Quotulatiousness

October 31, 2022

“If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Founding Questions, Severian offers some preliminary thoughts on the new field of “Brandonology”, specifically how to determine whether what’s in the legacy media is news or propaganda:

I’m throwing this out there now, because it’s shaping up to be a long-term project and I think we can all contribute to it as needed. But as Brandonology / FNGology is such a new discipline, it’ll help to lay in the foundations.

The first step in analyzing the “news” is determining whether or not it is, in fact, news. “News” here being defined as “an unplanned event — or catastrophic fuckup of a planned event — to which The Regime is forced to react in more or less real time”. Lot of that going around recently, such that we’re spoiled for choice. Pick pretty much any of the shenanigans in Ukraine: The botched assassination of Alexander Dugin; the Nordstream sabotage; the Ukrainian dirty bomb false flag. Those clearly fall into the “catastrophic fuckup of a planned event” category …

… or do they? Because as Z Man pointed out in great detail on his last podcast, all of that stuff seemed to catch The Regime flatfooted. Yeah, somebody planned those things, but that somebody wasn’t Brandon, or anyone close to Brandon, or anyone in position to prop up Brandon. Which is the surest tell for actual news (as defined above) right there: If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news.

The necessity of the canned narrative also allows the keen Brandonologist to anticipate the “news”. For instance, it has obviously started to dawn on The Regime that they’re going to get walloped in the midterms, so they’re trying out narratives as we speak. Z Man identified one I hadn’t seen, something about Brandon “inadvertently” saying something about the debt ceiling that’s supposed to give the Republicans all kinds of ammunition against him. I’m not so sure. I’ll have to look into it, but the fact that it squarely blames Brandon — who The Regime still insists is the very picture of mental acuity and vigor — pings my radar a bit. I think the stuff Her Nibs is rolling out is much likelier the Narrative being developed — she’s outright stating that “the Republicans” are going to engage in massive voter fraud.

Which to normal people is chutzpah beyond belief, but that’s how The Regime rolls. The 2016 election was, of course, full of Russian Hacking™. The 2020 election, by contrast, was the cleanest canvass in human history, and you’re an insurrectionist, a domestic extremist, and of course a racist if you dare to suggest the mere possibility of an American election being tampered with. But wouldn’t you know it, those dastardly Russians are going to rally here in 2022, because you can’t keep a Russian Hacker™ down. They might even hire a few prostitutes to pee on a bed for good measure; that’s how evil they are.

Further complicating the task, though, is that “botched op” thing. We’ve got Brandon et al. on record threatening Nordstream, so you know that was an American caper gone bad … but gone real, real bad, because if The Regime had been fully in the know, there’d have been a whole bunch of Tier Four Stoyak about lousy maintenance on the pipelines for months in advance.

Executed for Telling a Joke – October 30, 1943 – WAH 084

Filed under: Australia, Germany, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 30 Oct 2022

From a conference in Moscow the United Nations Alliance issues a warning to Nazi Germany about their atrocities, while those atrocities continue unabated.
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Why aren’t you as angry and afraid as the media wants you to be?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on the unrelenting din of fear porn you get if you pay any attention to the legacy media:

It’s like a magic act where the door to the secret compartment moves slowly and has a spotlight pointed at it, and the audience sees the illusion every time, because it’s literally not an illusion, being right out there in the open, but the magician still pretends that everyone watching is shocked and baffled by the trick.

So. Via Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense, this summary of findings from a recent study of the American news media:

Today’s Standard-Issue Explanatory Line™ on Paul Pelosi being attacked in his home is that TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, toxic far-right rhetoric!!!!! Ten minutes after the shabby break-in at the Katie Hobbs for Governor office was omfg literally Watergate before it evaporated into nothing much, a uniquely strange Berkeley nudist is a far-right puppet with an opening at the bottom for Donald Trump’s hand, steered by hateful rhetoric that incites violence:

[…]

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the news media focused on a clear description of what happened before they got to the blame and politicization?

There are a dozen obvious things to say about all of this, even if you aren’t Steve Scalise — the double standard, the depiction of ordinary political criticism as “demonization”, the discarding of contradictory evidence to make round pegs fit square holes — and I’m mostly not going to bother saying them in any detail.

But the thing that has to be said is that the people who increasingly hold the attention of their audiences with hyperemotional clickbait, with the obvious manipulation of negative emotions, are warning us about the dangerous effects of hyperemotional rhetorical manipulation in the public sphere.

Ohhhhh, we’re about to LOSE OUR VERY DEMOCRACY! We tremble on the edge of a FASCIST TAKEOVER! And also, toxic rhetoric is bad.

Halloween Special: The Wild Hunt

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Oct 2020

It’s a Halloween special AND a miscellaneous myth! Who could ask for more? Today let’s dive into a very spooktacular folkloric motif and get real in the spirit of the season!
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QotD: The True Believer

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A cult claimed that a flood would destroy the Earth on December 21, 1954. Only the faithful would be saved, because they’d be evacuated by a flying saucer. 12/21/54 passed without incident, of course, but what you’d expect to happen to the cult, didn’t — instead of everyone dropping out and moving on with their lives, most stayed, and their commitment to the cult’s leader actually increased.

Why? From the Wiki summary, believers will persist in the face of overwhelming disconfirmation if:

  • A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he or she behaves.
  • The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
  • The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
  • Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
  • The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

This is Leftism in a nutshell, and it explains why SJWs are impervious to factual, rational argument. Boiled down as far as it will go: Group identity is so important to the Leftist that, faced with the choice between continued group membership and the evidence of xzhyr own lying eyes, xzhey will pick group membership, every time. This sets up its own feedback mechanism, such that disconfirmations of their dogmas actually increase their commitment — only the truest, holiest believers would keep believing in the face of the facts.

Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.

October 30, 2022

Andrew Sullivan on the rise of Rishi Sunak (or was it “Rashid Sanook”?)

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from his Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan contemplates the differences between how Barack Obama was seen as a historical figure to the US media and yet that same media can’t manage to see how Prime Minister Sunak is “the British Obama”:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.

In his inimitable way, Joe Biden this week celebrated the rather remarkable fact the the new Conservative prime minister in Britain is the grandson of Indian immigrants:

    As recently as today, we’ve gotten news that Rashid Sanook is now the prime minister. As my brother would say, “Go figure.” And the Conservative party! … Pretty astounding. A groundbreaking milestone. And it matters! It matters!

He got the name wrong, but he’s Joe Biden. He gets names wrong. But unlike many on the left, especially the woke left, and perhaps because he is old enough to remember the after-effects of colonialism, Biden could bring himself to see what a staggering moment it is. It really is. It has gotten a bit obscured in the incredible mess of recent Tory politics. But staring us in the face is a historic shift.

It’s an Obama moment, after a fashion.

[…]

No, Sunak didn’t run an inspirational campaign like Obama. He’s not an orator even close in skill, he hasn’t won an election in his own right, and he didn’t come out of the blue. But he’s even younger than Obama when he took office — just 42, five years younger than Obama when he became president, and, unlike Obama, a slip of a thing and only 5’7″. And, for understandable reasons, Sunak seems much less worried about the cultural and political aspects of breaking the race barrier than Obama was.

Sunak is, for example, an openly practicing and proud Hindu. He lit Diwali lights around 11 Downing Street and took his oath on the Bhagavad Gita. That’s not someone running from his heritage. And he is also a Brexiteer from conviction, and, unlike Truss, a fiscal conservative who’s a realist about what can and can’t be done in a period of extraordinary economic stress for Brits and massive post-Covid debt.

All of this suggests something too many liberals have forgotten. These countries of alleged “white supremacy” have less racism than almost anywhere else in the world. It is hard to imagine a non-white president of France or Germany or Italy — let alone China or Russia or anywhere in Central Europe. It is hard to think of another empire that was deliberately unwound by its architects, and who then, within two generations, installed the grandson of former colonial subjects to its most powerful office. And Obama, of course, was twice elected with more heartland white support than Hillary Clinton.

Sunak has, moreover, been selected by the Tory party — that bastion of alleged bigotry that has already had three female prime ministers in its history, and now also a non-white man, James Cleverly, as foreign secretary, and a woman of Indian ancestry, Suella Braverman, as home secretary. Three of the top four ministers of state in Sunak’s cabinet are non-white. The new chairman of the Conservative party is Nadhim Zahawi. I’m telling you this because the US MSM — who are usually obsessed with racial representation in every single mundane situation — suddenly aren’t that interested, when some of their woke priors are rattled.

This is true of the broader American left. A faction obsessed with racial “equity” cannot take a moment to observe a historical moment of extraordinary proportions. Some, like Trevor Noah, have even completely invented a racist “backlash” against Sunak that simply hasn’t happened, apart from one call on one radio call-in show. (I was on BBC Radio this morning talking to an interviewer who was simply baffled by the projection.)

Noah has the excuse of being a comedian. But the New York Times‘ coverage has been almost as ludicrously slanted as its usual coverage of post-Brexit Britain, and it quickly ran two op-eds by British leftists trashing Sunak. Every story that refers to his ethnicity always slams his class “privilege” — i.e. that his parents were middle-class children of immigrants. This morning, the paper ran another hit-piece on Sunak’s wealth. The only benefit of his Indian ancestry appears to be that he will help the Indian diaspora in Britain itself. The incredible arc of imperial history finally coming full circle? Barely a mention.

Fresh German Armor in the USSR! – WW2 – 218 – October 29, 1943

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 29 Oct 2022

Erich von Manstein finally gets the reserve armor he’s been begging Hitler for, so he can carry out his counteroffensive in Ukraine. The Soviets are still on the move themselves though. In Italy, though, the Allies are moving at a crawl since the Germans have mined and booby trapped everything. There’s also new action in the Solomons and a celebration in Japan.
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“The Economist is the most over-rated publication in the English language”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I started reading The Economist when I was in college, and became a subscriber for nearly 20 years. Over the last few years, the tone of the articles shifted away from classical liberal toward communitarian or even full-blown socialist cheerleading, so I sadly ended my subscription and haven’t picked up a copy in at least 15 years. According to Ken Whyte in the SHuSH newsletter, things haven’t improved since I stopped paying attention:

The Economist recently said that book publishing in today’s economy resembles book publishing during the Second World War when “paper imports collapsed” and “publishers printed only sure-fire hits”.

The Economist is the most over-rated publication in the English language, especially by itself. I give it marks for its broad range of interests, ability to cover a lot of ground in relatively tight articles, and occasionally solid reporting, but if you’re going to boast incessantly about how smart you are …

… you’d better back it up. The Economist seldom does. It tends to glib, obvious, and sloppy. Most of its articles are written by anonymous b-level freelancers whose best stuff goes to outlets that afford bylines. Their work is edited to a stultifying homogeneity by a haughty grad student with a Financial Times subscription. Or so it reads.

This piece — “Books are Physically Changing Because of Inflation” — is a case in point. Paper imports to the UK were reduced during WW2 but they did not collapse. The problem for the book trade was rationing. The government restricted publishers to 60 percent of their pre-war paper volumes (later falling to 35 percent) and itself used far more tonnage for propaganda than the book industry normally required. Manpower shortages were another factor limiting the production of new titles.

Nor is it true that publishers released “only sure-fire hits”. While much of their paper allotment went to keeping hot-selling books in stock, many bets were placed on new titles and most of them paid. It was wartime and leisure activities were limited. “British publishers found that they could sell virtually any title,” writes Zoe Thomson in The Journal of Publishing Culture.

The article isn’t all bad. It reports that British book publishers are paying 70% more for paper than they were a year ago: “Supplies are erratic as well as expensive: paper mills have taken to switching off on days when electricity is too pricey. The card used in hardback covers has at times been all but unobtainable.”

To cope with the price increases, publishers are printing smaller books on cheaper paper and jamming more words onto the page. Writers are being asked to write shorter and are being held to their word limits.

That reflects the current state of the industry. It’s hardly news, though. SHuSH readers are probably sick of hearing me on rising paper and printing costs, and I’ve just been following what others have written. The cost of printing has more or less doubled since before COVID. Many smaller publishers are already releasing fewer and slimmer titles. If we are headed into a recession, the trend will continue.

Jatimatic: Finland’s Least Successful PDW

Filed under: Europe, History, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jun 2022

The Jatimatic was a stockless PDW designed by Jari Timari, who co-owned Tampereen Asepaja Oy, a firearms company in Tampere Finland. The firm was founded in the early 1920s, making .22 biathlon rifles, sporterizing military surplus, and other gunsmithing work. In the late 70s he got the idea for a compact 9mm PDW with some unique climb-reducing features, and in 1980 it was introduced as the Jatimatic (JAli TImari). Only about 400 were made, as it was not adopted or purchased in large quantities by anyone (although it was tested by many, including the Finnish Border Guards).

The Jatimatic was made without a stock, instead using a shooting sling for stabilization. It used standard Swedish K magazines, and has a distinctly off-angle appearance. This was done to counteract muzzle climb, as the line of the barrel points directly back into the shooter’s hand. It also has an interesting safety built into the folding front grip – if the grip is closed, the bolt is locked in place.

Production ended in the late 1980s after “permit irregularities” and a robbery of a bunch of Jatimatics from the company premises. The rights to the design were sold to a new company called Golden Gun in 1994, and they attempted to reintroduce it as the GG-95 with a few improvements, but it was a rather complete flop. Its best achievement was getting into several major movies, including Cobra and Red Dawn.
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QotD: Thatcher’s legacy

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it was not the Labour Party’s tribunes of the masses who evicted her but the duplicitous scheming twerps of her own cabinet, who rose up against her in an act of matricide from which the Tory Party has yet to recover. In the preferred euphemism of the American press, Mrs Thatcher was a “divisive” figure, but that hardly does her justice. She was “divided” not only from the opposition party but from most of her own, and from almost the entire British establishment, including the publicly funded arts panjandrums who ran the likes of the National Theatre and cheerfully commissioned one anti-Thatcher diatribe after another at taxpayer expense. And she was profoundly “divided” from millions and millions of the British people, perhaps a majority.

Nevertheless, she won. In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail … The government owned every industry — or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 per cent, and on investment income 98 per cent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants, and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obviously ridiculous to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge.

Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and the United Kingdom’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.

Mark Steyn, “The Uncowardly Lioness”, SteynOnline.com, 2019-05-05.

October 29, 2022

Witches, beware! It’s the Malleus Maleficarum!

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s the season for ghosts, goblins, and — of course — witches, so Scott Alexander decided to review that famous book for witch-hunters, the Malleus Maleficarum:

Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it.

I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it’s good (it isn’t), but because it’s by an slightly crazy 1920s deacon every bit as paranoid as his subject matter. He argues in his Translator’s Introduction that witches are real, and that a return to the wisdom of the Malleus is our only hope of standing against them:

    Although it may not be generally recognized, upon a close investigation it seems plain that the witches were a vast political movement, an organized society which was anti-social and anarchical, a world-wide plot against civilization. Naturally, although the Masters were often individuals of high rank and deep learning, that rank and file of the society, that is to say, those who for the most part fell into the hands of justice, were recruited from the least educated classes, the ignorant and the poor. As one might suppose, many of the branches or covens in remoter districts knew nothing and perhaps could have understood nothing of the enormous system. Nevertheless, as small cogs in a very small [sic] wheel, it might be, they were carrying on the work and actively helping to spread the infection.

And is this “world-wide plot against civilization” in the room with us right now? In the most 1920s argument ever, Summers concludes that this conspiracy against civilization has survived to the modern day and rebranded as Bolshevism.
Paging Arthur Miller…

You can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum. So, why haven’t you? Might the witches’ spiritual successors be desperate to delegitimize the only thing they’re truly afraid of — the vibrant, time-tested witch hunting expertise of the Catholic Church? Summers writes:

    It is safe to say that the book is to-day scarcely known save by name. It has become a legend. Writer after writer, who had never turned the pages, felt himself at liberty to heap ridicule and abuse upon this venerable volume … He did not know very clearly what he meant, and the humbug trusted that nobody would stop to inquire. For the most part his confidence was respected; his word was taken.

    We must approach this great work — admirable in spite of its trifling blemishes — with open minds and grave intent; if we duly consider the world of confusion, of Bolshevism, of anarchy and licentiousness all around to-day, it should be an easy task for us to picture the difficulties, the hideous dangers with which Henry Kramer and James Sprenger were called to combat and to cope … As for myself, I do not hesitate to record my judgement … the Malleus Maleficarum is one of the most pregnant and most interesting books I know in the library of its kind.

Big if true.

I myself read the Malleus in search of a different type of wisdom. We think of witch hunts as a byword for irrationality, joking about strategies like “if she floats, she’s a witch; if she drowns, we’ll exonerate the corpse”. But this sort of snide superiority to the past has led us wrong before. We used to make fun of phlogiston, of “dormitive potencies”, of geocentric theory. All these are indeed false, but more sober historians have explained why each made sense at the time, replacing our caricatures of absurd irrationality with a picture of smart people genuinely trying their best in epistemically treacherous situations. Were the witch-hunters as bad as everyone says? Or are they in line for a similar exoneration?

The Malleus is traditionally attributed to 15th century theologians/witch-hunters Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, but most modern scholars think Kramer wrote it alone, then added the more famous Sprenger as a co-author for a sales boost. The book has three parts. Part 1 is basically Summa Theologica, except all the questions are about witches. Part 2 is basically the DSM 5, except every condition is witchcraft. Part 3 is a manual for judges presiding over witch trials. We’ll go over each, then return to this question: why did a whole civilization spend three centuries killing thousands of people over a threat that didn’t exist?

Your Thoughts on Our D-Day Coverage So Far – WW2 – Reading Comments

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Updated with re-uploaded video, 3 Nov 2022. The original video was taken down within a few hours. This is the same video less one short rant that Indy reconsidered and has chosen to omit.

World War Two
Published 28 Oct 2022

Indy and Sparty pick out some of the best, most interesting, and even controversial comments by you under our videos. Stay for the PJs.
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The Canadian government, despite committing billions to replace old equipment, is still not serious about the Canadian Armed Forces

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why — despite big-ticket items getting a few headlines — the Canadian Armed Forces need far more than what any government has been willing to provide since the start of the Cold War:

Objectively speaking, there has been progress. Canada has committed billions to replacing the CF-18 fighter jets with F-35s — 88 of them. (That’s still way too small an air fleet for a country our literal size — it’s not a lot of planes for such a big place, folks — but it’s something.) Billions more have been committed to modernizing NORAD’s early warning systems. And, miracle of miracles, we finally got around to replacing the goddamned Second World War-era pistols!

These are real, tangible things. These things matter. They will leave the Canadian Armed Forces better off, our soldiers better protected and our continent more secure. This is good news.

It’s also the bare minimum.

Even these big spending announcements, and even the itty bitty pistol one, don’t actually add capabilities to the Canadian military. They replace existing ones. They maintain our capabilities. Sure, we can quibble about “maintain” or “replace” — the F-35 will give Canada a stealth capacity it has never had before, and all that jazz. Fine. Fair. But it isn’t really adding to the overall list of missions we are capable of conducting. It’s fleshing out capabilities that, due to advanced age and wear-and-tear for our critical equipment, were starting to exist only on paper. The government deserves credit for this, but only a really small amount of credit. Getting the urgently necessary basics done, many years after they should have been handled, is good, but it’s not worth a pat on the back. It is the bare minimum the country deserved and that the military needed to function, so that’s how far I’ll go in my praise: congratulations, Liberals, on responding to a massive change in our geopolitical order by accomplishing the bare minimum that was already overdue.

If that sounds scathing, here’s the worst part: that’s me being sincere. Thanks for the bare minimum! I wasn’t sure we’d get even that

So yeah. Good, but … you see the problem here, no? In a new era of global instability and geopolitical turmoil, the Canadian response, thus far, has been to get caught up to where we should have been 10 years ago. At the latest. And it’s far from clear that, if not for Russia kicking off the largest conflict we’ve seen in Europe since 1945, we’d have even bothered to do these necessary, long-overdue things.

And this is all shaping up to be just the latest iteration of a little game both Liberals and Conservatives like to play with the Canadian Armed Forces (and, come to think of it, most policy files). They’ll point to specific investments or particular accomplishments when defending their record. And the investment and accomplishment may well be excellent indeed! But they won’t speak to the full, broader picture. And the full, broader picture of the Canadian Armed Forces is grim, and some new F-35s and 9mm pistols isn’t going to change that.

There was a little story last month you might have seen. After Hurricane Fiona wrecked big parts of several Atlantic provinces, the feds sent in the military. This is right and proper. The troops would have made a welcome sight in those communities, of course. What you might not have noticed, though, was that Nova Scotia had to go public with its desire for more troops. It asked for a thousand. It got 500. It kept asking for more. It got the 500. And most of those 500 were troops already stationed in Nova Scotia; only about 200 were actually sent in from elsewhere. The government never really commented on this, but it’s not hard to suss out the problem: the military couldn’t scrape together any more troops.

The Absinthe Murder

Filed under: Europe, France, Health, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 28 Jun 2022
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QotD: Camille Paglia’s “Amazon” Feminism

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I am an equal opportunity feminist. That is, I demand the removal of all barriers to women’s advance in the political and professional realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, such as workplace quotas or campus procedures that favor women during sexual assault complaints. I want total equality before the law.

In my view, special protections of any kind infantilize women. My code of Amazon feminism is based on the empowerment of the individual: Women must not regress to a pre-feminist past to become passive wards of the state.

Camille Paglia, interviewed in “Feminist critic Camille Paglia: ‘Merkel is an important role model for mature women'”, DW, 2017-06-01.

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