Blame Tigerhawk for this

I’m looking at SiteMeter and seeing more click-overs from Tigerhawk, but I don’t see where he’s got any new linkage to me. Ergo, he got some kind of big ‘Lanche today, and I’m getting extra traffic from the blogroll or something.

But he’s got good stuff, including this:

Marriage and housework: “Marriage is no longer a man’s path to less housework.”

The hell you say. If marriage doesn’t decrease your housework, guys, you’re doing something wrong. You do it right, you’ll occasionally get breakfast in bed and never even have to think about the laundry.

Before you ladies start screaming “sexist patriarchal monster!” — guilty as charged, ma’am — you really need to think about the alternatives. I was completely autonomous as a bachelor. My mother worked, and she died when I was 16. There were just us three boys (no sisters), and I had plenty of experience with cooking, cleaning and laundry. So it wasn’t as if I needed those services, but the package deal . . .

A free-market economist Thomas Sowell could explain all this. Think trade-offs, efficiencies of scale, stuff like that.

There is such a thing as a marriage market and, given current market conditions, there is a noticeable surplus of angry careerist bitches who consider domestic drudgery beneath their dignity as womyn. Therefore, if only as a marketing strategy, no matter how demeaning you consider it to scrub toilets or fold towels, try to pretend as if nothing else on earth could give you greater pleasure.

Honestly. You’re already faking orgasms so . . .

The Dark Night of Patriarchal Oppression

Big hat tip to Dan Collins for discovering this groundshaking documentary video, exposing the heinous reality of misogynistic sexism before the triumph of the women’s movement:

How to Hate Feminism (And You Must)

From my latest Taki’s Magazine column:

American women today, as a class, are the most privileged women in the entire history of humanity. No women anywhere have ever enjoyed more wealth, more leisure, or more opportunity. And yet they are not grateful, nor do they give American men any credit for their good fortune.
All we ever hear from them is bitch, bitch, bitch — especially when a man dares call attention to their faults. Gentlemen, you are guilty of cowardice for not speaking out more strongly in your own defense, and in defense of your fellow men. . . .

Go read the whole thing, then come back and let’s talk. There are principles involved here.

Months ago, when I first coined the motto, “Equality Is For Ugly Losers,” some of the ladies took umbrage. What was I saying? What was the point? And, even if my point was valid, why would I choose to express it in such a potentially offensive manner? Isn’t it better to “draw more flies with honey,” so to speak?

Whomping the mule
Mild and accommodating rhetoric, the pleasing niceness of polite discourse, is a fine thing to practice in one’s personal life, and I attempt to do so. Taki’s editor Richard Spencer can tell you of the CPAC cocktail reception where he struck out with Suzanna Logan in part because he insisted on provoking rather a fierce argument with a Republican political operative. (Dude, we’ve got to work on your game. Seriously.)

However, the engaging habits of deference and humility, so requisite to success in interpersonal relationships, can become a deadly poison when applied to political and intellectual combat. The ability to bite one’s tongue and make amiable cocktail-reception chatter is a useful skill, but when it is time to fight, it’s time to fight, and a different skill set must be applied.

First, an argument cannot be influential if no one reads it. There is an old joke about a farmer training a mule. The farmer begins by taking out a stick and whomping the mule upside the head. “What’d you do that for?” asks the city slicker, to which the farmer replies: “Well, the first thing is to get the mule’s attention.”

Wishing to make an argument against feminism, an argument that could not be ignored or mistaken for any mild anti-feminist critique, I whomped that mule upside the head: Equality Is For Ugly Losers.

‘Winners’ in girly-land
One observes in our intellectual life persons who are eminently respectable, influential and successful while also being plainly and fundamentally wrong. Chris Matthews immediately springs to mind, and this is not Tuesday, so we will not digress to discuss David Brooks, but you see the point. Such people are always the best targets for Rule 4 (“Make Some Enemies”), the intellectual emperors whose nakedness must be exposed.

How do these people operate? How does a transparent bankruptcy of intellect gain respect, influence and success? And if one wishes to undermine such a person, how best to go about it?

Given that we are “An Army of Davids,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame says, I take it for granted that many will engage in the point-by-point refutation of the errors and lies in any 2-minute YouTube clip of Chris Matthews, or the latest David Brooks column. (As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ “) Yet if the wrongness of such people is so evident that any blogger in his pajamas can spot it, how do they get away with their fraudulence?

To answer that question, let me ask you another question: Why do Ace, Allah and Rusty insist on maintaining their personal anonymity? (NOTE: This is not intended as a slight to these three fine bloggers; see Update IV below.)

By slow and imperceptible degrees, like a vine climbing a wall, a stultifying artificiality has crept into American intellectual life, which is governed by a set of unspoken rules that prohibit engagement on terms that are honest, honorable and manly. Our discourse has become dishonest, dishonorable and effeminate, in the manner of vicious third-grade schoolgirls on the playground, whispering behind each others’ backs.

This nasty girlishness is the reason why David Kuo could get more than a million dollars to waste on Culture11, why Ace fiercely guards his privacy, and why I am out here shaking the tip jar (please give today) instead of composing columns for National Review. Am I the only one who remembers that, when Ann Coulter got axed from NRO, she denounced Rich Lowry as a “girly boy”? And am I the only one who knows exactly what she meant?

Capital climbers
When I arrived in Washington from Georgia in 1997, I was immediately struck by the stifling falseness of the place. The source of this falseness, however, was not immediately apparent, and it took me many years of careful observation, painful experience and lonely contemplation to discover that source.

In Washington, reputation, image, status and prestige are everything, for these are the means by which one acquires that most precious of commodities, influence. Here, a man can be a clueless fool, a two-faced liar and/or a porn-addicted closet homosexual in a sham marriage, yet as long as he has influence, he will be praised and treated with courtesy as if he were a gentleman.

The all-important factor of influence in D.C. means that the smart operator carefully calculates everything he says or does. He learns to be circumspect and obsequious, to fawn and flatter with those who can help him, to backstab and undermine his potential rivals, to ignore those who are inconsequential to his ambitions, and to carefully accumulate a curriculum vitae of senior fellowships, contributing editorships, board memberships, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Ordinary Americans do not operate by such methods, nor even attempt to understand them, because the Ordinary American happily lacks the quality essential to success in Washington, namely the ambition to be a success in Washington. And the reason the successful Washington operative is so insultingly arrogant is because he is so consumed by his pursuit of influence that he cannot distinguish between ambition and ability.

The press secretary to a Senator vainly imagines that he holds that job because he possesses such vast intelligence and skill that there is no one else in this nation of 300 million who could possibly do it so well. Yet if Tom Coburn fired his press secretary tomorrow — this is a name-out-of-a-hat example and I don’t even know Coburn’s press secretary, much less have any desire that he should be fired — the resultant job opening would attract a dozen or more applications from persons equally suited to the job. And never mind all those who might be qualified for the job, but have no interest in such work.

Such, however, is the role of influence in Washington that Coburn’s press secretary is treated with a measure of deference and respect. He exercises, by proxy, senatorial prestige, and those who seek favor with the senator will cultivate the press secretary’s friendship and admiration — though not nearly so much as they cultivate that kingpin of congressional bureaucrats, the Chief of Staff.

There are 535 chiefs of staff in the Capitol, and let the curious outsider inquire what terror the Chief of Staff wields over the lesser functionaires who are dependent on his good favor for their continued employment and hopeful advancement. No court eunuch in ancient Persia ever so jealously guarded his prerogative as does the congressional Chief of Staff.

Means of ascent
What is true on Capitol Hill is true at the White House, in every agency and bureau, in every think tank, policy shop, advocacy group and media organization in Washington. A young man or woman does not graduate from a Top 50 university with a degree in political science, public policy or communications, go through a series of internships and leadership seminars, then hire in on a lower rung of the Washington power establishment with the career goal of moving up one or two rungs before turning 65 and collecting a pension. Oh, hell, no.

When a fellow out of Penn or Stanford comes to Washington at age 23, he means to claw his way to power and wealth, if not also to fame, By Any Means Necessary. Influence is the objective, and ambition is the fuel, and woe unto he who is perceived as an impediment or obstacle to the success of the ambitious young Washingtonian.

To understand the culture of the place, you must understand these organizational dynamics, and with such an understanding, you then see how David Brooks gets away with his scam. David Brooks has friends in Washington, and all of his friends are influential friends, for the likes of him never cultivates the friendships of people who are not relevant or useful to his ambitions. He has kissed all the right asses, and the recipients of his tender ministrations are grateful to have their pliant toady occupy that precious slice of editorial real estate, a column at the New York Times, where — whatever useless idiocies he may spew — his patrons can be sure of one thing, and one crucially important thing: He will not attack them.

Ah, but today is not Tuesday, so we must leave aside this amusing digression and now return to our main theme.

Portrait of an Idea
The girlish artificiality of discourse in Washington, a byproduct of the game of ambition and influence which is the daily bloodsport of our nation’s capital, is manifested in any other arena of endeavor where similar organizational dynamics prevail. What is true of the senatorial Chief of Staff is therefore true of certain prestigous and respectable ideas, because the ambition/influence dynamic exists there also.

Falsehood cannot withstand truth, so long as truth is accompanied by courage, and therefore the practicioners of falsehood always seek to discourage the friends of truth. (Ask Kathy Shaidle or Rush Limbaugh about this.) One effective means of discouragement is to make truth a career liability, so that habits of honesty become an impediment to employment, promotion and success.

This is why our university faculties are dominated by bullshit artists. An honest man must remain silent for years to gain tenure at an American university, and after practicing silence as a necessary means of survival for so long, it is rare that any man recaptures the courage to speak out once he acquires that sweet reward, the Full Professorship. After all, once a man begins speaking truth in the Museum of Modern Bullshit that is American academia, he forfeits forever any other reward or honor that academia can bestow on its membership.

To bring one’s career to a full stop is a painful thing to contemplate, since the desire of advancement is natural to the man of ability and thus, in academia, few are so bold and manly as to denounce and repudiate feminism.

Like David Brooks, feminism retains its respectability because it has influential friends, including lawyers and judges. Speak out strongly against feminism, then find yourself the target of a sexual harassment accusation, then ask your attorney whether one thing has something to do with the other. (The feminist historian Elizabeth Fox Genovese was a victim of this at Emory University.) When you denounce feminism, you are attacking an idea that upholds privilege, and those who possess that privilege will do whatever it takes to maintain the intellectual fiction necessary to their status, their influence, their cherished prestige.

Therefore, however much effort one expends on a detailed forensic disproof of the tenets of feminism, the ultimate target of the attack is the prestige of the idea. People were once proud to call themselves Whigs, when being a Whig loyalist would gain them prestige among influential Whigs. And there were once many who proudly called themselves “liberal Republicans,” so long as there were liberal Republicans who could reward their comrades with jobs, awards, contracts, and other emoluments. But once being a Whig could no longer qualify a man for a patronage appointment at the post office, and once calling yourself a “liberal Republican” meant foreswearing any hope of high elective office, those who had once called themselves such things began to call themselves something else. But this is not Tuesday.

The Kleagles of feminism
Consider the example of Robert Byrd, who now weeps womanly tears for his dear friend Ted Kennedy, but who was once a Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan. What motivated Byrd to join the Klan is the same thing that motivates him to demonstrate by his Teddy-loving histrionics his devotion to the liberal Democratic cause. Byrd is a weak and vain creature who craves nothing so much as to belong, to be cherished and praised, to be one of the popular and pretty girls on the third-grade playground.

When his contemptible ambition could be served by becoming a Klansman, Byrd’s cunning earned him the honor of being a Kleagle. When that ambition could be served by demonstrating his devotion to segregation, he filibustered the Civil Rights Act. But once he realized the enormous opportunities for praise that awaited the outspoken liberal, Byrd became a disgusting toady of liberalism. Whatever his political peregrinations, the constant factors of Byrd’s career have been his overweening ambition, his shrewd opportunism and, above all, his enormous vanity.

We know in our hearts that liberalism is doomed precisely because it attracts the likes of Robert Byrd, unworthy weaklings who are more dangerous to their friends than to their enemies. When a man tells me that he is a liberal, he might as well tell me he is either a liar or a fool, because liberalism is nothing but a conspiracy whereby liars advance the cause of evil with the assistance of fools.

Why, then, do some women who call themselves conservatives insist on claiming that they are also feminists, since feminism is nothing more than the Ladies Auxilliary of Liberalism? The answer is simple: Because conservative men surrender to the fearful cowardice that they have been taught in the Museum of Modern Bullshit.

You will never meet a man working as a carpenter or truck driver who does not laugh to scorn the idiocy of feminism. The blue-collar man works a man’s job for a man’s pay, and his career ambition is not dependent on his ability to pretend he believes respectable nonsense. But if the working man’s son goes off to college, he must beware of becoming indifferent to the daily insults to his intelligence that academia inflicts. It is only too easy to acquiesce in silence, and thereby allow the boldness of falsehood to discourage the friends of truth.

Let the insult be returned in kind, and repaid with interest. Aim directly at the solar plexus of feminism’s bogus prestige, and when you are ready to take your shot, son, hit it with everything you’ve got: Equality Is For Ugly Losers.

And that, my friends, is how to hate feminism, as you must. The tip jar is open for business.

* * * * *

UPDATE: Linked at Protein Wisdom (compare and contrast) and I just got off the phone with my new most favorite blogger, Cynthia Yockey, who likes the large package. I owe Miss Yockey an apology, but that will come later. (Note to self: Resist temptation to brilliant double-entendre.) At this point, I would just suggest that the reader ask, “Why would a lesbian hate feminists?”

UPDATE II: BTW, among my regular readers is a fellow who is an associate pastor in a church attended by the girl I was in love with in third grade. And fourth grade. And fifth grade.

By sixth grade, I moved on to unrequited pining over others, but you cannot imagine what joy there is in knowing that Sunday morning, that Christian minister will say to that girl, “Oh, did you see what Stacy wrote this week? It was f—ing awesome!” (Yes, even ministers of the gospel are inspired to such vehement modes of expression when they encounter genuine, first-class lunatic gibberish.)

UPDATE III: A blogger who worked for five years on Capitol Hill: “I can’t begin to express how true this is. If the nail had been hit any more squarely on the head, it would have split an atom.”

UPDATE IV: The main text of this post (not including the column excerpt or the updates) is 2,400 words, written between 6 a.m. and 11 a.m. this morning. Do the math and figure that if David Brooks is paid $300,000 a year to produce two 750-word columns a week . . . well, the tip jar is open for business. It’s For The Children!

To compose original English prose at the pace of 480 words an hour means that the resulting draft will include errors and typos, and so when I wrote “Ace, Allah and Rusty,” I did not stop to include links, nor did I bother to answer the question I left hanging so ponderously in the air.

The reason those three bloggers jealously guard their anonymity is that they know how the enemy operates. When a cowardly character assassin comes to put the knife in your back, he will quite often do so by a vicious personal smear, accusing you of some vile thing — e.g., racism, adultery, failure to make timely payments on your 2004 KIA Optima.

So if you wish to blog with impunity, to deal out the punk-smacking goodness without fear or favor, then anonymous blogging is the way to go. You can ask Jeff Goldstein or Michelle Malkin about the professional and personal hazards of being a name-brand conservative blogger. The Left recognizes no standard of justice or decency. They will attack By Any Means Necessary, and if you are ever important enough to draw their attention, you had better pray that you are living right and have lots of good friends to defend you when the attack comes.

You will notice that at the top right of my page is a link to a new book by Sam Childers, Another Man’s War (which I urge everyone to buy). One of the things Pastor Sam talks about in the book is the role he played in bringing relief supplies to the South Sudanese during their long war to win their autonomy from Khartoum.

The South Sudanese were led by John Garang, a man of the Dinka tribe who deserves to be mentioned with reverence whenever the word “liberty” is spoken. During the fiercest battles of that war, the frontline was at a point on the Juba-Yei road called “Mile 40.”

Pastor Sam introduced me to some veterans of Garang’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Army who had helped hold the line at “Mile 40,” men who stayed and fought when others ran away. And there were many others who died fighting to hold that line, in what seemed at times a hopeless fight, so that their children could be free. And it occurs to me that at the Last Judgment, many soldiers of the SPLA will answer that trumpet call. The gates of heaven will swing wide, and the angels will gratefully sing welcome to those heroes, the Men of Mile 40. (And you should definitely order Another Man’s War now.)

Well, Ace, Allah, Rusty — these guys have spent years in anonymity, blogging to defend that which is right and good against those who are wrong and evil. All three of them have advanced degrees. They are men qualified for high professions, who have risked much and suffered much to do what they believed to be a duty in defense of liberty. Yet circumstances require them to remain anonymous in service to this great cause.

What if, however, some day freedom wins such a great victory that these anonymous bloggers should finally be recognized by name? Won’t you, dear reader, be proud to say then, “Hey, I used to read his blog!” And won’t you be even prouder when you say, “Hey, I hit his tip jar!”

You should be grateful for these men’s service in the blogosphere, because they have stuck with it when the tip-jar wasn’t jangling and the blog-o-bucks (to use Ace’s term) weren’t exactly rolling in. They were diligent in their work, a phrase I use with emphasis. Because if you buy my book — don’t do it now, buy Another Man’s War instead — and you ask me to autograph it, I will include below my signature “Proverbs 22:29,” which is:

Seest thou a man diligent in his work? He shall stand before kings . . .

A proverb with a promise, as they say. Like many of my posts, this one went off on some unexpected tangents and digressions. The one thing I meant to do when I got up this morning was not to get back into metablogging (i.e., blogging about blogging), but when Dan Collins gave me a little love tap this afternoon about Bristol Palin, it caused me to realize with sudden horror that I had not clarified the meaning of my question about Ace, Allah and Rusty, who have held the line online for so long.

God deals justly with man, and requires of man but two things: That we acknowledge Him, and that we deal justly with our fellow man. Sort of a divine Rule 2, you see. So . . .

Follow the links (right-click and choose “open in new window”), hit their tip jars, too, and please do yourself a huge favor and order Another Man’s War now.

David Brooks rumored for book deal: ‘How to Lose Influence and Alienate People’

He’s at the bottom of a deep hole, but refuses to stop digging, and Kazoolist calls him out for his violation of three principles — Equality, Liberty and Justice:

David Brooks doesn’t share a common outlook on these three American values with conservatives. He’s willing to do away with the conservative push for Justice and Liberty for a little Equality. That’s not the balance of a conservative, it’s the balance of a liberal. Now if only the mainstream media would bring Brooks on their programs under the right label.

Since becoming an ex-Democrat some 15 years ago, I am naturally suspicious of any tribute paid to Equality, since the pursuit of Equality tends to become a totalitarian impulse that obliterates all other values. One can accept the premise that “all men are create equal” only in the sense that Jefferson intended it, but that sense long ago evaporated, replaced with the radical egalitarianism that conceives of people having a right to housing, a right to health care, and so forth.

At any rate, I’m grateful to Kazoolist for his contribution to the cause, nearly as much as I am grateful to those who have contributed to The David Brooks Fisking Fund. Give now: It’s For The Children!

Justice by percentage

Ta-Nehisi Coates gets interviewed on NPR and James Poulos reflects:

Ta-Nehisi was challenged to affirm that a Senate which lacked even one black Senator, in this day and age, was by definition an unjust and/or unacceptable Senate. . . . “Okay,” I told the radio evenly, “imagine I grant that a Senate without any black and/or African(-)American Senators is unjust and/or unacceptable. Why doesn’t the minimum threshhold then become two such Senators? Or three? Or…?”

Or how about 12? If 12% of the U.S. population is black, and the Senate is a representative institution, then why aren’t blacks equally represented? And why aren’t there 51 women senators? Why don’t we have a Senate that “looks like America”?

We are once again back to the liberal fetish of equality, rooted in the hidden premise that equality and justice are the same thing, the obverse of which is that wherever one finds inequality, one has also found injustice. And James discovers CNN giving voice to Latinos who assert that they are underrepresented in the Obama Cabinet.

The unexamined “truth” that equality and justice are synonymous is pernicious enough when it involves ethnic mau-mauing over political spoils. Egalitarianism is actually more dangerous when applied to economics, as Ronald Reagan once wryly observed:

We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.

And it is this same egalitarian fallacy, I have argued, that motivates both feminism and the gay-rights movement. Mere liberty — the freedom to live their lives with a minimum of government interference — will not do. Rather, they demand that the coercive power of government be applied to rearrange society for their benefit.

Believe me, sir, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.

The egalitarian fallacy rears its ugly head not merely in complaints of underrepresentation, but in overrepresentation, as in the ADL’s fearfulness that some people suspect Jews of controlling Hollywood. Well, they do — so what? And, to bring the subject back around to the Senate, while Jews are less than 2% of the U.S. population, they are 14% of the Senate. My own ethnic group, redneckus Americanus, might be said to be overrepresented among NASCAR drivers and country music stars. Is this evidence of a fiendish hillbilly conspiracy?

When children are thwarted, they are wont to complain, “That’s not fair!” And as my parents inevitably replied, “Whoever told you life was supposede to be fair?” There is something puerile in the complaint that every inequality is unfair. Political maturity — statesmanship — requires a certain indifference to such complaints, and if Obama can resist pressure to apportion his appointments by quota, he will deserve praise for his statesmanship.

2009 Prediction Number One

Feminists will continue to provide a target-rich environment in the coming year. This fearless prognostication for 2009 is prompted by blogger Sylvia M.’s demonstration of the magical feminist ability to detect evidence of patriarchal oppression everywhere.

The New York Times: “After a lifetime of being wooed by others, Caroline Kennedy is still learning how to sell herself.”

Sylvia M. “They’re calling her a whore!”

No reasonable person could find sexism in such a commonplace phrase — “selling yourself,” i.e., self-promotion — but a feminist is, by definition, not a reasonable person. Rush Limbaugh gets a lot of grief for coining the term “feminazi,” but that expression captures the fundamental similarity between theories of Aryan supremacy and the feminist worldview of gynocentric biological determinism. And just as the Nazis relentlessly inveighed against “Jewish art” and “Jewish science,” so does the feminist use “sexism” as a synonym for “anything I don’t like.”

Like Nazism, feminism is about fostering a sense of grievance based on evil attributed to a scapegoat. Both ideologies are based on a classic paranoid delusion:

Your failures are not due to any negligence or shortcomings of your own. You are a such a superior person that you are blameless for any misfortune that befalls you. Therefore, your failures are caused by the treachery of your enemies, who so envy your superiority that they conspire to undermine you. You have been betrayed and sabotaged.

This madness is self-contradictory — the scapegoated enemy is both inherently inferior and yet so clever as to thwart the supposedly superior paranoiac. So, just as Nazis believed that the feeble and decadent Jew was able to sabotage the mighty Aryan civilization, the feminist believes that reactionary male troglydytes are capable of oppressing advanced, enlightened womanhood.

Like Nazism, feminism offers to comfort the isolated and fearful individual with the warm security of collective identity. To reject this collectivism is to betray The Cause and give tacit aid to the scapegoated enemy. The German who rejected Nazism was accused of being something other than a True German, and a woman who rejects feminism is not a True Woman.

Of course, a German of the 1920s and ’30s might have been a genuine patriot — sharing the common grievance over the degradingly unfair terms of Versailles, and eager to see his nation restored to strength and health — and yet rejected the Nazis. Similarly, a woman might sincerely believe in the importance of educational and career opportunities for women without embracing the rigid ideology of femisism. Like Nazism, feminism demands that its followers either toe the party line or else be demonized as betrayers.

Tammy Bruce was a feminist in good standing, president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, until she refused to go along with NOW’s national leadership in insisting on solidarity with O.J. Simpson. Although she continues to cherish the same ideals of fairness and justice that motivated her as a NOW activist, Bruce is now despised as a turncoat by her former comrades.

The feminist movement — as a movement — is totalitarian. It is one thing to seek to remedy specific and well-defined wrongs against women. It is something very different to portray all men as scapegoats complicit in universal oppression, and to advocate social revolution “by any means necessary” as the only acceptable response.
‘
So it is that with supreme confidence I predict that, in 2009, feminists will continue to make idiots of themselves. Always remember: Equality Is For Ugly Losers.

Feminist mythology

Kathy Shaidle levels her aim at the myth that the “women’s movement” was necessary because discrimination prevented women from pursuing careers. This myth allows feminists to take credit for all achievement by women, suggesting that if you are a woman today who isn’t barefoot, pregnant and doing some guy’s laundry, you owe a debt of gratitude to Ti-Grace Atkinson, Mary Daly, et al.

Some people really need to read Domestic Tranquility by Carolyn Graglia, who was a lawyer before anybody outside the world of Communist fellow-travelers ever heard of Betty Friedan. A gendered world — where certain careers are viewed as “men’s jobs” — does not necessarily equate to discrimination. Consider the career field of long-haul trucking. Very nearly all semi-truck drivers are male. Does this mean trucking companies discriminate again women? No, it just means that very few women are interested in driving trucks for a living.

To the egalitarian mind, inequality can only be explained in terms of injustice. If immigrants from Fiji and their descendants are 0.01% of the U.S. population, and there is some career field — say, for example, biomedical technology — in which Fiji-Americans are less than 0.01% of the workforce, the egalitarian mind deduces that the biomedical technology industry is animated by anti-Fijian bias. And don’t you dare deny it, buddy!

The “diversity” rationale embodies this kind of mental rigidity. When I lived in Georgia, some student columnist at Berry College wrote a hand-wringing column bemoaning the lack of “diversity” at the school. Now, Berry is a private liberal arts school where tuition, room and board amount to $30,000 a year. And Georgia not only has a very robust state university system, but it also has a number of famed historically black colleges like Morehouse, Morris Brown and Clark-Atlanta. So the fact that 89% of Berry students are white doesn’t suggest any discrimination on the part of Berry, it merely reflects the reality of the situation. A minority student with a 1,200 SAT has many other options, and there is only so much a small liberal arts school can offer in the way of inducements.

Why, then, was that Berry student wringing his hands? Because, to the egalitarian mind, it is not sufficient that minority students have opportunities for education, or that 11% of Berry’s students are “diverse.” No, all institutions must be equally diverse, and if Berry is less diverse than other institutions, something has gone horribly wrong.

And so, back to feminism’s absurd mythology. It’s the Kara Hultgreen syndrome. Kara Hultgreen died in 1994 because the Navy was trying to push her into becoming America’s first female combat fighter pilot. She was allowed to continue training after repeatedly committing errors that would have caused any male trainee to be washed out of the program. And then she committed the error that killed her, and the Navy engaged in a cover-up to hide the reality.

Why? Because the egalitarian mind assumed there was some kind of injustice involved in the previously all-male status of the Navy’s fighter-pilot cadre, and therefore having a female fighter pilot would represent “progress” toward equality. It’s the same mentality that got Larry Summers purged at Harvard. I’m not against female pilots or female research scientists, I just can’t understand why institutions tie themselves in knots trying to eliminate statistical disparities that don’t actually involve unjust discrimination.

This is especially true because there is no substantial evidence that radical egalitarianism actually improves the quality of life for the “victims” it professes to help, while forcing society into artificial patterns that don’t work as well as traditional, voluntary ways of life:

Believe me sir, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.

Truth is a most durable commodity.

UPDATE: Little Miss Attila is mad at me. But it’s OK. What kind of feminist goes for Mary Kay?

Obama goes both ways on gay marriage

Courts impose gay marriage, and when the people try to overrule the courts, they’re accused of bigotry:

Obama told MTV he believes marriage is “between a man and a woman” and that he is “not in favor of gay marriage.”
At the same time, Obama reiterated his opposition to Proposition 8, the California ballot measure which would eliminate a right to same-sex marriage that the state’s Supreme Court recently recognized.
“I’ve stated my opposition to this. I think it’s unnecessary,” Obama told MTV. “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about.”

Classic. And utterly incoherent. He’s “not in favor of gay marriage,” but he is in favor of judges legislating from the bench — and the people having no remedy to countermand such rulings.

Yesterday, I got slammed as a homophobe for referencing the monomaniacal fanaticism with which gay radicals pursue their agenda. The problem is in the idea of equality, and the radical notion of using political power to impose “equality” of things that are not equal.

The gay rights crowd doesn’t realize they’re endeavoring to vindicate Phyllis Schlafly. In opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, Schlafly warned that — in abolishing all legal distinctions between men and women — the ERA could lead to gay marriage. Though the ERA was defeated, its egalitarian principles have nonetheless corruputed American jurisprudence.

A man is not a woman, and insofar as they are different, men and women are not equal. They are not fungible. To say that men and women are different is not to say that either is inferior. But to require that they must in all senses be treated as equal — that no distinction can be made between men and women without a violation of “rights” — is to enforce falsehood, requiring that the very real differences be ignored or compensated for. The real differences (inequality) cannot even be acknowledged, so that everyone is forced to engage in a game of make-believe, with strong sanctions against skeptics.

Such a regime of “equality” must logically lead to same-sex marriage, but oh, how the sophisticates jeered at Schafly when she warned about it 30-odd years ago! Schafly understood that ideas have consequences, and this conception of “equality” has had consequences that were utterly predictable.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

And remember: Equality is for ugly losers.

Ivy League inspiration

Weird news from New Haven:

It’s a profound honor for a graduate of Jacksonville (Ala.) State University to learn that he has inspired reactionary protest slogans at Yale University. Should this right-wing campus movement succeed, I might go down in history as the Timothy Leary of the counter-revolution.

And because the counter-revolution is all about mindless greed, don’t forget to order your “Equality Is For Ugly Losers” T-shirts.