidence” standard without also securing adequate due-process rights for the accused.

Why do such a thing? Because campus activists (and Obama-administration allies) were convinced that colleges were in the middle of a “rape crisis.” Shoddy studies conducted with expansive definitions of sexual assault convinced the Left that an astounding 20 percent of college women are assaulted during their campus years, rendering the university a virtual war zone for women. It’s a rate that contradicts Bureau of Justice statistics showing that women are safer on campus than off, and that the real rate of sexual violence on campus isn’t one in five but closer to 6.1 per 1,000, a number that had been trending downward for 14 years as of 2013, the last year covered in the BJS report.

But no matter, the fake crisis demanded extreme measures, and the result was a series of federally mandated kangaroo courts. The goal was to create a summary procedure that permitted wronged women to safely and easily report their abusers and remove them from campus. The actual result was that poorly trained campus officials stepped into a miasma of drunken hookups and broken hearts. By 2016, colleges were buffeted from two directions — by an activist Democratic administration that demanded ever-more-decisive actions to address the alleged “crisis” and by mushrooming lawsuits brought by aggrieved male students, young men who were often forced off campus on the flimsiest of charges.

Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos signaled that help — or at least due process — was on the way.

Bias Beyond Credulity

Sorry Ladies, You’re the Wrong Kind of Muslims

The latest in profiles in cowardice from Senate Democrats.

Thomas J. Craughwell
The American Spectator

The two women invited to the Dirksen Senate Office Building a couple of  weeks ago seemed like the kind of expert witnesses any Democrat, especially a female Democrat, would love. Both have become respected academics, authors, and activists for women’s rights. Both are outspoken critics of religious extremism. Both are Muslims, and both are critical of Muslim extremism, but for way too many Democrats that point of view is not legitimate.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a Muslim family. As a young girl she suffered genital mutilation. Her family and friends followed such an intense form of Islam that in her teens she cheerfully looked forward to the day when the fatwa against author Salman Rushdie would be carried out at last. When her family tried to force her into marriage, she fled Africa for the Netherlands.

There she met director Theo Van Gogh; together they made a film critical of extreme interpretations of Islam which sanction the abuse, degradation, even the killing of Muslim women. After the film was released, Van Gogh was murdered on a city street by a terrorist. Pinned to his clothes was a note declaring that Hirsi Ali would be next. Today, Ali is in the United States. She is a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of two best-sellers, Heretic and Infidel. And she has renounced her Muslim faith. Because of all these factors, her life is in constant danger.

The other witness was Asra Nomani, a writer and activist for equal rights for women in Islam.

Doppelganger of Islamic Fundamentalism

"You Will Live, Move, and Have Your Being at Our Pleasure"

No Room for Dissent in Women’s Movement Today

Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represents Republican candidates and conservative groups, says the women’s movement has morphed into a giant abortion rights lobby.

By Cleta Mitchell
New York Times

Is there a “women’s movement” in 2017? What is it? Who is it?

I became involved with the women’s movement in the early 1970s, when, as a junior at the University of Oklahoma, I was one of five founders of the Oklahoma Women’s Political Caucus. For over a decade, I traveled the state working for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Later, as an Oklahoma state legislator, I was a champion of women’s rights, including supporting abortion rights within the Roe v. Wade framework.

In the 1970s, we fought for legal equality and eradication of the laws, based on English common law, that put women in the same legal category as children and insane persons. We wanted access to the Ivy League schools, the professions, the clubs — everything. Wherever men could go and become successful, we wanted to be there, too.

And we got it all. Big time. The antiquated statutes were repealed. Women got into the professions and the C-suites and the schools and the TV news anchor desks. We got there. We ARE there.  So why, pray tell, were those women and girls wearing those ridiculous hats at the purposeless “women’s marches” in January? Why do they perpetuate the Freudian question, “What do women want?”

The women’s movement has ebbed because it succeeded. Yet the suffragist Susan B. Anthony’s mantra “Failure is impossible” has been so hijacked by post-millennium feminism that declaring victory is unforgivable.

All that a “movement” could responsibly achieve, has been achieved. My 32-year-old daughter doesn’t know the meaning of “girls not allowed.”

The Children of The Age Rise Up to Kill Themselves

The Dwarves Have Delved Too Greedily

Barbara Ehrenreich has been an advocate for the proposition that the "family is dangerous".   The idea was that the family represents a primitive social arrangement which needs radical rework by the State.

In an article in Time (July 18, 1994) she wrote:

A disturbing subtext runs through our recent media fixations. Parents abuse sons -- allegedly at least, in the Menendez case -- who in turn rise up and kill them. A husband torments a wife, who retaliates with a kitchen knife. Love turns into obsession, between the Simpsons anyway, and then perhaps into murderous rage: the family, in other words, becomes personal hell. . . . We live in a culture that fetishizes the family as the ideal unit of human community. . .

In the same article she asserted:

. . . even the ostensibly 'functional' non-violent family can be a nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence.

She should know, for Ehrenreich publicly confesses to killing two of her children by aborting them.

What concerns us here was the continuing effort by Unbelief from the seventies onwards to persuade people that the family needed to be replaced.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

No Goddess Can Ever Save Us

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

INTRODUCTION:

Last week I posted something called Potiphar’s Wife, Survivor, which elicited something of an enthusiastic reaction. That reaction was registered in different places, like Facebook, Twitter, and in the comments section here, and a noticeable bit of it ran down the lines of the eff-you-Doug school of thought. Not only was it registered in different places, it was registered in different registers. What I was doing was vile, outside the pale, scarcely civilized, and so on.

What I actually had done was to take the case of Potiphar’s wife, who falsely played the victim, and give her the jargon that victims are expected to use today—survivor, therapy, rape culture, and so on.
What I want to do here is examine why such an innocuous point garnered such a fierce reaction, and then I want to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to bear on the foundational compromises which necessarily breed that kind of reaction. It would be dereliction of ministerial responsibility to do anything other than bring the message of Jesus to bear on a mess like that.

So a very reasonable question asks, “What do you intend when you do things like this? What are you trying to accomplish?” The answer is simple, and comes near the conclusion of The Silver Chair. I want everyone to notice, in the first instance, that the thrumming has stopped, and I want them to realize, the second place, that everything smells pretty much like burnt marshwiggle. It is not a pleasant smell, I freely grant, but it is what the situation calls for.

Women Standing Up

Protesting The Women's March On Washington

Emily Knorr
asoulatwork.com

Like many others, I have been closely following the news surrounding the Women’s March occurring in DC today. The conversation surrounding it has been interesting, yet largely unsurprising, and, for me, very frustrating.

I’ve found it frustrating because the March’s purpose and surrounding controversy not only touches on, but stems from two of my greatest passions - (1) infants, both inside and outside of the womb, and (2) womenhood/women’s health.

And to my disappointment, in the present conversation, I find both are being largely misunderstood.

I am a twenty-three year old woman who has led a blessed life in many ways.

How Did It Come to This . . . ?

The Liberated Woman Shows What She Wants

We awoke the other morning to the completely unexpected news that Donald Trump is going to do something inconceivably horrible.  He was going to remove Federal money from funding the odium of abortion outside the boundaries of the United States.  The howls of protest have even reached far away New Zealand.  

Yet, some perspective is in order.  The prohibition on funding abortions offshore was first enacted by President Ronald Reagan in 1984.  It was reversed by Billary, but was subsequently reinstated by every Republican president since.  Trump is merely following suit.  We say "merely", not because it is an unimportant or insignificant step but because it was an expected outcome.  Nevertheless the banshees and the dervishes protesting outrage at the restoration of the "Mexico City Policy" tell us that killing babies is regarded by some, if not many, as a mark of ideological purity and zealotry.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Trump Tape

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

I will have more to say about this, probably Monday, but I did want to take a moment to tell everyone something important. With the release of this TackyTrumpTape, we all ought to sit down, compose ourselves, and on the count of three, put on our surprised face.

What about this did anyone find surprising? What about this did all the Republicans who endorsed Trump find to be unexpected? And if they found it unexpected, why should we trust any of their political calculations ever again?

And who finds it disconcerting that the banner of “respect for women” will be carried at the debate tomorrow by Hillary “the Enabler” Clinton? As my son just tweeted, either way we go, degradation of women is coming to the White House. And degradation of women will come to the White House because, in just a few weeks, we the people are all going to make it happen.

FDR once glibbed, “We owe it to ourselves!” We can top that — “We did it to ourselves.”

Perspectives on Mary Magdalene

Lies, Damned Lies, and Post-Modern Academics

It's been some years since we heard about Jesus' wife.  The academic world was all agog in 2012 when Dr Karen L King, a professor at Harvard, announced to the world that she had possession of a scrap of an ancient text which implied most clearly that Jesus was married--to Mary Magdalene.  

Withing a few short weeks of this cacophonous announcement, serious New Testament scholars were debunking the claim.  But that did not put the Unbelieving academic world--let alone their tame, fawning media--in any doubt.

 At a splashy roll-out a stone’s throw from the Vatican in 2012, King presented a paper to more than 300 scholars from 27 countries, where she announced the discovery of an ancient scrap of papyrus in which Jesus refers to his “wife,” whom King said is probably Mary Magdalene.  “All of the evidence points to it being ancient,” King later said. “As historians, the question then becomes, what does it mean?” [Thomas D. Williams, Breitbart News]

"All the evidence" said the headline-seeking scholar indicated that the text was authentic.  In this venerable, most ancient artifact, Jesus is quoted as saying “My wife… she is able to be my disciple.”  That's it then.  Proof positive.  The heavyweight, high-brow organs weighed in.

The Harvard Theological Review published an entire journal edition on the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” and the Smithsonian Channel produced a major documentary on the topic. National Geographic confidently announced, “No Forgery Evidence Seen in ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife’ Papyrus” in its issue from April 11, 2014.

No evidence of forgery, huh?   Not a skerrick.  Hold that thought.

A Picture More Profound Than A Thousand Words

Reality--Unrehearsed and Spontaneous

Remember the 'Napalm Girl' shot which aroused the world over the horror of US napalm being dropped on Vietnamese villages?  The picture of the naked, fleeing infant, amidst the other terrified children, said it all.

Sometimes a news photos capture a reality which is so profound it becomes indeed much more powerful than thousands of words.

What is wrong with this photo? What is so graphically epitomic about this image?



A group of migrants walk on the road near a border line between Serbia and Croatia, near the village of Berkasovo, Serbia, Monday, Oct. 19, 2015. Tension was building among thousands of migrants as they remained stranded in fog and cold weather in the Balkans on Sunday in their quest to reach a better life in Western Europe, two days after Hungary closed its border with Croatia and the flow of people was redirected to a much slower route via Slovenia. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Some hints:
Count the number of young men. Consider their clothing and what they are carrying.
Compare and contrast with the woman.

The culture which Western feminists lionise and idolize is portrayed quintessentially in this image.  It is a negative parable of how the truth of Jesus Christ sets people free.

Rejecting Nihilism

Revolutionary Transformation

Femen is an "organization" that takes seriously the implicit nihilism in secular feminist ideology.  When its rage is spent, very little is left.  It is a particular political expression of existentialism where one's identity has much to do with wilfulness and its myriad of expressions.  No law, no boundaries, no limitations are recognised.

One of Femen's shock troops, Sara Fernanda Giromin has back-flipped, repenting of her life of destructive nihilism.  This from News.Com:

Led By the Nose

The Father of Lies Knows His Own

Lena Dunham has been exposed as a fraud.  She is clearly a narcissist.  Yet like many pseudo-intellectuals she remains lauded by the glitterati, a class of doyens never inclined to let the facts get in the way of a good story.  So Marx, Tolstoi, Hemingway, Satre, Gollanz, Rousseau, and Lillian Hellman--notorious liars all-- were lionised by the Commentariat of their day.  They remain lionised amongst the "smart set" to this day.

It has been well said that a person's character can be known by their acquaintances and friends as well as by their enemies.  The glitterati of our day illustrate the point.  A fraud such as Dunham continues to be celebrated and lionised amongst them.  By so doing, the glitterati betray their true character.  Michelle Malkin puts the matter in perspective.