the Revision Division

JANICE FIAMENGO: English Studies, R.I.P.

The small world that is Canadian literary-academic culture underwent convulsions last week when a novelist named David Gilmour, a part-time English instructor at the University of Toronto, announced in an interview that he doesn’t love women and Chinese writers enough to teach them in his fiction course, and that he prefers books by “very serious heterosexual guys.” . . .

When such literary masters as Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and Anton Chekhov are dismissed by a professor of English as “dead white guys,” it’s clear that a blanket anti-male animus—of the sort only a feminist could love—has overtaken the ivory tower. Contrary to the self-righteous huffing and puffing of the advocates of gender [sic] justice, Gilmour’s off-hand statements highlighted not misogynist tyranny but the lockdown by academic feminism on even the most flippant and marginal deviations from the correct line.

MATT FORNEY: How I Became the Most Hated Man on the Internet. “A few weeks back, I posted an article titled ‘The Case Against Female Self-Esteem‘ that made the argument that girls these days are too full of themselves and that combating female self-esteen will help restore balance to the Force. It went viral on Tumblr Tuesday, garnering me 80,000 views in a single day and forcing my webhost to throttle my bandwidth. I had figured that would be the end of it, but Wednesday actually doubled to just under 170,000 views… and it would have been higher had my webhost not killed my site to keep their servers from melting down.”

THE SPECTATOR: The war on Christians.

According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, an average of 100,000 Christians have been killed in what the centre calls a ‘situation of witness’ each year for the past decade. That works out to 11 Christians killed somewhere in the world every hour, seven days a week and 365 days a year, for reasons related to their faith.

In effect, the world is witnessing the rise of an entire new generation of Christian martyrs. The carnage is occurring on such a vast scale that it represents not only the most dramatic Christian story of our time, but arguably the premier human rights challenge of this era as well.

REMINDER: McCarthy correct about the Hollywood Ten.

What about the Hollywood Ten? Were they, as is commonly held today, brave and patriotic men standing up to the great evil of the Red Scare?

No. They were all card-carrying Communists.

STEPHEN BASKERVILLE: Politicizing Potiphar’s Wife: Today’s New Ideology. “Since the inception of their Revolution – and well beneath the media radar screen – militants have been creating a panoply of new crimes and expanded redefinitions of existing crimes – all involving sexual relations.  While it is very likely that the Sexual Revolution has also increased incidents of real sex crimes, the new gender [sic] crimes are different:  They exploit the fear of sex crimes, but they redefine these politically to include not simply acts but deviations from orthodox political doctrines.  The reality of the witch hunts thus bears no necessary relation to what is suggested by the inflammatory language and jargon.”

OBSERVANT: Hypothesis: It’s only rape when he doesn’t fall in love.

MICHELLE MALKIN: Creepy Oregon educrat preaches government authority over kids from “prenatal to graduate school”.

STEVE SAILER: In Search of Sexier Scientists. “Feminism rationalizes a culture of complaint no matter how contradictory the gripes.”

EDUCATIONREALIST: Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud.

Cheating is a big problem in American high schools, and doom and gloom stories like this emphasize that high-achiever cheating is on the rise. Well, Asian immigration is on the rise, too, and Asian schoolkids are a huge percentage of high achieving kids. Is there any correlation, or is it rude to ask?

Teachers will tell you that high achiever cheating has a distinctly demographic tilt, which you can find in the stories if you look for it. Scratch the surface of any cheating story and odds are well above average the school or the class in question is disproportionately Asian. Journalists carefully scrub cheating stories of any racial references—unless it’s rich whites. In fact, it’s obvious that the SAT scandal was first thought to be “white” kids, which is why the reports contained names. Then it turned out they are mostly Iranian Jews, first or second generation immigrant. Oops.

CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Imams at 18 British mosques agreed to marry a 14-year-old girl.

UK: Lesbian couples twice as likely as gay men to end civil partnership as ‘divorces’ up by 20%. And yet the image at the top is of two women kissing rather than breaking up. Maybe they’re kissing goodbye.

Gunnar Andersson, professor of demography at Stockholm University, has found in successive studies that women in Norway, Sweden and Denmark are twice as likely to dissolve their civil partnerships than men. He said: “This reflects trends in a heterosexual marriage because women are more prone to say they want to marry – but they’re also more likely to initiate a divorce. Women usually have higher demands on relationship quality, that’s often been said in studies. Even if you control for age there is still a trend of more women ending partnerships than men.”

Previous figures show British women in heterosexual relationships are more likely to file for divorce than men. Women initiated the divorce in two thirds of cases in the UK in 2011.

If a man left his wife because she lost her looks, would we say that he just has “higher demands on relationship quality”? How absurd.

THEY SEE HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE: Why do public school teachers send their own children to private schools at a rate 2X the national average?

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: White Women’s Marriage Rates Dropping Much Faster Than Men’s. “For whatever reason, be it desire or ability, white men are now able to marry more readily in their 30′s than white women and the gap has vanished for 25-29 y/o’s. It’s clear that women are much more able to marry in their 20′s and should forget about the feminist nonsense to consciously put off marriage until 30 or 35.”

TIM WORSTALL: It Is Not True That 15% Of Americans Live In Poverty.

There are two things that make this correction really rather important. The first being that everyone else measures poverty after all the things that are done to alleviate it. Thus any comparison across countries is going to leave the US looking very bad indeed: for others are talking about the residual poverty left after trying to do something about it and the US is talking about the poverty before alleviation. . . .

The 15% number is not the number living in poverty. It is the number who would be living in poverty if it weren’t for all the money n’stuff we give to the poor. For when we calculate the poverty number we ignore almost all of what is done to alleviate poverty. We leave out all four of the largest anti-poverty programs in fact. We don’t count the money spent on Medicaid, we don’t count the EITC, we ignore the costs of SNAP and we completely overlook Section 8 housing vouchers. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars worth of spending on poverty alleviation right there and all of it is entirely ignored when calculating the poverty numbers. What’s worse, we could double the amount of money we spend to alleviate poverty and the number under the poverty line wouldn’t change by one single digit.

WARREN MEYER: Forest Service Closing Only Small Private Campground Operators, Not Closing Large Ski Corporations or State Parks that Operate on Forest Service Land. “I will also add that the USFS is continuing to allow individuals to hike and camp in non-developed areas of the forests. I have no problem with this — there is no reason for the USFS to halt public access to public land just because their employees are getting a paid vacation. But this just highlights how crazy and inconsistent their policies are. People can camp in the National Forest everywhere except in developed campgrounds where private companies who take no Federal money normally have employees on site to clean up trash and provide security and prevent fires. Many campers take good care of the land but some do not, and driving these campers out of privately-operated developed sites into dispersed areas where their impact cannot be mitigated is just another way these actions increase rather than decrease costs.”

WESLEY J. SMITH: Euthanasia of the Blind in the Netherlands. “Strict conditions?! Mentally ill people are euthanized. Disabled people are euthanized. Infants are killed in their cribs based on an ‘unlivable life.’ Etc. beyond etc. . . . The guidelines aren’t there to actually protect the vulnerable. They exist to give the false appearance of control.”

USEFUL: Home-brewed Audiobooks.

PETER FROST: Brainwashed by a microbe?

Have some microbes evolved to manipulate our brains? Perhaps, but it would be hard to prove. For one thing, we’re continually being infected by seemingly benign microbes that trigger no symptoms of infection, i.e., fever, pus formation, immune response, etc. They go about their business without our knowing they’re inside us.

For another thing, a microbe can permanently alter our mental wiring and then be removed from our body. The culprit vanishes from the scene of the crime and leaves only a few ambiguous clues. This is the conclusion of a recent study on Toxoplasma gondii. . . .

T. gondii is being studied for possible behavioral effects mainly because it has attracted so much attention. But we’re probably being manipulated by other parasites. . . .

Where to look? Cherchez la femme. Sexually transmitted diseases have much to gain from altering host behavior. I would especially look at bacterial vaginosis, chlamydia, and vaginal yeast.

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: The Bizarre, Misguided Campaign to Get Rid of Single-Sex Classrooms.

Today millions of American boys are languishing academically. Boys in all ethnic groups and social classes are far less likely than their sisters to feel connected to school, to earn good grades, or to attend college. Girls, by comparison, are thriving academically, but are still far less likely than boys to enter fields in science and technology. Boys and girls, taken as groups, have different interests, propensities, and needs. These academies can provide important lessons on how to educate our children more effectively.

What sensible person would call these programs and others like them morally and legally suspect? And yet the American Civil Liberties Union says they are. It has launched a major campaign called “Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes” to discredit and terminate gender-specific programs in American schools.

Earlier: It stopped being a good policy when it started benefiting young men, I guess.

AN ALL-TOO-COMMON ERROR: Scruton Gets Mises and Free-Market Ideologies Wrong. “Scruton then goes off course when he claims that ‘[t]he free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction.'” Anyone who says this needs to provide a citation. Saying simply “this libertarian guy I know” doesn’t cut it.

DON BOUDREAUX: Destroying Civil Society. “As Reason’s Jim Epstein documents in this video, Obamacare threatens to destroy even more private civil-society organizations.  In the process, this government overreach makes us not only poorer and less in control of our own individual and our families’ destinies, but it makes us also more infantilized and less civilized.  It’s as tragic as it is regressive.”

FOR THE LADIES: 25 Ways to Keep Your Virginity.

FISH SEEKING BICYCLES: U.S. Shutdown May Be Driving Traffic To ‘Sugar Daddy’ Sites.

Related: Seven ways American women have made the government their husbands. Sucks when he takes time off, doesn’t it, ladies?

ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: Brown signs bill to allow children more than two legal parents. “The bill was partially a reaction to a 2011 court decision involving a lesbian couple that briefly ended their relationship, according to Leno’s office. One of the women was impregnated by a man before the women resumed their relationship. A fight broke out, putting one of the women in the hospital and the other in jail, but the daughter was sent to foster care because her biological father did not have parental rights.”

“A fight broke out, putting one of the women in the hospital and the other in jail.” Somebody had better stop that naughty ol’ fight from breaking out again. Bad fight, bad!

A HELPFUL HISTORY: Matt Welch delves deeper into the comparison of the current government shutdown with the mid-nineties and its implications for limited government.

POTENTIAL DARWIN AWARD CONTENDER: Convictions, releases were prolific for Rosemount murder suspect. Good thing a 20-year-old college student was there to help. A smart one, even! Wow!

He and Anarae Schunk, a smart 20-year-old college student, met at a bus stop in the summer of 2012, during Nelson’s longest stretch as a free man. He told her he was a hedge fund manager, and despite the disapproval of her family and friends, Schunk dated him for a few months. Those who knew her say she thought she could help him. . . .

“I think she understood that he had a violent criminal history. But she also believed in the good of humanity and in people’s power to change, and her power to bring that change about,” Schunk’s oldest brother, Tyson, said Thursday, two days after police announced that a body found in a roadside ditch was his sister’s.

MINIMUM WAGE AS MAXIMUM FOLLY: Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams summarize the argument in a short video.

LET’S HOPE SPIDERMAN 2 WAS JUST A ONE-OFF: Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab.

CANADA: Pan Am Games Diversity Standards Denigrate Regular Business Folks. “Today’s topic is the Pan Am Games taking place in Toronto, which requires all vendors to submit information about their gender, LGBT orientation, aboriginal background and/or disabilities.”

ALLEGED CHILD MOLESTER accepts a sweet plea bargain.

Under the terms of the agreement, Hunt would be sentenced to four months in jail, to be followed by two years of house arrest with electronic monitoring, and nine months of monitored probation after that, he said earlier.

If she has no violations, she will not be a convicted felon under Florida law, and she will have the possibility of sealing her file and having the case expunged after 10 years, he said.

That might seem pretty rough at first, but imagine a young man getting this deal after pleading no contest to molesting a fourteen-year-old a couple of times and then contacting her in violation of a court order. Not bad.

MARK PERRY: Women earned majority of doctoral degrees in 2012 for 4th straight year, and outnumber men in grad school 141 to 100. “Here’s my prediction – the facts that: a) men are underrepresented in graduate school enrollment overall (100 men were enrolled in 2012 for every 141 women), b) men received fewer master’s (40.5% of the total) and doctoral degrees (47.8% of the total) than women in 2012, and c) men were underrepresented in 7 out of 11 graduate fields of study at both the master’s and doctoral levels last year will get no attention at all from the media, universities and anybody in the higher education industry.”

HOW YOU KNOW IT’S EFFECTIVE: An account of a debate on the use of “abortion imagery” outside abortion clinics. “Ann Furedi, CEO of the UK’s largest private abortion provider . . . acknowledged that the pictures are ‘disturbing’ and called the displays outside abortion clinics ‘inhumane’ and ‘reprehensible’, believing them to be morally wrong.” Hey, pal: You do it; they just show it.

IT STOPPED BEING A GOOD POLICY WHEN IT STARTED BENEFITING YOUNG MEN, I GUESS: Pa. school sports group may revisit cross-gender play.

The association removed the previous rule prohibiting cross-gender [sic] play from its bylaws in 1975, although individual schools can still ban the practice, according to PIAA associate executive director Melissa Mertz.

But this year, the association joined a couple from Pittsburgh who asked a judge to overturn the 38-year-old ruling, citing the competitive imbalance boys were causing in their daughters’ field hockey contests. . . .

Mertz said last week the PIAA board had not decided how it would respond. Lawyers for the association are expected to discuss the matter with board members at a meeting this week.

She did say, however, that the association was wary of establishing such a policy because it could lead to lawsuits alleging violation of the state’s Equal Rights Amendment, the same amendment that was cited to strike down the previous PIAA policy.

USEFUL: Getting started with the Fathers. Church Fathers, that is.

FEMINISTS realize they haven’t ruined Mormonism yet.

Related: Whether it’s deciding to be a stay at home mother or a pastor, it’s all about what women want for themselves. This is a solid post that explains the broader context. A snippet:

The purpose of the event is to train men about their responsibilities but notice what the women say is their motivation for wanting to elbow their way in – achieving complete equality.  It’s not because this is a role in which women are needed, it’s not because women want to be stewards, it’s not because women want these traditionally-male responsibilities.  It is because they mistakenly believe that these responsibilities are privileges that men are hoarding for themselves, and they want in on it.  It isn’t because women selflessly want to serve; it is because they selfishly want to be served.

CULTURAL ENRICHMENT: Illegal Immigrant sentenced for attacking Virginia Tech student.

THE LIFE OF A GRADUATE STUDENT: ‘Diversity Training’ at Wisconsin. “At the end of yesterday’s diversity ‘re-education,’ we were told that our next session would include a presentation on ‘Trans Students.’ At that coming session, according to the handout we were given, we will learn how to let students ‘choose their own pronouns’, how to correct other students who mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, and how to ask people which pronouns they prefer (‘I use the pronouns he/him/his. I want to make sure I address you correctly. What pronouns do you use?’).”

Isn’t a “trans student” someone who wasn’t born a student but who identifies as one?

USEFUL: How to Turn Your Garage Into a Home Gym.

SUCKERS: British Education: Creeping Sharia. “Critics say the school — which originally marketed itself as an ‘inter-faith’ school in order to qualify for taxpayer monies — promised that at least 50% of its students would be non-Muslim. Now that it has obtained £1.4 million (€1.7 million; $2.25 million) in government financing, however, the administrators of Al-Madinah are switching gears by operating the school according to Islamic law, apparently to ensure that the school will be 100% Muslim.”

AARON CLAREY on women’s studies degrees: “What we’re witnessing here is the cannibalism that occurs in leftist academia.  Liberals and leftists major in some faux humanities degree.  They can’t find a job with a ‘Bachelor’s in Vicitimization’ so they proceed to get a ‘Masters in Whining.’  That doesn’t result in employment so they go full on for a ‘Doctorate in Asking the Government for More Money While Claiming We’re Independent.'”

FOR THE LADIES: Girl Game is so Simple and Yet so Hard.

APATHY: American churches silent as Christians in Middle East face persecution.

ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: $175 premium for a young, healthy student? Thanks, Obamacare!

During a congressional hearing in August, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., asked Marilyn Tavenner of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services whether President Obama’s promise that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” was true.

“It is true,” Tavenner said, but added that it was true “under the assumption that your insurance is ‘true’ insurance that provides coverage.”

STUFF FEMINISTS SAY: All non-consensual touching is sexual assault.

So, what is sexual assault, exactly, then?  She explains (highlighting mine):

…nonconsensual sexual touching is sexual assault. Whether one is touching another with or without clothing, whether one is touching another’s genitals or any other part of their body—in any and every circumstance, it will never not be sexual assault. 

So, by this definition, touching someone’s clothed arm while engaging in a consensual kiss could in fact be sexual assault if he didn’t ask first to touch her arm.  Does anyone else find this ludicrous?

A conversation from the future:

Woman: I find it hard to become intimate. You see, I was sexually assaulted when I was young.

Man: Oh, is that all?

ONLINE DATING SITE allows users to filter out spatially-endowed individuals, just like how real life works. And this is controversial somehow. “Rowan Pelling added: . . . ‘All I can say is that you’re pretty dumb and Z-list if you allow screening so prejudiced that some brainless body-fascist can screen out all plus-size suitors: goodbye Marilyn Monroe, Sophie Dahl, Lena Dunham, Gerard Depardieu, James Corden, Seth Rogen.'”

My response:

1. Marilyn Monroe wasn’t “plus-sized.” Indeed, she was far from it.
2. Sophie Dahl isn’t “plus-sized” — unless our standard is a skeleton.
3. Lena Dunham is undesirable in many ways. Pass.
4. Gerard Depardieu, James Corden, and Seth Rogen are men. Pass.

Conclusion: The site’s filter function is looking pretty good. Another win for the body-fascists.

USEFUL: Feminist Catchphrase Translator. Highlights:

exploitation, noun
1. anything that gives straight men pleasure.

mansplaining, noun
1. logic.
2. reason.

cisgender, noun
1. normal human being.

LOL: Obama: “During the course of my presidency, I have bent over backwards to work with the Republican party and have purposely kept my rhetoric down.”

THE COLLEGE FIX: African-American Professor Comes ‘Out of the Closet’ as a Republican.

ADVENTURES IN EUPHEMISM: “My intent was to be inclusive but my phrasing suggested otherwise.” Yes, lack of inclusiveness was certainly “suggested” by the phrasing, “In order to create a safe space, this program is open to people of color only.”

IT WAS NICE KNOWING YOU: Christianity in danger of becoming extinct in its birthplace.

Respected UK historian Tom Holland told a briefing in London this week that the world is watching the effective extinction of Christianity from its birthplace.

In an apocalyptic appraisal of the worsening political situation in the region, a panel of experts provided a mass of evidence and statistics for the end of the region’s nation states under the onslaught of militant Islam.

“In terms of the sheer scale of the hatreds and sectarian rivalries, we are witnessing something on the scale of horror of the European Thirty Years War,” said Holland.