He’s back!

Once an influential figure, he died two months ago and nobody noticed:

The idea was “consensual adultery”,’ explains Gay Talese, a celebrated New York writer and ‘participating observer’ at the retreat, whose bestselling 1980 book about the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, put Sandstone on the map for many Americans.

‘The theory is that if both parties know what the other is doing, or thinking of doing, it can be understood and perhaps condoned without it being a cause of divorce. They were re-defining “‘sin”’.’

When I tracked down Barbara Williamson this week, now 74 and running a wildlife sanctuary in Nevada, she told me they had personal motives, too — though many would regard them as utterly misguided.

Their quest for this perverse Utopia started in 1968 when — inspired by Atlas Shrugged, the libertarian thinker Ayn Rand’s novel about industrialists who drop out of an oppressive society — Williamson gave up his electronics firm and his wife threw in her insurance sales job.

The best one-stop summary of what’s wrong with the Millennials.

However, it leaves out a) the rampant beta-male faggotry and b) their related obsession with “racism” and “sexism” while living in the least “racist” and “sexist” time and place in history, and the way this manifests itself: in puny expressions of petty outrage towards safe targets, all of which serve as a convenient but fairly convincing substitute for demanding, risk-taking action and thought.

Walid Shoebat:

Hardly. The Muslims who take this position take it by claiming that only the Khalifa or the Mahdi can establish these.

By switching Muhammad from “Islamist” to “Muslim, Pipes must then answer a crucial question: is Islam defined by its founder or by Mr. Pipes? Muhammad defined Islam as “Al-Islamu deen wa dawla” (“Islam is a religion and a state”). Pipes then must remove the “and” to substantiate his false case.

Then Pipes makes even more blunders…

Jim Goad:

GRASS-ROOTS—Elite-orchestrated protests that occur in places where there is usually no grass and plenty of cement.
GREEN—Naïve and inexperienced.
GUN NUT—Anyone who owns a gun yet doesn’t belong to the group that actually commits the majority of American gun violence.
HATRED—Anything that we hate.
HERSTORY—The part of history that is usually ignored because not much really happened.
HETERONORMATIVE—Sexually normal.

Just reading all the synopses of Rod Dreher’s latest book gives me hives (same with his last, Crunchy Cons, one).

So thank you, Ross Douthat…

 This point is illustrated, richly, in one of the best books of the spring, Rod Dreher’s memoir, “The Little Way of Ruthie Leming,” an account of his sister’s death from cancer at the age of 42. A journalist and author, Dreher had left their small Louisiana hometown behind decades before and never imagined coming back. But watching how the rural community rallied around his sister in her crisis, and how being rooted in a specific place carried her family through its drawn-out agony, inspired him to reconsider, and return.

What makes “The Little Way” such an illuminating book, though, is that it doesn’t just uncritically celebrate the form of community that its author rediscovered in his hometown. It also explains why he left in the first place: because being a bookish kid made him a target for bullying, because his relationship with his father was oppressive, because he wasn’t as comfortable as his sister in a world of traditions, obligations, rules. Because community can imprison as well as sustain, and sometimes it needs to be escaped in order to be appreciated.

In today’s society, that escape is easier than ever before. And that’s a great gift to many people: if you don’t have much in common with your relatives and neighbors, if you’re gay or a genius (or both), if you’re simply restless and footloose, the world can feel much less lonely than it would have in the past. Our society is often kinder to differences and eccentricities than past eras, and our economy rewards extraordinary talent more richly than ever before.  

(KEEP READING...)

Paul Rosenberg:

Petitioning an abuser for compassion.
The “good guys” are considered to be a few people inside the abusive government. But if the good guys were really good, wouldn’t they have dissociated themselves with an abuser some time ago? By pleading for the good guys to rise up, people are asking one sub-group of the abusers to save them from the rest of the abusers. However, they all work for the same operation; they all get paid out of the same offices; according to the same rulebook. And if the good guys are so willing to turn against their employers, why would they have waited until now?

Man, that was bad.

(Language warning):

 But people with heretical opinions now expect to lose their jobs.  It’s not something shocking and new anymore, so it’s lost a considerable amount of its power.

***
I, too, have been “fired” by “conservatives” and “conservative institutions” — who initially hired me to “be myself” and because I’m so “brilliant” and so on.

Then one day they are “going in a different direction” or just plain — in one instance — go post-menopausal on you and, I guess, forget to refill their meds.

(You should see THOSE emails…)

So what? Something else comes along.

I’d be way more pissed about being a “moped” if I didn’t have a tiny handful of loyal right wingers I still trust 100%, because of their actions, not their words.

The rest?

Trust no one. Count on nothing.

Also? This is pretty true.

Except for “do your best.” Instead, “do Adam Carolla’s best.” Your “best” may be pretty lame-o.

Hmmm…

The massive publicity of these and other cases has helped push the forced-marriage business into the public eye and—with the help of taxpayers’ money set aside to tackle the problem—it is now a big public-sector money-spinner. (…)

There are expensive marketing materials in print and online materials available in any language. There are educational resources and extensively written “multi-agency guidelines” (also available in Welsh). (…)

Britain’s progressives are able to see opportunity in every crisis, and for them the formation of a new victim group is an upside. In Britain today, power flows from victimhood and money flows from power.

You simply can’t have too many victim groups.

Binks is back, blogging at FreeMarkSteyn after a six-month hiatus.

He specializes in aggregating free speech/anti-jihad stuff from around the globe, and also writes his own thoughtful yet whimsical meditations on the issues of the day, which blend pop culture with deep history and theology.

Nice to see an old friend back online!

I felt the same way about museum dinosaurs:

Both were MUCH smaller than I’d always imagined.

Anyhow, did you know that the government didn’t actually build the Hoover Dam, contrary to leftist claims?

Never mind that Hoover Dam was in fact built by a consortium of private firms headed by Bechtel-Kaiser, under precisely the sort of outsourcing/private contractor arrangement that Maddow has no time for in most other contexts — in fact, she includes a chapter in one of her books denouncing this practice.