Anti-American Graffiti: Marxist Scribblings Sighted in Suburban Orange County

Here's the writing on the restroom wall at Barnes and Nobles at the Irvine Spectrum, found this weekend. Recall last year Gallup found that a 61 percent majority of progressives had a positive image of socialism. And here's another example in real life. Remember Marx's exhortation: "Workers of the world unite." The Marxian system is built on the increasing immiseration of labor. The graffiti implies that no one can get rich without exploiting workers, that is, it's impossible to be entrepreneurial without exploitation, and hence the rejection of the foundation of the capitalist free-enterprise system. It's fundamentally anti-American, as is all progressivism, for as an ideology it rejects the exceptionalism that built the nation to world preponderance, instead invoking the state-socialist model of the stagnant European welfare states, if not the murderous totalitarianism of Stalin. Either way, the Democrat Party's 20th-century socialist model is dragging us down, which is exactly what progressives want.

RELATED: At New York Times, "Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Millionaires" (via Digby and Memorandum), and Washington Post, "Vast majority of tax breaks go to households."

College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

Oh boy, Peter Berkowitz is opening it up with this one, at Wall Street Journal, "Pressured by the Obama administration, universities abandon any pretense of due process in sexual assault cases":

Late August and early September bring recent high school graduates, bright and eager, to campuses around the country. Carefully planned orientation sessions will impress upon freshmen the paramount importance of sensitivity, of avoiding offensive words and ideas, and—notwithstanding that in recent years approximately 55% of matriculating freshmen nationally have been female—the urgency of maintaining a campus atmosphere friendly to women.



But parents who might expect this orientation to include an introduction to the moral and political purposes of liberal education—including respect for liberty of thought and discussion, and due process of law—will be sorely disappointed.



The neglect at freshmen orientation of the aim of liberal education and how it undergirds and is undergirded by the principles of freedom is not an accident. It is emblematic of college as a whole. Our universities impair liberal education not only by what they teach and do not teach in classrooms but also by the illiberal rules they promulgate to regulate speech and conduct outside of class.



The Obama administration has aggravated the problem. On April 4, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, head of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), distributed a 19-page "Dear Colleague" letter to "provide recipients with information to assist them in meeting their obligations."



At the cost of losing federal funding—on which all major institutions of higher education have grown dependent—colleges and universities are obliged under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex) to thoroughly investigate all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, including the felony of rape. They are also obliged, according to Ms. Ali, to curtail due process rights of the accused.

Keep reading.



And following the discussion takes you right to the neo-Marxist legal and educational "reforms" of the last couple of decades, those instituting a sexual harassment regime of radical feminist ideological totalitarianism. And that's what today's "liberal" education is really all about. Isn't that sick?

Nouriel Roubini Video: Karl Marx Was Right

Roubini's a gifted economist, although this is the first I've seen him on video. He comes across more radical during interviews. At WSJ, "Nouriel Roubini: Karl Marx Was Right." (I had to click on the "pop-up player" to get the clip to load.)



I wrote previously on this here: "Capitalism in Crisis?" And see also Christopher Whalen, "Why Nouriel Roubini and all of us are wrong about Karl Marx":

When I hear people talking about Marxism in reverent tones it makes me nauseous. Marx was not right at all about class being the key determinant of human action. Yet despite America’s pretensions to being a free market, democratic society, the Marxian world view won the battle for ideas in the 20th Century. The New Deal and Great Society efforts to increase the scope of government in America all stem from the socialist ideas of FDR and his political heirs in both parties.



So much of our economic discourse in America today is entirely Marxist in nature — a reference to both Karl and Groucho Marx, as noted above. The legacy of FDR and the two world wars was to kill the American republic and put in its place a cheap imitation of France with platonic regulators pretending to moderate the bad old ways of greedy private business...



The fact of our intellectual reliance upon the work of Karl Marx to benchmark our economic success show humans to be creatures of habit, not reason. Marx embarked from a position of dialectical mysticism borrowed from Hegel and then attacked the classical economists, the enlightenment thinkers such as John Staurt Mill and Adam Smith who elevated the role of the individual. Those who laud Marx disparage all things American.



Ludwig von Mises writes in his book Human Action, that Marx stigmatized the economists as “the sycophants of the bourgeoisie.” He notes that Marx was “the son of a well-to-do lawyer,” and Engles, “a wealthy textile manufacturer, never doubted that they themselves were above the law and, notwithstanding their bourgeois background, were endowed with the power to discover absolute truth. It is the task of history to describe the historical conditions which made such a crude doctrine popular.”



Not only was Marxism crude, but it missed most of the major developments of the 20th Century. Revolution occurred not in bourgeois Germany but in brutal, backward Czarist Russia. More important, the class-centric view of Marxism proved incorrect in a world of greater openness, mobility and individual choice. The act of conscious choice driven not by greed, but the desire for betterment; of human action as von Mises coined the term, rejects Marxist class determinism.

That reminds me of an essay, Eric Foner's, "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" Foner wants to minimize American exceptionalism while holding out more commonality with the European experience than scholars acknowledge (which is leftist baloney, of course). See also, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, "It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States."

Capitalism in Crisis?

Old Man Marx is (partially) being resurrected in Nouriel Roubini's, "Is Capitalism Doomed?" (at Memeorandum):

So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality and reduces final demand.



Recent popular demonstrations, from the Middle East to Israel to the UK, and rising popular anger in China – and soon enough in other advanced economies and emerging markets – are all driven by the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. Even the world’s middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities.



To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.



The right balance today requires creating jobs partly through additional fiscal stimulus aimed at productive infrastructure investment. It also requires more progressive taxation; more short-term fiscal stimulus with medium- and long-term fiscal discipline; lender-of-last-resort support by monetary authorities to prevent ruinous runs on banks; reduction of the debt burden for insolvent households and other distressed economic agents; and stricter supervision and regulation of a financial system run amok; breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and oligopolistic trusts.



Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible and thrive in a globalized economy. The alternative is – like in the 1930s - unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability.

RTWT for the context. Roubini can't go all the way for the socialist revolutionary program (completely smashing capital), so he goes for a hyper-Keynesian quasi-socialist model instead. The end result is really the same: The complete obliteration of the individual into the maw of the state bureaucracy (and today's progressive thought police are the spiffed up version of communist totalitarianism's secret police, i.e., a new NKVD). And while Roubini merely cites Marx on the crisis, Stefan Stern (tweeted by Roubini), goes all the way for the proletarian revolution, "Marx was right about change":

Those who regard the recent actions of rioters in English cities as "criminality pure and simple" will not see any connection between Roubini's declaration that "Marx was right" and the decision to steal a 42-inch TV from a burning electricals store. But, for some, looting may have seemed a sensible (if illegal) response to the apparently continuous turmoil of the economy. If everything about your financial future seems at best uncertain and at worst desperate, why not carpe diem, or carpe television at any rate? Rational economic man (and woman) has finally been sighted, legging it down Tottenham High Street in a new pair of trainers.



Marx said that while interpreting the world was all very well, the point was to change it. If capitalists want to keep their world safe for capitalism, they need to face up to what is wrong with it, and change it, fast.

I agree. We need to change the ever expanding social welfare state, rationalize the economy with lower taxes and less regulation, and put people to work. The rioters in Britain's aren't remotely near the starving urchins of the British 19th century industrial revolution. They're mobs of yobbers outfitted with Blackberries. The state keeps them well fed and what do they do but burn down their cities? Socialism sucks. It creates ungrateful losers who kill the innocent and destroy productive capital. The left owns this crisis, all of it, and the politically correct spinelessness has only exacerbated the dislocation. ASFLs.

Rush Limbaugh: Obama 'Doubles Down on His Failures'

Great discussion, via Ann Althouse.

Ann focuses on the critical legal studies bit, but I like this part, highlighted:

Here's the thing. If Obama is so smart, isn't two and a half years enough time to figure out it isn't working? That is if his intentions are honorable, if he really wants a growing economy, if he really wants new jobs, isn't two and a half years of this ridiculousness enough to show that it's not the right way to do it? Isn't two and a half years enough time to realize that you're on the wrong path? Hint: This is why some of us believe all this is on purpose. There's no indication of smartness in anything he tries to do. He doubles down on his failures. Now, speaking of Obama's academic record, he attended Harvard Law School at the height of something that it was promoting, education technique or a theory. It was called critical legal studies. Critical legal studies was in its ascendancy at Harvard Law when Obama was there. You can look it up. Just Google critical legal studies. It is out and out Marxism.

Ann's got the link to the transcript.

And Rush seems a bit late on this. I wrote on Obama's critical legal framework during campaign 2008, when his University of Chicago law seminar syllabi were released, "Professor Obama's Radical Syllabus":

By training and profession, he's a social deconstructionist comfortably embedded in the lifestyle of oppositional legal and political culture. He has carefully navigated the waters of legal academe and municipal machine politics to carve out an outwardly non-confrontational demeanor, while on the inside he's informed by post-material, postmodern activist priorities, and his possible accession to the presidency would bring to power an occupant in the Oval Office dramatically unlike any of those who have come before.

Marxism in the Classroom

At Washington Times, "NYC school teacher: Here's how you promote socialism in the classroom":

I'll have more on this later. Progressive asshats keep claiming there are few (if any) "real" communists in America, but they're actually coming out of the woodworks like a mass infestation. Must be "imaginary" communists, messin' with my head. Freakin' cobags.

Frances Fox Piven's Violent Agenda

This is the first of a series of Glenn Beck broadcasts whereby he really started hammering on Frances Fox Piven, or at least this year.

Sometimes Beck is a little loose with his typologies --- for example, I doubt that the Federal Reserve System was established as an institution of the "socialist-progressive hegemonic" takeover of the state. That said, at about 3:20 minutes Beck suggests that "what I would call socialist or communist they call just social justice or progressive --- that is critical to understand, because it really helps these people sleep at night and what's allowing them to get away with it." That's one of those statements that's laser-beam concentrated to nuclear-level gradient. The left-wing blogs and the Democrat-Media-Complex can't have that, so they strike back with a vicious inhuman fury. It's frightening, really. And of course, Beck's lengthy discussion after the program begins is a striking build-up to the introduction of the Cloward and Piven strategy (at about halfway through the clip). And oh boy, did that release Hell's wrath these last few days!



For example, see Stanley Kurtz, at National Review (via Instapundit):

The campaign to use the tragic shootings in Tucson to silence conservatives continues. The latest twist is an attempt to highlight anonymous threats against leftist scholar and strategist Frances Fox Piven as a way of forcing Glenn Beck, a critic of Piven, off the air, or at least prohibiting him from mentioning her on his Fox News television show. This affects me as well, since an excerpt from my recent appearance on Beck’s show to discuss Piven has been aired in the course of the controversy. My new book, Radical-in-Chief, extensively treats Piven’s influence on contemporary leftist strategy, and on Barack Obama’s political development. If Beck is forced to stop talking about Piven, efforts will surely be made to silence me and other conservative critics of Piven.

It is extraordinary that conservatives should be charged with stirring up violence at a moment when Piven, in an editorial in The Nation, has called for an American movement of “strikes and riots” on the model of the one recently seen in Greece. The anonymous threats against Piven are reprehensible. I condemn them in the strongest terms. Yet it is not conservatives but Piven and The Nation who advocate violence. Neither Piven nor The Nation should be forcibly silenced, but they certainly ought to be criticized. Instead, The Nation is leading the effort to silence those who have rightly condemned Piven’s call for rioting in America.

An article by Brian Stelter in Saturday’s New York Times is a thinly disguised gesture of support for The Nation’s campaign. The piece downplays Piven’s radicalism, noting that her widely criticized call for intentionally creating a political and economic crisis in America’s welfare system was made 45 long years ago. Although Piven has freely described her own strategy as an effort to set off “fiscal and political crises in the cities,” Stelter delicately avoids the word “crises,” writing instead of “fiscal and political stress.”

Absolutely perfect. Be sure to read the whole thing.



And see also James Taranto, "Advocate of Violence: Frances Fox Piven and the New York Times's Dishonest Campaign for 'Civility'":

Why is a newspaper that has been posturing as the scourge of violent rhetoric now siding with a purveyor of such rhetoric, and blatantly slanting the news as it does so? Because her opponent is a prominent media figure from outside the old media establishment. Because Glenn Beck is a threat to the authority of the New York Times.

Taranto make a careful distinction been advocating violence and inciting it, and so far Frances Fox Piven hasn't done the latter. But read this one in full as well. While Piven hasn't crossed a legal line, she's crossed a moral one, and so has the New York Times.



RELATED: "Henry Farrell, GWU Political Scientist, Falsely Attacks Glenn Beck Over Alleged Threats to Frances Fox Piven."

Henry Farrell, GWU Political Scientist, Falsely Attacks Glenn Beck Over Alleged Threats to Frances Fox Piven

Following up on my earlier piece: "New York Times Whitewashes Marxist Revolutionary Frances Fox Piven."



It turns out that George Washington University Political Scientist Henry Farrell has published a spurious diatribe against Glenn Beck and his programming on Marxist Frances Fox Piven: "Violent Threats Against a Political Scientist." In an essentially dishonest essay, Farrell offers the disclaimer that it would be "causally irresponsible" to link harsh political rhetoric with acts of violence "without good evidence."

Okay. No doubt Farrell's being especially careful here, since progressives were widely rebuked for exploiting --- within minutes --- the Arizona shooting for wicked political gain. Interestingly, though, Farrell builds his argument off the erroneous New York Times article cited at my entry above. (And recall that the Times was the leading mainstream press outlet fomenting blood libel against conservatives after Arizona.) And he then writes:

I have no doubt that Fox News is correct in saying that Beck has never directly called for violence against Piven, if only because we would surely know if he had. But if some crazy person does decide to try to murder Piven, it will probably be caused in large part by the rhetoric of Beck and others like him. If it were not for Beck and other, less successful demagogues, Piven's name would only be familiar to those who read the Nation or who have a historical interest in left wing politics.

Actually, notice how Farrell can't place any responsibility on Glenn Beck or Fox News for specifically and allegedly advocating violence against Francis Fox Piven. He's thus reduced to mere "probabilistic" analysis, which in the jargon of political science means, "frankly, I can't predict squat about this." Farrell then cites an August 2010 Dana Milbank hit-piece at Washington Post. Milbank alleges that "an unemployed carpenter" set off to "kill progressives" in San Francisco after being moved to political violence by Glenn Beck. But Milbank offers not a single piece of evidence for his claims, and includes this disclaimer: "It's not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by people who watch his show." Henry Farrell omits that key sentence at his post. And he then once again throws out a disclaimer to his argument before offering a causal hypothesis attacking Glenn Beck:

It is not a good idea to make broad claims about how an atmosphere of violent rhetoric is causally responsible for this or that specific incident without good evidence. However, where there is good evidence of a more specific causal relationship between particular speech acts, and particular outcomes, it's a very different matter. There is good evidence that Beck's targeting of the Tides Foundation very nearly helped cause a major tragedy. There is also good evidence that his targeting of a political science professor is causing death threats and sundry other forms of nastiness. I hope that Piven doesn't suffer anything worse than the (doubtless pretty horrible) forms of verbal assault that she is now undergoing.

Actually, the only piece of remotely related "evidence" cited at the Milbank essay is a quote from the unemployed carpenter's mother saying her son watched a lot of television. That's it. The rest is pure conjecture, and certainly not any kind of hard data to warrant Farrell's claim that there's "hard evidence" that "Beck's targeting of the Tides Foundation very nearly helped cause a major tragedy." Moreover, there's not much more to Farrell's claim of "good evidence" that Beck is "targeting" Frances Fox Piven. Glenn Beck's a political commentator on a conservative cable outlet. He publishes some of his stuff to his homepage and his political blog, The Blaze. But Farrell is claiming there's a causal relationship between Beck's commentary and hypothesized violence against Piven. This implies a relationship that condition A is the cause of effect B. However, there is no logical reason here to argue that Glenn Beck's own programming (A) would be the cause of violence against Frances Fox Piven (B). The reason, most importantly, as acknowledged by Farrell, is that there's no evidence that Beck has personally called for violence against Professor Piven. So methodologically it can't be said that such an outcome would be determined causally from the broadcasts in a scientifically empirical way. The relationship wouldn't even be true in the probabilistic sense (i.e., drastically reduced degree of predictive accuracy). Farrell's claim rests simply on the fact that Beck frequently reports on Piven's revolutionary agenda. Of course, there are some heated comments at The Blaze website, and there are reports of alleged threatening e-mails. Yet, these cannot be blamed on Glenn Beck, just as the Arizona shooting could not be blamed on Sarah Palin. This is libel. Hostile and threatening comments at online message boards and blog posts are a regular feature of online discourse. And this is to say nothing of secondary variables that could influence potential violence (as in mental instability, like Jared Loughner, who didn't even watch political television or listen to talk radio).



Fact is, Henry Farrell's attack is political and pathetic, just as the unhinged attacks on Sarah Palin after Arizona were political and pathetic. Both are wrong. Both are efforts to delegitimize, marginalize, and silence their targets. It's reprehensible really, especially considering that, indeed, Frances Fox Piven has herself called for revolutionary violence, just last week in fact. As Glenn Reynolds notes, "Praising riots involving Molotov cocktails and people burning to death? Fine. Criticizing a lefty on a cable TV network? Why that’s “hatemongering” and incitement."



Farrell updates his post with a piece from Professor Peter Dreier at Huffington Post, "Glenn Beck's Attacks on Frances Fox Piven Trigger Death Threats." Dreier repeats the allegations of death threats: "Some of Beck's followers have emailed Piven directly." He then posts a number of comments from The Blaze. But all of this is simply backdrop for what's really going on. Dreier is a radical leftist. He teaches at Occidental College, where he's been described as romanticizing "Socialism and Communism, often ignoring the brutal truth about those economic systems, in order to indoctrinate his students." And further, "The professor doesn't use his course just to brainwash his students into the thrills of Socialism and Communism; he uses his course to routinely demean conservatives."



Exactly.



Here's Dreier describing the right's campaign against Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward, from the Huffington Post piece:

Conservatives have been attacking their ideas for decades. But the paranoid demonization of the couple by the extreme Right has escalated since Obama's election.



The story they now tell about Piven can be traced to David Horowitz, a former New Left radical who did an about-face in the 1970s and became a prominent conservative propagandist. In his 2006 book, written with Richard Poe, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party, Horowitz identifies the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" outlined in their 1966 Nation article as the centerpiece of the radical blueprint to "collapse" the capitalist system.



Horowitz's idea caught on with other elements of the conservative lunatic fringe, particularly after an African American former community organizer was elected president. A few weeks after Obama's victory, James Simpson penned an article for the right-wing American Thinker entitled, "Cloward-Piven Government," describing their "malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government." The right-wing echo chamber has transformed the duo into Marxist Machiavellis whose ideas have not only spawned an interlocking radical movement dedicated to destroying modern-day capitalism but also, in their minds at least, almost succeeded, as evidenced by what they consider Obama's "socialist" agenda.



Conservative radio jockeys Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have, on multiple occasions, warned their listeners about the nefarious social scientists. "The Cloward-Piven strategy is essentially what Obama and a number of these people are following," Limbaugh told his listeners on December 18, 2009, "and its ultimate objective is to have everybody in the country on welfare, by destroying it."



Horowitz, the editor of FrontPage, a far-right magazine and website, called Cloward and Piven the "architects" of "radical change." Other right-wing outlets, including American Spectator, The Washington Times, The American Thinker, Free Republic, NewsMax, and WorldNetDaily, have all educated their audiences about how the Cloward-Piven Strategy has infected society like a dangerous left-wing virus.

It goes on like that for a while, and in fact, it's personal for Dreier. He's an academic radical in the tank for the Democrat Party's socialist/community activist operations. Or as journalist Matthew Vadum indicates, Dreier's an "academic for hire" who "has spent much of the last few years as a paid shill for the organized crime syndicate, ACORN." Dreier wrote a whitewash of ACORN for the American Political Science Association's journal, Perspectives on Politics: "How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda Setting." And as noted at the abstract:

Using the news controversy over the community group ACORN, we illustrate the way that the media help set the agenda for public debate and frame the way that debate is shaped. Opinion entrepreneurs (primarily business and conservative groups and individuals, often working through web sites) set the story in motion as early as 2006, the conservative echo chamber orchestrated an anti-ACORN campaign in 2008, the Republican presidential campaign repeated the allegations with a more prominent platform, and the mainstream media reported the allegations without investigating their veracity ... We demonstrate that the national news media agenda is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign by opinion entrepreneurs alleging controversy, even when there is little or no truth to the story ...

Blah, blah.



It's all a bunch of bull, frankly. As Vadum remarked about the broader whitewashing campaign, "ACORN’s radical allies are now attempting to rewrite history to cast the organized crime syndicate as victim instead of as the prolific victimizer that it has been ever since it was created in 1970."



And this brings us back to Professor Henry Farrell. It's clear from the foregoing that he's not only making bogus claims against Glenn Beck, but that his own ideological program is working in solidarity with the likes of Peter Dreier and other socialist radicals in the academy. What's pathetic is that Farrell posted his smear at The Monkey Cage, which was originally launched by the late George Washington Professor Lee Sigelman, a distinguished political scientist and former editor of both the American Political Science Review and American Politics Quarterly. I seriously doubt that Professor Sigelman would have stood for such rank libels as those posted by the dishonest Henry Farrell. But then, I doubt that Professor Sigelman was a communist propagandist either.



In any case, see also Ron Radosh, "Glenn Beck, Frances Fox Piven, and How the New York Times Falsely Depicts the Controversy."

The Socialist Agenda of Revolutionary Transformation

I'm still trying to shake off the cognitive dissonance here, because, you know, there's no real communist revolutionaries citing Marxist doctrines calling for the mass proletarian overthrow of capital:

"Because we do in fact hate commies, at least real commies, not the imaginary commies that community college Assistant Associate Professor Douglas sees lurking behind every potted plant."

Right. Imaginary. That is, if you're idiot butt-freak Tintin from Sadly No!



This Sadly prick remains outside the realm of objective reality, of course, sippin' his commie Kool-aid. And all hate all the time whips up all kinds of paranoid delusions, no doubt. And don't even get me going about the world historical dim bulbs in the comments (Malaclypse especially).



That said, Francis Fox Piven is on a roll. See, "Globalization Destruction: Piven Gleefully ‘Hopes’ and Explains How Countries Like China Can Shut Down USA and Bring Revolutionary Transformation."

BONUS: From the Poor Old Francis Fox Piven School for Advanced Sympathy Studies, "Glenn Beck's Continuing Obsession with Professor Frances Fox Piven and the Roots of Violence in America":

Several months ago I published a post about Glenn Beck's obsession with City University of New York Professor Frances Fox Piven. I talked about having met her briefly in the early '80s in a grad course and about what a wonderful experience that was.



Mostly I wrote about how Beck, and those inclined to buy into his hateful message, can't stand anyone who helps poor people be heard or helps them make a legitimate claim to a decent life in America. I wrote about how Piven's career has been largely dedicated to helping us understand marginalized people and helping them help themselves, and that for this sin Beck was using the full weight of Fox News to vilify her.

Oh my gosh (sniffle, sniffle).



That is horrible! Glenn Beck's a rank brute! A scourge! No, a bully! Poor old Francis Fox Piven hasn't done a thing but help those poor people throw off their chains. She's helped them smash their oppressors and realize their alienation from the fruits of humanity. These people, by Jove, deserve a decent existence --- and you! --- you horrid bourgeois exploiters owe them a damned living! For shame!



EXPROPRIATE THE EXPROPRIATORS!!

Naomi Wolf Feminist Concern Troll — 'If One Makes a Serious Criminal Accusation, One Must Be Treated As a Moral Adult'

I'm getting that partial title off this awful hate-Naomi Twitter feed.

Turn's out there's a huge uproar on the extreme gender-left over Naomi Wolf's latest piece at The Guardian, "Julian Assange's Sex-Crime Accusers Deserve to Be Named" (at Memeorandum).

And in an unusual twist, Ms. Naomi enters the comments section to defend herself, for example:

Well, I have now read all comments. Obviously and understandably very strong feelings and opinions stirred by my piece. To my fellow feminists, I wish to be completely clear about my experience that led me to this position: it derives from working WITH rape and sexual abuse victims IN the United Kingdom. Again and again I saw how the secrecy that surrounds this issue and their identities was used by police, defendants, and society in general -- and especially the media -- to inflame rape stereotypes and most of all to ensure that women who were raped or sexually assaulted had an ice cube's chance in hell of getting any serious justice. I also reported on my own experience with sexual harassment at Yale and reported out two decades of serious sex crime at Yale that was similarly swept under the rug -- to the point that an accused rapist (professor) had gotten several other positions where similar accusations arose -- and the practice of dealing with these accusations anonymously guaranteed that there was NO accountability institutionally and that future victims could not be protected. I also do believe strongly that rape should be treated, as we used to say in the second wave, like any other crime and that if we really want to communicate to our daughters that it is not a woman's stigma (if she is the victim) or a woman's fault then shielding her identity conveys the opposite. If it is his crime why should she have to hide? Of course rape is terribly traumatic. My mother was raped when she was twelve and she agrees with my position on this and gave me her permission to say so and to disclose her experience. The practice of secrecy is presented as a support for victims but in practice simply serves impunity for rapists and impunity for organizations in which rape and sexual assault are endemic. I am sorry it seems that many readers cast this position as anti-feminist and assume I have no familiarity with this issue; had I not seen rapists treated with impunity in your nation's system, and seen so many victims vilified in the media and denied justice systematically, I too would have believed the canard that anonymity serves women. I say again, it serves rapists.

And here's Ian B.'s take:

Naomi Wolf is an icon of feminism. In making this argument she has broken ranks with other feminists. Schadenfreude at the the sight of them rending each other is never far away, but schadenfreude does not actually give me an answer as to whether anonymity in rape cases is a good or a bad thing. I have bitterly criticised feminists and anti-rape activists in the past for their wilful denial of the possibility of false accusations of rape. I sneer at Naomi Wolf's late discovery of this type of possible injustice. Yet she makes a strong argument:

"Though children's identities should, of course, be shielded, women are not children. If one makes a serious criminal accusation, one must be treated as a moral adult."

Against that is a more nebulous pressure, but one with deep roots in the human psyche: rape is different from other forms of assault. The trauma of a rape victim, male or female, does not arise only from the physical injuries received. Harm is done to them by having the fact that they have suffered such a violation made public. Some victims would feel unable to come forward if it were to be made public.

Yet other rape victims argue that this reluctance merely reinforces the barbaric idea that there is something shameful in being raped. We use the word shame to mean too many things.

Christian Caryl, Contributing Editor at Foreign Policy and Newsweek, Slams Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

And Caryl's currently a Senior Fellow at MIT's Center for International Studies (CIS). And he's got a refreshing take on the WikiLeaks phenomenon, at New York Review, "Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything":

Among the cables released so far are revelations that have prompted headlines around the world, but there are also dispatches on Bavarian election results and Argentine maritime law. If the aim is to strike a blow against American imperial designs—as Assange has suggested in some of his statements—I don’t see how these particular cables support it. Assange has claimed to Time magazine that he wants to “make the world more civil” by making secretive organizations like the US State Department and Department of Defense accountable for their actions; he also told Time that, as an alternative, he wants to force them “to lock down internally and to balkanize,” protecting themselves by becoming more opaque and thereby more “closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.” This is, to say the least, a patently contradictory agenda; I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make sense of it. In practical terms it seems to boil down to a policy of disclosure for disclosure’s sake. This is what the technology allows, and Assange has merely followed its lead. I don’t see coherently articulated morality, or immorality, at work here at all; what I see is an amoral, technocratic void.

As Alan Cowell has written in The New York Times, the careers of some foreign officials—and not necessarily high-level ones—have already been destroyed or threatened by these revelations.

In at least one case the person’s name had been redacted, but his identity was clear enough from the context. One is justified in asking: Will deaths occur as these and other statements are published? We do not know, and we may not hear about them if they do. But damage of various kinds is sure to result. (For his part, Assange seems remarkably unable to discuss these very real dangers; in the Time interview he claims that “this sort of nonsense about lives being put into jeopardy” is simply an excuse.) Can WikiLeaks at least tell us why this was necessary?

In the old days, journalists would have done what WikiLeaks’s print media partners, like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, are attempting to do now: make judgments about which documents to release and whether or not to redact the names mentioned in them based on the larger public interest and the risk of inflicting harm on innocent bystanders. Yet one cannot escape the feeling that the entire exercise is rendered tragicomically moot by the mountain of raw material looming, soon to be equally accessible, in the background. Khatchadourian contends that WikiLeaks is evolving into something more like a conventional journalistic organization, one that will make value judgments about what it’s doing rather than simply dumping documents into cyberspace willy-nilly. But the sheer scale of what the group does suggests that this is something of a fool’s errand. Assange says the organization has been releasing the cables at the rate of about eighty a day. (By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means that we have three thousand days of revelations to go as this article goes to press.)

The comparison some people have been making between the WikiLeaks document dumps and the Pentagon Papers affair back in the 1970s is illuminating precisely because it shows how little the two stories have in common. As pointed out by Max Frankel, an ex–New York Times editor who was one of those overseeing publication of the papers, the leaker in that case, Daniel Ellsberg,

was not breaching secrecy for its own sake, unlike the WikiLeakers of today; he was looking to defeat a specific government policy. Moreover, he was acutely conscious of the risks of disclosure and did not distribute documents betraying live diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting. And it took him years to find a credible medium of distribution, which is now available at the push of a button.

I’m fully aware that Daniel Ellsberg has lent his support to Julian Assange. That’s his right. But I think he might be overlooking a few vital points.

One of the most obvious is that WikiLeaks is posting these raw documents on the Web, the most permissive information medium we have yet to invent. As a result we are now experiencing yet another jump from the ploddingly analog to the explosively digital. Just as the concept of “privacy” fades into obscurity when sixteen-year-olds can present their innermost thoughts to an audience of billions, so, too, the Internet distribution of official secrets changes the rules of the game. Once all the documents are online they will be subjected not only to the often clumsy ministrations of journalists and historians but also to the far more efficient data-mining programs and pattern- analysis software of foreign governments and private companies (the extent of which, in the case of China’s handling of Google, the cables themselves make clear). The implications for the conduct of government policy (not to mention individual lives) are monumental. I wish I could predict what they might be, but I can’t. I’m not sure anyone can.

There's more at the link.

I noted Caryl's credentials at the title above because he seems so unusual --- and incredibly lucid. Continuing the essay he unfolds the logic of the argument, which is to say that the enormity of the latest WikiLeaks data dump is greater than any one individual or institution to manage. And the consequences --- collateral damage for the information leakers, who are less interested in changing policies than they are in bringing down governments --- are the untold and potentially catastrophic risks to the lives and careers of honest people carrying out their jobs in government, military institutions, humanitarian organizations, and so forth. These are questions ultimately of tremendous power, and Caryl in fact indicates his support for much of what WikiLeaks is supposedly all about --- greater transparency and accountability of governments. But in the end, Julian Assange comes out looking both quite poor and insignificant in this account. And Caryl perhaps might have continued a bit more by delving into the motivations of Assange, and especially his more enthusiastic adherents on the anarcho- and neo-communist left. If there was ever an equalizing force for anti-establishment actors to take down the state sources of world hegemonic power, WikiLeaks is it. Its utility lies not so much in exposure of government duplicity, corruption, or realpolitik, but in radicalizing the radicals, and enabling their growing revolutionary program. And recall there's an almost perfect ideological correlation betwen those who favor and those who oppose the WikiLeaks project. Even purportedly moderate leftists are gung ho on this transformationalist agenda, while either naive or in conscious denial to the nihilist destruction that's essential to the anarcho- and neo-communist program. Caryl does yoeman's work in getting the alternative meme out in leftist outlets like New York Review. It's an interesting development that will hopefully gain traction.

I'll have more later, in any case ...

Kate Ausburn Enters #MooreandMe Feminist Minefield

Kate Ausburn, out of Sydney, Australia, has offered the latest pushback against the #MooreandMe ayatollahs, "Why Feminists and the Left Must Defend Julian Assange":

The key demands in the campaign to support Assange are that he be presumed innocent until proven otherwise, that he receive a fair and just trial, and included in that, the recognition of the case as being one against allegations of sexual misconduct by Assange and not a case against Wikileaks and its role in publishing leaked documents.

Well, extreme gender feminists have called Assange a liar, so I doubt the assumption of innocence is really in play here. But Ausburn continues:

It is important that the left continues to defend Assange’s right to a fair trial. It is not up to the media, politicians, or water-cooler conversations to condemn Assange or decide his fate, or that of Wikileaks. As Glenn Greenwald told CNN on Monday 27 December 2010: “People should go to jail when they are charged with a crime, and they are convicted of that crime, in a court of law.”

Some facts of which are certain: Assange remained in Sweden for more than a month after the initial allegations were made, he complied fully with police questioning at the time. The current arrest warrant was issued “in relation to questions the prosecutors’ office wishes him to answer regarding the accusations” (Sydney Morning Herald on 24 December 2o10).

Assange has at no time been charged with any crime and neither he or his lawyers have received evidence from Sweden of the crimes he is accused of having committed. Assange will next appear in court on 11 January for a case management session and again on 7 and 8 February for his extradition hearing.

It is up to us to ensure the process involved in prosecuting any charges brought against Assange in this case be fair and just, and that a sexual misconduct case does not instead become a case to stifle freedom of information or publishing rights.

Expect updates.

Daniel Ellsberg Defends Julian Assange Against 'False and Slanderous' Rape Allegations

Well, I wonder what hashtag the extreme gender feminists will come up with now?



I reported earlier on the Trotskyite defense of Julian Assange, which frankly offered a brutal take-down of the feminist-left's "legitimizing the suppression of nonconformists and political dissidents." And now comes news that antiwar icon Daniel Ellsberg is dissing the rape allegations, on Twitter:

Greg Mitchell at The Nation retweeted, and Melissa McEwan picked it up and ran with it, "The Thing Is, Rapists Lie":

I wonder if Ellsberg has also personally heard the accounts of Assange's accusers, and found them unconvincing. I doubt it.



I suspect that he just assumes that they would sound like liars, were he to speak to them, because Assange sounded sincere. And why would he not make that assumption? One of the key narratives of the rape culture is that false accusations are extremely common. (They are not.)



Or maybe he just assumes that rapists are easily identifiable, that he can suss out a rapist by talking to him. Unlike the stupid women who trust them, date them, marry them, work alongside them unawares. Until.



It's funny, ahem, how much implicit victim-blaming is embedded in the assertion to know a man has been wrongly accused.



The truth is, it doesn't really matter what Assange or his accusers sound like to Ellsburg, or anyone else. Because sounding honest and being honest are often mutually exclusive concepts.



And rapists are excellent liars.

More at the link.



This is a fascinating development. It's hardly constroversial to suggest that Daniel Ellsberg is a far more iconic figure on the progressive left than is Michael Moore. But clearly his support for Assange has struck a nerve among hardline anti-rape culture feminists. And while Sady Doyle's 15 minutes are up, no doubt we'll be seeing another man-hating extremist take the baton. Seriously. How far will this go? Personally, I'm hoping to see Glenn Greenwald strapped to the stocks and lashed to a bloody pulp, although so far he's stayed clear of the feminist backlash. He does have a new essay typically attacking the media's "pro-war agitprop" during the Iraq war (via Memeorandum). And linked there is another piece on WikiLeaks from Newsweek: "Why Journalists Aren’t Standing Up for WikiLeaks." But the big story is this soap opera of whiny feminist progressives who just can't catch a break. And speaking of breaks: Julian Assange is trying to break governments. Feminists are crying over broken condoms. (But to be fair, it's more complicated, for sure, but following the revolt of the violent femmes this last couple of weeks does feed the cynicism just a bit.)

Trotskyite Fourth International Attacks The Nation's 'Right-Wing Campaign' Against Julian Assange

You know this whole radical progressive schism over the Assange rape allegations has gotten out of control when one of the world's leading revolutionary parties is pushing back against the feminist left's charges against the WikiLeaks frontman. See the Socialist Equality Party's, "The Nation Joins the Campaign Against Julian Assange."

This article is just too darn good --- and I hate to admit it because I'm so bloody anti-communist! The writer David Walsh, a top editor at World Socialist Web Site, just hammers Katha Pollitt and her recent piece on the rape allegations. See, "The Nation joins the campaign against Julian Assange." There's a lot to digest, and for a progressive/communist organization, I'm even a little surprised at the not so subtle political incorrectness. More on that below. The introduction is worth sharing first of all:

The Nation magazine in the US, with its publication of “The Case of Julian Assange” by columnist Katha Pollitt (posted December 22, 2010), has joined the right-wing campaign against WikiLeaks co-founder Assange, a campaign directed by the highest levels of the American state.



The sexual assault charges against Assange in Sweden are part of an orchestrated effort to divert public attention from the content of the WikiLeaks exposures—the duplicity, hypocrisy and criminality of American and world imperialism—and bury the important revelations in a pile of scandalous garbage. Pollitt has eagerly lent a hand to that effort.



Such a development was predictable, given the history of the journalist and the publication, but that does not make it any less reprehensible… or educational. The arguments employed by Pollitt shed further light on the politically rotten character of contemporary feminism and identity politics generally.

This is conspiracy theorizing par excellence, which I doubt could be improved upon by anyone to right or left of the author. But notice this as well:

This is not the first time we have noted the alliance of the extreme right and feminism. [http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/pola-o08.shtml] The latter has assumed deeply reactionary characteristics, misappropriating the movement for women’s rights that at one time was an element of the struggle against oppression.



Pollitt goes on to lambaste Assange’s supporters who have denounced the trumped-up and politically motivated character of the “rape” charges, including Truthout’s Dave Lindorff, filmmaker Michael Moore, MSNBC talk show host Keith Olbermann and feminists Naomi Wolf and Katrin Axelsson. “What's disturbing,” she writes, “is the way some WikiLeaks admirers have misrepresented the allegations, attacked the women and made light of date rape.”



Date rape has nothing to do with it, by the women’s own statements. The case involves consensual relations. Each of the women actively sought a sexual involvement with Assange.

I had to highlight that passage about the "deeply reactionary characteristics" of contemporary feminists. Sounds about right. And that last part about consensual relations is basically what Robert Stacy McCain said with "You buy the ticket, you take the ride" --- although I doubt The Other McCain would enjoy being lumped in with some Trotskyite revolutionary internationalists.



And here's my favorite:

Feminist opinion—as the Assange case and the Polanski affair before it have demonstrated—has become one of the means of legitimizing the suppression of nonconformists and political dissidents, and of changing the subject from the great social issues, above all, class oppression and social inequality, to stale and self-pitying concerns.

That whole thing could be placed in bold, but then none of it would be. I think folks catch my drift, in any case. "The means of legitimizing the suppression of nonconformists and political dissidents" has been the issue I've been exposing here this last few weeks. I'm especially interested in this since radical feminists are among the most fanatical activists you're likely to come across --- and I definitely get my quota of these types online. And clearly Sady Doyle's in a class all of her own. And while I'm getting a kick outta blogging the #MooreandMe campaign, I had to laugh out loud when I noticed that she'd unblocked me on Twittter the other day. Yep, she wants to see me tweets and she wants to read my blog. She won't link, but she's reading. And while of course there's nothing I could say to change any of her views --- considering that for Ms. Sady my effort to document her Stalinism confirms her whole program of Dworkinite feminist machinations (misogyny, blah, blah.) --- it's certainly worth it from my point of view. Some of her acolytes have been making sensational claims puffing up the impact of #MooreandMe to the scale of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Michael Moore really is a god if women today have placed him on par with Martin Luther King, Jr. The flip side is that of course such inflation of accomplishments reveals how little today's feminists have left to achieve. Hey, once you bring down MLK let's go for dethroning the 16th President of the United States from the pantheon of America's greatest leaders. Shoot. Saving the Union from irreparable and violent dissolution? That's nothing compared to getting the Flint Fatso to confess on Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that "every woman who claims to have been raped has to be, must be taken seriously ..." Blah, blah. Gosh. I mean, wow. That has to be Michael Moore's Appomattox. Ms. Sady is the rail splitter of the radical gender feminist contingents! Surrender!



More later ...

Progressives and Net Neutrality

I wrote about this last July: "Al Franken's Keynote Speech at Netroots Nation."

It was freaky then and it's freaky now. This video's awesome, however, and be sure to read John Fund's piece from a few of days ago, "The Net Neutrality Coup" (via Left Coast Rebel):

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

Cancer Trending? Don't Tell Scott Eric Kaufman

Because he'll issue a decree for your death. But probably not for the editors at CNN, or Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars, for that matter (link). No, SEK saves his evil derangement for right wing enemies (even when they haven't written that "cancer is trending"). You know, because wishing death on your political enemies is just what secular leftists do:

Leftists Chant for the Death of Ann Althouse — UPDATED!!

God have mercy on us all, for there is evil in the world.



I love Ann Althouse. She is my friend and I look up to her in many ways. I am thus horrified to see calls for her death at a leftist message board discussing recent responses to the death of Elizabeth Edwards:

I can't fucking wait for Ann Althouse to die. The only thing that would make that perfect would be if her husband cheats on her beforehand.

While I've already posted on all of this at length, I'm still shocked at how brazen are some of the leftist death chants, for Althouse — and for me too, from the genuinely demonic Tintin at Sadly No!, as just one more example:

RELATED: Recall that RepRacist3 has been retweeting all kinds of vile hatred like this, which once again demonstrates that his claims to Christian compassion are all just poorly executed acts of deception. God have mercy on him.



**********



UPDATE: Racist Repsac3 tried to comment, alleging that "no conservatives are behind you" on this. Not true, obviously — and hilariously so, since no sooner than I deleted RepRacist's comment did I find Althouse at the Sitemeter, linking with "Oh, the violent ideation of the lefties!"

It's so hypocritical!

Word.



I've been receiving praise and thanks all week, and it's just killing the nihilists, who have responded to my honest and very straightforward reflections on faith with an extremist jihad. So yeah, hypocritical, but typical for these Godless freaks.

Nihilism and Progressivism

Bosch Fawstin illustrated my recent essay, "Navigating Past Nihilism," which is cross-posted to NewsReal Blog.

And now I'm re-reading Sean Kelly's original essay at New York Times, but this time in light of the left's response to my thoughts on Elizabeth Edwards' rejection of God. Citing Nietzsche, Kelly suggests that those who have abandoned God are living in "self-deceit." The deceit is to hold out the possibility of the good life. The solution, suggested by Kelly, is to adopt an alternative set of commitments, as Melville would say, in a smaller, more local set of values. I don't doubt many could find a pleasing and satisfying life. But it would be materialistic and autonomously derived, i.e., without a greater nobility found in the eternal. This is, then, an inferior substitute to God. People would find meaning not in self-denial, abstinence, and penitence, but in engorgement on worldly pleasures. Spiffing this up in fancy sounding language won't do (these "many new possible and incommensurate meanings," for example). It's a jumble of nothingness in the end. Nothing higher to seek, and hence little to be attained. It's metaphor for progressivism. Excellence and attainment are for the selfish and greedy. And the response to that alleged greed is redistribution of wealth and the organization of society into hierarchies of recrimination. Appropriate ways of thinking are enforced. Truth is deemed hate speech, and expressions of faith are excoriated as theological fascism. Hence the response to my commentary on Elizabeth Edwards. It took a day or two, but just to speak out boldly for a vision of God in full awesomeness, God at our moment of complete and utter vulnerability, was just too much for the progressive nihilists. It's a rare thing, but shock-proof demons of the leftist netherworld were indeed shocked. The attacks followed. I was "Donald Dick" for refusing to embrace Elizabeth Edwards' non-belief. Another gleefully exclaimed that someone needed "to take a shot at Donald Douglas." And of course SEK blew his wad before he'd even consummated the information I'd posted. And upon receiving my response (linked to LGM), SEK proceeded to swiftly threaten death. It's always that way with progressives:

The Donalde, I am absolutely serious here: try to drive traffic to your shit site one more time on this thread and I will end you. Remember, before I taught composition, I taught journalism, and some of my former students are very, very intrepid.

So I’m only going to say this once: diminish the experience of cancer to a cancer survivor again and you’ll learn exactly how great of a teacher I am. That’s the deal: you be a fucking human being and allow that scoring points by writing “trending” instead of “dying” is a cheap tactic that makes you a terrible person, and no one I’ve taught will prove you’re a terrible person. This is your first and only warning.

I allow nothing short of indicating SEK's Stalinism.

I'll have more later, in any case.

Opiate of the Masses

This guy, at the demonic ridicule machine, while crude, is about the only one over there with any brains:

I couldn’t resist leaving a comment (along with several dozen other folks), and was surprised to see that it appeared almost immediately. This is a little creepy – comments must be approved, and he’s apparently approving ‘em as quickly as they come in. The guy is digging it, people: Donald Dick is without shame; he’s feeding on the negative comments, and no doubt every nihilistic, atheistical comment he gets just reinforces his twisted religious beliefs.

Word.

I've been getting hella kick out of these God-hating freaks:

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

-- Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right."

Imaginary Communists? Sadly No!

Recall the famous claim from Tintin the ringleader of collectivist hate: There's no real communists any more, just "imaginary" ones.



Well, Doug Ross administers the hammer to these pricks: "Sadly, No Economic Literates at Unintentionally Hilarious Lib Blog."



Hilarious — and demonic.