“Survivors” are the new sacred class in academia, and criticizing them the new heresy

The New Neo Posted on by

The pattern is clear.

Georgetown University refuses to sanction Professor Christine Fair for one of the most egregiously vile and violent comments I’ve ever seen on Twitter, whereas Catholic University comes down hard on Dean Rainford for merely stating a rather mild truth critical of already-debunked “accuser” Julie Swetnick.

If I had to choose only one of the two disparate responses, I’d chose Georgetown’s, which at least comes down on the side of liberty, and then let the market decide if students wish to attend Prof. Fair’s (a more inappropriate name was never seen) classes.

Catholic University’s response, on the other hand is craven and anti-liberty. And it’s not a one-off. A similar event has occurred at USC, where tenured professor James Moore is in trouble for saying that 2+2=4.

Yes, for merely stating an obvious, non-abusive, inoffensive (except to SJWs) truth about accusers (otherwise known as “survivors” and “victims,” because even false accusers are to be regarded as victims, right?):

Nearly 100 students at the University of Southern California attended a rally at noon on Monday demanding a tenured professor be fired after he sent a reply-all email last Thursday to the student body noting that “accusers sometimes lie.”

“If the day comes you are accused of some crime or tort of which you are not guilty, and you find your peers automatically believing your accuser, I expect you find yourself a stronger proponent of due process than you are now,” emailed Professor James Moore.

The email — in response to a reply-all email that urged students to “Believe Survivors” on the day of Christine Ford’s testimony — triggered what one school admin said was “hundreds” of emails from concerned students and alumni since Thursday.

USC students Audrey Mechling and Joelle Montier then organized a Facebook rally against the engineering professor, entitled “Times Up for James Moore.”

These anti-free-speech zealots can rally all they want; that’s free speech, too. It’s intensely depressing that they can draw any sort of crowd at all, but that’s what decades of leftist control of schools has wrought. The bigger problem is the response of USC’s administration in the person of Dean Jack Knott, the dancing bear du jour:

“What [Professor Moore] sent was extremely inappropriate, hurtful, insensitive. We are going to try to do everything we can to try to create a better school, to educate the faculty,” said Dean Knott to the crowd.

He then announced that USC would take action.

“This is going to be a multi-pronged effort. We are going to have a faculty meeting later this week around implicit bias, sensitivity towards [sexual assault]….” he said.

Isn’t that special, Dean Knott. Maybe the crocodile will eat you last. Send whatever portion of your faculty still retaining the values of logic and truth to the re-education camps for the proper training in right-thinking. And by the way, what Professor Moore said was actually extremely appropriate. If it hurt some sensitive SJW creatures who would like to do away with the protections Western civilization has struggled to put in place against false accusations, well then, tough.

Moore’s apology was tepid, and his defense of himself robust:

It is never my intention to hurt anyone. My intention is to protect more students than we currently do from being punished for acts of misconduct they have not committed. Any of us might stand accused of any number of misdeeds, and each of us at that point will want to be treated fairly under due process.

In light of all of this, consider the widespread criticism President Trump has gotten for mocking Christine Ford in a speech he gave recently. I happen to think he should have refrained for strategic reasons because (as the article demonstrates) the wavering senators who are gumming up the works didn’t like it. What he said may have essentially been true, but I think it didn’t help achieve the goal at all, and gave Ford’s defenders and Kavanaugh’s enemies grist for their mill. It was also unnecessary; Ford’s veracity problems and memory lapses have already been pointed out, and he was preaching to the choir.

On the other hand, I’ve been wrong many times about Trump’s controversial tweets and statements and their effect. I think he was trying to highlight the inconsistencies in Ford’s story in a way that really sinks in for people. He knew that his statements would get wide coverage, of course, much wider than if he’d said the same thing in a more restrained way.

Who knows? I suspect that on the whole what Trump did was a bad idea. But I also think that Ford’s lack of truthfulness is coming more and more into focus, and it should be fair game for criticism. Is she a “victim” of something? Who knows? But the lies of accusers are not to be afforded some special kid glove treatment merely because the accusers choose to couch those lies in accusations of sexual abuse, and/or because they are women. And yet that’s the hill most of our universities have chosen to die on.

Meanwhile, Catholic University slaps down speech that criticizes self-described “victims”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…no matter how illogical or implausible their stories.

Earlier today, I wrote about how a disgusting and violent, racist and sexist tweet of Professor Christine Fair got no flak from her employer, Georgetown University. Meanwhile, Dean Will Rainford received some harsh treatment from his employer, Catholic University, for the following tweet:

“Swetnick is 55 y/o. Kavanaugh is 52 y/o. Since when do senior girls hang with freshmen boys? If it happened when Kavanaugh was a senior, Swetnick was an adult drinking with&by her admission, having sex with underage boys. In another universe, he would be victim & she the perp!”

For this rather mild criticism of the abominable Swetnick, Rainford was suspended from his job for the remainder of the semester and apparently forced to apologize. I say “forced” because it’s hard to believe that he issued this statement voluntarily. I suspect he did it to avoid becoming a pariah (and perhaps to have his very own false allegations of sexual assault lodged against him). This is sickening, worthy of the Soviet Union:

Rainford issued an apology Thursday, saying that his tweet “unfortunately degraded” Swetnick.

“My tweet suggested that she was not a victim of sexual assault,” he wrote. “I offer no excuse. It was impulsive and thoughtless and I apologize.”

The excuse is as plain as the nose on anyone’s face: Swetnick is lying, and even those who originally believed her are well aware at this point that it’s all lies on her part. Her story has zero credibility on its face, she has recanted most of it, and her record gives her zero credibility in general (see this, this, and this). .

But this man is paying the price for even questioning her story. The university’s president John Garvey has called Rainford’s tweet “unacceptable” and says it “demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to the victim.”

What “victim” are you talking about? Swetnick is a victimizer, not a victim.

Garvey added:

“While it was appropriate for [Rainford] to apologize and to delete his Twitter and Facebook accounts, this does not excuse the serious lack of judgment and insensitivity of his comments.”

I wonder what Garvey would have had to say if he’d been the president of Georgetown. Would he have called Christine Fair’s comments “insensitive” and say they showed a “serious lack of judgment”? I doubt it.

Just to refresh your memory, here’s what Fair wrote:

Georgetown seemed to take it right in stride.

[ADDENDUM: I want to call your attention to this. It’s part of a post I wrote about a year ago:

As Allan Bloom wrote in the late 80s, describing events that had occurred at Cornell during the late 60s:

“[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”

“Teachers” includes “administrators,” of course. One difference, though, between the 60s and now, is that I don’t think there’s quite as much talk by professors about academic freedom.

Except, apparently, at Georgetown—if you’re a leftist calling for the murder and castration of white males.]

And why should anyone on earth care?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s my question: why should anyone on earth care if college student Brett Kavanaugh once got into a bar fight that resulted in no charges—or once precipitated a bar fight by reacting to an insult by throwing the contents of a drink in someone’s face—about 35 years ago, and has done nothing of the sort since?

Why should we care? We shouldn’t. It is irrelevant. It is normal guy behavior. It is nothing.

What’s more, those who are trying desperately to make it out to be something don’t even believe that themselves. They are doing this solely—and I mean solely—for political reasons, and that fact is nakedly transparent.

No other SCOTUS nominee has ever been asked about anything of the sort, and if asked no one has cared about the answer. The FBI has looked with great thoroughness, many times over, into any police records or reports about Kavanaugh and found them to be a big nothingburger.

This is all a huge charade by the left to gain political power. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad and dangerous.

But it’s apparently a useful charade. One of its purposes is to provide cover for any senators who want to vote “no” on Kavanaugh. Another is to de-legitimize Kavanaugh forever in the eyes of half the public if he does become a SCOTUS justice. Still another is to serve notice on any future Trump nominees that they better not have a history of any altercations or transgressions in their lives back to the cradle, because the left will be uncovering anything other than Dalai Lama behavior. What’s more, if the transgressions don’t exist, the left will invent them.

In Canada, another move to the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Canada’s Quebec seems to be joining the many places around the western world that are swinging towards the right in response to the left’s immigration policies:

The business-friendly CAQ is expected to win a majority of seats in Canada’s second most populous province, according to early results from Elections Quebec and network projections…

The CAQ win would follow a shift to the right in Ontario, where Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government swept to power in June, ending 15 years of Liberal rule in Canada’s most populous province.

Quebec’s Liberals held power for 13 out of the last 15 years.

Legault campaigned on a controversial plan to take in 10,000 fewer immigrants a year and to expel new residents who fail tests on French and Quebec values within three years.

“Quebecers have clearly indicated their desire for change,” Liberal leader and former Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said in a concession speech, adding that he would reflect on his political future.

The left thought it would be immune to any backlash from its immigration policies, just as they did in this country. So far they are not. Of course, in this country, we are getting an inkling of just how far they are willing to go to take back power. I hope for Canada’s sake it’s not the same there.

Logic vs. emotion: Rachel Mitchell’s report on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony

The New Neo Posted on by

Rachel Mitchell has issued a report that criticizes Ford’s testimony, but what does Mitchell know? She’s only an expert. And she deals with facts and logic, and we don’t want no steeenking facts here.

Here’s the complete report and a discussion of it. But how many people will pay attention, compared to the number watching the hearing, or watching sound bites from it, or joining the feeding frenzy on Twitter? The people who automatically believed Ford because of her vulnerable affect are functioning through emotion rather than logic, and “you cannot reason people out of something they were not reasoned into.”

We don’t know if Ford is telling the truth in identifying her perpetrator, or indeed whether she was attacked at all, or whether even she thinks she’s telling the truth. We do know that her story has changed over and over in important and material facts, contains perplexing holes, was a long time coming, and could easily be politically motivted. The fact that she can tell a convincing story, and look traumatized while doing it, does not tell us whether that story is the truth. Rachel Mitchell makes it clear that the story could not hold up in a court of law even in a civil suit, and does not even hold up as a credible story.

Those who believe Ford’s story is true have ignored or rationalized the obvious inconsistencies, explaining them away by saying that of course trauma clouds memory. But sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, and at any rate that cannot do away with the need for evidence. When the supposed “survivor’s” narrative is the only evidence there is, if she cannot tell the story’s relevant facts the case is suspect on its face and can never be used as evidence of an offense. Her friends and family are welcome to believe her, but no one else should rely on her story as the truth.

Those who believe Ford’s story also are ignoring or rationalizing the actual lies she has told (and/or let slide when her attorneys told the lies about her), such as the one concerning her fear of flying (there are apparently others, such as her explanation for the second door on her house). And that lie about flying was not an inconsequential, trangential, “white” lie, either. Although that lie was not about the sexual assault allegations themselves, it was a nakedly manipulative lie told in order to affect the committee’s schedule and alter congressional politics, as well as public opinion (“oh, the poor woman, traumatized by Brett Kavanaugh!”). It was a successful lie, too, at least at the time, even though it could be easily refuted by evidence. But the evidence came too late to undo the damage the lie had already done, and that almost certainly was part of the calculation of the telling of the lie.

Ford’s defenders say something like this in order to explain it all away: “Just because she flies a lot doesn’t mean she’s not afraid of flying!” That is certainly true, but completely and utterly irrelevant. Ford’s lawyers were not citing her fear of flying to discuss her mental state in the abstract, they were citing it to justify a delay in the hearing because she could not fly as a result of that fear of flying. That argument is torn to shreds by the simple fact that she flies often despite whatever fear she has, and therefore of course could have flown to any hearing in a timely fashion. And she did fly to the hearing, after having it postponed for this contrived reason.

That is simple logic, but simple logic is not something Ford’s defenders seem to want to apply or even be able to apply. And no, they’re not all women. Plenty of them are men.

And they’re not all stupid or globally illogical, although some are. For many it’s a case of 2 + 2= 5, because the Party wills it.

Why is Christine Fair still a professor at Georgetown?

The New Neo Posted on by

And I might add: why is she still allowed on Twitter?

Those questions are rhetorical—I know the answer, which is that her vicious hatred is directed towards the correct people.

Here’s the author’s Wiki entry. And here’s Georgetown’s response to her tweet:

“The views of faculty members expressed in their private capacities are their own and not the views of the University. Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable. While faculty members may exercise freedom of speech, we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”

That is a ludicrous response on Georgetown’s part. This is not a situation in which it is even remotely possible that someone expressing such thoughts in a public forum will be able to “interact” with students in a manner that is “free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”

Fair’s student evaluations from before this ever happened indicate that she already wasn’t interacting with students in such a way.

Fair is also the person who was responsible for Richard Spencer being thrown out of his health club, as well as several other disputes that got some press. According to Fair’s Wiki entry:

In January 2017, Fair was involved in a Twitter dispute with Asra Q. Nomani [Nomani is another professor; you can find her Wiki entry here]. In response to Nomani’s tweet that as a Muslim, she voted for President Trump, Fair tweeted that she had “written [Nomani] off as a human being” and that Nomani had “pimped herself out to all media outlets.” Nomani responded by filing a complaint with Georgetown University, Fair’s employer, alleging discrimination and harassment.

In May 2017, Fair began an altercation with white nationalist Richard B. Spencer at a gym in Alexandria, Virginia. While the two were working out, Fair approached Spencer and accused him of being a Nazi, along with a number of other accusations, leading a third gym patron to intervene on behalf of him. This incident resulted in Spencer’s membership being terminated by the manager of the gym.

In January 2018, Fair was involved in an incident at Frankfurt Airport. When her bag was flagged for possibly containing explosives, it was searched and German Federal Police instructed Fair that she would have to dispose of a liquid deodorant or transfer it to her checked bag. German police stated that Fair was uncooperative, as she accused them of sexism, of being Nazis and thugs, and directed expletives at them. Fair was charged with slander under Germany’s defamation law. She subsequently published an article on HuffPost partially rejecting the police account of the incident.

Interesting that Fair’s favorite term of opprobrium seems to be to call people Nazis. If you want to see the tenor of her dispute with Nomani (in which the Nazi-name-calling was also quite prominent on Fair’s part) please see this. And yet Fair retained her position at Georgetown after that.

Now, Richard Spencer (not to be confused with Robert Spencer) is in fact a white supremacist (a discussion of Richard Spencer occurs in a comment thread beginning here). If not an actual Nazi, he seems rather Nazi-esque. But he should be allowed to work out at a gym, where he basically minds his own business and lives his life.

But Christine Fair, the woman who doesn’t limit the word “Nazi” to the likes of Richard Spencer but who uses it for just about everyone who doesn’t share her extreme political point of view, and who has called for the murder and castration of a group based on their sex and race, exhibits that true Nazi spirit herself.

I’m not aware of Georgetown’s specific rules regarding when a tenured professor can be dismissed, but this article indicates that “moral turpitude” is one reason that generally suffices. Moral turpitude is defined this way:

The concept of “moral turpitude” might escape precise definition, but it has been described as an “act of baseness, vileness, or depravity in the private and social duties which a man owes to his fellowmen, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between man and man.”

The rest of the article has to do with crimes involving moral turpitude. Obviously, nothing Fair has written is a crime, although it states a desire to commit the crime of mass murder and then defacement of bodies, based on sex and race. In this country we don’t criminalize speech, except in very rare instances that her tweets would not fall into. But in terms of tenure, wouldn’t those tweets constitute moral turpitude by almost any definition? It’s a judgment call, of course, but I cannot imagine that if the sex and/or race of her targets were different—say, if she was calling for the murder and mutilation of blacks and/or women—that she would be retaining her job.

[NOTE: One solution might be for students to simply boycott her class. But it wouldn’t surprise me at this point if her notoriety attracts a lot of students rather than repels them. And it might be that her class is required for some degree program, which might make it difficult for students in that major to avoid it.

Another possibility is for Georgetown alums to threaten to stop giving money to the school.

More here about some of Fair’s previous tweets.]

[Hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr.]

[ADDENDUM: A little more searching has turned up an article Fair wrote that sheds some light on the origins of her towering rage. Her family apparently wasn’t just dysfunctional, it was horrifically so. She admits that she was highly damaged by it and lives in a constant state of rage. Not an excuse for her own behavior as a 50-year-old woman, but a terribly sad story.]

[ADDENDUM II: Fair’s Twitter account has been suspended.]

Server cache problem now

The New Neo Posted on by

The Bing bot attack seems to have subsided—for now, anyway. But that’s certainly not a result of anything my host did to fix it, which was basically nothing.

But now there’s an intermittent problem with comment autofill, in which every now and then a previous commenter’s data is being autofilled on someone else’s computer. This happened once before a year or two ago, and involves a cache problem at the host’s server. It went away fairly quickly the last time. But in the meantime I’m suggesting that people put in false email addresses if they’re concerned about this.

I am also about to migrate to a new host because I am very dissatisfied with my present host. However, the migration will take a few days. I apologize for the problem and the inconvenience, but I trust it will be better soon and I hope that with a new host these problems will not recur.

neo.

Yes, there is actually other news in the world: the US, Canada, Mexico deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember all the dire prognostications from press and leftist pundits about what would happen to NAFTA as a result of Trump’s ignorant bluster?

Well, this is what has happened:

The deal replaces, or amends, the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement between the three countries. From the moment he announced his candidacy, way back in 2015, until the day before yesterday, President Trump has assailed the original Nafta as ‘the worst deal ever.’ The fact that US trade with Mexico has gone from a modest surplus in the early years of Nafta to a $68 billion deficit now highlights his concern.

The President came to terms with Mexico last month, but Canada was adamant about not making the concessions that Trump demanded. Last night, burning the midnight oil, US negotiators finally hammered out a deal with Canada to preserve the three-country agreement just moments before the midnight deadline. The deal, which President Trump wants to rename the US-Mexico-Canada — difficult to acronymise, but accurate in its dramatis personae — will go some distance in levelling the playing field for trade among the three countries. As before-the-bell market indices suggest, the citizens and economies of all three countries will benefit. Even Justin Trudeau, Canada’s fountain-of-youth Prime Minister, acknowledged that ‘It’s a good day for Canada’ as he left a Cabinet meeting last night.

One of the many many benefits for the left of the extreme focus on the defamation of Brett Kavanaugh is that other news favorable to Trump can take a back seat:

The deal, which will be signed in late November, greatly reduces impediments to US farmers and manufacturers, especially automakers, and modernises the agreement by providing rules for the world of digital exchange which was in its infancy when the original deal was struck.

A last-minute concession by Canada will open the country’s dairy markets to the US, while for its part the US dropped its demand that special NAFTA trade courts be abolished. There was, in other words, plenty of give-and-take. All parties got important concessions.

The art of the deal

More here, including the fact that Congress may balk at this, and that’s especially true if the House falls into Democratic hands, as so many have predicted. I would think that the Republican turnout in November would be absolutely enormous. But I’ve been wrong before about the American electorate.

The left and the double bind: setting a new standard for chutzpah

The New Neo Posted on by

Yiddish is a language that has a lot of words that express personality qualities and types, particularly loser types or mean types or conniving types. These words often combine humor with rueful sarcasm and cynical realism about the vagaries of the human condition.

One of those words is “chutzpah.” You’re probably familiar with it, because it passed into the American vernacular some time ago. It is usually translated as something like “audacity,” and it most often contains an element of outrageous gall [my emphasis]:

Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’, presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to”. In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and condemnation. In the same work, Rosten also defines the term as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan”. Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, which renders others speechless and incredulous…

The left’s attack on Kavanaugh involves the following, which I think sets a new standard for chutzpah: take a man with a sterling public record during his entire life, mount an attack on his integrity that involves an unsubstantiated, uncorroborated, impossible-to-defend-against charge of sexual attack (up to and including gang rape), and do it at the pinnacle of his career, unleashing a social media war against him of the most vicious kind, including death threats towards him and his family. Do that publicly while cloaking yourself in self-aggrandizing sanctity, and make him sit there and listen.

But that’s not the “chutzpah” part, although that does take some chutzpah. The real chutzpah part is this: if he acts at all angry in his response to being defamed in that way, say that his anger shows that he doesn’t have the temperament to be a justice, despite the fact that it is well-documented that he has shown an exemplary judicial temperament for his entire previous career as a judge.

And one more thing: if he hadn’t shown anger in response to these extreme charges against him and their public airing in the United States Senate, accuse him of lacking the appropriate outrage that would have been the sure mark of an innocent man. Does any fair-minded person doubt that would have been the outcome, had Kavanaugh not been angry?

“Chutzpah” is too light a word to describe that kind of ploy.

But still another word for what the left has done to Kavanaugh—a more technical and academic one—is that they placed him in a “double bind,” which is:

…a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that the person will automatically be wrong regardless of response. The double bind occurs when the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore can neither resolve it nor opt out of the situation…

Thus, the essence of a double bind is two conflicting demands, each on a different logical level, neither of which can be ignored or escaped. This leaves the subject torn both ways, so that whichever demand they try to meet, the other demand cannot be met.

So Kavanaugh’s anger elicited intense criticism, and lack of anger would have done the same. I doubt that Judge Kavanaugh anticipated the nature of the bind he was in, unless he’s unusually psychologically astute. But even if he had foreseen it and tried to prepare for it, it’s nearly impossible to find a way out of a double bind and its contradictory demands.

Some of you may recall my previous discussion of the importance of understanding the difference between process arguments and content arguments (please see this post for more detail). If you are caught in a double bind—such as the dilemma Kavanaugh faced—it is best to “go process” and address the underlying double bind itself rather than just the content of the argument at hand. To “go process” takes an unusual amount of psychological and communicative savvy, and an understanding of the content-process distinction.

Most people don’t have that knowledge. But I think it might have helped had Kavanaugh said something like this:

You may think I may sound outraged and angry, and no doubt some people will criticize me for that. But I believe that any person who knows that he or she is innocent and yet is accused of the kind of offenses I’ve been accused of here today would feel and express the same very controlled anger. What’s more, if I showed no such emotion when faced with these charges, charges that violate everything I hold dear, you would criticize me just as strongly for not showing the appropriate emotion, and you would blame me for that. It’s a classic double bind, where no reaction is okay and all reactions are fodder for the criticism mill.

When I say that sort of statement might have helped Kavanaugh, I don’t mean it would have prevented the criticism. He would have been criticized for saying what I’ve suggested, too. But still, I have noticed that “going process” and revealing the underlying game being played by the opposition is usually a good tactic, because there may be some listeners who will then understand what’s happening. The tactic of going process offers the only chance of breaking the Gordian knot of the double-bind.

It’s also a tactic that often surprises the opposition; they rarely expect it. But to be successful, the person making the statement has to have either anticipated the double bind and the form it will take, or at least must be able to recognize the double bind while it’s in progress, which is also very difficult to do. One of the many goals of placing someone in a double bind is to confuse the person in real time so that, unless he/she is quite sophisticated about human communication patterns, that person will fail to recognize what’s going on.

Another aspect of the criticism of Kavanaugh’s anger is that it delegitimizes what is felt to be a typically masculine response. Even controlled and highly appropriate verbal anger, when exhibited by a man (a white man in particular), will now be labeled inappropriate and frightening and disqualifying as an example of toxic masculinity—if the man is on the non-leftist side of the political fence, that is.

[ADDENDUM: It is also true that you could look at his dilemma as a triple or even a quadruple bind. Probably even more than that.

“Double bind” is the technical term, though, for this general type of dilemma.

And it is absolutely true that Kavanaugh was also criticized for crying—thereby indicating that there was no response of his that wouldn’t have been criticized. In my suggested speech for him, I think he could even have added that tearing up and/or crying would be criticized, too.

Oh, and had he actually added that, he would have been criticized for being a whiny complainer.

The basic point is that all responses are forbidden and there are no choices left except to point out the game.]

Please read my article on bearing false witness and the incidence of false rape claims

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote this article in 2014. I suggest you read it; it seems highly relevant these days.

See also this article of mine from around the same time.

[NOTE: Also please see this, on the effect of false rape accusations on the men targeted.

And remember what happened to Margaret Atwood when she had the temerity to suggest that even men’s rights should be protected?]

Tech and tiffs

The New Neo Posted on by

Sunday is my usual day off, so I’ll make this brief.

The technical problems with the Bing bot crawler attack that began on Friday are continuing. My host is still working on it, as am I. I may end up changing hosts after this.

I expect a solution might take a couple more days, although I hope it will take less time than that. Please be patient if you’re getting error messages. Some people aren’t having many problems getting to the site, but some are having a lot of difficulty. My apologies. Believe me, I find this state of affairs very frustrating.

Another thought that has nothing to do with Bing crawlers—

I haven’t discussed the Kavanaugh fracas with any of my liberal friends, either female or male but particularly female. The reason is quite simple: I am fearful that their answers will anger me too much and cause too big a rift. Interestingly, none of them have brought it up with me, either, and since I’m not on social media I am spared that particular cesspool of what passes for human thought.

I probably will bring the topic up with one or two friends I’ve found to be open-minded and calm in the past. But I may wait a bit.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people on the right say they’ve never seen anything quite like the level of vitriol that’s been going down on social media on the topic of the Kavanaugh hearing. What’s been your experience with that?