NRO’s Charlotte Allen is back at it again:
I am also responding to David Weigel, who told me I gotten my facts wrong: that there are actually two men, a custodian and a fourth-grade teacher, on Sandy Hook’s 52-person staff. He’s right, and I stand corrected. This does help prove my point, though: just two adult men in a building containing 500 people — and it’s not clear that both of them were at work that day. Indeed, a visit to Sandy Hook’s staff website is a depressing experience, the sea of women’s names. Why aren’t there more men? Perhaps not enough want the job? But why? Because they are tacitly discouraged from careers in elementary education? It’s certainly not the money, because union rules typically require kindergarten teachers and high-school chemistry teachers to be paid on exactly the same salary scale. Another depressing page on the Sandy Hook website is the “Safe Schools Climate” page. It’s a page of links to “anti-bullying” resources. Yes, the Sandy Hook staff’s idea of a “safe school” was a school where kids didn’t say mean things about each other on Facebook! The Sandy Hook massacre was a tragedy, but it was at least in part a tragedy of the collision between feminist delusions and reality.
How out of ideas is the modern conservative movement? They are now recycling the guttural utterances of d-list bloggers from a decade ago. Ladies and Gentlemen, the seminal blog post in right wing blogging history, a timeless classic, The Pussification of the Western Male by Kim du Toit:
We have become a nation of women.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.
There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)
There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.
There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.
We’re not like that anymore.
Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.
Now, men are taught that violence is bad—that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.
Now, men’s fashion includes not a man dressed in a three-piece suit, but a tight sweater worn by a man with breasts.
Now, warning labels are indelibly etched into gun barrels, as though men have somehow forgotten that guns are dangerous things.
Now, men are given Ritalin as little boys, so that their natural aggressiveness, curiosity and restlessness can be controlled, instead of nurtured and directed.
And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction—and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.
How did we get to this?
In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.
Your modern Republican party and conservative movement.
Schlemizel
Fuck NRO and fuck Charlotte Allen sideways with a rusty chainsaw. “Thinking” like this does not deserve a sincere, thoughtful, answer
schrodinger's cat
Men of European origin have been responsible for innumerable wars and millions of deaths in the last 3 centuries. I am not sure I would call them girly.
schrodinger's cat
Who is this Charlotte Allen person, I hadn’t heard of her before she wrote this idiotic post. These days conservative seems to be a synonym for stupid.
Anoniminous
Oh for god’s sake make it stop.
Mustang Bobby
@Schlemizel: I was going to suggest a garden rake, but your response is more manly.
Birthmarker
DougJ needs to come up with a clever way to change his handle. The options are staggering…
Suzanne
The only reasonable argument against evolution that I can think of is that people this stupid still exist.
Spankyslappybottom
One sad thing in all this Newtown mess is that school shootings are a small, statistically insignificant fraction of all gun assaults and murders. Thus, if we solve for Newtown-type situations, we will, in all likelihood, not be solving the larger problem.
Oh, and that woman Charlotte is an idiot.
Corner Stone
??
Ok, grammar nutpicking is pretty low, but this is ridiculous.
Schlemizel
@Mustang Bobby: Damn Straight! I am an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender! (H/T to Jesus General)
And not one of those little wussy 12 inch models either. No sir! Something like a Husqvarna 3120 XP with A 32 32 inch bar. But not from a so-shal-ist country
Southern Beale
One more time with feeling:
IT’S THE GUNS, STUPID!
Jayzus Effin Christmas the stupidity of the right, their stubborn unwillingness to see the obvious, their absolute bullheadedness in pretending this tragedy is a result of the cultural changes with which they’ve been unable to cope for the past generation. It boggles the mind.
NO the fault was not feminism, secularism, video games, multiculturism, etc etc. IT’S THE GUNS, STUPID.
quannlace
Right, the same pittance. Cause we all know high-school chemistry teachers make out like bandits.
God, who are these conservative women that despise those of their own gender to this degree?
Jay
I’ve been reading blogs for a good while, so I’ve heard the name “Kim du Toit,” but I have just enough of a life to be uninterested in the guy’s background. Comes the question: what on Earth is it? Has he done anything in his life – military service, police work, risky volunteer gigs in rough parts of the world – the stress from which might’ve brought on his ridiculous tough guy language? That, folks, I can wrap my head around. If he’s really another fat, Glenn Reynolds – style keyboard commando, though, I might just lose it. I mean, that post John links isn’t even keyboard commando material, it’s a parody of a keyboard commando…
geg6
One of the defining features of modern conservatism is misogyny. Doesn’t matter if the wingnut is a male or female. All of them live totally in fear of the vagina. Or, rather, women who prefer to use their brains instead of offering up their vaginas for male wingnuts’ use and control.
Charlotte Allen is a dried up, bitter, self-hating idiot. But there are no women on the right who aren’t. I had no idea who this woman was until a couple of days ago, but if I had not seen that the article was attributed to her, I’d have thought it was written by Phyllis Schlafly, the original dried up, bitter, self-hating hypocrite idiot.
Schlemizel
@Spankyslappybottom:
We kill just a smidgen over 10 people per 100,000 with guns every year in the US. The insignificant number who all end up dead at one time (Newtown, Aurora, UVA) isn’t even a drop in the bucket. But we LUVZ us our guns
Schlemizel
This posting by TNC has an excellent piece from Tony Horwitz, a historian. He compares the NRA’s tactics and behavior to the slavery supporters of the 1800s. It is pretty short but very worthwhile read.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/the-nra-and-the-positive-good-of-maximum-guns/266571/
jl
” It’s certainly not the money, because union rules typically require kindergarten teachers and high-school chemistry teachers to be paid on exactly the same salary scale. ”
Is Allen subtly suggesting that manly men would not be kindergarten teachers, rather than manly he man chemistry teachers?
Besides the ‘not the money’ fantasy aspect of that passage, I wonder why Allen is not decrying the feminazification of kindergarten. We need more he men in kindergarten.
Which brings to mind that while my HS chemistry teacher was excellent, and his very good teaching was the only thing that allowed me to survive the horrors of learning chemistry, he was, how should I put this delicately, very non high on the he man scale. He was married with kids, so I guess that stopped us from making fun of his prissy ways.
Though his discipline was not prissy. He had a talent for inflicting truly hilarious and appropriate humiliation and shame on those who deserved it.
DH
Charlotte Allen also wrote this piece in the Kaplan Prep Test Daily:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902992.html
The question that arises: Does National Review give an IQ test to select their women commenters? And do they select for only the terminally stupid? K Lo, anyone?
To be fair: since Goldberg writes for it also, I guess they give the IQ test to their male commenters too. And for the same reason.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
I’m sure it makes me an evil man-hating feminist or something that I think men are fully capable of having worthwhile, enjoyable lives without doing any violence to anyone whatsoever.
Srsly, what is it about conservatives equating masculinity with “yay for violence”????
John O
“I was wrong. This is central to my point,” has grown a bit tiresome from the right.
pat
My high school chemistry teacher, back in the dark ages of the late 50’s, was a woman and an excellent teacher. Unmarried, of course. I think in those days women who got pregnant had to quit their teaching jobs. And oh,yeah, girls went in to teaching or nursing so they would have “something to fall back on..”, I guess if they couldn’t find a manly man to marry..
Those were the good ol’ days, fershur.
I’d love to see this Allen woman try to make it in that world.
Spaghetti Lee
And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.
Bud, we’ve been trying to stamp out you fucks for years, but you’re like cockroaches. You’ll never die so long as there’s a demand for right-wing bullshit to fill the airwaves and keep people stupid.
Southern Beale
Schadenfreude:
Irony alert!
Maude
@Schlemizel:
I think it was him I heard on Bloomberg radio this past week. He talked about the NRA becoming extreme with Harlan Carter overnight. He was so interesting. Not Harlan, the guest.
Redshift
@DH: Willingness to write for the National Review is itself an IQ test. Only those who have completed a self-lobotomy need apply.
jl
@Schlemizel:
Thanks for that link. I liked this paragraph:
” The NRA’s first president was General Ambrose Burnside, who led Union troops at Antietam, a battle that in turn led Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This early NRA appears to have regarded guns and marksmanship as necessary to the maintenance of a well-regulated militia. Today’s NRA, of course, resists the “regulated” part of that equation. And militia, in its mind, means massively armed individuals ready to resist the “jack-booted government thugs” of the ATF and other agencies (including the United Nations). ”
The worst cancer in my mind is the NRA and its ideological allies pushing the line that armed anarchy is some kind of quasi-constitutional right guaranteed along with the right to bear arms, in the pursuit of self defense and as some kind of quasi legal recourse against that devil government (at any level) of doing something you don’t like.
This absurd view has spread so wide I fear that it will result in quite a bit of civil violence and unrest from the deluded white bigots when the country gets saner and appropriate measures taken to control the gun epidemic.
You see it in blogs like Pat Langs where he very selectively and misleadingly quotes Madison in the Fed papers, totally ignoring Madison’s other writings, and ignoring Hamilton’s very different take on the right to bear arms in the Fed papers and other public writings and speeches.
Noxious and frightening, and in my view ‘one plus one equals ten’ style incoherent, recent Supreme Court decisions that a citizen can claim a supposed constitutional right to do pretty much as he or she damn well pleases wrt to weapons in the name of self defense are another sign of the rot.
And of course, the horrible stand-your-ground laws in a number of states, that basically make gun toters more equal than others under the law. And grown people who are ept enough to stand on their hind legs, dress themselves, and speak a human language, trying to abolish all ‘gun-free zones’ as a danger to public safety.
It is a mess.
I will admit, though, that lack of good Union markmanship was not Burnside’s problem in the Civil War.
RSA
@jl:
I could not figure out what Allen was getting at in that paragraph. I think she’s suggesting, as you say, that social pressure keeps men from being kindergarten teachers. (I looked this up a couple of years ago and found that the percentage of male kindergarten teachers, 4%, was about the same percentage as female CEOs in the Fortune 500.) Conservatives are usually very big on gender roles, seeing them as being natural. But on the other hand she’s blaming feminists for feminizing teaching. I don’t think Allen can have both ways.
The Dangerman
WTF? Now, if a Dude had written this, I could safely assume he wasn’t getting any. I have no idea why a Dudette would right it.
Josie
@Schlemizel: Interesting. I am currently reading Team of Rivals in preparation for seeing the movie Lincoln, and I had that same thought upon reading the arguments and publications from the pro slavery politicians of the time. It is a bit spooky.
Southern Beale
@jl:
This reminds me of that animated bit from “Bowling For Columbine” that connects the dots between the founding of the NRA and the founding of the KKK.
Mike G
And there is an obese drug addicted cowardly asshole with a radio show who called the President’s 13-year old daughter a “dog” on national TV, and was worshipped as a political hero by Kim du Toit as he decried the loss of old-fashioned civility and chivalry.
jp7505a
I think I need a thicker piece of wood to bang my head on. I just splintered the last 4X6. Back in the good old days when mem were men and women were wives or old maids,(i.e. the 1950’s) my elementary school had 3 male teachers – the shop teacher and two 6th grade teachers. Even the phys. ed teacher was a woman. It wasn’t till junior high that I had mostly men as teachers. I’m not sure why this is such a surprise to Ms. Allen and the rest of the reactionary right. Of course things must be different on planet bizzaro so they are surprised when they stop in on planet earth every so often.
FlipYrWhig
Was there some halcyon age where elementary schools used to be crammed full of the manliest of men? Seems to me that the word “schoolmarm” has a rather long history. Maybe Charlotte Allen is daydreaming of Pink Floyd: The Wall again. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?
Joseph Nobles
Did you see how that school was dressed? The slut was asking for it.
Decrease Mather
Lead the troops at Fredericksburg too, and did a crap job of it. Burnside was an awful general.
jl
@RSA: Yeah, I was joking. I can;t figure out what her point is. Her reference to the money angle suggested that mere (and appropriately?) women mere kindergarten teachers should get paid less than the manly he man male chemistry teachers?
The whole idea that jiggering with the miserable pay scale of the modern US teacher would make any difference at all shows how divorced from reality she is, especially when that is added to the extreme job insecurity in many states. In CA getting the March pink slip is routine, and most teachers spend the summer wondering whether, and if so, where, they will be teaching next Fall.
The reactionaries have turned into such incoherent wrong about everything losers it is really difficult to hide it anymore.
FlipYrWhig
If only public school teachers were something other than a buncha feminized union thugs.
Older_Wiser
I’ll bet Allen is into into kinky, spanking type sex, too.
Beat me, daddy, 8 to the bar.
jl
One thing I am glad to learn from the excerpts in this post is that there are no damn moobs hiding underneath those Master of the Universe’s pinstripes. That is a relief. They are real manly he men, fer sher.
All you lib moob men with your sweaters should take note, and pay attention to Brooks’ upcoming humbility class at Yale.
lahru
Oh! Look over there and,Look over there and,Look over there and,Look over there and,Look over there and, see these are the reason for the killings.
Oh! That over there is a GUN.
Ruckus
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:
I’m sure it makes me an evil man-hating feminist or something that I think men are fully capable of having worthwhile, enjoyable lives without doing any violence to anyone whatsoever.
We are but even so we still sometimes seem to have to speak with our testosterone voice from time to time. Not sure if it’s up bringing or or the fore mentioned substance.
RedKitten
So the party that venerates machismo and big-swinging-dick types is now saying that we should have more male kindergarten teachers. Because you know damn well that if Charlotte Allen met a male kindergarten teacher in real life, it wouldn’t even OCCUR to her to laugh derisively at him and call him an effeminate pussy.
mai naem
@schrodinger’s cat: Well, she’s a Gooper woman which means you have two choices – 1/ she’s kind of an average looking brunette with shoulder length hair, who’s done everything she can with her looks. She’s a graduate of an okay to third rate school. She probably does not believe in what she says but she knows its an easy ticket for the wingnut welfare gravy train. Her goal in life is to be a pundit/talk show host with a side gig with a right wing think tank. Since she is not famous currently, she’s a blogger and writes some columns for a right wing website. Choice two is she’s a fairly attractive with longish blonde hair who’s gone to a top tier school and is also paying her dues for a ride on the wingnut gravy train. Same goals and MO as brunette above.
Jennifer
Why? Because it has traditionally been a woman’s job, for several reasons:
The sexist assumption that women are more nurturing and therefore better with children, but primarily because it never paid as well as most other jobs requiring post-secondary education.
Also, men tend to need ego-stroking more than women, and one place where they aren’t going to get it is in teaching. That’s primarily thanks to people like you, who have for a generation or more been screeching about what a bunch of worthless moochers teachers are.
See? I can turn the blame around on you as easily as you tried to turn it on us. Except what I said was true.
pat
Another recollection, the first time I had a man teacher (can’t say how MANLY he was) was in the fourth grade.
Which brings up the logical question, what the hell is this idiot talking about? It was an elementary school, ferchrissake.
And an armed security guard rushing the shooter would have been a dead armed security guard. These idiots do not have the imagination god gave a fruit fly.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
I’m guessing Allen thought Kindergarten Cop was a documentary about Schwarzenegger’s days as a teacher.
“It’s not a tumor!”
Lurking Canadian
@jl: Burnside may have been at Antietam, but that’s the first time I’ve ever seen the poor guy associated with a union victory. I have real respect for him, because in some writings of his that I’ve seen, he appears to be as aware o anyone of his shortcomings, but he’s as inept a military figure as ever there was.
Kyle
Let’s take a look at the ideological leaders of today’s pro-gun Republican Party — Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and Roger Ailes.
Do these old, bald tubs of lard strike anyone as being symbols of manly strength and vitality? You think any of these moral cowards would take down a gunman without their personal security detail? They’d be blubbering and running away with soiled pants at the first sign of danger — then bragging about how tough they were the next day.
Mike in NC
NRO employs wingnut hacks? Who could ever have predicted?
RedKitten
Honestly, part of me would love for them to get their wish: for schools to be staffed primarily with heavily armed Chuck Norris doppelgangers.
I bet the right wing would stop implying that teachers are overpaid, lazy union thugs…
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@geg6:
And yet, Charlotte Allen (like other members of the Conservative Women’s Token Caucus) will never figure out that no matter how much contempt she heaps on women, the guys will never accept her as One of the Boys.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
I spent the previous 3 years working in a district with 10,000 students and 13 school buildings. Yes, lots of the teachers from top to bottom grades are women. No, they are not pushovers. They are not less courageous and heroic than men. To imply that schools need more testosterone to be safer is ludicrous. And insulting.
mai naem
I forgot to ask how does Allen explain the Colorado theater shooting. There were plenty of men there.
These people have just gone off the edge. Just something about Obama has driven them off the cliff. They used to talk about Bush Derangement Syndrome. BDS is literally Bush league compared to ODR.
jl
@Mike G:
From Wikipedia, Truman’s letter to guy who dissed his daughter’s singing:
” Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below! Pegler, a gutter snipe, is a gentleman alongside you. I hope you’ll accept that statement as a worse insult than a reflection on your ancestry. ”
The goofus Toit forgot Truman threatened to blacken his eye.
What a third rate column. Didn’t Jackson beat the crap out of some guy who tried to assassinate him on the Capitol steps? Now there is a he-man president.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S.
So, if I’m reading this right, Kim du Toit (whom I’ve never heard of, but if this piece is standard for her, then her name should be Kim du Twat) is obliquely suggesting that giving women the vote was a bad thing. Fuck. If we can’t find some way to politically marginalize these fuckweeds, then we’re done as country.
jp7505a
@jl: I’m afraid that any new gun control legislation will fail. Even if it gets past the troglytes in congress, there are to many guns already in circulation and to many people who will not give up their ar15’s to that n-clang terrorist loving socialist Kenyanian. Prohibition failed in the 20s, the war on drugs has failed over the last 40 years, prostitution continues to turn a tidy profit and in the spirit of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ we have legalized the numbers racket and renamed it the state lottery. It seems to me that there will be so many ways for a black-market to develop that we are stuck with this mess. I can’t imagine the ATF and/or local police ever having the resources to put a dent in the underground gun trade.
Older_Wiser
@Jay: An ex-pat Afrikaner or Rhodesian, perhaps? That would explain a lot.
http://www.amazon.com/Kim-du-Toit/e/B006XXISVG
Jennifer
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S.: Better yet, Kim du Twat IS A GUY.
So you can see where the manliness fetish comes from. Unfortunately, it appears that his parents’ decision to name him “Kim” did not have the same effect of masculinizing him that the Boy Named Sue experienced.
Litlebritdifrnt
My husband, as most of you know, is a High School Band Director and a former Marine. He thinks these people who state that the only way to avoid situations like Newtown is to arm teachers are just brain dead fucking stupid. He is slightly to the right of me on politics (although there was no way he was going to vote for Romney) but he is 100% with me on the need for a serious ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons. He sees no reason for any regular person to have access to those weapons. As he noted, the reason that most elementary school teachers are female is because the majority of teachers are female period. The reason that the majority of teachers are female is because teachers are paid so poorly and are basically unemployed for two months out of the year they NEED a spouse who has a regular income (in our case me). If you start paying teachers a good salary, and stop making them unemployed two months of the year then maybe you will get guys interested in the job.
Bisonjones
Send my credentials to the house of detention…
Depressing wingnut blog citation aside, I do enjoy a good reference to The Doors.
jl
@Lurking Canadian:
When I was a youngin’, on a visit to the eastern branch o’ my fambly, I done was taken on a guided tour of the battle site, and heard the story. Some jack booted totalitarian thug federal
revenooerpark ranger done showed us all about it, and even then it done tingled my spine with horror, what done happened.Battle of Fredericksburg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fredericksburg
And I think sideburns look goofy.
Poor inept but well-intentioned and decent Burnside, who if I remember right, tried to beg off command as not being up to it.
RSA
@jl:
I think you’re right; that makes sense (as much as a lot of conservative points of view make sense, that is).
newtons.third
The whole education part of Allen’s comments make perfect sense considering my background. I teach math/physics at a urban high school. However, I live in a very religious community, where there are enough Christian high schools to form an athletic conference (and from which I graduated). There are some that do require a woman to take a five year leave on becoming pregnant. And that extends to 5 years after the last one is born. The woman’s place, and all of that. There was also a to-do over “headship”, the placing of a woman in a position of authority over a male. A local Christian grade school decided that there could be no female teachers over grade 4 (I think, it is a case of IIRC).
Another school district in the area was forced to turn into a charter school, and the company that runs it cut salaries, by some reports as low as the low 20’s, without benefits. They are surprised that one-fourth of the teachers have left in the first 4 months of school. But, we get paid great, says Allen.
It reminds me of my response to the health care debate. I often respond to the market-is-god argument with, who do you want to tell you what treatment you should have: a government bureaucrat whose mission is to keep people healthy, or an insurance bureaucrat whose mission is to make a profit? Same in education. Do you trust a school whose goal it is to educate, or one whose goal is to make money? We saw on that horrific Friday what teachers will do to protect their kids. They were not outliers, they were the norm.
Gex
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker: Their idea of “man” is really messed up. As a lesbian, there have been no shortage of conservative men who have asked one of us, “Who is the man in your relationship?”
Um… Neither of us. That is one of the defining features of lesbianism.
Are you asking who shovels the walk? That’s me.
Who mows the yard? That’s her.
She grocery shops and cooks. I clean.
Does that help you feel like you have an answer to your question? Maybe not everybody has to live with the same constructs as you do: master and property.
ETA: It turns out it is just as easy to divide the work of making a home based on individual strengths and interests, not just predetermined based on what your swimsuit area looks like.
Tehanu
@jp7505a:
Wasn’t I just reading, a week or two ago, about some right-wing idiot’s great idea that we should force women out of the other professions so they could go back to being teachers? After all, the intellectual level of teachers was so much higher when the smart women weren’t allowed to have any other job than teacher or nurse. I am not making this up.
Oh, and btw, it was my comment over at Charlie Pierce’s place that elicited Ms. Allen’s response about how a firing rate of 1 bullet per 1.3 seconds didn’t qualify as a “hail of bullets.” Am I a bad person if I say I’d really like to see her dodging that many paintballs? At that rate she’d look like a Jackson Pollack painting in, let’s see — 15 seconds.
jl
@jp7505a: It will take a change in public opinion, but if public opinion changes, it can happen. May take decades.
I do think some guns should be banned, but even with assault weapons out of the picture, you are correct, there are two many guns of all kinds out there. Ability to regulate ownership, and ability to track guns is key. But seems to me first roadblock is getting sane and not too corrupt Supreme Court.
Also, these gun nuts need to be stopped with their stand your ground and concealed carry BS.
It will take decades, but to give up is to commit social suicide. The NRA industry front and their deluded gun nut members are not standing still. Unless we are willing to push back, they will work furiously to make things worse as quickly as possible.
Suffern ACE
@Spaghetti Lee: really? So what was so evil about the Austrians and the Spanish that those Europeans thought to care about succession. As far as I can tell, we had exactly one, maybe two wars in the past 300 years that could be said to be about fighting evil.
Cause you know that kaiser was sooooo clearly a bad guy.
Rosie Outlook
@schrodinger’s cat: Charlotte Allen used to write for an outfit called the Independent Women’s Forum. They are, or were, the dumbest fvcking human beings on the planet, orders of magnitude worse than their feminist enemies.
MikeJ
Lets solve this with racial profiling. Inner city black young men, statistically speaking, never go on mass murder sprees. Lets give each of them a gun, so as to please the NRA, and have them follow around the demographic that is statistically likely to go on a mass murder spree, ie, white men.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@Gex: Yeah. The whole conservative notion of “masculinity = aggression” just strikes me as a terribly negative view of men.
Cacti
Where have all the husky 12-year olds with buckets gone?
jl
@Gex: Well, gee, every right thinking person knows that the defining characteristics of a real he man manly man is to shoot things, blow shit up and beat the crap out of anyone who don’t mind. And those kind of people should run everything. All problems will be solved!
Any interest in anything else is sign of a feminized moob man weakling.
That is the first lesson of our history from manly he men like Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, etc. Franklin was well-known for shooting everybody who came hear him a s a possible threat, blowing shit up, and beating the crap out of anyone who disagreed with him, and having no interest in anything else.
Mnemosyne
@jp7505a:
I would be perfectly happy with my three-point plan:
Register all guns.
License all gun owners.
Ban swappable magazines. (Originally I said “high capacity magazines,” but others have convinced me that it’s not much better if someone has 5 pre-loaded 10-cartridge magazines in his pocket than if he has 2 pre-loaded 30-cartridge magazines.)
I think these three steps alone would go a long way towards mitigating the majority of our gun problem, which is suicides and spur-of-the-moment homicides. Plus the “no swappable magazines” part will help a lot with the gang killings that we’re having trouble with out here in California right now.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@Rosie Outlook: Charlotte Allen used to write for an outfit called the Independent Women’s Forum.
Were they the ones with a male director, or am I thinking of Concerned Women for America?
jp7505a
If there is any justice in this world, I want to be a fly on the wall when the NRA stars recruiting for their safe schools program and the first Muslim or New Black Panther applies as a volunteer!!!! Heads will explode
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@jl:
It absolutely will take decades for any change in laws to make a difference. Even the severest restrictions on sales, enacted today, would not stop the next mass murder which is already being planned.
This gives the NRA an opportunity to claim that the new gun law was ineffective and demand its repeal.
JoyfulA
@Jennifer: In my over-60 age group, I have known several male Kims and only Novak as a female Kim. Lynn was a male name, too.
Gex
@mai naem: Colorado also has conceal and carry. So the obvious solution is mandatory carry. I mean, clapping harder will work eventually.
Cassidy
What’s funny is that piece was written by a guy who later proceeded to beg people for money as his inability to function socially and professionally got him pushed out as a contractor. Moocher.
jl
This is second or third time I have pimped this obscure Buñel film, but when I saw it at a degenerate godless film festival years ago, I never dreamed it would someday play like a documentary about what has happened in the US.
El río y la muerte, The River and Death.
The sissy girlified artiste ‘men’ here might want to check it out. And others too.
Comrade Jake
The sad reality is that Jim DeMint is an intellectual giant compared to these people.
catclub
@jl: I have been out the past two days. Did Wayne Lapierre propose a large tax on gun and ammo sales to pay for the unfunded mandate proposal to put guards at schools? Just catching up here.
Gex
@jp7505a: It won’t happen overnight, no. It took the NRA from 1977 until now to froth gun owners all up into this lather. It will take time to ramp down.
The Australia example could be followed. And we’d have to be willing to have a generous buy back program to start destroying some of these surplus weapons.
newtons.third
@Mnemosyne:
What about some form of ID that must be presented to purchase a gun? Sort of like you must show for alcohol. The seller is legally responsible for the validity of the ID. A bar can be closed for selling to underage kids, gun seller can be convicted of selling to an unregistered buyer.
Then tax the ammo. The intermediate rounds of an assault rifle make $500 apiece. Emptying a 30 round magazine is the cost of a (cheap) new car. Bullets used in a semi-automatic hand gun, same story. Hunting rifle ammo is too powerful for those types of uses, and can still be cheap.
I know that spit ball will never stick, but one can hope, what with 2 billion rounds sold last year.
Cacti
@jp7505a:
When the original Panthers decided to practice open carry, Gov. Ronald Reagan decided that there was “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.
What a coincidence.
schrodinger's cat
@Rosie Outlook: So she is a real person, for a moment I thought Charlotte was one DougJ’s sock puppets. The farce is strong with that one (Allen not DougJ).
Gex
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker: Agreed. I think more of men than they do.
CW in LA
Is Charlotte Allen some kind of rising star in the moron pundit firmament? I mean, she’s been for years part of the LA Times’ ongoing effort to create a newspaper that sucks so much that light itself cannot escape it. But she seems to be everywhere lately; is she what the wingnut movement is coming to?
steve
Can you imagine Charlotte Allen or Kim du Tard rushing a shooter like Dawn Hochsprung did?
Yeah me neither.
Mnemosyne
@newtons.third:
That’s the “license all gun owners” part. No license, no gun.
Rosie Outlook
Re Kim du Toit (and with a name like that, no wonder he ain’t wrapped too tight: it’s like being the boy named Sue): I just checked my guns. The 20-gauge is an older model, probably manufactured in the ’70’s; it was a gift from a now deceased friend so God alone knows where the paperwork is and even He would probably have to dig through the Vatican archives to find it. Anyway, there is no writing etched on the barrel of this gun, about warnings or anything else, though it’s possible that in its travels the writing was sanded off. The other gun, a .38 pistol, was manufactured in South America. I found no warnings etched onto it, in English or Spanish. I don’t think Kim knows what he’s talking about. That is all. Except–John, how do you keep your rugs so clean with 3 pets?
jp7505a
@Gex: I hope the optimists are right. Mothers Aginst Drunk Driving is an obvious template for pushing these types of changes
J
Love this post title & lyric from When The Music’s Over by The Doors. A little surprised that DougJ didn’t write it.
Also, thanks for the memories on that idiotic post from Kim du Toit…legendary stupidity.
jl
@catclub: Should ask some one else. I was so disgusted by Lapierre’s bloody minded and crazed BS, I couldn’t watch the speech or ‘press conference’ or lunatic raving, or whatever it was, or follow the commentary (except of course, here at the fount of all wisdom, BJ blog).
I gritted my teeth and read a transcript and have been able to not turn off the radio when news spots about it came on.
Apparently the NRA floated trail balloons for arming teachers via loons like Gohmert. When that got ridiculed, they settled on some kind of Manhattan Project to have armed police at all schools and some kind of security system program for schools. Basically, have armed cops roaming the schools, and put in a bunch of bullet proof glass barriers, and buzzers and crap, as if the neighborhood school should operate like a maximum security juvi hall, or SRO lobby in the SF Tenderloin.
And, IIRC, registry for anyone deemed mentally or emotionally ‘disturbed’. Oh yeah, that is a great idea.
catclub
@Litlebritdifrnt: I agree, and would only suggest that the Allen suggestion (more men teachers) is (unfortunately) one of the best ways to raise salaries for all Elementary School teachers. Men’s work _is_ more valuable, dontchaknow.
I wonder how this squares with gutting school teachers’ unions to cut teacher pay, though.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@CW in LA:
Yes.
Gex
@Gex: Well that sounds bad. That makes it sound like I think poorly of men, which I don’t.
Litlebritdifrnt
@efgoldman:
I thought everyone round here knew that. Anyway now you know.
catclub
@jp7505a: Gaaahhh. The stupid party has to win, if the model is MADD. Of course, the stupid party does usually win. The Kuwait (?) ports takeover uproar was another example where the democrats piled on opposing something because they knew it would be popular (jingoistic, xenophobic, ineffective) to oppose it.
catclub
@Gex: “…I think poorly of men, which I don’t.”
They are tasty with some fava beans?
neighborhood street signs you never see:
“Drive safely. We love our children, delicious”
Cacti
@jl:
There was an armed guard at Colombine, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy that even exchanged fire with Harris.
12 students and 1 teacher still died that day.
Schlemizel
@jl:
I really wanted to cut and paste the whole thing in here it is so good.
I think it is really important to understand the NRAs rhetoric and propaganda but the key to “getting” the NRA is to always remember that their job as the see it is to sell more guns. They work for the gun manufacturers & their entire existence is bent towards increasing the number of guns sold in the US every year. Second is electing more Republicans, they are a tool of the 1% but only secondarily.
If it increases paranoia and sells more guns the NRA is there!
Jennifer
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:
These groups have since merged to better advance their core mission. They are now known as Ladies Against Women.
folsom ca
@Litlebritdifrnt: I would love to flip the pay scales, from cops, firefighters, California Hwy Patrol, to the teachers. My experience with teachers if fantastic. Band and the Arts are so important in a child’s life. Pay teachers. Make the cops, etc., a separate entity. Teaching is an honorable business, and they are paid nothing. Well, after all, it is women’s work. Ha Ha. Most men and boys, love their mom, and trust their teachers. A solid cheer for music teachers. My son was a jazz flautist, and a jazz pianist, taught by a few famous folks. He also marched at UC Berk, with a trumpet. Music and academia made him the man he is today. Of course, his lily livered mommy, had nothing to do with it. Nor his daddy. Honestly do some of these people live in candy colored boxes, or maybe just penthouses, filled with Koch money. It is nuts.
PurpleGirl
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S.:
Kim du Toit is a male. His website (The Other Side of Kim du Toit) is no longer open to the public and is non-active, to boot.
Schlemizel
@jl:
Another thing about this. Militia’s were huge in the South before the ACW. Thats where all those corn pone “Colonels” came from. Every white guy was expected to have a gun and to participate in regular drills. Well-to-do units even bought cannons. Many formed horse cavalry. For plantation owners it was a way to show off their wealth. They also formed a sort of social club in the society. This is why the South was viewed to have superior soldiers early in the war.
The real reason they were so important was the constant fear of a slave revolt. So the NRAs paranoia about Black men goes back to before their founding.
Schlemizel
@Josie:
I have argued fro some time now (10-20 years at least) that the modern conservative movement in the US is an exact echo of the pro-slave movement in the 1850s
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@Jennifer: Be sure to get permission from your husband before joining!
Schlemizel
Well obviously the ONLY solution is that every student should be armed, every teacher, every janitor, EVERYONE.
Then we will all be as safe as safe can be!
Matt
Du Toit’s article is way more informative if you reverse which side of each example you’re looking at:
Kinda sums up the modern GOP pretty well…
SiubhanDuinne
@Southern Beale:
I was just looking at a shelf of DVDs I haven’t watched in years, and thinking — in light of Newtown and the refreshed gun discussion — that I should watch “Columbine” again. I’ll pay particular attention to the section you flag.
arguingwithsignposts
OMG, I had blotted KdT out of my memory. What a contemptible ass he was.
NobodySpecial
I eagerly await Charlotte Allen’s next column, in which she asserts that we should staff schools with manly men, the type not afraid to use a gun. You know, like the shooter. Or maybe her next column will be about how shooting his mom four times in the head was really striking a blow against feminism.
Anne Laurie
@Cassidy:
Was du Toit the Manly Moocher who grifted his readers for money to cover his gastric bypass surgery?… and his lady wife’s gastric bypass surgery?… and then his conservatively-raised adolescent offsprings’ bypass surgeries? Or was that a different Manly Conserva-Blogger?
J
@Bisonjones: i’ve got some friends inside
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike G:
Apropos of absolutely nothing, but I once worked — years after the event, of course — with the daughter of “the man who had the temerity” (he was WaPo music critic Paul Hume, and the President was Truman). But I am actually old enough that I kind of remember the incident itself, or at least the jokes that swirled around at the time.
Chris
I know everyone remembers that dude for the Alamo and the Indian wars. I remember him for his time in Congress in between the two, when he stood up for Indian rights and was run out on a rail for it by his constituents who felt that he was an Injun-loving traitor. Also seem to recall that he tried to push back (unsuccessfully) against big land sharks who were buying up money in the new territories out west for next to nothing, then turning around and selling it at unaffordably high prices to settlers.
The idea that this guy is being held up by conservatives as their kind of guy is amusing to say the least. They’d have hated his guts if they’d been around in his day. Then again, that’s true of… quite a few historical figures that they claim as their own.
srv
We would have won the War on Terror if we had not been overwhelmed by all you girly surrender monkeys.
kerFuFFler
@Gex:
I suspect they want to picture who is wearing the strap-on…
Rosie Outlook
@Gex: Hi Gex, I once asked a gay (male) friend who leads when dancing. I was expecting him to say either “whoever is the better dancer,” or “we flip a coin.”. (I suppose saying “I call dibs!” as you’re heading to the dance floor would also work.) Anyway, he surprised me with his reply of the lead being taken by “whoever is more masculine.”. Sounds like lesbian mileage varies.
I am a terrible ballroom dancer myself; when my partner tries to steer us one way, some perverse instinct makes me start to flop to the opposite, and my hasty correction throws us further off the beat. As we hitch around the dance floor, we look like a man trying to drive a stick-shift Yugo which is, for some strange reason, wearing a cocktail dress and has heels on its wheels (Hee). I think this may have to do with my ambidexterity; I have read that the ambidextrous, as well as those whose handedness was forcibly switched from left to right in infancy , are prone to these problems. I solved my problem by switching to belly dance. Belly dancers don’t need partners. We just drape ourselves in our tinkly accoutrements and get our jingle on.
Gex
@jp7505a: My girlfriend is starting stand up comedy, so we suddenly hang out with people 10-20 years younger than us. Very liberal. The conservative ones refuse to use politics in their act. They’ll spout ignorant BS on Facebook, but they seem to realize that isn’t going to please the crowds.
So, while taking a good look at us where we stand, I guess I’m feeling some optimism. Change is generational.
Slavery lasted a long time. Segregation lasted a century. This neo-Confederate period will probably be even shorter yet. I am very interested to see what our politics will look like once the old racists are out of the picture and the straights vs. hippies war can finally end.
ETA: Actually, I think I know what it will look like. The young people that aren’t liberals that aren’t ashamed of their positions are libertarians.
SiubhanDuinne
@Joseph Nobles:
I didn’t think I had it in me to laugh at a joke about Sandy Hook, but this line is WIN.
Cassidy
@Anne Laurie: I don’t know those details, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I do know that he started selling his guns and complaining about being shut out of work and that it was “those people” who did it. His wife had her own blog and write long rambling pieces of crazy. They tried to start a business creating a conservative homeschool curriculum and solicited donations for that, but it never got into the development stage. So again, that wouldn’t surprise me.
slag
@DH: Wow. They published that.
Gex
@Rosie Outlook: Still not determined by swim suit area. So this is just a special case of negotiating based on each individuals strengths.
redshirt
This is like a mashup of two Schwarzenegger memes: Kindergarten Cop and “Hanz and Franz” from SNL
SiubhanDuinne
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Cool. I didn’t know. I was vocal/choral myself, but it’s all good.
Schlemizel
@Rosie Outlook:
We know a few gay couples both men and women. I have never discussed this with them as I don’t think its any of my business but in each of those relationships one party is the “husband” and take the role normally filled by the guy and the other is the “wife” I find it first amusing because even people who don’t fit our stereotypes fit our stereotypes sometimes. And secondly I find it fascinating and wonder if these roles are societal in that they are the only template our society provides, or if they are more deeply ingrained and fit some “genetic need”.
Of course I’m the guy who does most of the cooking & my wife insists on mowing the lawn so maybe I am making too much of the stereotypes
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Somehow I’m not allowed to edit on the iPad, FYWP, so I should just clarify that I was never a vocal/choral teacher, but that when I was in high school I was on the v/c track rather than orchestra/band.
SiubhanDuinne
@Cacti:
When will they ever learn?
jl
@Chris: Except I think Crockett said that to the voters before he lost another election. Something like, you can vote for me or not vote for me, what you saw was what you will get, and if you don’t vote for you can go to hell and I will go to Texas.
And I think he enrolled as a Texas citizen, in exchange for a few thousand acres of property for the would be founder of the Republic of Texas. So, a traitor of sorts as well?
So, that Crockett was a mixed bag. But surely did show signs of feminized weakness. Why did he not hunger to drive the Civilized Tribes before him, to crush them, (illegally take their lawful title to the land) and listen to the lamentations of their women?
Bendal
@jl:
Yes, Burnside knew he wasn’t suited for overall army command, but Lincoln insisted and he reluctantly took the job. After Fredericksburg and the “Mud March” he resigned and was later given a corps command under Grant and Meade, where he performed more or less as expected.
Mnemosyne
@catclub:
Unfortunately, you are right. I’m not quite sure if nursing salaries started to rise after men started going back into nursing, or if they were attracted by the higher salaries being offered because of the shortage, but now it’s not at all unusual to find male nurses. I know two male RNs myself.
(Though employers also get around the prejudice by calling the same job a “technician” if they expect it to attract more men, so “surgical technicians” do a lot of the same jobs that “surgical nurses” used to do.)
Mnemosyne
@Schlemizel:
I think it also depends on what career path each of the people follows. There are still some careers where it’s really helpful to have a “wife” who can keep up with the social contacts, do the expected charity work, etc. And since the “wife” role is generally the one of the organizer for the family, I think even gay couples can fall into that if they have kids since it’s easiest for one person to be in charge of keeping track of the kids’ doctor appointments, after-school activities, etc. Notice that on “Modern Family,” all three of the families have a full-time “housewife,” including the gay couple.
But my other guess would be that gay male couples are more likely to fall into those roles than lesbian couples since the lesbians were raised with those roles and are more wary of being forced into them. But I am not gay (or lesbian), so I’m just speculating from outside observation.
Rosie Outlook
@Schlemizel: I got onto the subject when I was bemoaning my difficulties with ballroom dancing and ny friend had the same problem. Thinking I might have solved his problem, if not my own, I said “Try leading, maybe the other guy will be able to follow.”. He said he would feel awkward leading and that’s how I found out the above.
I would like to meet a nice man who likes to cook. I know one guy who does the cooking AND the grocery shopping ; to me, that’s Prince Charming . His wife shops for everything else, but they figured that since he cooks the food, he should pick it out. They have this refined to the point that they each take a cart at the store; he gets the food, she gets the toilet paper, laundry soap, that sort of thing.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@Lurking Canadian:
Fredericksburg was a mess, all right. Burnside’s major failing was that when somebody gave him orders, he tried to carry them out, to a fault. At Antietam, he was ordered in no uncertain terms to force a crossing of the creek, and he thought the bridge was the only way. Nowadays he’s laughed at because there was a fordable spot a short distance downstream—I guess he failed to download the USCGS map from the internet—whadda maroon!
He also gets the majority of the blame for the Crater fiasco, although it wasn’t his fault that the higher-ups decided at the last moment to replace the veteran black regiment that had been intensively training for the operation for a month with a totally green white regiment, for fear that if they were wiped out people would say they sent in a black unit because they didn’t care what happened to them.
When he was given an independent command in East Tennessee, to hold it against rebel attempts to retake it, and without being forced to do specific things, but allowed to think for himself, he succeeded admirably, and in fact invented tactics that would be used by all sides in WWI. (He was also willing to take this assignment, which amounted to a demotion, with good grace.)
So there are plenty of generals from the Civil War I love to hate, but I think Burnside’s gotten a bad rap.
SiubhanDuinne
@Chris:
I remember him because he kilt him a b’ar when he was only three.
:-)
Rosie Outlook
@Mnemosyne: My uncle is a big time lawyer, corporate type. When he brought my aunt home from Asia, his company sent her to charm school to learn how to be a corporate wife; the average person rarely if ever meets his colleagues’s spouses except at the company picnic or at a funeral, but at my uncle’s level the exec and his wife are judged as a unit. I remember my aunt being quite shocked at the idea of shaving her armpits.
SiubhanDuinne
@Gex:
It’s quite possible I’ve missed him –or maybe he’s on vacation or something– but isn’t this right up DennisG’s (Dengre’s) street? DG, have you been weighing in and I’ve just managed not to see your posts?
Back to point, Gex, I think and hope you’re right. Not sure it will happen in my lifetime, but I am optimistic.
Maude
@Rosie Outlook:
Just make sure prince charming takes out garbage.
shortstop
I thought of the du Toit classic immediately when I read Allen’s verbal vomit the first time. But she is so, so, so much creepier than he is (yes, that’s possible) because her fascination with feminism-bashing — I have learned this week that it’s pretty much her one trick, employed in everything she writes — exhibits an incredibly sick mixture of worship and revulsion toward masculinity. Even as she hates her own femaleness and that of almost all the women around her, and even as she touts the “masculine” virtues of “strength, aggression and strategic thinking,” she is horrified by and alienated from men, or at least from her narrow perception of the opposite sex.
A day or two ago when Charlie Pierce joined the brigade of people openly mocking her musings on husky boys and custodial buckets, she responded in the comments with a story of an attempted rape against her 30 or 40 years ago:
Leaving aside the fact that Allen’s version of this event has her exhibiting exactly the same kind of non-violent but non-passive solution-seeking the women at Sandy Hook employed, and which she mocks as wholly worthless when other women are doing it, there are some seriously creepy phrases and concepts here, straight out of a 19th-century gothic novel: “had his will with me,” rape is worse than death, etc. She is clearly both attracted and repelled by what she sees as men’s raw and brutal nature, and she gives them no more credit for nuance than she does women.
I think most of us have met winger women like Allen who respond to open displays of male contempt for women — these are in no short supply in her chosen party — with a burning desire to set themselves apart from the despised feminists by proving to men: “I’m not like that. I’m a real woman.” It’s a novelty act that gets a woman in politics or political commentary more attention than she’d receive as a Democrat (just as Michael Steele and Condoleezza Rice and Herman Cain are working the Black Person Racist White People Can Feel Good About shtick), but it’s also quite obviously a deep and twisted need to make the boys in the (Republican) class finally, finally like her. And when they still don’t, other than paying her cursory attention and continuing to go about their no-girls-allowed business, or when they reject her plaintive offerings as Jonah Goldberg did, it just reinforces her anger against men while she doubles down on attempts to please them.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@Schlemizel: I have long hair and work in a “feminine” job, while my wife Packrat has short hair and has done tilesetting and carpentry. (And I’ve seen her in skirts exactly twice, once on a dare and once at our wedding.) So people tend to assume that she’s the butch/husband and I’m the wife/femme.
But I think there’s a certain amount of confirmation bias in that: once someone thinks they’ve determined the roles, they won’t notice that Packrat loves jewelry and I’m indifferent to it, or that she has the nurturing, heart-on-her-sleeve “feminine” personality while I’m much more cerebral.
CW in LA
@Suffern ACE: I’d go as high as three, perhaps: The Civil War and WWII, and Korea seems to have been defending evil against worse evil.
Bubblegum Tate
@Southern Beale:
That is just beautiful. Ready to rethink some of those dumbass positions of yours, Dana?
CW in LA
@Older_Wiser: Hey, man, don’t disparage kinky, spanking type sex like that.
shortstop
@CW in LA: Yeah, it’s a myth that spankos are self-haters. Some are, of course, but most are not. Definitively.
JPL
Charlotte should just keep digging. She might be able to be a host on Fox and Friends.
mainmati
@Jay: Kim can be both a male or female first name and is just about the most common Korean last name so not sure about the gender/ethnicity in this case.
General Stuck
Well, all I can say is, You get nothing. I get that for free.
Tally Ho!!
Mnemosyne
@Rosie Outlook:
My aunt’s second husband (of 30+ years) is 14 years younger than she is and does all of the cooking because none of my father’s sisters can cook worth a damn. He makes ravioli from scratch, among other things.
If anything happens to my aunt, I’ll introduce you, but you may have a long wait — my grandmother made it to 94 and her sister-in-law (my grandfather’s sister) broke 100. :-)
TS
@jp7505a:
I like the nicotine style attack better – mass charges against gun sellers and manufacturers when their money making machines cause deaths. The majority who do not carry guns – like the majority who do not smoke – should have the right to live without the fallout from the gun owners’ addictions.
shortstop
@Anne Laurie: That’s the same family. It’s even worse than that. After they went broke in a Ralph Kramden-quality business scheme, they told their kids they couldn’t send them to college. The daughter then decided to join the Navy for tuition benefits, but she was too overweight to get in. Rather than taking accountability and bootstrapping and not being afraid of hard work, these true conservatives decided she should gain even more weight to reach the 100-pounds-overweight minimum (I think) that qualifies for gastric bypass so she wouldn’t have to count calories or work out. I am not making this up.
shortstop
@mainmati: Male. South African-born. Moved here after apartheid ended, as I recall.
Patricia Kayden
@geg6: Your comment is absolutely true. Instead of discussing sensible gun control after the Newton Massacre, Rightwingers are pining for a fantasy world where hunky men ran around saving the women and children from other hunky men.
Sorry, Rightwingers, that world never existed.
This is exactly the same as White Americans pining for the “good old days”, which for Black Americans simply never existed.
Mister Harvest
@Gex:
I am going to quote the shit out of this.
Dr. Loveless
Ah, Kim du Toit. What a trip down Memory Lane, reading that shit again.
Fortunately, in Googling around to see what he’s been up to, I found this thing of beauty:
http://philosoraptor.blogspot.com/2003/11/dutoitification-of-western.html
Also too, this nomination of him as one of America’s Worst Bloggers:
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/25/the-worst/
You’re welcome.
FlipYrWhig
@Patricia Kayden:
Isn’t this the appeal of _300_?
Rosie Outlook
@shortstop: Those true conservatives may get a nasty surprise. Most insurance companies want several years worth of weight records for that surgery, which is very expensive , and if they can find even a hint that you bulked up on purpose–they won’t pay.
I know a lady who recently had the surgery . You have to take classes about it beforehand. Her class had several people who would be having their 3rd or 4th surgeries. She did not know how their insurance companies felt about that.
Cassidy
@Jay: He is an immigrant from South Africa and moved prior to apartheid ending, if I recall. Supposedly he was in the Army their; I believe they had compulsory service at the time, according to him. Anyway, once he moved to the states, he became a consultant to various retail chains, mostly it seems in grocery, and complained about his gout.
Mister Harvest
@Mnemosyne: My wife uses the power tools, I cook, and if anyone says that I’m insufficiently masculine, I’ll brutally and savagely… ignore them, because who listens to weirdos like that in the first place?
shortstop
@Dr. Loveless: Find anything more recent than 2005? Never mind…I’ll have a look round.
1badbaba3
@General Stuck: mor free stuf plz
RaflW
Any amount of time we spend talking about this among the massive crop of GOP idiots is time we’re not discussing the various ways we can tell the NRA to fuck itself sideways.
Seriously, the NRA is the target. Not some d-level blog-starlet.
UmYeah
@Jay:
He hung out on the Idiotarian Rotweiler which to this day is the biggest collection of whackjobs hitherto known.
Lyrebird
@The Dangerman: I’m just as baffled, but the writer is clearly and fiercely promoting her antifeminist delusions and keeping reality at bay… Srsly, does she have a memory problem? When in the last 100 yrs has there been any other sort of gender bias than Lots More Women in the field of elementary education?
That she needs to spout these delusions now as some sort of answer to this tragedy… that’s simply because she’s got no morals and no sense, since if she had either she woulda saved it for another day..
Lyrebird
@Rosie Outlook:
Love it!!!
And hey, one of the points I try to get through to my students is that whenever they read a neuroscience article regarding gender differences, they should remember that the bulk of these studies (using MRI, etc) screen out left-handers and ambidextrous folks at the outset (for technical reasons), so we shouldn’t take the results as rock-solid descriptions of everyone.
russell
sorry, but i’m not reading the kim du toit crap again.
fuck it.
Mike D.
The Pussification of the Western Male by Kim du Toit
That HAS to be an ironic, made-up nom de plume.
g
We have become a nation of women.
Would that it were so.
g
Does this twit understand anything about how job classification and salary scales work?
Rhetorical question, I know, but – is this idiot really trying to claim that all teachers get paid the same, no matter what their level of certification and training are?
It’s not true, of course, it’s much more complicated. But let’s say it were – is she trying to claim that no men want to work in that field because of equal pay?
Jason
Clue: elementary school teacher has been a woman’s profession since approximately forever. What good old days are Charlotte Allen thinking of?
Rosie Outlook
@Lyrebird: I didn’t know that. Why would southpaws and the ambidextrous mess up the study?
Omnes Omnibus
@Rosie Outlook: For sinister reasons.
Higgs Boson
@FlipYrWhig:
If only public school teachers were something other than a buncha
feminazi union thugs.
There, that’s better.
rea
@Lurking Canadian: “Burnside may have been at Antietam, but that’s the first time I’ve ever seen the poor guy associated with a union victory.”
Beat Longstreet at Knoxville. Corps commander in Grant’s Overland Campaign. The Crater might have been a huge victory but for Meade’s last-minute insistance on using white troops rather than the black troops that had rehearsed the assault.
Ash
I like how the guy who wrote that piece of shit screed is asking for donations for his disabled wife on his website.
Ken
“In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother…”
I’m sure that Christians in general and Catholics is particular would not object to this view.. oh, nevermind.
Ajaye
Sorry, can’t resist the allure of going Godwin here. Anyone remember how the nazis called germany the fatherland?