Protecting/hating women – the #Clinton rulebook.

A women writes…but the problem is that the woman in question is Ann Coulter. Ms Coulter is tall, blonde, ferociously articulate, very funny, very opinionated, very well informed, and she’s also a dynamite writer. She’s the Lefties’ nightmare stalking in broad daylight, with a high output of books, columns, TV appearances and the rest. She is – like your humble author – one of the few people who predicted Trump’s success, and for the correct reasons.

She is of the mainstream, with her media presence, but stands apart from it. She is thick skinned (she must be) but takes torrential abuse from her political opposites, and here’s the kicker – much of it revolves around her appearance and her gender. It is appallingly sexist, violent and bigoted. All the accusations hurled by people to whom the same terms simultaneously apply. The hypocrisy is as breathtaking as it is predictable.

All of which is a preamble to her latest column, on the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of abuse of women – the answer, in case you wondered, is it depend on who is doing the alleged abuse. Put simply, would a friend of luvvies and liberals like Harvey Weinstein be in trouble today – with the #metoo hordes revelling in his downfall – had Hillary won the election?

Clearly not. And the same double standards apply over here in the UK, I would venture.

Take it away Ms Coulter:

A New York Times article on Weinstein’s court appearance noted how the “ground shifted” last year, finally ending the “code of silence” surrounding powerful men. Why “last year,” if this has been going on for decades? The article explained that Weinstein’s power was enormous, his connections extensive and his willingness to play dirty without bounds. Did Harvey lose his money and connections “last year”?

Nope. But “last year” was the first year of Trump’s presidency, or as I like to think of it, the first year of Hillary not being president. Ever.  The liberal protection racket for sexual predators was always intimately intertwined with the Clintons. The template used to defend Bill Clinton became a model for all left-wing sexual predators. They all hired the same lawyers and detectives and counted on the same cultural elites to mete out punishment to anyone who stood in the way of their Caligula lifestyles. It was Total War against the original #MeToo movement. Even Teddy Kennedy never plotted revenge on reporters or smeared his sexual conquests as bimbos, trailer park trash and stalkers. That was the Clinton model.

She has a point. It gets worse, as back then private investigators were hired to find dirt on anyone who had spilt the beans on the Clinton bad behaviour. This, by the way, is fact, not paranoia or speculation. Any dirt would, do, irrespective of whether it was true, or of the damage it would cause. Nice, huh? As Ann goes on:

No one cared about any of our private lives. The only point was to humiliate anyone who hadn’t endorsed Clinton’s treatment of women as his sexual playthings. There were plenty who did.

Well into the Monica Lewinsky scandal — which followed the Gennifer Flowers scandal, the Paula Jones scandal, the Dolly Kyle Browning scandal, the Elizabeth Ward Gracen scandal, the Sally Perdue scandal and the Kathleen Willey scandal — feminist icon Gloria Steinem wrote her infamous New York Times op-ed, announcing the “One Free Grope” rule for progressive men.

“He takes no for an answer,” Steinem explained. Whether he was groping Kathleen Willey in the Oval Office or dropping his pants for Paula Jones in the Excelsior Hotel, she said, Clinton “accepted rejection.”  Soon thereafter, we found out about Juanita Broaddrick.

As Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times, the reaction of the feminists to Clinton’s predatory behavior “can most charitably be described as restrained.” (This was when the Times was still an occasionally serious newspaper.)

Not one Senate Democrat voted to remove Clinton from office for various felonies related to his sexual assaults.  The message was clear. Liberal men got a pass for any sexual misconduct, even rape. But woe be to those who accused them. (Even last year, NBC News was still following the old rule: It fired Ronan Farrow rather than publish his Weinstein expose.)

Liberal males treated progressive politics like carbon credits for rape. Last year, MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt reported that Democratic sexual predators on Capitol Hill say, “I can’t be sexist; I’m a progressive.” ….. It’s hard to avoid the impression that a big part of the reason Weinstein was finally exposed is that the Clinton machine is dead. Trump killed it. Would anyone have called out Weinstein if his good friend Hillary Clinton were “Madame President”? I doubt it. The Clinton protection racket would have gone on and on and on.  After years of feminists excusing sexual predators, once the Clintons were out of the way, the dam broke. There was no reason to keep humiliating themselves by defending the indefensible.

The Worst Generation has flatlined. There are no more Clintons to save. But as absolutely intellectually convinced as I am of the Clintons’ demise, I’d feel a lot better if someone would keep a wooden stake handy.

This is the truth of the current sorry state of affairs amongst the rich and powerful. Don’t ever give these people a pass again.

Well……?

 

ISIS morons empower women…

real feminists

…well, in reality they kidnap them, rape them and sell them, as the first order effect, but the secondary consequence is more unwelcome to these jihadi misogynists, whose behaviour is uncannily mirrored by Boko Haram in Africa.

Take, for example, the now famous peshmerga female soldiers. This is no token gesture. They have their own battalion, their own officer ranks, and they can really fight. They have a wonderful degree of contempt for ISIS, To quote the splendid Colonel Nahida Ahmad Rashid:

‘I find them indescribably disgusting. How would you feel if it was women living near you who were being married off by force by ISIS? How would you feel? They are doing the most disgusting things I have ever seen in my life.’…

…‘I have told all my frontline soldiers to keep one bullet in their pocket in case they are captured. I never want any of them to be captured by ISIS.’

They’re not a last minute reaction to being under the threat of ISIS slaughter, the Kurds have been giving women equal status as fighters for years. To add to their value, although the claim is disputed, there seems to be something in the story that if you’re a jihadi killed by a woman, don’t expect the legendary (and in itself, more than a bit strange) reward of 72 virgins, or as the Al-Arabiya network called it, their “virgin-fuelled utopian rest”.

So good for the Kurds. The Iraqi Kurd who sells me kebabs had his peshmerga brother killed a month ago, fighting ISIS. The ramifications of this brutal pseudo-caliphate reach our streets quickly, one way or another.

 

Then along comes this remarkable old lady, who confronts a couple of the thugs in the street in Syria,  in this now famous video. She doesn’t let them off the hook, and they have no answer to her. Brilliant:

 

 

Lastly there are the journalists. The Sunday Times’ superb Hala Jaber (@HalaJaber) completely understands the mentality of ISIS, and indeed the rest of the Middle East, and her Twitter feed is quite brilliant, attracting the enmity of what she refers to as ‘ISIS fanboys’. The Kurdish journalist Shler Bapiri (@shlerbapiri) is another tireless advocate for the truth against Islamic female genital mutilation, and the fight to the death with ISIS. These fearless women – who are not remote from danger themselves – are very much in the noble tradition of people like the superb Veena Malik and the legendary Oriana Fallaci, both previously featured in this blog. Here is Veena eloquently putting the boot into an absurd imam on Pakistani TV:

 

Her confident outspokenness has just earned her a 26 year jail sentence in Pakistan. Luckily she lives in Dubai. The late Oriana Fallaci was the Italian powerhouse who famously gave the Ayatollah Khomeini a lesson in practical feminism. As it turns out, she was something of a prophet herself, and her best-selling post 9/11 polemic The Rage and the Pride remains a much needed counterblast to the situation we find ourselves in today.

When the British idea of feminism seems often to revolve around a privileged pink bus idiot like Harriet Harman wearing an inane sweat shop produced T shirt in parliament, you can only stand in awe of these women who are out there, in the real world, dealing with unimaginable problems that men don’t have to suffer. As the reliably funny and controversial Gavin McInnes writes, Harman’s kind of feminism is basically  “women doing what they’re told”.

…really, I don’t know what to say about this image

 

ISIS/IS/ISIL: revenge of the nerds

This one’s a Saudi, but you get the picture

If there are really 500 IS jihadis of British origin roaming around Iraq being supertough, then I think I’ve met some of the prototypes.

More than three years ago I did a post highlighting the problems women can face in the Islamic world ( nothing too original, beyond the still incredible fact that Jack Straw was correct for once in his political career). It included the lines:

The Muslim lads, mostly Pakistani, but not exclusively so, all tended to hang around together. Very few had girlfriends, and conversation – without the excuse of booze – would often revolve around women. The discussions would have rapidly turned Polly Toynbee and Germaine Greer to violence.

Women were routinely referred to as ‘slags’ and the like, with their main function being sexual.  Insight into female psychology was absent, and was often along the lines of  “she’s gagging for it” etc etc. The men very rarely had friendly chat with women, it just didn’t happen. When I asked a muslim friend why they all went on like this, he candidly explained that they were all expecting arranged marriages, dating was frowned upon, and because they were medics, they knew that they’d be offered physically attractive intelligent wives. They couldn’t be bothered getting to know the women as friends, and  it was all “a bit of fun”.

Porn was popular though. One of The Knife’s acquaintances worked in Quetta, Pakistan in a Red Cross hospital in the nineties. He routinely treated badly injured Taliban from Afghanistan civil conflicts. Many of them, young lads, who’d been closing down girls schools etc the week before, would head into the bazaar as soon as they could,  to catch up on hardcore porn. Once they had fully recovered, off they went on their religious mission.

That was true then, and I suspect it’s true now, though shaking off the shackles of a culture** which intentionally separates men and women is one of the ways forward in our multicultural society.

Similarly, I had a Libyan colleague who made disastrous attempts, in his mid thirties, to talk to women staff in a romantic way. One week he went off to Libya and secretly got married. It lasted a week (divorce being relatively easy in that society), and the bride’s family declared their intention to kill him for the dishonour. When he reappeared he became a wannabe jihadi, assuring me of Bin Laden’s greatness, and in a typically confused way, conceded that the victims of 9/11 were innocent, but still deserved to die “because they were Americans”. As is usually the case, he wanted to stay here, Libya wasn’t for him.

The hopelessly crap Glasgow Airport medical bombers were cut from the same cloth. So is this guy (worth reading as it pretty much backs up the above).

So, when you’ve been brought up in this stifling misogynistic way, when you’re a bit hormonal, when the groomers at the mosque begin to turn their attention to you, a possibly one way trip to Syria and Iraq is your ticket to being a man.

Holding a severed head is not too difficult – I’ve done it a few times myself – but sawing it off a struggling victim requires a previously unplumbed depth of amorality and a deliberate suppression of humanity that is what makes these idiots dangerous. They have little physical prowess, their martial feats are based on the fact that they have thus far encountered almost no resistance, and normal people in any society find the thought of being beheaded, stoned and crucified terrifying.

All this will change if the confused wimpiness of Obama and Dave begins to coalesce into something more than ASBO’s, as it will. No doubt there is a huge amount of intelligence, planning and so on going on right now, but it frequently seems that certain journalists are way ahead of politicians in this sphere. I quoted in full Brendan O’Neill’s magnificent overview  of the problem of Islamic terrorism last year, and that was before the rise of the current ISIS lot. O’Neill, and his colleague at Spiked, Frank Furedi, continue to provide a lot of sensible analysis on these issues.

In the meantime, no-one should think of these British jihadis as tough, fearless or principled.

They are the Islamic Inbetweeners gone wrong.

 

**One of the finest and funniest journalists ever, Mark Steyn, offers this complementary take

 

Climate change: moral atrophy

This one has been doing the rounds on Twitter, and a good thing too. It’s pretty much true.  The last paragraph says it all. What is going through the ‘crazed sex poodle’s’ head, that he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize ahead of this lady? We know that the Nobel committee is a busted flush, but some of the nominees might be better than that.

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It should be noted that Irena Sendler was a real person, with real achievements. Al Gore is a real multimillionaire fraud.

All Souls’ Day

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On a day when the vapid celebrity of someone who seems to be genuinely unpleasant, sexist and self-obsessed (Russell Brand) is expertly exposed by Quentin Letts, The Knife found himself  considering the diametric opposite.

They are women who have had long lives utterly dedicated to others, whose simple graves lie in the small and beautiful cemetery in the picture. These are the Little Sisters of the Poor, whose lives are devoted to the practical care of the impoverished sick and elderly. In the cemetery the most recent four graves’ occupants died aged 87, 89, 94 and 97. One had over 70 years of service.

It’s All Souls’ Day today. Anyone who has lost someone would – perhaps even if you’re Richard Dawkins – like to think that the deceased is now in a better place, to use the cliche.

For every Russell Brand figure, there is a small army of people like these nuns, helping those whose lives are ebbing away, who offer practical help and prayers, in the knowledge that when they die, others will pray for them. It’s the least we can do, and the best.

Internet Porn: first they came for our filth, then they came for our freedom

…no one should be forced back to the dark ages…freedom of speech….Voltaire said….er…big norks are great…..

So Dave wants to restrict easy access to porn on the internet.  He’s not banning it, just requiring an active ‘opt in’. That could be embarrassing in some households**, $$.

Plenty of objections it seems, emanating from a mix of  libertarians (and libertines probably), and various patronising geeks who think that only they ‘get’ the internet thing.  There is also a sprinkling of lefties who should probably be applauding Dave, given their objections to Page 3, which one suspects are entirely insincere. It’s a strange world where just because child porn etc is universally acknowledged as evil, access to every other …um..”specialist areas”…is de facto alright, and when you think about it, is really a human right, and should be defended as such.

To my mind there are two main groups of objectors here:

1. People who  genuinely see this as an attack on freedom of speech, expression etc

2. People who are worried that they may lose their own easy access to porn.

Strangely, all the complainants seem to be putting themselves in the first category, principled warriors for free speech, all of them. Personally  I think it’s a bit rich to imply that the freedom to watch gangbanging grannies is on a par with the right to, say, express politically inconvenient views. One has been available for about 15-20 years, maximum, the other is as old as human civilization. To quote a particularly boneheaded effort from The Independent:

Do we want to live in a nanny state?

The basis of Mr Cameron’s argument is that people should have to make a conscious decision to watch pornography. But civil liberties groups take the opposite approach and accuse him of hypocrisy. It was Mr Cameron who used to decry Labour’s nanny state.

Anyway, my advice is that when you next see some high minded defender of our immemorial freedoms having a go at Dave about this one, it’s wise to assume that they’re in category 2 above. Especially if they’re lefties.     W*****s.

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I thought I’d cite examples of the above as they crop up:

1. Various Tom Watson tweets/retweets eg. “I guess Lynton Crosby doesn’t represent any internet porn sites.”

2. Something (typically) called the Open Rights Group

3. Somebody called ‘Mic’ Wright at Telegraph blogs. Note typically arch name spelling and pretentious photo.

4. Willard Foxton (??), a few weeks ago

5. Delingpole ‘fesses up. At least he’s open about it.

6. Hard to know what ‘Mic’ is trying to say with this one.

7. Delingpole again, ends up with a line not dissimilar to this post’s title

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** Great summary by Jan Moir

$$ Remarkably good article in the Guardian, of all places, by Deborah Orr

The perfect man: the painful truth

Self praise is no praise of course, which is why it was kind of Vanity Fair to ask 1,168 women what makes the perfect man, as summarised by the Daily Mail:

…shucks

Life imitates art, sort of

Only one of these is a spoof. This:

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or this?

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To quote the sublime philosopher king,  Marcus Aurelius:

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

Cutting the NHS (1): a new crusade

The queen of leftie hackerie, Polly Toynbee, has me in her debt, after today’s column.

Firstly for reminding me of the faintly sexist allusion of “lipstick on a pig” ( with reference to trying to make the NHS reforms palatable, nothing else).

I do like that Polly Toynbee

Secondly for the following paragraph:

Cash crises breaking out all over. The King’s Fund deputy director says cuts will be closer to £50bn than £20bn. John Appleby reports a 1% cut each year, compounded by 2.5% inflation, when the NHS always hits crisis without at least 2% above inflation to keep up with ageing patients. The NHS Confederation warns of “a super-tanker heading for an iceberg”. There is emergency cash saved by the NHS Commissioning Board this year: Appleby expects mounting trouble from next year to election year. Labour private finance initiatives exacerbate the problem – but PFIs are only 1% of NHS turnover.

Scary stuff from Polly. The difficulty for me is that she and I (who am an NHS stalwart, I suppose), see this financial problem a little differently. Polly’s take is that current NHS spending is all good, and must inevitably rise. Implicit in her analysis is the baffling idea that NHS management are noble, thrifty guardians of the public purse.

My take is that the rising costs of real healthcare (eg the price of antibiotics), could be massively offset by no longer spending money on half the things that have gathered under the umbrella of our national health service.

Believe me, the sort of stuff that you get now, “free at the point of delivery”, is frequently not what Aneurin Bevan had in mind, back in 1948***, regardless of the facts of advances in medical care. I object to a lot of this shit, partly as someone who hands over a colossal amount of tax, but mainly as a working doctor.

I’m not talking about the wisdom of spending a lot of money on chemotherapy that might prolong life by a few months, that’s a different argument. I’m talking about getting the NHS’ nose out of matters that shouldn’t really concern it, or examples of flagrant unjustifiable waste.  So, here’s three suggestions to set the ball rolling. There’s a lot, lot more.

1. There’s no sound clinical reason to have a huge variety of prostheses. 80% or more of all hip replacements, as one example, could be done with a single kind of implant. The price cut, with the NHS purchasing power would be massive, with no clinical detriment at all.

2. The dreaded emotive topic of IVF. If the NHS really has to take this on (The Knife says no), there’s no point each health region funding its own service.  You’re just duplicating costly overheads and diluting expertise. Tell “clients” that they have to cough up a significant chunk of the fee themselves, and get a bulk contract with a private clinic – where the outcomes are often better.

3. NHS Scotland has about 10 health boards, all with their own costly infrastructure and disparate decision making. This is for the same population as one English health region. This is just embarrassing. A single Scottish board would not only avoid duplication, it would get everything cheaper.

4. Sack all psychiatrists

Just joking with that last one. There will be more in future posts.

***For what Labour really feel about the NHS, see Guido here

Labour stalwart wins by-election!!

Ho Ho Ho.  Labour bitten badly by one of their own.

George strikes again. The weird thing is that Labour couldn’t see it coming. The Knife has a lot of time for the vain, egotistical, anti-Israel, pro-mad muslim, self-regarding, womanising Mr Galloway.

Not because of the above qualities, though he is certainly capable of great charm too, and not because of his widely lauded appearance before senate in the USA. That was popular because of the cheap thrill it gave to trendy anti-Americanism, but it was hardly George’s finest hour. He’s always been eloquent and bold. The Knife praised George more than two years ago, for his remarkably accurate predictions before the Iraq disaster. He also reliably adds to the gaiety of the nation. Strictly heterosexually of course.

Anyway, it will be a pleasure to see Dundee’s finest back in the Commons, brazenly sucking up to some of the most militant and nasty muslims in Britain and abroad, as well as the nicer ones. As Brendan O’Neill points out, talk of a new resurgence of the hard left is rubbish, but George has certainly seized his chance:

Galloway is merely a beneficiary of the decay of politics as we knew it, which means that, far from representing a surge in radical Left-wing sentiment, his victory isn’t that different to when a member of the BNP wins a seat on a local council or some UKIP suit gets sent to Brussels. In all these cases, the vote tends to be less a positive endorsement of any clear-eyed political agenda than simply a “screw you” to the three big parties which once claimed to represent the political spectrum. Indeed, Galloway’s victory points to the further denigration of radical Left-wing politics rather than its meaningful revival. It shows how far the radical Left has been “Islamicised”, where, having utterly abandoned the allegedly feckless and thick working classes, the radical Left has become increasingly reliant upon alienated Muslim communities for support…

…probably the most worrying thing about Galloway’s victory is that it confirms the further splintering of Britain into “identities”, where people no longer conceive of themselves as belonging to a class or a political set but rather to a fixed, culturally determined “identity”. Muslims vote one way, the white working classes vote another, and so on. What is remotely positive about the demise of an old politics that was at least based on the idea of shared interests and its replacement by a new politics based on shared cultural characteristics? In going for “the Muslim vote”, just as Livingstone recently did in a speech at North London Central Mosque, Galloway actually further exposed the dearth of principle on the modern Left.

Where once the Left saw it as its mission to unite people who had more in common than they thought they did (remember “workers of the world unite”?), now it happily feeds off community disintegration and even segregation for short-term political gain. If it helps to get them into power, it seems radical Leftists don’t have a problem with the political ghettoisation of certain communities in Britain, or with the further tearing-apart of man from fellow man that is at the heart of identity politics.

Overall though, a good day for democracy. And silly Taliban-lite beards.

** Interesting view from Melanie McDonagh

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