Operation Pouty Face

I did a lot of research on human trafficking and modern slavery before Mike Kupari and I wrote Swords of Exodus. It is a horrible, evil, and surprisingly gigantic thing. One thing I’m fairly sure of about the kind of people who do that sort of thing for a living, is that they really don’t give a shit about a bunch of American movie stars taking pouty selfies of themselves holding up signs with hash tag give our girls back. The disapproval of fat, soft, Americans on Facebook really doesn’t move them. They care about getting paid or getting killed, that’s about it. The self-righteous pouting is useless.

Don't tell me about it, got tell your husband. He's the one with the red phone.
Don’t tell me about it, go tell your husband. He’s the one with the red phone.

For the idiot libprog pussies with the selfies, the world is a violent place, filled with violent men. If you actually want something to be done about these evil people, maybe you shouldn’t bitch, whine, and moan every time our military takes action against evil people. It seems odd to me that the same people demanding military action for this are the same ones that complain about military action for anything else. Oh, but wait, I forgot, the left has no overriding principles, and to them violence is always bad unless their guy does it, and evil is relative depending on how it trends on Twitter.

This kidnapping event made the news, but this sort of thing happens every day somewhere in the world. You’re shocked and outraged about this, but that just shows how little you know about the subject. There are plenty of outrageous acts of evil out there to choose from. You can take useless photos of yourself holding up a sign, but it will do nothing other than prove to your fellow idiots that you care so hard.

You want to actually do something? You can demand that America truly be World Cop and swoop in to kill all the bad people every time they do something bad somewhere… Only if you really want that, then you probably shouldn’t bitch continually about the American military doing violent things to violent people. The problem is in reality we couldn’t afford to kill every bad person, we couldn’t pull it off anyway, and it isn’t really our problem.

Real men don't punch out their wives either. And Hugo Chavez's political machine just "allocated" girls. Totally different.
Real men don’t punch out their wives either. And Hugo Chavez’s political machine just “allocated” girls. Totally different.

But if your selective outrage is really up in arms about this one, movie stars with the hash tag, I’ve got a simple solution for you. Take some of your millions of dollars and hire some mercenaries to go into Africa to shoot all the members of Boko Haram. I wonder how that would trend on Twitter. #gurkhaskillscumbags

But the left hates the private sector, so hiring Blackwater (or whatever they are named this week) to gleefully give slavers some stylish new 5.56 body piercings is out of the question. So we’re back to being useless or taking military action. And if we drop Navy SEALs on these assholes, you guys really need to think through how come it is okay for our guys to kill these woman abusing assholes, but not other woman abusing assholes. Those assholes, left wingers invite to speak at Ivy League colleges.

The real solution? Nigeria is one of dozens of screwed up countries. If Nigeria wants to be truly safe from slavers and madmen, it is going to require the Nigerians defend themselves from assholes, and if the Nigerian government won’t do it, then the Nigerian government needs to be replaced by Nigerians who want something better. For the thousands of other evil events that don’t trend on Twitter, replace Nigeria with whatever lawless hellhole country is in question and you get the same answer. People get freedom when they demand it for themselves.

 

Real Men provide their wives and daughters with guns so they can shoot kidnappers in the face. Real Countries have laws and exterminate slavers like vermin.
Real Men provide their wives and daughters with guns so they can shoot kidnappers in the face. Real Countries have laws and exterminate slavers like vermin.

On the Real Men Don’t Buy Girls campaign… Holy shit… Seriously? That is so blindingly obvious that it takes a campaign on Twitter? “OMG! I was totally buying some child brides for my harem and then I saw that Ashton Kutcher said slavery was bad! LOL. I would have been soooo embarrassed!” said no Saudi prince ever.

Sometimes I wish that Exodus was a real organization—a bunch of warriors dedicated to brutally killing slavers and evil warlords in the places where law has broken down and chaos rules—only in real life I bet the morons holding up the signs on Twitter would complain about what horrible violent cismale gendernormative colonialists they were. They’d probably come up with a catchy hash tag or something.

Writers for Life Workshop
Larry shoots stuff for charity, THE VIDEO!

458 thoughts on “Operation Pouty Face”

  1. and sadly we have your own little terrorists called gangs here. but when we do something about them all we hear is what a good boy/girl they are. drives me nuts

    1. As I recall, we recently had a White Hispanic that did something about gang violence in HIS neighborhood…

        1. They made it up for George Zimmerman. 🙂 (no, seriously, the NYT called him that. So apparently, if you are warm beige like me, but don’t confirm to the left’s racist stereotypes of what every race should be, they have to make a new box to put you in)

      1. An interesting concept for a story: one’s race literally changes depending on good or bad thoughts, like The Hulk. If The Hulk thinks about smashing the wrong stuff, he turns bright orange and sirens go off from his ears. Jekyll and Hyde? He becomes weak and normal if he tries to kill and monstrous when he’s having tea or volunteering in a soup kitchen, and then he tries to kill, and then…

  2. The problem we’ve got, Larry, is the same problem we had in Rwanda; really; the domestic political costs of American soldiers killing subSaharan blacks is pretty much insupportable, no matter how much they may need a good dose a killin’ and no matter how evil the result of us not killing them.

    Now, Obama, interestingly enough, is much better placed to order us in than any previous president in the last 40 years or so; though I wouldn’t entirely discount the Nigerian army if we did, and I would presume that some numbers of them are probably on the side of Boko Haram.

    In reply to the pic up there, I might add that real men don’t redeem slaves, because it just incites the slavers to take more of them.

      1. As an Israeli, I completely agree. Though, to be fair, the Shalit deal was but the last (so far) in a line of shameful deals, so the previous government, the one that concluded this deal, is not solely to blame.

      1. Thing is, this isn’t really our business and, even if it were, nothing we can or are likely to do will be effective. On the other hand, we _could_ tell the Christians. mostly Igbo and Ibibio, “Secede again; we’ll support you this time and turn a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing you’ll have to engage in.” And the Igbo are far and away the _most_ capable people in Subsaharan Africa. They could make a real country. Fairly prosperous one, too, what with the oil for starter capital. Wouldn’t help these kidnapped girls but could prevent future kidnappings.

    1. Except
      A: Obama doesn’t have the balls to actually give troops the orders that would count: “Find the enemy. Kill them. Save the hostages. Air support will be provided as called for.”

      B: If Obama DID give the orders, the troops would be under such idiotic ROE that they’d accomplish little and some of them wind up dead. Because “Public relations, and me not being called names by the EU and African leaders, is more important than peas- er, soldiers lives.”

  3. The only thing worse than child slavery is Conservatives mocking a noble Hollywood Twitter campaign.

    Shut up and get back to work paying your taxes, you hatey hate mongering International Lord of Eeeevile. Jeeze!

    1. Oh yes, how “noble.” Making a completely useless gesture in order to feel good about yourself-that’s a “progressive” (so-called) to a “T.”

      1. I gotta put a /sarc/ on it? I thought the hatey hate mongering thing would have been a dead giveaway.

        Admittedly, it is getting harder to lampoon the Left every day. No matter how wacky a thing you come up with, they top it.

      2. Yea, Phantom, you really do need to use a /sarc/ tag.

        I’ve been guilty of watching sarcasm flying over my head as well.

      3. Seriously? You missed the sarcasm of “you hatey hate mongering International Lord of Eeeevile”??

        Maybe you should stop and reflect a bit before you post again.

    2. BTW: conservatives mocking your precious little Hollywood morons; THAT’S “worse than child slavery”??? Bizarre set of “progressive” (so-called) priorities you have there, pal.

      1. Bwa ha ha ha ha haaaa!
        Love it!
        Hey, he’s got a pen and a phone, right? Let’s see what he can get done.

      2. Just think of Boko Haram as an African branch of Tea Party and unleash IRS audit on them. That’ll teach them.

      1. Not just any line will do. It must be a red line. Blue ones don’t really instill fear in anyone.

    3. Nobel, taking 2 seconds to take a stupid, worthless picture is what passes for nobility now????? Get a grip. Next we should call them hero’s for tweeting a tweet. God forbid when the west has to face a real enemy, twitter campaigns won’t do much in the face of men with guns.

      1. I seriously think that you are underestimating the power of love and understanding.

        If we just show the slavers love (because they obviously came from poor backgrounds were abuse was common place) they will find the inner child within them.

        Then it will be healed and they realize how horrible they have been and stop selling children.

        They will even go forth and spread the joys of love and understanding among the slaver community.

        This love will infect them like a virus and make all the world a brighter place, with sunshine, rainbows and rivers of chocolate that children play gaily next to for days on end with nary a cloud in the sky.

          1. Since they have “Evil Oliver (A Subsidy of Happy Corp)” in Whimsyshire, i wonder if we can petition Blizz to get the cute cuddly “Larry, International Lord of hate” Teddy bear in there too?

        1. Helping them find their inner child is a good idea. What part of the body is it in? Do we use a sword, a machete, or some other sharp instrument?

  4. I remembered how the Left whined about the Taliban but then whined about the evil Bush who attempted to do something about them. [Frown]

    1. Obviously, Chimpy McBushHitler using the military to kill Talibani is infinitely more evil than the Taliban killing their own women and blowing up thousand year old monuments!

      Check Your Privilege!

      (man this crap makes my head hurt)

      1. Given his Texas background vs Leonard’s more… upscale urban upbringing it’s much more likely that would have been Sheldon using sarcasm with Leonard being the nonplussed one.

    2. Lets get a few thing straight. These Muslim warriors are trying to win favour with Allah and they know that should they be killed they will go straight to Muslim heaven. It is our sacred duty to facilitate that meeting and the left should be thrilled that us conservatives are willing to send these creeps to Allah and to use our own ammunition.

  5. I’m curious about the legality of hiring a paramilitary organization to go shoot up Boko Haram. Is that against some international law? Is it more illegal than a country sending military people in? Is it more legal than just going over there myself and doing it? Who decides whether it is okay or not? If I went over and did it myself, would/could the US govt put me in prison or something?

    1. It would probably violate the conventions against mercenaries. Tom could answer better than I, of course.

      Damn, I wish M-Day existed…

    2. I think the applicable law would be Nigerian law. Of course, they couldn’t be mercenaries because that would be illegal. Instead, they’d be a private security and crime prevention company.

      BTW, I think they really wouldn’t function as mercenaries under international law. They’re not participating in a war between recognized states, but attacking private criminals.

      1. Would it be illegal to take up a collection from private citizens to hire Blackwater( or the org de jure) to go kill these ass sucks? And would it really matter in the long run when you read the stats that the VD rates in 10 to 14 year old Russian girls is up by 40%. ?

    3. “I’m curious about the legality of hiring a paramilitary organization to go shoot up Boko Haram. Is that against some international law? ”

      I am a lawyer, but this is not my field, so I cannot answer the question authoritatively. I can tell you this: that when the British put their mind to wiping out the slave trade (and it was wiped out during the first half of my lifetime, mind you) they hired privateers to hunt down the slavers.

      You heard me. Pirates verses slavers! What a great movie that would make.

      (Larry, you can use that idea for your next novel. Please.)

      1. I can see this plot, and we can even do a hat tip to the Brits with the commanding officer. Navy guy deployed in captures a band of desperate men, forced from their homes (by our slavers), who have taken to piracy (but not murder and the like “redeemable pirates”). A disastrous boarding action, caused by the betrayal of an influential political type who profits from the slave trade, leaves our officer disgraced, wanted and with only a shadow of the crew he had. He unleashes the pirates to avenge his crew, recover their families and redeem the honor of his country by defeating the forces of evil. Gunfire and explosions later, pirates return to their homes and evil political type falls into a lake of fire.

      2. Ummm..not exactly. Though tranzilaw has attempted to use piracy to justify universal jurisdiction, as piracy was so “heinous,” in fact, to the victims, piracy and privateering were usually indistinguishable. The difference is that privateers, being licensed by a state, were responsible to that state for their conduct, which made the state responsible to oversee and police them. It was the lack of a state over them that made pirates hosti generis, not what they did or where they did it.

        Of course, one could cross over from one status to the other and many did.

        1. Curiosity: Would it be practical for a state sponsoring privateers to use its oversight to enforce “law of war” codes of conduct upon them? If a state could effectively do so, would such a power need privateers in the first place? Are privateers just an excuse for paying one group of criminals to target another? If part of the motive for hiring privateers is their ability to operate outside the parameters of the power’s own forces, wouldn’t imposing codes of conduct eliminate a great deal of their efficacy?

      3. Absolutely practical. The thing with privateers, though, the reason that they were used, was that they’re _cheap_, and can even make the state a profit. (Yes, yes, occasionally plausible deniability cropped up there, too.)

        1. They may be financially cheaper. However, I’m not sure they’re practical if your organization can’t tolerate their normal tactics and behavior. Obviously, if you can deny responsibility, you can tolerate their tactics (practically speaking), but I don’t know if that would fly. Though, I suppose that’s what a CIA is for.

      4. What about land-pirates like the East India Company? They didn’t wear eye-patches or anything but they dressed like pirates and wore wigs ‘n’ shit.

      5. Sometimes you encounter a gun-grabber who claims that the Second Amendment only applies to the weapons that were in use at the time (“Sure, you can have a muzzle-loading musket, but not a scary black rifle”).

        I like to point out that at the time of ratification private individuals could, and did, own fully armed and crewed ships of war, which (just to twist the knife) they operated for profit.

      6. The United States never signed the treaty outlawing privateers. Congress still has constitutional authority to issue letters of marque and reprisal.

        1. One of the plot points of Poul Anderson’s THE STAR FOX was that the world government failed to forbid its member states from issuing letters of marque and reprisal, and the main characters get in their privately built and own warship and go. It’s is a pretty good story.

      7. For the record, the last instance of an actual privateer I’ve heard of was surprisingly recent. Within living memory, in fact: the US War Department commissioned the Goodyear Blimp to patrol coastal waters, on the lookout for German U-Boats during the Second World War. In an age before radar and nuclear submarines, this made sense: long visual range, good radio conditions, extreme loiter times – it was a natural fit. I think they carried a rifle or two, but their biggest weapons were binoculars and radios. Congress drew up a full-on Letter of Marque to make it official.

        So, that means that the last time anyone commissioned a privateer, they wound up with an airship hoisting the black flag to hunt Nazis.

        Truly, it does not get better than that.

  6. I so totally agree. Of course, the whole liberal concept that all people are basically good is flawed, and of course since all people are good, this whole picture thing will make the bad guys feel guilt and of course they will return the girls to their families and make nice. Dudes, that is not gonna happen. The only way to cure this problem is to eliminate the cause, and I don’t think your signs and righteous indignation is going to cut it.

    1. Of course it’s not going to do any good and of course the girls aren’t going to be returned. Boko’s head shithead has already released a statement that he’s going to sell the girls into slavery.

    2. But, come on, we just need more famous people to say it’s bad.

      If enough people come out against it in twitter, then we can channel all the positive energy and feed it to the care bears who can do the care bear stare and cause all the mean bad people to understand how mean and bad they are and then free all the girls while crying a public apology!

      It’s mean hatey mchatertons like you who prevent this from becoming a reality!

    3. This isn’t about getting the girls back or even about shaming the slavers into rethinking their life.

      This is about preening for the public and showing their audience that they really, really care. It’s signalling their status as members of the elite club of caring liberals.

      1. This. It also explains why there will never be a #RealMenDon’tSupportMurderousDictatorships campaign.

        (I was just about throwing things at the TV when I saw Penn on the televised bits of Chavez’s funeral, looking so serious.)

      2. It’s about signaling to anyone with the sense that God gave a gnat that they are self-absorbed nitwits.

        I would love to see a President who would react to one of these barbarisms by sending out a team to collect heads. Extra points if, when the Usual Suspects demanded an explanation he said “Well, Delta Force needed the exercise”.

        Not gonna happen. A Republican would get impeached, and no Democrat understands military force and its employment well enough to avoid turning the whole thing into a neon lit, gas powered Mongolian clusterfuck.

        *sigh*

  7. I’m with you on this one, Larry. Completely. I really wish Exodus was a real organization. I’d probably enlist.

    But hey, we don’t really need military action, because we’ve totally got Twitter pictures of celebrities holding up signs. Who needs to shoot bad guys in the face when you’ve got Sean Penn holding up a sign?

    I really feel bad that I used to be one of these jerkoffs. At least it wasn’t a permanent condition.

    1. I’d probably enlist.

      Same here. I’d probably die, and fairly fast, but at least I’d feel like I wasn’t just wasting my life.

      1. I’m 40 years old and out of shape. I’d be among the first to die. But I’d rather be cannon fodder for a noble cause than live to a ripe old age because I was too scared to do something.

      2. That could be a story in it’s own right. A group of aging, retired, partially crippled, what-have-you men… Deciding that some things -are- worth dying for, and by god, they’re going to stand, and -fight-. Most, almost all of them die. But not without results…Done right, it could be -Glorious-.

    2. I’d sign on in a heartbeat. I’d probably die just as fast, but at least I’d die doing what I believed was the right thing.

    3. You don’t need to sign on to kill people, gosh….

      We will start a letter writing campaign. we can send angry letters telling them how wrong they are!! YEAH!

      It will be beautiful, (lip quiver)

      1. Good point. But I mean business, so I’ll be sure to make sure my letter uses very harsh language.

        I don’t want these turdnuggets to understand that I’m not playing around!

    1. HEADLINE: Progressive science fiction writers make stunning claim they are against rape and child slavery.

      Said one author: “So many cis-het white men are in favor of that we felt we had to speak up.”

      Go to SFWA.org for more details and also how to accurately depict non-whites in your misogynist SFF without being a typically white racist.

  8. By the way, a pic of the First Lady Klingon beheading some slaver with her batleth might have been more effective. What I really want to know is how she gets her brow ridges all smooth like that. You can hardly see ’em.

    1. On behalf of the Klingon-American community, I’m offended 😉 *That* woman has *no* honor.

      (Yeah, yeah; I remember Lursa and B’etor. I can also tell the difference between “bug” and “feature”.)

      1. Is that like how Klingon software is never “released”, it FIGHTS its way out over the dead bodies of its software engineers? 😛

      2. Good move on the discretion, Shadowdancer. Klingons stop when you’re dead. Ferengi just keep on suing your descendants. And ancestors, pets, neighbors….

      3. @Henchman

        Yeah, I thought about it for a few seconds because if nothing else, Lady Hissyface and her hubby have run the greatest scam in recent history, and their supporters can’t give them up because they’ll then look like complete and total idiots. But you can get a Ferengi to uphold their side of their deal, especially if you outwit them; and they have a form of honor that goes along with profit. I can’t quite think of an example that would fit the Zeroes, not with their brazeness.

    1. No need for that. Watch:

      END SLAVERY AND KIDNAPPING NOW BY TYING A YELLOW RIBBON AROUND THE OLD OAK TREE AND THEN GO TAKE A NAP!!!

      See, that takes care of that. Problem solved. Why would anyone need guns? Ish.

      Hasn’t anyone read about how we defeated Hitler by binding an entire forest of oak trees?

  9. Thank you. Saw a Change.org email on it and went WTF, who is going to care about a freaking petition on this. As usual, you put it so much better than I could have.

      1. Well, you see, kidnapping children for sexual purposes apparently isn’t innately political.

        To an adversarial ear, the libertines’ insistence that we tolerate diversity when it comes to sexual practices sounds inclusive of that sort of stuff.

        Or it could be the school of thought that feels that ‘culture’ excuses a multitude of sins, presuming we aren’t talking the western Judeo-Christian sort of ‘sin’.

        In fairness, many of the signers might dispute other conclusions of mine of what is and isn’t a terrorist organization, worth destroying on general principles.

    1. “Well, you see, kidnapping children for sexual purposes apparently isn’t innately political.”

      Of course it isn’t it has a long and ongoing cultural history with the “religion of peace” you see.

      1. I was thinking as much about those that cannot be discouraged from kidnapping and murdering youngsters for jollies. Those are in just about every population.

        Growing up, they were more active in my neck of the woods than Muslim raiders or communist guerrillas. The Indian wars had also been long over. So the murdering pederasts tend to be on my mind more than the others.

        I also see parallels between pederasts and others who refuse to subordinate their sexual desires to an objective view of right and wrong. As in a view of morality in sexual matters that is not derived from sexual desires.

  10. I’m of two minds about this. Because slavery = bad. Slavery = very, very bad. And I have no problem starting a hashtag or talking to friends or whatever is needed in order to make sure that people are aware that slavery still exists and that it needs to be fought. It’s scary as hell how many idiots out there have no clue this is going on. Because, Beyonce! And stuff!

    So with that in mind, I have no problem with the hashtag campaign. I think it’s awesome. Hell, I’ll even support it and take a sad selfie of myself doing the same if it gets people to pay the f**k attention, dammit.

    What I find ridiculous is that the left does crap like this… and then that’s where it ends. For them, “awareness” is the goal. We all need to be aware that slavery exists, that these children were stolen, that very bad things are happening elsewhere in the world. We need to be aware and we need to feel really, really bad about it and we need to tell each other how really, really bad we feel, but that’s about it. Goal accomplished. Feel Bad and Awareness is the end-game. Nothing more needs to be said.

    Except “check your privilege,” I guess, when it’s brought up that maybe we should be doing something about this. Not just “spreading awareness.”

    1. Pretty much. Once side is about caring but never accomplishing anything. The other side deals with reality, but is then accused of being uncaring.

      1. Honestly, I AM uncaring… I’m uncaring about the assholes who stole those girls. May they rot in hell (at least they’ll be well prepped for it with lots of little ventilation holes to help deal with the heat) and have their carcasses eaten by carrion beetles.

      2. I don’t think that’s quite right, Mr. Correia. It seems that the Left is biased toward avoiding immediate conflict and pain and delaying it as long as possible. However, the Right tends to confront conflict and pain, seeking a decision.

        In this scenario, the hashtag campaign avoids the conflict of sending in men with guns, and the pain of shame from doing nothing. True, it is illusory. Boko Haram isn’t going to stop kidnapping people, so the conflict is ongoing. Also, twitter doesn’t free slaves. However, the costs are primarily emotional, so a strategy that gives one the feeling of having done something successfully avoids the shame.

        1. Actually, the Right confronts conflict and pain, seeking RESOLUTION. As in, “Our Ma Deuce made red jelly out of those slavers. The slaves are now free. The slavers, being very dead, are now less likely to continue capturing slaves. Situation RESOLVED.” 😀

      3. Decision/Resolution, either way. The point being that people on the Right are generally more comfortable with getting the thing over with and/or answered than they are with leaving it in the air while people on the Left are generally more comfortable putting off a confrontation.

      4. I disagree with you all.

        The left is about raising awareness, then hosting FUNDRAISERS. To pay for more parties where they can preen and get laid.

    2. Consider one more thing: if raising awareness really worked, then is the Left guilty by omission when it doesn’t raise awareness of other forms of evil? What about giving lots of coverage to certain conflicts and totally disregarding others?

      For instance, 200,000 dead in Sudan got less press than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which less than 25,000 people have died . . . in the past forty years .

      In Syria, over 100,000 people have died, and no one gave a damn until Pres. Obama made his red-line gaffe.

      In CAR there is widespread civil war with horrors that gets hardly a trace of media coverage.

      In Iraq and Pakistan Christians are targeted with impunity.

      I could go on.

      The truth is that Boko Haram have been active for years. The only reason why they became front page news is because of the abduction of these girls. If they had killed a few dozen civilians, instead, no one of note would be talking about them.

      1. Last year, at the Australian SF convention Continuum, N.K. Jemisin claimed Australia wasn’t a safe place for people of color…

        …a few years after over 5 million people died in the 2nd Congo War.

        This year’s Continuum Guest of Honor is Jim Hines. So get ready for more SFF-less SFF. I can see his speech now:

        “Greetings from America with hugs and kittens and googly goblin eyes. My, my… you Ozzies have a lot rapes, dontcha…”

      2. I borrowed this comment for a Facebook debate because it makes a really good point and it does so in a pretty cogent manner.

      3. Apparently they killed 65 young boys once and nobody made a single tweet about it.

        (They also killed hundreds of people while kidnapping those girls, but hey, they were likely non girls.)

    3. Leftism is the sin that looks like a mental disease. It is the state of mine where an otherwise grown up man pretends he is an infant who cannot form the concept of cause and effect. He then demands the effect without the cause.

      This is true from the lowest to the highest of their thought. They want prosperity without the hard work and Anglo-American laws protecting private property which alone make prosperity possible.

      They want peace without the good armed men ready to suffer the hell of war and eager to work painful harm on evil armed men which alone makes peace possible.

      They want equality of law without the blindness of justice to matter of race and creed and rank and color which alone makes equality possible.

      They want equality of women without the chivalry and chastity and other uniquely Christian social artifacts which alone make equality of women possible.

      They want modern science without the rigorous objectivity of thought, the rejection of consensus and the academic independence of inquiry which alone makes modern science possible.

      They want a universe without a deity to create it. They want a moral code without an objective source of virtues to create it.

      They want the benefits of civilization, but without the Greco-Roman philosophy, the Judeo-Christian values, and the Anglo-American law without which civilization is the hell of vice and tyranny in the hellhole of misery and poverty (cf. ancient Babylon, modern Red China).

      They want an flying unicorn pony with rainbow magic sparkles to fly them to the moon which they want to be made of green cheese and they want it NOW.

      1. In other words they have identified success with white men, want that success, but without the white men. Bit of a sticky wicket there, as Omar Khayyam said.

        Funny how they never stray far from that which they hate. In fact they seem to dote on us, like chewed gum dotes on window sills. Too bad there’s no more new continents. Cuz, really, one of us should leave.

        Looking forward to the first WisCon SF convention aboard their feminist-designed and built space-station “Safe Space.”

        Mebbe about the time the sun burns out.

      2. I don’t think it’s the white men exactly. It’s more materialist than that. Success is associated with the products of success, the things that people who are successful have. Computers, tools, houses and such. If we give people computers, tools and houses, then they will be successful (not poor). The trouble is, that success is a result, and the products of success are a secondary result. Houses don’t cause houses, nor do computers cause computers. Certain modes of action and models of behavior result in success, computers and houses.

        The materialistic outlook says that the things are responsible for their own existence ( but doesn’t say it because it sounds stupid) and the behavior of people, rather than the behaviors of individuals are responsible for the existence of things. Generational poverty is a disease, true, but it’s not malnutrition, it’s a behavioral disorder.

      3. You know, I really really want to like your POV – and then you trot out the Christian misogyny crap. And speaking as a Christian woman, let me tell you it’s massively offensive. You have noticed, I hope, that at no point does Jesus ever demean and oppress women? All that biblical oppression of women comes from the OT and people who weren’t Jesus. It’s Christian men like you who give the religion a bad name, and so much fodder for the truly appalling progressive left.

        1. You have noticed, I hope, that at no point do I ever demean and oppress women. Quite the opposite. You make an accusation I frankly do not understand.

          My comment was this: “They want equality of women without the chivalry and chastity and other uniquely Christian social artifacts which alone make equality of women possible.”

          Please look at what the words actually say. There are three statements:

          1. Without chivalry, no equality for women.

          Chivalry is the mystical adoration of men who are willing to defend women with their lives rather than exploit them or allow see them exploited.

          It is a devotion to the proposition that women not be demeaned.

          We live in a world where chivalry is dying. In its place we have a porn-drenched abattoir of sexual malfeasance. I humbly submit that women in this environment have more legal equality but less real equality than the average women of your grandmother’s day enjoyed. Being used and abandoned by one man after another is not equality.

          Once chivalry is entirely dead, we will treat women the way Muslims treat them.

          The statement is the opposite of demeaning. It is a call for men to adore and uplift the station of women.

          2. Without chastity, no equality for women.

          What we have now is a sexual free for all. The inevitable outcome of a free for all is that the childbearing sex is stuck with the duties of child-rearing, with little or no help from the menfolk.

          The rate of venereal disease goes up, the suicide rate for women goes up. Daughters are raised with no father figures, and an astronomical number of daughters are killed in the womb.

          Even in states where prostitution is legal, whores are beaten and controlled by their pimps. The culture of unchastity leads to the culture of abortion. Paramours are not husbands but much more ruthless both to their womenfolk and to her children by other men.

          THAT lifestyle is oppression, because it leaves women helpless to male sexual predation. Chastity is rescue from oppression.

          If you think I am saying that only women need be chaste and not men, you are inventing words that are not on the page. I am Catholic: The Ten Commandments apply to both sexes with equal force.

          3. These and other cultural artifacts are uniquely Christian.

          Forgive me, but I cannot see how this statement is insulting, or even controversial.

          In India or Babylon, or China, or among the nightmare empire of the Aztecs, women enjoyed less respect and fewer rights Christendom bestowed even as early as the Middle Ages.

          I assure you no Roman matron of the pagan days had the authority of an abbess or the founder of an order of nuns. An the ancient Greeks kept their women in harem, or something like.

          To sum up: what I said was that votes for women came out of Anglo American law. I called this ‘ a uniquely Christian artifact’.

          Without chivalry, men will abuse women. The women are equally free to abuse men back, but since we don’t bear children, the cost to us is less.

          Without chastity, the family structure suffers, and women are again exploited and unduly burdened.

          If you found this offensive, I blame myself for being unclear. The offense was unintentional.

  11. Larry, absolutely spot on here, are you familiar with ourrescuedotorg I saw them at the Salt Lake Comicon last month and stopped and talked with one of their guys, they seem like a pretty legit operation, trying to do their part.

  12. Real Men Don’t Buy Girls… But apparently they give them quaaludes and alcohol and then rape them.
    Do these Twitter hastags remind anyone else of “Free Tibet” bumper stickers?

    1. Haven’t you seen the news lately? Real men don’t buy girls… they hire boys to act in their films and then rape the hell out of them. Apparently.

    2. Don’t see many of those. More often “Free Darfur” stickers the libprogs put on their smart cars to feel like they’re “doing something.”

      Which is what liberalism is about these days: feeling good. Be it feeling good about stopping perceived social injustice from bigots (like Larry), feeling good about stopping genocide by “raising awareness”, or feeling good about helping the poor with handouts they just get dependent on. There’s no logic. There’s not even any selflessness, no matter what they say. It’s all about doing things that make them feel good.

      1. I was at the college one day with my wife enrolling for the next semester when we got approached by a kid who said, “Excuse me, would you guys like to sign a petition to stop the genocide in Darfur?” I looked at my wife, who promptly initiated the “Oh, here we go again” eye-roll, and I said, “What do you think, Dear? Should me and my boys mount up an M-1 Abrams and go put a stop to some genocide?”
        The kid turned about five shades of pale as his brain vapor-locked. After a second, I just said, “I’ll tell you what, you have a great day.” We stepped around him and moved on.

      2. Had a few of those on campus. Best one was a bunch of a-holes passing out flyers about their “Protect der Chilluns” group. I asked them if they were planning on arming teachers to the level of the crazies trying to shoot up schools. I really wish I had a picture of the face of this guy. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to someone dying of an aneurism.

      3. I think that’s what gets to me most on campus (or at science fiction conventions time to time… but lets not go there) since I went back to school isn’t that some people have a stupid opinion… it’s that they can’t even *imagine* that anyone they meet will have a different opinion.

    3. RKW we all buy them some windup buying them returning them and still having to pay. Most of us are smart enough to not treat em as property.

      A smart man pays a premium for qualtity cleanlyness and leases one for an evening or a weekend. Its less hassle in the long run.

        1. As long as the women are consenting, I’ve got no issues with it. It’s a mutually beneficial transaction, the glory of capitalism and all that.

          My problem with it – and I’m not saying anyone here does this or disagrees with me even – are these assholes who push young girls into that life before they’re old enough to even be allowed to consent. Those guys, I want to string up by their short, curly ones and torture until they beg for death.

      1. I think, I hope – that the folks who view prostitution as a problem free economic transaction recognize that it is possible, even common, to compel someone to make free economic choices originating from a terrible set of options. This is true regardless of age.

  13. I’ve got an idea to both deal with the problem and keep the libprog outrage down:

    HIRE some very good mercs to go kill boko haram or whatever his name is and his followers and rescue the girls, but pay a big fat bonus if they’re able to do it while making it look like a totally different group did it.

    Pass the blame, rescue the girls, kill the scumbuckets. Problem solved, libprogs don’t know any better, everybody wins.

    1. I like it but can we have them going in as the libprogs just to mess with their minds to the extreme, who knows maybe it will mess them up so bad that they will take credit for it and start actually doing things because then they will have a name to hold up or lose face. 🙂 Exploding heads. 🙂

      1. Sorry I just realized how unclear that was. Have the mercenaries go in as libprogs, the libprogs can than either be super offended or take the credit and have a reputation to actually uphold somehow or risk losing face.

    2. Wear Waffen-SS uniforms while the killing the Boko Haram lunatics. Film themselves throwing nazi salutes and speaking in bad WWII-movie German over the dead slavers’ bodies.

      Post the vids on you-tube.

      ( disclaimer: I am a libertarian, and not a neo-nazi. But I do like confusing libtards )

  14. By book bombing Bad Penny, Larry has done more to combat slavery than any of these idiots with their selfies.

    1. That depends on how you define “drone,” doesn’t it? Because Hollywood is just chock full of drones…

      1. Hmm…

        That’s a sign of things starting to get very interesting. On the one hand, regions with large amounts of lawlessness *need* to have a local armed citizenry. On the other hand, governments start to get very touchy about that sort of thing because the locals are effectively a local army that the government doesn’t control. And also because once the fighting’s done, the locals don’t always put down their arms.

        How the Nigerian government reacts to the news that the locals are arming up will be very important.

    2. This reminds me of the sign-holding campaign that tipped the balance in favor of the Allies in the European Theater of Operations in WW II.

      That and the 117th motorized division of tough chicks. Their motto: “We Have Always Fought… and We Got the Paintings To Prove It.”

      Plus about 10 gazillion bombs and bullets.

      I’m holding up my own sign right now QUILTbros and bags. Can you read it? It says “Pie-Chart This.”

    3. If Boko Haram is selling these girls for 12 bucks, why isn’t Sean Penn holding a sign offering, like… 15 bucks? I’m sure Penn would be a lot nicer to them and give them back to their families.

      Or the Screen Actors Guild could simply make bulk payments to Boko Haram to not kidnap anyone in the first place. I’m sure Boko Haram would like to live in a nice apt. with lots of blue-rays instead of running around damp forests. They’ve shown they want wives to settle down with – they just don’t know how to properly woo girls due to spending all their money on rocket propelled grenades.

      Why spend 100 million dollars and get people killed when Sean Penn can send in his agent to cut a deal? Who knows, they might end up starring in Hollywood films. See: diversity.

      1. “If Boko Haram is selling these girls for 12 bucks, why isn’t Sean Penn holding a sign offering, like… 15 bucks?”

        Because all that does is make it a more profitable enterprise for the slavers.

        I prefer the solution proposed by Joel Rosenberg — kill the slavers. Kill them, kill the ones that come later, and keep killing slavers until no one wants to be a slavery anymore because it’s not a way to get rich, but a short trip to a shallow, unmarked grave.

      2. Rawlenyanzi, I think Kipling would have liked the half-dozen Martini-Henry Enfields I brought back from the Hindu Kush. I need to do some more research so I can get a set of dies put together to load for it, and I need to learn some gunsmithing to get them in firing order, but when I’m done with them they’ll make a heck of a conversation piece when mounted over my mantle. I did some internet research, and all but one appear to me to be genuine British Army pieces. Although I know that gun dealers everywhere say genuine British Army Enfields in the Hindu Kush don’t exist.

        It pays to be around when an infantry Sergeant Major throws a hissy fit about the TOC closet being full of sh** and starts throwing said sh** into the FOB yard. 😀

      3. “Rudyard Kipling says that’s a bad idea.”
        “Because all that does is make it a more profitable enterprise for the slavers.”

        Ah but what if in very tine fine print the sale contract also said “post sale merchandise exchange complementary anti-personnel cluster munitions included.” ?

  15. Bloody hell – the human race has descended from ‘Deus Vult’ to pouty faces… Orwell missed half the formulation about the ‘rough men’ – it requires the rest of the human race to tolerate them doing their bloody jobs.

    1. Be fair. This isn’t the human race acting like this. It’s a bunch of pampered spoiled childr… adults that have very little grounding in reality. If you look at that particular demographic, this behavior isn’t exactly a low for them. (Please note I’m not defending their actions, I’m just saying that their stupidity could be, and have been, exhibited in many more damaging ways.)

      1. Yep. I’ve read a few things about Sean Penn’s safari into post-Katrina New Orleans. Quite a few people who saw him were a bit upset that he couldn’t do anything to actually help, what with his boat being full of his camera man, sound man, support staff, etc.

  16. Great post, Larry! Real Men Don’t Buy Girls. In Hollywood, though, some do buy opportunities to rape young men. But that’s totally different. :p

      1. Too true. So I guess what they’re really saying is that real men aren’t part of the entertainment industry. Kinda knew that already, though.

  17. I find the notion that the horny, high, bored (and thus prone to violence – ask me how I know) gang that snatched the women from that school are (a) watching the trending hashtag and (b) are worried about it to be hilarious.

    A couple things – I have operated (and not in the Myke Cole sense) in few African countries – finding some candidate bad guys and making certain that you have the ‘right’ bad guys (because in select nations in Africa (and not just Africa) nearly every armed group is responsible for something that would violate the law of war as referenced by the UN) is tough. Solutions that use local forces means that you are hiring your own thugs. No one is clean.

    Why doesn’t the media call it what it is? If you snatch someone out of their home, subdue them, use them sexually, and sell them to someone who compels their labor and sexual availability by force – you are a slaver. This business is common in several places – but since the skin color of the slavers matches that of their victims it doesn’t fit the narrative of privilege. Please note that the slavers were mostly Muslim and their victims mostly Christian – again, this doesn’t match the privilege narrative so it doesn’t get any play.

    Note that this event happened 3 weeks ago and was reported then. Who did anything then? Guess it took a while for caring about this to be cool.

      1. Had the slavers been of a different race the outcry would have been instantaneous and material international action would already have occured. I suppose that it take longer to recognize evil when it doesn’t align with helpful color coding.

  18. Larry,

    Actually, this _should_ be JUST the thing for Sean Penn. He likes personally involving himself in “noble” causes – so long as his entourage and personal photographer is there at his side to tend to his needs and record his greatness in his lowering himself to help.

    So, the guy has the money, he has the means, he has armed himself to the teeth in the past, thus, why not send him?

    It’d be a perfect way to demonstrate that his life isn’t just the calculated posturing of an actor’s method. But, in reality, that he willing to back up his pouty faced sentiment with his own sweat and blood! The optics on this are fabulous! And after wading into the African bush and killing as many Islamists as he could find – all recorded in surround sound HD digital, of course – he could come back and earn millions telling his tale and then starring in a movie about it – with he himself as its star, of course.

    It’d be an absolute win / win for all!

    And if all he does is just hold that stupid sign then that says everything about the “man” he is…

    1. Send him to negotiate for the return the girls. Boko Haram has a tendency I’ve read recently of BEHEADING negotiators. We send him to negotiate, they send us back his headless corpse. works for me

      1. Oh, my GOSH! What a douche! BAD Synova, BAD! 😉

        That’s the problem with Lefties. They can’t tell the difference between a raping, pillaging mob of slavers and thugs and an actual organized military force that fights according to rules and has a governmental mandate to save those who would otherwise get raped and pillaged.

        “If I had a rocket launcher…”
        What’s stopping you from buying one, you moron? You’re a singer/songwriter. You could get a rocket launcher and retaliate with just the cost of the two or three lines of coke you did for lunch today!

        I can just see the ad campaign now. “Hey, Sean Penn! For the cost of ONE line of coke that we all know you did this morning (let’s not kid ourselves, Spicoli), you can equip an entire African village to burn a slaving mob to the ground. Only YOU can make a difference, Hollywood.”

        We can call it, “From white lines to red lines.”

      2. CombatMissionary, that was my thought as well. RPG’s aren’t that expensive, and tend to be widely available in regions where helicopters shoot stuff frequently. Better yet, the guy could buy a .50 in most any gun store legally. Since he’s clearly not doing that, the song is an example of someone being completely full of it.

        I like the idea of arming villagers, but I don’t know if there is sufficient will to fight to make it worthwhile. Seems like a potential Green Beanie job. Hey…you writer types…that sounds like a book I’d buy.

      3. How about a new social awareness campaign?

        #JustSayNoToDo-NothingHollywoodDouchebags

      4. The problem with arming villagers in that part of the world is that they don’t always go back home quietly when they’re done. So while it’s a very good short term solution, it can have bad long-term repercussions. You can end up with a situation like Afghanistan or Somalia with a self-styled “warlord” in every other village. Of course, it’s not at all hard to get weapons in that region. But actively encouraging the formation of militias (what is really needed before those armed villagers can do much good) is always risky.

        And that’s also why the national governments tend to be very wary of local militias as well.

        1. I’m somewhat less worried about that, since one of the issues with warlords is that, since only their people are armed (and maybe trained), they get to dictate.

          If everyone they want to control is also armed, that becomes a dicier proposition.

      5. I seem to remember somebody saying something about a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.

      6. I think that the cause and effect relationship between an armed militia and a free state is sort of non-directional. I was going to say circular, but that’s not right either. Er… coexistent rather than causal… or something.

        It has to do mostly with the status of the people in relationship to those who are rulers. Are people viewed as elements of responsibility and stability? Throughout history and across cultures “citizens” have been armed, and non-citizens have been disarmed. The ruling class has an interest in stability and maintaining the status quo so the men of the ruling class are trusted with the weapons of war as normal attire and everyone with no rational reason to favor the status quo are mistrusted and disarmed.

        If you’ve GOT a free state, then the list of “entitled to weapons of war as daily wear” includes everyone. If you don’t have a free state then arming people is an invitation to civil war on account of people have *reason* to revolt.

        OTOH, the mere action of public proclamation… that YOU are an equal citizen, you are TRUSTED, you are a force for good and stability and OF COURSE you ought to all have weapons of war in order to form protective militias for your school girls… that can (or ought to) do a lot to move a people group or faction into the “stake in ensuring stability” camp.

        So egg->chicken or chicken->egg… who knows?

    1. Man, I don’t think there has ever been a more fitting and appropriate last name than this dude’s. What a jerkoff.

  19. New foreign aid policy:

    If you want aid, you cede all rights to land on a border. (A water border for all non-landbound places). Not as a lease, but as sovreign soil. No, I don’t give a darn how crappy it is: C4, repeat.

    A 10k by 10k empty box can still hold a heck of a lot of conex. You want food aid? Come visit the well-protected ‘proto-Imperial Free City’. Medical? Need a job? Want education in English?

    Stop flushing the money through the existing cities, where the top tier takes their 50%, and the next tier takes -their- 50%, and the lower tier just makes sure it’s all untraceable.

  20. My preferred medium term solution: Arm the villages to so as to stomp raiders.

    Copied from another discussion (involving warlords, but similar applies)
    =======
    Arm and train the villagers, with a focus on what can be done with locally sourced materials and labour in terms of defensive fortification. You have a group of Western trainers work with each village on a medium term (several month) basis. They’d need that for good training time, anyway. IIRC, this was the original mission of the US SOCOM. Hard to overrun slaughter people when they have pre-built defenses and are firing back with a semi-decent level of skill. Even if you succeed, you lose enough that it’s not possible to to go on doing it repeatedly.

    A single village is not capable of seriously attacking others, generally, since it doesn’t have the logistics for it. Make the villages hard targets instead of soft ones. Especially when one has proper defenses (bulwarks and fighting positions which can be planned and prepared well in advance are a major force multiplier), it’s not really feasible.

    I’m talking small arms here, btw. AK47s and RPGs, mostly. Maybe some mortars in fixed positions, as well. The former are so common as to not be worth hijacking by villagers for sale, and the latter are (or can be made to be) an epic pain in the ass to move without the right gear. That means the villages would not be targets for looting, since any attacker would lose more than he gained. It should also be made clear to village leadership that, while ammo resupply would be forthcoming, weapon resupply would be much more limited (prevents them from selling the stuff off for cash).

    An added twist could be a reaction force of helicopter gunships (or better yet, A-10 Warthogs) able to support a village in serious danger and screaming for help.

      1. Well, that *is* sort of their founding concept, after all.

        Or do it per M-Day, Carrera, Kildar…

        I’m sure there’d be plenty of vets willing to help out in the cause of stomping bad guys.

    1. With appropriate support and training, I think this is possible. You don’t need them to be capable of defeating a group like Boko Haram (that’s a big ask), just to be more trouble than it’s worth.

      Of course, eventually, the existence of free villages becomes a threat in itself. Given the comparative strength of forces, not sure how to preserve the gains at that point.

  21. Well at least now we understand the dynamic as to why Ann Leckie and Kameron Hurley think the white chapter of Boko Haram called the GOP want to punch them and drag them behind pick-up trucks as opposed to carrying them away on motorcycles.

    Let us once again congratulate Hurley on her Hugo nomination for “We Have Always Done Jack Shit,” which she continues to do by making youtube videos with pictures of women who look just like someone who might actually rescue those girls…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36rGxLVUQo&app=desktop

    …but they aren’t…

    … and so they won’t.

    Someone like me will. Tweet, tweet little birdies. Don’t forget to pie-chart everything for later study. In this case I think the QUILTbag slice of the pie-chart will be around zero. They won’t whine about that lack of diversity. Why would they – they cry at comedians and maybe clowns too. Better that cis-het men should have their heads shot off. That leaves more precious darlings to write precious books about gender pronouns and bi-sexual medieval PoC who order men around without getting acid thrown in their faces, although Leckie and Hurley apparently have recurring dreams we want to do that.

  22. >>>did a lot of research on human trafficking and modern slavery

    Any reccommendations for texts on the subject? (Not looking for personnal accounts so much as analysis of operations, economy, methods, and valid means of disruption.)

    As an American, I have a great deal of sympathy for those nations trying to root out the use of slaves within their borders. By our own example, it is not easy, quick, nor cheap.

    1. Mike compiled a giant list of links. I doubt I still have it. Honestly, start with google and go from there. Most Americans are stunned to find out how common this is.

      Mike got started on the topic because he met people who were defacto slaves while he was living in Qatar. They bring in workers from the Phillipines, then take away their papers so they can’t leave the country, and they’re trapped. The girls get sold to different employers. If they try to run or cause any trouble the employers just report them, and the secret police make them vanish.

      1. Thanks for the reply – had to go through the google links for a work project a while back, so I know there’s a lot out there.

        “secret polic make them vanish” – *nods* And yet, the line to get a worker’s permit for Qatar, Kuwait, etc, etc, goes out the door, in the PI, Pakistan, whereever. Because the potiental risk is not big as the potiental gain, in so many eyes.

        So long as there are mommas with five kids, another on the way, and no money, and a buyer willing to pay half a year’s workmans wages for the clubfoot girl, we’re going to have slavery in some form.

        This is, of course, not the same thing as the BH thing, but then again, it’s as equally likely to get solved with hashtags.

      2. Happens in south korea, too. My brother got involved with one of the ‘juicy girls’ there and ended up helping to get her new papers.
        Sadly, now she’s just a leech sucking at his wallet from the Philippines.

      3. It happens right here in the US. A guy who’s a friend of the family used to work as an agent for INS (and then later DHS when the latter took over). He was involved in more than one bust of prostitution rings that were basically smuggling sex slaves into the US. I don’t know anything more than that, though, as he really didn’t like to talk about those particular incidents.

    2. It is often not called slavery, but is. Read up on the foreign workers in the Persian Gulf states.

      There is also a massive amount of sex slaves, and these can be found everywhere, including the West. I once saw a video of a police raid in which the slaves were found behind a wall, where each had a tiny niche to sleep in between shifts. Utterly horrific.

  23. Hey, International Lord of Hate (#234, but who’s counting). I dare you to take a picture of yourself with a sign reading “Real Men Arm Girls” 🙂 Because you do, you admitted it several times! Shamelessly even!

    Somebody needs to make some el cheepo Liberator pistols for those poor girls instead of #hashtagging them to death…

      1. The motion for Larry to take a picture of himself holding a sign reading “Real Men Arm Girls” has been seconded. Mr Speaker, if you would direct this assembly we can carry this to a vote.

      2. Maybe at the next Con Larry goes to, my mom could show up with her Winchester model 1200 and get her picture taken with Larry holding that sign? Larry could take photos and then autograph them. I’d pay ten bucks for that. “Larry! Come here and take some of my sweet, sweaty money!”

  24. my sympathy for women has entirely dried up. no one gives a shit when men are abused or killed.

    solve the problem yourselves, ladies.

    1. I totally disagree. This isn’t an either/or thing. Some people are just evil and need to be stopped. Good people protect other good people and shoot bad people. Pretty simple, and it has nothing to do with sex, race, or any other qualifier other than decent human versus scumbag.

      1. True. Just pisses me off that, among other things, Boko Haram has been massacring whole villages, over and over, but THIS is what finally makes the ‘caring people’ give a crap.

      2. I’m on board with you there. Opting out of doing the right thing is for whiny, self-centered bitches.

        Sorry about my swearing today, Larry. I saw women living like slaves in Afghanistan, and I have daughters. Scum like these slavers are why I joined the Army.

        #RealMenVentilateSlavingScum

      3. Quite apart from Obama and Hillary ignoring Boko Haram until the girl kidnappings, they also helped (indirectly) to arm them as well: Much – most? – of Boko Haram’s firepower was sourced from post-Qaddaffi Libya.

        http://ace.mu.nu/archives/349048.php

        [i]Smart power![/i]

      4. Priority target needs to be the AQ pukes that gave them the money to buy these weapons.

        Said targets are probably living in slavery-central, the Arabian peninsula.

        Always always always cut the money and logistics off first.

      5. Honk. honk. To the entire post. Thank you, Larry. In the words of Captain America — when I woke up, they told me we won. They didn’t tell me what we lost. How did it fall apart so fast, and so far? The glorious men and women who gave their lives for the future in WWII. How could we have lost their values so quickly, and so easily? Squandered their courage? Pissed away what their blood bought?

      6. Dear Firehand,

        If Michelle really gave a crap, she wouldn’t be holding up a sign. She’d be saying, “Barak, you are going to get those girls home, and I mean it.”

        Instead, she’s just posturing for fundraising letters to “raise awareness”.

    2. I agree with Larry, unsurprisingly. We have a saying here in Texas in regards to certain types of people “He just needed killin” That fits Boko Haram to a T.

      1. Can’t tell if you have a /s going there or not. Are you mocking or stating that only men should engage in combat?

      2. women are perfectly capable of combat. Negotiation is combat by other means. Also women fight DIRTY.

      1. If you’re talking to Hillary Clinton or Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein or one of those loonbats, maybe. Not ordinary women from a village in the middle of nowhere. Be a man, not a resentful child.

    3. It hurts to read this, but I understand your rage. Boko Haram murdered a bunch of little boys first, and nobody gave a shit about them in the international community. I know it often seems as though crimes against men don’t count, or are even deserved. Please know that I don’t believe that, and I know a lot of good women who don’t believe it either.

  25. This stuff is a sterling example of why I don’t have a lot of respect for slacktivism. Any damned fool can take a selfie with a sign, and post it to the internet. The world is not changed by you taking a selfie with a sign. The world is changed by men and women who are able and willing to take action in response to criminal wrongdoing. Kidnapped girls will not be returned alive and unharmed because Sean Penn took a selfie with a sign. Kidnapped girls will be returned alive and unharmed if the perps realize they have a world of hurt coming after them, and that the only way to avoid the hurt is to return the girls alive and unharmed. Hurting or killing even one girl should earn every single perp a death sentence. We got fucking Osama bin Laden. If the perps knew they were going to get the Osama bin Laden doorbell treatment, they’d perhaps consider returning the girls. Not because a bunch of qweefie actors and celebrities took selfies with signs. But because the perps knew they were going to get two in the chest, one in the head — eventually, no matter how far they ran, no matter where they tried to hide.

  26. I wonder at the raw, brass-balled courage it took to stand there and let someone take a picture of you holding a sign saying something most of the First World agrees about. To stand up in the face of bowel-churning fear over reprisals from basically nobody who can ever reach you or who would ever learn of your existence, or would even care if they did. Given the adversity they faced to make that Twitter pic, is it any wonder that veterans of the Pouty-Face Offensive of ’14 feel that they have done enough, sacrificed all they could for The Cause?
    My hat’s off, Hashtag Army. Your bravery leaves me aghast.

      1. Considering the prefab nature of much of the Left’s “protests” these days, I’d have to say that’s a possibility

  27. These people remind me of a guy I hunted in Afghanistan. Seems like every time I’d drop a JDAM on a bad guy convention in his house, he’d be out watering the daisies. We got a fistful of very bad guys every time, but not him. I seriously think I blew up all his wives and kids and never got him.

    On the other hand, I got all his buddies over the course of about half a dozen houses being blown up, and eventually nobody would work with him anymore. So in the end, he became useless as a bad guy.

    Here’s a campaign we should be pushing for Boko Haram:
    #RealMenDropJDAMSOnBadGuys

      1. There’s always Black Jack Pershing’s way of handling this kind of problem. 😉

      1. Wait, wait, wait. Slogans on armament are a proud American tradition. It’s just about the only way slogans can be effective.

      2. Next time I’ll go up to his house and ask him if I can start a flower garden in remembrance of his membership in the family of personkind. I’ll make sure to have a “Free hugs: One Size Fits All” bumper sticker on the HMMWV. 😀

  28. Thinking about it, I disagree with one of your statements: “People get freedom when they demand it for themselves.” I believe it should read “People get freedom when they enforce it for themselves.” Just demanding it is a bit too OWS. However, your other statements about what Nigerians really need to do if they don’t like what’s happening in their country suggest it’s a phrasing disagreement, not one of intent.

  29. Preach on, Brother Larry! Great job pointing out just how useless most of these Hollywood toolbags are.

    These Boko Haram idiots definitely “just need killin'” as has been said already. They don’t fear any reprisals. Just a few days after their big heist, they went and took about 10 more girls and then sent a video by their leader taunting the government.

    This is hilarious. Found this in the wiki article about Boko Haram:
    In a 2009 BBC interview, Mohammed Yusuf, then leader of the group, stated his belief that the fact of a spherical Earth is contrary to Islamic teaching and should be rejected, along with Darwinian evolution and the fact of rain originating from water evaporated by the sun.[49] Before his death, Yusuf reiterated the group’s objective of changing the current education system and rejecting democracy.[50] Nigerian academic Hussain Zakaria told BBC News that the controversial cleric had a graduate education, spoke proficient English, lived a lavish lifestyle and drove a Mercedes-Benz.

  30. It’s interesting to me that for most of 2011 and 2012 then-Secretary of State, and now-presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton fought tooth and nail against having Boko Haram formally designated as a terrorist organization. As far as a reason for this, all I have to offer is speculation that it’s related to claims that globally speaking terrorism was dead and al-Qaida was in retreat. It’s hard to claim victory right before a presidential election when you’re simultaneously naming more enemies.

    Unless I’m completely misinformed here, Boko Haram roughly translates to “western education is evil.” This is because we allow our daughters to learn to read.

    So Hillary spent time as Secretary of State keeping a crowd from being branded as terrorists, a crowd who believe that it is evil to allow women to fucking read but righteous to sell pre-pubescent girls to grown men to marry. Tell me again how the right is waging a war against women?

    1. FWIW – I fully believe that Boko Haram would oppose educating women period, and considers this a cornerstone of “western” education. They’re scum.

      That said, given the nanny state idiots with no concept of consequence, danger, or courage, who suspend and harass our kids for chewing pop tarts into the wrong shape, and the damage that feminism and leftism have done to and through our schools, I tend to answer “at best” when Glenn Reynolds questions if sending kids to public school is child abuse.

      Education is great. Having men and women who know what they’re doing (and a following generation to pass it on to) is awesome.

      The idiots running the asylum, not so much.

      1. I’m surprised the Islamists haven’t been attacking schools in this country. Remember Beslan?

        (Even more horrible: I’m sure the current administration would be absolutely DELIGHTED at having an American Beslan to exploit in the interest of divisive domestic political point-scoring, just as they did Sandy Hook. Which would only make such a terrorist attack even more attractive, in the eyes of one of the Al Qaeda-affiliated groups…like, for instance, Boko Haram.)

      2. Russia’s got Chechnya just across the border. If we had a similar situation, then something like Beslan might be realistic. But it takes a lot more effort and resources to plan something like that when your target is seperated from you by a massive ocean.

        Of course, that’s also why Iran values its links with Venezuela so much…

    2. Stupid question — I know “haram” is an Islamic term for “divinely forbidden”, but “boko” throws me. Pidgin from “book”?

      1. Be useful, Wikipedia!:
        In the town of Maiduguri, where the group was formed, the residents dubbed it Boko Haram. The term “Boko Haram” comes from the Hausa word boko figuratively meaning “western education” (often said to be literally “alphabet”, from English “book”, but the Hausa expert Paul Newman says it derives from a Hausa word with meanings such as “fraud” and “inauthenticity”)[35][36] and the Arabic word haram figuratively meaning “sin” (literally, “forbidden”).[37][38][39][40] Loosely translated, the name could mean “western education is sinful”, which might symbolizes its strong opposition to anything Western, which it sees as corrupting Muslims.[41] However, this interpretation of the name is disputed.[42] Locals who speak the Hausa language are also unsure what it actually means.[43]

        Dr Ahmad Murtada of the Islamic Studies Department, University of Bayero, Kano has noted in his research of the group that the name of the movement should not be understood literally from the Hausa, but rather as meaning “traversing the Western system of education is haram”.[44]

    3. But… but… but… we have a wage gap! Unless you account for women taking more time off work due to maternity! And Republicans are OK with that! (Aside: What? They’re asking how come we’re not demanding to see more women in the trades destroying their knees and backs like the men? Tell them to SHUT UP!)

  31. People get freedom when they demand it for themselves.

    Why is it that we have to say more? “Well, because not everybody has the means to protect or fight for themselves!” Then why are you trying to dismantle the military? “Because of all the sexual assaults and because of the expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism of America!” Then why do you want us to go to a different country with our military to save everyone? “Because not everybody has the means to protect of fight for themselves!” Then why are you trying to dismantle the military? “Because of all the sexual assaults and because of the expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism of America!”

    I swear, not even with a compass could I draw a more perfect circle. People get freedom when they demand it for themselves,

    1. “People get freedom when they demand it for themselves.”

      I think this might be the fundamental problem for the West in “nation building.”

      1. For certain. There’s also a strange dichotomy in that thought when it comes to liberal progressives.

        For instance, libprogs don’t like state-building, referring to it with disdain as imperialism and tyranny. As such, they advocate defunding and dismantling the military. The irony is that if they ever got real control over the people like they want to, their control would only be kept through increased military strength. Ergo, they like the military, just not the current military. Why don’t they like the current military? Well, not only are the armed forces generally comprised of right-wing conservatives, but they’re also in the business of keeping people free. This is at odds with libprog ideology, for in their minds the military exists not for liberation, but for suppression, because that’s what they would use it for if given the chance. Since state-building typically requires liberation, it is automatically viewed as oppressive, and since state-building typically requires a strong military presence, it is automatically viewed as tyrannical, because those are the ways in which the libprogs think the military should be used. In other words, freedom is labeled tyranny, and tyranny is labeled freedom. We must speak for those with no voices, but only because it grants us power over them, and if the population demands freedom for themselves, then we must take away their voices. Only one voice should be heard, and that voice speaks the approved propaganda. To clarify, the libprogs prefer actual imperialism over state-building, and instead want annexation (e.g., conquest), just as Nazi-Germany did, and just as the U.S.S.R/Russia did and still does. When the annexation is resisted, military force is applied (e.g., invasion), and the excuse provided is that the invaded nation needs to be “saved,” or “protected,” or “civilized,” or perhaps the invaded “wanted” to “join” the invaders’ country and system of rule. There is no intention of setting up and building a new state—the invaders will impose their own rule by “lending” government “support.” They decry true state-building as imperialism and tyranny because it lets the opportunity of true imperialist expansion and tyranny to slip by.

        When one person makes an accusation, check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamor.
        ~Piers Anthony, Bio of an Ogre

  32. We need a Kickstarter campaign to hire a mercenary group. Think of the reward levels. For instance:

    $200: Observer. We will take a selfie over one of our confirmed kills.

    1. Love it! Though we’d probably have to use Indiegogo cause Kickstarter would wring their hands and fret over something so un-PC.

    2. $1000 gets a caricature of your choice painted on the side of an armored vehicle and a signed shell casing from the crew.

    3. $100.000: “Mission Director” all the perks of the “Operator” level Plus we let one of the mercs prove it when he said “Hell get me close enough and i can pull the targets liver out of their ass with a spoon” You get the spoon, autographed by Celebrities Nick Searcy and Adam Baldwin.

  33. Too bad Kickstarter probably has rules against crowdsourced bounties and such.

    Maybe someone should start up a KickAsser.

    1. How cool would that be? Anyone can donate to kill any militant belligerent in any non-westernized country! We could ask Vladimir Putin to let some of his former spec-op types go do the killin’ without official sanction. I’m sure he’d just put up the footage on “Russia’s Zaniest Insurgent Killing Videos!” It could be sold as, “Funded by the decadent West, entertaining the masses in the East, and making sure developed nations and innocents worldwide have less a**holes irritating them all around!”

    1. Thank God for twitter. It makes so much difference. Yes, what we need is more discussion and education on how being evil is… well, pretty fucking evil really. Fucking morons. I suggest a new title for this campaign. “Faces you just gotta punch.”

      1. “You think any government would pay it? Probably require corporate backing.”

        More true than you’d think.

        A presentation at work yesterday detailed how a retail chain has established its own investigative team, and how they’ve managed to flip professional thieves (“boosters”) into turning in networks of fences…

        …and how those fences were pumping money into Yemen and Afghanistan.

  34. Not any business or responsibility of the American tax payer. If you want to donate your own money to hire people to deal with this fine, go for it. Don’t be borrowing money that my kids and grandkids will have to pay back.

    Slavery is a fact of life in Africa. It has been the rule there since time immemorial. It will be a fact of life as long as there are Africans and Arabs. We have other things to deal with, namely securing our own borders.

  35. Remember, Ashton didn’t Buy those women, he just paid them to leave afterwards. The campaign might work better if all those guys weren’t such notorious abusive pieces of shit.

  36. The more this sort of thing comes up, the more I realize that left-wingers are all about *feeling* the right sorts of things. Right-wingers, on the other hand, are focused on effectiveness; feelings scarcely enter into it.

  37. Are the bronies in the picture celebrities? ’cause other than Captain Red Cup, I have no idea who they are. The one in the upper right might be Moira Queen’s second husband. Maybe.

    1. one of them seems to be Asshat Kutcher. i think the blonde douche is either eminem or justin timberlake.

        1. After watching the video, I think he needs to brush up on his shooting to get the title upgrade. *zing*

      1. To quote Richard The Warlock of Looking for Group… “You get more titles with a higher kill count.”

        In your case Larry the more hate mail you get and the more liberal skewering you do the more titles you get.

  38. Maybe they are trying to get Moochelle a Nobel prize after all she’s now worthy of that honor because of her involvement in this twitter campaign. It wouldn’t be any more then BHO did to get the Nobel Peace Prize.

  39. Being a sweet little old lady with granddaughters, I believe you hit the nail on the head. The country needs to provide tactics and not tweets.

  40. These folks have just broken one of the commandments of the Internet: “Thou shalt never post a photo of thyself holding a sign.” Anyone with access to a computer can make them say whatever he wants.

  41. Why did the west ever abandon the Church Militant. We could have the Knights of Malta providing support and training to the Christian villagers. Eventually, when the Moslem villages kept getting raided because they were the softer targets they would convert. Rinse and repeat.

  42. The interesting question to me is how many of these movie stars do as Charlie Sheen does and pay much younger women to have sex with them? I suspect their hypocrisy goes miles beyond their blindly idiotic socialism.

    1. Oddly enough I have no issue with them renting a lady of the evening. It thier situation it really is better in the long run to protect ones assets with a vetted, tested, evaluated lady of the evening paying for the services rendered and to go away.

  43. Thank you for addressing this issue. I recently attended a conflict resolution conference at Kennesaw State University where the majority of the speakers and attendees were Nigerian. It underscored for me how different things appear to those in the developing world. One presentation I attended focused on three types of negotiation outlined by the presenter, a man who holds a doctoral degree from a Nigerian university. The three types of negotiation he offered for consideration were 1) “standard” negotiation — the type most of us are familiar with where two parties of reasonable goodwill sit down and hash out their issues, 2) “deceptive” negotiation — where at least one of the parties agrees to negotiations under false pretenses (this is not particularly uncommon even here in the US), and 3) “extreme” negotiation — where at least one of the parties shows up to negotiations with weapons or threats of same.

    A gentleman in the audience (who is from South America, lives here in the US, and has mediated labor negotiations around the world) felt compelled to interrupt to point out that, the moment someone shows up with guns, it stops being a negotiation and becomes a coercion. He insisted that the speaker “call a thing by its proper name,” and I could not but agree. The speaker humbly acknowledged that he is forever a student and still has much to learn, and that he came to the conference to have his ideas challenged.

    It occurred to me that, when a person’s bar for “normal” is set at “people show up with guns when they fear they won’t get their way otherwise,” it does tend to skew how one sees the world. All this to say, Nigeria is a developing nation. It has a very long way to go. My sense from the people I met at this conference is that they want very much to catch up. They want very much to do right… but they have not yet reached that tipping point we reached decades ago where the majority of the population not only has shelter, clothes, and enough food to eat, they also have at least a high school education. They can’t have any hope of addressing the threat of Boko Haram and other Islamist insurgents until they reach that tipping point. All we can do is help them to get there, and maybe help out with a decapitation or rescue operation from time to time to keep the Islamists in check.

    All this to say, you make some very interesting points and have given me much food for thought, and I want to thank you for that. I do wish I didn’t have to wade through a sea of profanities to get to these nuggets of insight, however. I would also like to share what you have to say with several of my friends, but I know full well that some of them would be so put off by your choice of words that they’d end up dismissing you rather than taking you seriously — and I would rather they hear you out in full. You’re a very thoughtful, highly intelligent, and articulate man. It would be a pleasure to see more posts in the future that fully convey the…gravitas… of which I believe an author of your stature to be capable. Namaste ~

  44. Curtation might explain it.

    Real Men don’t buy Girls…
    nonsense.
    dinner.
    they rent or lease them.
    they use Call Girl options.

    1. I once heard it as they pay them to leave.

      I suppose that would include divorce. But you don’t even have to marry them to be on the hook, “Palimony” for example.

      I’ll stop before I horn in on Vox’s act.

      1. best 2000 dollars i ever spent. To bad the broad hasnt finished moving her stuff out the house. 2 and a half years later.

        1. I suggest either a ritual ceremonial bonfire (your neighbors might object to the loud music and you doing the dance of joy wearing only your boxers and smeared head to toe with mud) or just renting a dump truck and dropping it off on her front lawn.

  45. A hundred years ago the world had a very effective organization to suppress slavery. The British army in the Sudan, the Royal Navy in West Africa, in the Red Sea and other tropic paradises put a lot of slavers out of business and stopped desert bandits from raiding agricultural villages in many dusty locales.

    But long before Gandhi began his agitating, most Americans had decided the British Empire mostly consisted of sadists grinding the faces of noble brown and black victims. Even during WWII FDR was quite explicit about his aim of dismantling the empires of his British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, etc. allies. Having bankrupted itself in the two world wars, Britain essentially chose the National Health Service and the dole over the expense of empire. The British Army is now at its lowest strength since that (for the army) dismal decade after the American war and up to the French Revolutionary War. Britain doesn’t have the will to spend money on defence if it means the transgendered will be denied sex-altering surgery.

    Just as mould appears in hot, damp weather, in the absence of an imperial power patrolling the sea lanes, piracy will spring up. And marine efforts may be insufficient. Despite the American wars against Tunis, despite such allied strikes as Lord Exmouth’s bombardment of Algiers in 1816, the problem of Moslem corsairs taking Christian slaves only ended with the French occupation of North Africa.

    Razzias by land, piracy by sea have been tactics of the jihad for fourteen centuries. Only the hiatus of European dominance for a few centuries has obscured the pattern from the intelligentsia. It makes the actions of Boko Haram seem new, strange, and eerie to the young progressives in the mass media. To others, who’ve done some reading, it’s just part of an old, old pattern.

    1. In fairness, had we actually eliminated french colonialism the entire Vietnam fracas could have probably been avoided. Instead we backed their play and look how that turned out.

  46. Why oh why didn’t Michelle start up a hashtag when all the fighting in Ukraine first started?! Putin would have run for the hills!

    These Boko Bozos will surely return the girls. And when they do, she can then hashtag those nasty Mexican drug cartels so they pony up some choom distribution for the folks having to pay double for Incompetencecare. That way they’ll at least be happy as their money is sucked into the big money pit her husband started.

    And then she can hashtag the mistreatment of ducks.

    And then

    And then

    Puppies.

    1. Why in the world would Michelle Obama even so much as lift her hooded eyeballs for white men? Were 200 orthodox Christian 17 yr old Ukrainian men abducted by Muslim radicals, can you imagine her holding a sign that says “Bring Back Our Boys?”

      Eric Holder knows who “our boys” are, or rather, “my people.”

      The funny thing is that you have goofy QUILTbro allies like Jim Hines and Scalzi adopting that same kind of rhetoric, but not understanding what “our girls” really means, since Scalzi and Hines will never be “our boys.”

      Can you imagine help from that misery of a feminist often at the HuffPo Soraya Chemaly, who Tweeted “That educated girls threaten corrupt men, who feel symbolically emasculated, knows no borders”? She claims that “is how misogyny reproduces itself.”

      That is the classic example of a bigot: they take what a few bad identities they don’t like do, Taliban and Boko Haram MEN, and smear it onto tens of millions of others. That is classic demonization theory, as is “white privilege.” Notice how that smearing never works for anything positive, only negative.

      Then listen how she manages to stick Christians and Boko Haram in the same fire:

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/our-visible-spectrum-is-o_b_5290015.html

      “Islam is an Abrahamic faith and shares foundational ideas with other Abrahamic faiths. Every single day, conservative religious leaders function in tandem, horizontally across faiths, in ways that substantively suppress girls’ and women’s rights.”

      Consider all religion smeared – Catholics co-equals with acid-throwing Taliban. Now you know why these morons call the GOP “Taliban” and also where that stuff comes from in the Dem Party.

      Then read this wonderful feminist sleight-of-moral-hand where Chemaly acknowledges men pretty much do everything and spins it:

      “That the ideas promulgated by these men (that they are all men is not actually the fault of feminism, by the way) have legitimate moral authority is a dangerous perversion. Human ethics are informed by experience; therefore, the ethics of all-male-led religious organizations will always remain fatally flawed, and their conclusions fatally unjust.”

      In other words, everything today is “fatally flawed.” Chemaly goes on to list a bunch of bad stuff, forgetting that if men do everything, then they do everything, but she acknowledges only the bad. Read the whole thing, cuz that’s what you’re up against in the SFF community and the SFWA. It is a mistake to think they have any interest in obeying neutral principles, law, or a Constitution created by men.

      1. But Christian men who openly declare that women should not be allowed to speak in church – by inference having any kind of insight or authority from which men can learn – , should be submissive to their husbands, and are apparently incapable of casting an intelligent vote in the democratic process — those men are absolutely in the same class of men as fundamentalist Islamic men. Because both demonstrate a belief that women are less than men, and should be denied the rights enjoyed by men, and use the flimsy cover of religion to justify their bigotry.

        Rejecting this medieval mindset with utter revulsion is not the same as agreeing with the equally horrifying madness of the left, by the way. It is possible to be a person of faith and not need to subjugate anybody for no better reason than their biology. And frankly, anyone who feels the need to belittle and diminish the other gender, and use God to justify it, needs to have a good hard look at him or herself.

        1. Why bring God into it?

          If you belittle the “opposite sex”, then there’s something wrong with you (male or female).

          On the other hand, people who equate Conservative Christians (of any sort) with Muslims who kidnapped and enslave girls IMO don’t show much intelligence.

        2. You don’t name specific organizations or people holding these philosophies, so it’s difficult to answer to the charge. Particularly in the absence of the theology they’re using to support their position.

          But I’m going to have to trend to Paul’s side here, equating men of whatever religious persuasion holding whatever particular views in an American society where women have the freedom and power to walk away with the atrocities perpetuated against women and female children in some parts of the world is — a bit reprehensible.

  47. How about the hashtag #exterminatebokoharam ? There’s a cause I’d support.

    For a thousand years or more, it has been the slavers that were themselves AFRICAN (Saharan and sub-Saharan), that did all the raiding, killing and ravaging on land, before selling the survivors off to those with ships (and these days, much like prior to 1600, most of the shipments go east to Asia). This incident just restates the ugly truth in a way that the libs can’t bear (like the revelations that, for example, one of the most heralded books on the subject was a mix of plagiarism and outright fantasy).

  48. Was watching this story unfold here in the UK. The BBC was about 5 hours behind everyone else, no doubt while the editorial dept tore itself apart over whether it would be racist and islamophobic to run the story.

  49. I’d be more impressed with “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” crowd pictured (& other celebs doing those) if I believed any one of them who’d been a celeb for more than 12 months could honesty make *either* of the following statements, “I have never had sex with a prostitute” (I’m not going to be nitpicky about the “paid for sex” thing), or “Since becoming a celebrity over the age of consent where I live(d), I have not nailed anyone under that age”, I wouldn’t insist on “I have never slept with an underage hooker” because I suspect that most of the people who really care how old their hooker is are the ones _seeking_ those they shouldn’t be.

  50. Reblogged this on saboteur365 and commented:
    h/t to flyingtigercomics.wordpress.com, which is where I discovered this significant analysis of the whole bring back our girls idiocy. This is spot on truth, with a capital “T.”

  51. REAL MEN DON’T:

    Make potato salad out of cute little kitty cats
    Tear their own ears off
    Destroy galaxies
    Hoard cooking gas
    Use a four-stroke 100 cc. motorcycle to kidnap brides
    Drag Hugo-nominees behind four-stroke 100 cc. motorcycles
    Ride four-stroke 100 cc. motorcycles
    Punch women at random
    Punch little girls at random
    Polish knobs
    Fire a BAR sideways
    Stare at Mars
    Make omelettes out of their own hands
    Consummate relationships with birds
    Name their dog “Privilege”
    Make jokes about “Cis-lunar space” on their way to the moon
    Think “transgender” is a turnpike
    Laugh at people who haven’t amassed 10,000 hours on a self-powered double palette-jack
    Use ant-farms to practice privilege
    Insist their wives never leave the house and only show themselves unveiled to close relatives except for when running for cigarettes and ice for the poker game

    1. REAL MEN DON’T:

      Name their dog “Privilege”

      Actually, I kind of want to do this. Mostly so I can say, “I checked my Privilege. He thinks you’re a fucking moron too.”

      1. I think the name seems more appropriate for a cat.

        “Hey, Privilege, what do you think of this idea?”

        *long slow contemptuous stare at you, followed by a yawn, and rolling over to take a nap*

      2. “Now! Privilege, now! Mancer, now! Prancer and Vixen,
        “On! CisHet, on! Cupid, on! StrapOn and Postcolonial;
        “To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!
        “Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!”

        – Ode to a Snowflake, by Race Jender

    2. “Make potato salad out of cute little kitty cats”

      …we don’t?
      Rats, there goes the picnic.

    3. I have to disagree with you there.

      Hoarding cooking gas is only prudent. It’s good disaster preparedness. 😀

    4. “REAL MEN DON’T: Stare at Mars”

      Wait a minute. John Carter of Virginia stared at Mars and got teleported there when he was dead, found out he was superstrong and able to read minds, fell in love, and kicked ass all the way from the south pole to the north pole to recover this bride, and became warlord of the planet, all while buck naked except for a warbelt. And all from staring at Mars.

      1. Is that from the movie? iirc, in the book he got transported the first time after getting chased into a cave by a bunch of Indians.

        1. It’s from the book. He dies in the cave, and the Apache are unwilling to enter. He looks down and sees his own dead body, goes outside, sees Mars, and salutes it as the patron of his own soldierly profession. Then he is transported to the Red Planet.

      2. Too true:

        “As I stood thus meditating, I turned my gaze from the landscape to the
        heavens where the myriad stars formed a gorgeous and fitting canopy for
        the wonders of the earthly scene. My attention was quickly riveted by
        a large red star close to the distant horizon. As I gazed upon it I
        felt a spell of overpowering fascination–it was Mars, the god of war,
        and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of
        irresistible enchantment. As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it
        seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw
        me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron.

        “My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes,
        stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself
        drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of
        space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness.”

      3. Separated from his body in the cave, got to Mars by stepping outside and planet-gazing (first real book I ever read)

  52. Your post was great, really spelled out realistically what this movement is doing for sex trafficking. Nothing. Holding out a pouty face and a sign is not going to change anything.

  53. Perhaps they just need a Twitter campaign for “Real Men Don’t Buy Women. They raid their neighbors for Cattle and Wives.”

  54. WAIT! WAIT! WAIT! ‘Chelle and Barry have girls in Nigeria? I thought Barry was Kenyan, not Nigerian! Do Sasha and Malia know they have sisters that have been kidnapped in Nigeria? Where the hell was the Secret Service when this was going on? What’s being done to protect us from Barry being blackmailed over these previously undisclosed female Nigerian children? Enquiring minds want to know!

    1. There’s obviously some Nigerian in that family. Only a Nigerian could have that many scams running simultaneously.

  55. This is all just another form of self-promotion for these Hollywood/Liberal types. Regardless, at least some good might come of it like the time Facebook/Twitter caught Joseph Koney right?

    edit… I have been informed that Joseph Koney is still at large. You mean to tell me that with all the Koney 2012 posts on Facebook a few years back he is still out there? What!?!? Outrage!?!?

  56. There are no words in the English language that can convey the loathing I feel towards the human trafficking business and those working in it. These selfies of celebrities looking sad and holding signs are appalling in how useless they are. They will do exactly nothing to help the situation.

    I’d prefer a trend of signs reading “Real men shoot slavers in the face instead of asking nicely for their return.”
    Larry is of course perfectly correct in that America can’t stop all of the evil out there and can’t crush the human trafficking business around the world. Just not feasible. I do believe however that we can make that business most dangerous for slavers health close to home and perhaps abroad.

    Heck, I’d support merc forces chopping up slave harem runners with automatic weapons. Screw the guys who frown upon battling evil. I’m going to care more about the opinions of young girls being returned to their families than celebrities or stuffy politicians who have never known mortal peril.

  57. Quote of the day:
    “Sean Penn went full. retard… he never came back.”
    Tropic Thunder

  58. Well I think they should just do the same thing they suggested we all do after the 9/11 attacks.

    Wage Peace
    By Judyth Hill*

    Wage peace with your breath.
    Breathe in firemen and rubble,
    breathe out whole buildings
    and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

    Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
    and freshly mown fields.
    Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
    Breathe in the fallen
    and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

    Wage peace with your listening:
    hearing sirens, pray loud.
    Remember your tools:
    flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

    Make soup.
    Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
    Learn to knit, and make a hat.
    Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
    imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
    or the gesture of fish.
    Swim for the other side.
    Wage peace.

    Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
    have a cup of tea and rejoice.
    Act as if armistice has already arrived.
    Celebrate today.

  59. It’s pathetic and obtuse beyond words, this Twitter campaign, useless and highly selective in its outrage. Impossible even to parody. This jihadist terror and rape and pillaging has been going on for uh centuries, it is ongoing for decades now in Sudan. What about Kashmir, Pakistan, Algeria, what about what is now happening in the Central African Republic? This social media Twitter nonsense is about as effective as throwing wet toilet paper.

    Imagine if Twitter, social media and the Internet were around in the 1930s. These morons would turn to Twitter and hashtag ‘Nazis, please stop what you are doing, it’s not nice’. If only America and Britain had Twitter back then – that would have gotten the Nazi war machine and Hitler himself to shake in their shoes, abandon their plans of Anschluss and seizure of the Sudetenland, never mind the invasion of Poland and their plans for the Jews. There would have been no need to mobilize armies, build up navies and air forces, bombers and artillery, train millions of Allied servicemen for war. Excuse my sarcasm.

    These airheads, Michelle O included, and all these social media Twitterarti, make Neville Chamberlain look like Genghis Khan by comparison. It’s beyond parody. It’s beyond depressing. There is no silver lining in this cloud.

  60. My late second fiancee said, more than once, “‘Symbolic’ is a word adults use when they play at make-believe, to pretend that what they’re doing has real effect when in fact it doesn’t.”

  61. Besides the risibility of this self-righteous pouting on Facebook, I wonder, “where have these morons been for the last upty-ump years?” To take just one example, I’ve been reading about Egyptian Muslims kidnapping and raping Coptic Christian girls since I started surfing the net. (Not before, because, inexplicabley, the New York Times never seems to get around to reporting on these atrocities. /sarc) Are those Egyptian girls not dark-skinned enough? Are they too Christian? Did liberals have to wait until George Bush left office before they could begin to “notice” the evils of Islam? (I did notice that phenomenon with some liberals I know: I never heard any anti-Islamic comments until 2009.)

    1. Regarding the slowness of so many liberals to notice evil: Consider anthropologist Napoloeon Chagnon, who made a career studying the Yanomamo indians.

      He reported that they were very violent, and that most of the violence was competition for women, with raids to kidnap wives from other villages, counter-raids to recapture the women or wreak vengance, etc. This contradicted the reigning Marxist dogma that violence should be over scarce resources and that it should be rare for most primitive tribes because few resources were actually all that scarce.

      The reaction of the anthropologists was to condemn Chagnon, call him a liar, and subject him to a decades-long campaign of vilification and defamation. Only recently has Chagnon made some headway in persuading academia that he is right.

      Chagnon wrote that few anthropologists have actual field experience, and thus although they right as if they are authorities in truth they get their “knowledge” from books. (Sort of like a decadent “researcher” in an early story in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.) He further noted that the field anthropologists, who actually did get first-hand experience, were covering up the truth about the primitive peoples they studied, for reasons of Marxist political correctness. So once again we see that leftists cannot be trusted in any field of human endeavor…except maybe sweeping floors.)

      Appropriately, his latest book is titled “Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.”

  62. Paul and Eaomon — I have no reply button to hit under that run of comments, so I hope you see this. I refer specifically to Mr Wright and Mr Beale, who make no secret of their interpretations of Christianity on their blogs and carry those opinions into the wider world. Now please note — I’m not telling them to sit down and shut up (as they are telling me). They have the right to believe as they wish to believe. And I have the right to reject their attempted oppression and speak against it, as I have done.

    Just as the US Civil Rights movement has been hijacked and twisted into something ugly and counter-productive by some sections of the non-Caucasian community, so has feminism been warped by some women. Make no mistake, I despair at the misandry, hypocrisy and ugliness that abounds within the ranks of modern day feminists. But that doesn’t mean that the original underpinnings of the philosophy are flawed, any more than Martin Luther King’s philosophical platform was flawed. Any man who tries to tell me that as a woman I am less than a man, deserving of less power and authority and autonomy than a man, required by God to be silent in the presence of men? That man serves evil, not good. This is what the fundamentalist Islamists believe, and if you take their words at face value, this is what some Christian men believe. And if I don’t speak against that horror, then I am condoning it. If it’s not okay to tell a black person to shut up and sit at the back of the bus, if that rightfully outrages all decent people, then they should also be outraged by the notion of a man brandishing a religious text and using it as a pretext for silencing and limiting women.

    And just to un-derail this for a moment — Larry’s points are perfectly made. Boko Haram burned those boys alive and kidnapped those girls because they want to keep other people in subjugation. They want Nigerians living in terror, ignorant and emasculated and enslaved to BH’s evil philosophies. You don’t negotiate with evil. You do what you must to crush it into oblivion.

    Finally — while I’m no fan of the progressive left, I think many who are posting selfies and tweeting and so forth are genuinely distressed by the BH situation. They feel angry and outraged and helpless and are seeking some way of communicating that. Their thinking may often be flawed but to be of the left is not to automatically be venal, shallow and insincere.

    1. Shakes head sadly.

      I don’t know either of those gentleman but I doubt that they believe the nonsense that you think they do.

      In any case, whatever they do believe is far from what the Muslims believe and practice.

      1. Go read their own words. Then tell me I’ve misunderstood what they believe. You only reveal your ignorance when you claim I’m wrong without any factual grounding for the statement.

        And for their beliefs and Islam, they coincide more than I think many want to accept, or feel comfortable with.

    2. You know, there’s a lot of rage coming from you towards Christianity. At least, that’s the feeling I’m getting from your comments. I don’t know where you get the idea that the Bible has men telling women to sit down and shut up.

      From Ephesians 5:
      21 Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.
      22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
      23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
      24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
      25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;
      26 That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,
      27 That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
      28 So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.

      I suppose that, depending on your definition of “submit” you can be offended. That said, look at the responsibility he lays on the men. Essentially he says, “Men, be like Christ and put your wife’s needs before your own.” Do YOU want the personal responsibility of being like Christ? You’re awfully worried about power and authority. What exactly would you do with that power and authority if it was handed to you?

      I’m not telling you my interpretation of things is gospel, because I’m mortal. But maybe you should examine why you think you’re being cheated out of something or devalued.

      What if the Bible isn’t some old man’s way of usurping power over women, but it’s God telling women that they are no less valuable than men, but that they have a different role than men? Do you accept that your own wisdom is limited, and that God’s is not? Do you believe that God is kind and loves us because he is our Father, and that sometimes he tells us things we don’t want to hear because it’s for our good? Do you have a very, very good reason to think that Paul is wrong?

      1. In a nutshell, here’s what I believe: that God is vast and we are small, and in attempting to comprehend we make him small too. History is littered with atrocities committed in the name of somebody’s deity. Often those atrocities are justified by quotes from the relevant religious text. I believe that throughout history men and women have perverted religion to serve their own agendas, to silence those they prefer not to hear, to eradicate thoughts that disturb their equilibrium and threaten their power. Evil flourishes in the world, God does not step in to end it. To say that no man or woman who quotes Scripture can be questioned about their veracity or intent is a nonsense. Didn’t somebody somewhere say something about the Devil quoting Scripture for his own purposes?

        I find myself most often agreeing with Ghandi. I like your Christ, I don’t much like your Christians. I have no rage against Christianity, per se. I’ve been privileged to know many truly humbling and awe-inpsiring people who follow Christ’s teachings. But I also have seen men and women twisting those teachings to satisfy needs and agendas that I believe are in conflict with the lessons he taught.

        As for Paul, yes. Absolutely on occasion I believe he is dead wrong. Paul was not God. Paul was a man spreading the gospel within an historical context. Some of his words are inspiring. Some are skin-crawling – at least for a woman. Nothing Jesus ever did or said, to my knowledge, encouraged or supported the notion that women are less. Paul does. Much of the OT does. I reject those philosophies as I reject much of the barbarity contained in the OT. At the end of the day, the Bible is a manmade construct and it has been restructed and rewritten and reinterpreted more than once over the centuries. And because man is flawed, what he creates can also be flawed. And to say that God wouldn’t let that happen, even as on a daily basis he does not intervene to stop the pederasts and the drug dealers and the wife beaters and the abortionists and the sex traffickers is, I believe, also a nonsense.

        You are free to believe what you like. If you are comfortable justifying inequality and repression under the cover of religious authority, that’s up to you. I’m not comfortable with it. I can no more accept or condone religious justification for discrimination against women than I can when it’s used to discriminate against anyone else.

        It’s too comfortable and convenient for men to say: you get to sit down and shut up, you get to submit, you get to be treated as less than, because God said so. That way you never have to question your actions and you never have to acknowledge the fundamental inequality of the arrangement. Any man who tells me that because of my gender I have no right to instruct, no right to teach, no right to explore aspects of the faith, with authority, the same authority that men take for granted, is not a man I can respect or give credence to.

        Let Jesus tell me that to my face, I’ll think about it. I’ll most likely argue the point with him. Bottom line? We can’t truly know. We can only think we know. When we’re dead we’ll find out for sure. Until then, I will stand up for what I believe is right, in the context of what I believe Jesus wants for us all as evidenced by his words in the gospels.

      2. Underwhelmed,
        Here’s the deal. Either the Bible is true or it’s false. If you believe the Bible to be the word of God, then Peter had Apostolic authority to say what he said. Argue with my interpretation of it (or anyone’s interpretation of it), but that’s it.

        If you don’t believe the Bible to be the word of God, then just say so. Say that you believe Adam, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jesus, Peter, James, John and all the rest to be liars. Christianity isn’t a buffet. You don’t get to pick and choose to think that prophets were right part of the time. That’s not how prophets work. Prophets reveal the word of God. Either they’re real or they’re not.

        Further, nobody’s making you get baptized at the point of a bayonet or kidnapping and raping you until you get baptized. And even if you’ve been baptized, nobody’s stopping you from saying, “You know what? I changed my mind. I don’t believe this anymore.” and walking away.

        Essentially, Christianity and Judaism as far as I can tell are at-will clubs. You join, then it’s because you buy into what they’re telling you. If you decide to walk away, they may give you cookies and tell you you’re missed, but if you tell them to buzz off, they don’t kill you for leaving.

        The women that are Christians and Jews are so because they believe what they’re being told. You may look on it as inequality and oppression. They clearly don’t.

        Further, anyone can find examples of less-than-perfect Jews and Christians. The whole point of Judaism and Christianity is that we’re living in a fallen world that is in need of redemption. Finding examples of bad Jews and Christians and saying that their religions are false is like finding sick people in a hospital and claiming it’s prima facie evidence that medicine is bollocks.

        And for you to equate an at-will club membership with whose beliefs you differ to a religion that mandates rape, torture and slavery of kaffirs is ridiculous and says a lot more about you than it does about Christianity and Judaism.

    3. Any man who tries to tell me that as a woman I am less than a man, deserving of less power and authority and autonomy than a man, required by God to be silent in the presence of men? That man serves evil, not good.

      I wouldn’t argue with that. I haven’t seen such from Mr. Wright, and I don’t read VD because he’s deliberately inflammatory and he irritates me. In any event, I won’t undertake to defend them, they can see to that themselves.

      But I will take exception to the comparison of a few men who might be espousing idiotic views to entire societies wherein the speaking out you are freely doing here brings torture and death. In fact far, far less than you’re engaged in here brings torture and death. Often, nothing at all brings torture and death.

      These sorts of hyperbolic equations blur the reality of both situations.

      You should absolutely stand against any injustice you perceive, and bolster your case with clear examples.

      But if you think some dude expressing an unwelcome opinion in the U.S. is in any way equivalent to the horror perpetuated by whole societies in some dark parts of this world…

      Well, if you really think that, it’s time for some perspective.

      1. VD is a very hard man to figure out. On one hand, what choice do we have but to take his words at face value? On the other, I find some of what he espouses to be truly mind-boggling and really want to think he’s conducting some kind of devils’ advocate agitprop. But if I do take him on face value I don’t have much choice other than to condemn, because he has flatly stated he’d like to take away my right to vote because I am a woman and unfit to render an opinion or have any meaningful agency in the world or my life.

        I’m not saying I lack freedom. I am bitterly aware of the freedoms I enjoy, that so many women in the world will never enjoy in my or their lifetimes. But if eternal vigilance is the price of peace, so it’s also the price of my freedoms. Just because you are not a man who openly expresses the desire to silence women doesn’t mean there aren’t men who do. There are those men, and they are a threat. It’s all a matter of degree. Once upon a time, in the Western World, women were treated as chattel, possessions, objects without agency or legal status or rights of any kind. The West moved past that evil, but don’t ever think we can’t regress. All it takes is enough men who think that women shouldn’t be given the right to vote, to speak, to have authority, and we’ll wake up one morning and it’ll be Afghanistan post the Taliban takeover. It can happen so easily, it has happened so easily. Look at Iran. Look at Turkey. There is a vile and virulent strain of misogyny in Judaism, Islam and Christianity that I believe is evil, and its proponents commit evil when trying to justify their acts under colour of religious authority or even with spurious declarations of concern.

        But please don’t think I’m into men-blaming holus bolus. There’s a reason feminist has become a dirty word. I can only look upon the damage so many women have done to themselves, to men, and to the fabric of society and despair. But I will never ever believe that the answer is to surrender my personal power to a man under the guise of following God.

      2. That’s one reason that the stupid upsets me so much. It’s awful hard to get upset at men who (serious or not) suggest that women shouldn’t vote when I look at the stupid and think, “Wow, who allowed these ridiculous little flower-pots to vote?”

        It’s just to hard to keep on insisting that women are rational grown-ups when they’re prancing about in bright pink vagina costumes, humming happily through their abortion video, explaining that by “control my own reproduction” they actually mean “never take responsibility for anything I do” and sign on to this sort of “it’s all about how emotional I am for the right causes” sort of political hashtag endgame… all while refusing to condemn *Islam* and whining about how oppressed they are in America.

        Dear gawd who gave these flower-pots the right to vote?

        When I was young we insisted that women be respected for their brains… now it’s all, whoohoo, I’ve got a vajayjay!

        Reason weeps.

      3. “There is a vile and virulent strain of misogyny in Judaism, Islam and Christianity that I believe is evil…”

        And with this, you’ve lost me.

        1. Amen. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Equating, “Wives, submit yourselves to your husband. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church, and gave himself for it,” to “Go marry a 12-year-old, cut out her genitals, beat her and rape her, and don’t take any back-talk out of her until she’s dead, lather, rinse and repeat,” is flat-out willful ignorance.

    4. “I refer specifically to Mr Wright and Mr Beale, who make no secret of their interpretations of Christianity on their blogs and carry those opinions into the wider world.”
      “Finally — while I’m no fan of the progressive left, I think many who are posting selfies and tweeting and so forth are genuinely distressed by the BH situation. They feel angry and outraged and helpless and are seeking some way of communicating that. Their thinking may often be flawed but to be of the left is not to automatically be venal, shallow and insincere.”

      And this is the main point of contention many of us have with your argument. In both of the cases you seem to equate words with actual meaningful action.

  63. I don’t know. I voted for Obama in 2008 (first black president in 2008 wasn’t any too soon, and McCain?), against him in 2012 (crappy administrator, and I never liked the pinko-commie thing). Crap administrator, overrated speaker, but he’s got good instincts in a fight. He did good presiding over the killing of bin Laden (stayed out of the way of technical details he had no skills for, but was THERE taking overall responsibility, and provided political cover for the military when they asked. Jimmy Carter would have micromanaged, Bush senior would have done as well, Clinton would have ducked taking responsibility, Bush junior would have either done as well or blown it somehow (what if some retard told him ‘you break bin Laden you buy him’?)).

    Now, everyone knows we won’t magically fix Africa. Something awful happens there, why not blow a little smoke and throw a little red tofu to his base? The world won’t lose much more respect for America because one more of our politicians blows a little smoke. I liked Exodus, but our present political class is not capable of hiring competent people, and if you hired incompetent mercenaries to try Exodus, ick.

  64. Mark Steyn on hashtag diplomacy: #BringBackOurBalls.

    http://www.steynonline.com/6326/bringbackourballs

    A snippet:

    “…Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn’t actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama’s hashtag is just a form of moral preening…

    There’s something slightly weird about taking a hashtag – which on the Internet at least has a functional purpose – and getting a big black felt marker and writing it on a piece of cardboard and holding it up, as if somehow the comforting props of social media can be extended beyond the computer and out into the real world.”

    1. An excellent article by Mr. Steyn alas his next one left much to be desired, with him seeming to fall into a belif in warning shots ans shooting to wound.

  65. Synova, neither gender has a monopoly on Teh Stupid. I mean, look at those idiot white boys who got together this week to make the video claiming that they are evil because they’re white and everything wrong evah is their fault? I heartily wish they weren’t voting either, but they have the right no matter how stupid and misguided and dangerous I think they are.

    DaveP, I know a woman who was spat on by Hassidic Jewish men because she walked through their neighbourhood unescorted by a man. Don’t tell me there isn’t misogyny in the Big 3 religions. If we can’t face the ugly truths about our own tribes, however can we make a decent difference?

    1. I know a…

      Condemn the man that did the spitting. Condemn his interpretation, condemn his supporters.

      But stop conflating individual behaviors in the U.S., behaviors widely condemned by people who share the various perpetrators’ faith, with actions largely condoned by entire societies and sanctioned by states. For clarity, I’m not talking about societies of men, I’m talking about the entire society. You are painting with a wide and undeserved brush.

      One Hasidic Jew being an ass does not make Hasidic Judaism equivalent to radical Islam and the horrors it perpetuates. Not even close. If you cannot understand this, there’s not enough common ground here to continue a discussion.

      I didn’t get my perspective on radical Islam off the internet, I’ve seen it from a somewhat closer vantage. These indignities and injustices occuring in the U.S. are pale fare comparitively. (Not to say, they shouldn’t be condemned, I believe I’ve been clear on that.)

      1. I do hear what you’re saying. But certain groups of people live by a codified, mutually-agreed upon set of rules/values, and therefore I believe can be judged as a unit taking those beliefs as the yardstick. Boko Haram have a unified belief system, anti Western, pro fundamentalist, and they are currently inflicting that yardstick upon the wider population in their country. Hassidic Jews repress women. They have more in common with fundamentalist Islam than they do with the mainstream Jewish population. As a group, they conduct themselves in a way that delegates women as second class citizens, legally unequal, socially inferior, thus depriving them of freedoms enjoyed by the men in their community. It is precisely their adherence to that set of beliefs/rules that sets them apart from other folk who nominally share the faith/culture of Judaism. It’s a subset of the wider faith, just as certain subsets of Christianity (ie Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons) are subsets, and Sunnis and Shias are subsets of Islam. The religions aren’t monolithic, and each group can and must be judged on its own merits and declared rules and by the actions it takes. Episcopalians welcome women in their ministry. Catholics don’t.

        I never said that there is an exact equivalency between Islam and Hasidic Judaism. But I do believe there’s a bell curve, a continuum, in terms of misogyny in religion, and I do believe there is a demonstrable crossover in certain attitudes/beliefs between the faiths. Just because not all Jewish and Christian communities actively promote the silencing of women doesn’t mean that some don’t. They do.

        What I firmly believe is that until and unless we’re willing to examine our own tribes, our own assumptions, our own historical legacies with regards to beliefs and actions, we’ll never make any progress. We must be willing to feel uncomfortable, we must be willing to feel threatened and defensive and then move past those initial reactions to the place where honest discussions and recognitions take place.

        I despair of this sometimes because of the enormous damage done to the whole by certain sections of the media/political classes/academia et al. I can’t tell you how enraged I become when I’m told (as I have been told) that because I’m white I am by definition a racist and nothing about me matters beyond that. So when I hear the rage from men about being labelled women-haters, tools of the patriarchy, for no better reason than they are men, all that crap, I totally get it. And I support that rage. But if you pointed me to a subset of white women who created a club that denied membership and agency to any woman who wasn’t white, or if you pointed me to a group of men who actively campaigned to relegate me to second class status within my community because I’m a woman, I’d condemn them. Not because all white women are racist or because all men are misogynists, but because those particular subsets are conducting themselves in a manner that leaves them open to that accusation.

        Thank you for this discussion.

      2. Sunni is not a sub-set of Islam, it is almost all of it, at least 85%. It has only one spiritual center, S. Arabia, and one center of legal orthodoxy, Cairo. In fact Islam is a monolith far more than the fractured orthodoxy of Christianity.

        Shia constitutes almost all the rest of Islam. It stems from a 7th century fracture with Sunni Islam but in real world terms is either the result of Iranian anti-Arab colonialism (Iran, S. Iraq), or Iranian colonialism itself (India, Pakistan, Bahrain). There’s not much Shia after that.

        Comparing that with the vast number of reform movements and orthodoxy within Christianity lacks merit. Orthodox Christianity alone has a few popes, one of them based in Cairo for a thousand years.

    2. How are the white boys who made the “we’re evil” video dangerous? I’m not sure that anyone has even decided yet if it was satire or not… so if it was satire are they dangerous? Or are they dangerous if it was serious?

      1. I believe they’re dangerous because what they’re saying is untrue. It damages many many people, it encourages a victimhood mentality in those who aren’t white men and fosters an environment of judicial abuse, where white men are blamed and punished for things they didn’t do and they are ridiculed and worse for protesting their innocence. The Duke rape allegations, for example.

      2. I certainly agree with you that the “white privilege” thing is actively and significantly harmful. It *hurts* people. I don’t believe that the people it hurts are white people, primarily.

        It’s a yin-yang thing, or at least two inevitable sides of the same coin.

        Two things are said every time someone says “white is the easy setting”. Two things are said every time someone says “check your privilege.” The other thing that is said is… “don’t try.”

        It’s a vile thing to have decided that it is SO important to make white people admit something they have no control over and that *can’t* be changed, nor is there any effort to change it… a person can change their attitude if they’re racist, but they can’t change their race, so nothing is gained and nothing is even strived for except, perhaps, some sort of personal statement of virtue attendant to the public confession of “sin”… which if those boys were serious, is what they were doing. “Look how pious I am!”

        And all of that white *piety* is far far far more important than the second thing that is said which is… life is against you, don’t try, nothing will go your way, you’ve got life on the “hard” setting, nothing can possibly change.

        And that’s just evil.

    3. Also… it’s important to be able to talk about things… even “who should be allowed to vote.”

      Other than “18 or over”, “a citizen and resident”, and “not a convicted felon” we give everyone the right to vote (once) for elections dictated by geography. At one time wasn’t the rule “land owner?” Maybe only taxpayers should be allowed to vote since they ought to have a say in how their contribution is used that isn’t diluted by non-contributors. Or only people who are employed… as long as you’re on the dole, no vote for you! Maybe the age shouldn’t be 18 but should be 30… with exception for military and veterans… maybe it should just be veterans or those with medical exemptions who served in a parallel volunteer capacity so if you care about voting you “buy” your vote with service.

      Can you imagine what a “political machine” would look like if in order to secure a vote you didn’t need to give people a hand out, you needed to find them a job?

      1. I get what you’re saying. But I fear the slippery slope, I fear the law of unintended consequences, and I fear what happens when one subset of the community uses their own agenda and arbitrary yardstick to disenfranchise people who don’t agree with them in order to protect their power base.

      2. Underwhelmed: “Arbitrary yardstick”? Did you just write “arbitrary yardstick”?

        In Egypt, a country of 95 million people, none of the 47 million women or 10 million Christians can be president – by law. In S. Arabia, by cultural custom and practice, women are not allowed to drive alone. In Iran women are not allowed to go to soccer games. In some Islamic and sub-Saharan countries, girls age 6 to 11 are seized by strangers at the behest of their own families, and then have their private parts treated like you’re sanding a wood floor. Keep on going – there’s lots more. In the real world, there is no comparison to that in Christianity, either in institutions, nation, or raw numbers.

        Please stop writing “Oh, yeah. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – three peas in a pod.”

        Thank you.

      3. Fail Burton wrote: “Please stop writing “Oh, yeah. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – three peas in a pod.”

        Especially since 2 of those 3 don’t seem to regard honor killing as SOP.

    4. I know a woman who was spat on by Hassidic Jewish men because she walked through their neighbourhood unescorted by a man.

      Because that is totally equivalent to stoning a woman to death because she was the victim of rape.

      The fact that you have tried to make them equivalent is hurting your overall argument. You might want to see to that.

      1. What you’re seeing in this type of arguing shows not only the typical PC targets but how insidious demonization theories of identity are. And it’s always the same: the worst of a chosen identity is smeared onto all or attributed to the most base motives using rhetoric. A black criminal is “blacks.” A greedy Jew is “Jews.” A lot of white male SFF writers is an informal racist-sexist cabal interested in maintaining their “centrality,” and fearful of non-whites, gays and women. The idea Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkien, and Van Vogt operated from within such an ideology is nuts. It’s childish paranoia, but no less dangerous for that, especially in an artistic community.

        Notice how it never goes the other way, and in fact is argued the opposite: terrorists are never “Islam.” A black SFF symposium is “diversity.” A feminist SFF convention is never a sexist cabal, gay awards are never an expression of supremacy. These arguments are transparently supremacist, sexist, and racist, since true diversity resides in the communities the PC suspect, and their own preferred spaces are hideously segregated by sex, race, and gender-expression. In other words, the worst racist-gender supremacists who formally express themselves from within institutions like anthologies, awards, webzines and conventions are the PC themselves.

        The solution of course is to treat these things much the way law does: take out the individuals, not smear their ethnicity or sex. These are not feminists, anti-racists and gay rights advocates, but bigoted supremacists who demonstrably exhibit racist, segregationist, and supremacist tendencies who hide within those movements to camouflage their hatred and disdain of whites, men, and heterosexuals.

        If the PC want to make a case for the targets of their paranoia operating within larger institutions, make the case, but let’s not have Jim Hines showing us photos of WorldCon chairs and throwing around racist innuendoes about “problems” in SFF, or waving around pie-charts. SFF has no such problems if that’s your frickin’ case.

        1. I’m not sure if this is an example of PCism or not. It sounds more like bigotry as a bigot always picks “bad examples” to excuse his/her bigotry.

          On the other hand, is there that big of difference between PCism and bigotry?

      2. I do not claim equivalency. I maintain there is a sliding scale and a slippery slope. There are behaviours that can be grouped into families, and spitting is a violent act, it is an assault. The rest is merely a matter of degree. That there is hatred and bigotry motivating both acts is the point.

        1. “…merely a matter of degree.”

          You’ve confirmed for me that you are in desperate need of not only perspective, but experience in patterns of human behavior.

        2. The problem is that you did claim equivalency. Your exact comment, with emphasis added by me.

          But Christian men who openly declare that women should not be allowed to speak in church – by inference having any kind of insight or authority from which men can learn – , should be submissive to their husbands, and are apparently incapable of casting an intelligent vote in the democratic process — those men are absolutely in the same class of men as fundamentalist Islamic men.

          Those fundamentalist Islamic men stone women who are the victims of rape, and yet you claim they’re “in the same class” That is equivalency. It’s not even close to the same class.

          For the record, I’m far from a misogynist. I’m not defending any action or words of anyone in particular. I’m simply pointing out that by saying someone using words you don’t like or even dickish behavior is the same thing as stoning women who don’t act “right” is killing anything approaching a valid argument you might actually make.

    5. Underwhelmed said, “I know a woman who was spat on by Hassidic Jewish men because she walked through their neighbourhood unescorted by a man.”

      I highly doubt that story.

      There are certainly fuggheads within the Chassidic community who will harass visitors who are not dressed according to their community standards; this is a known problem. (Note that this will equally apply to a male jogger in shorts and no shirt. The harassment is inexcusable, but it’s not sex-specific.)

      But a woman spat upon for walking “unescorted by a man”? Sorry, wrong stereotype.

      1. Sounded off, to me. But I am so very far from being knowledgeable in that regard…

        I think I’ll trust your judgement over another’s.

  66. Now Larry’s getting one-star reviews on Goodreads, citing his mockery of hashtag activism. Boy, that didn’t take long. Maybe they’ll start a new campaign: #DontReadLarry 😀

  67. Whatever happened to the “Wanted: Dead or Alive” bounties? I would think that people should be able to contribute to such a bounty to push it to an acceptable range.

    Of course, our current political leadership probably isn’t too fond of such a concept nor of the idea that foreign nations could reciprocate in the same fashion.

    So, all in all, Larry is right (no surprise). Under principles of national sovereignty Nigeria must solve Nigeria’s problems or formally request assistance from a nation that is willing to help.

  68. Of course, when I first saw the title of the article I thought it was “Operation Poultry Face” with Mooch standing there with her lips pooched out looking like a duck.
    It seemed reasonable. Crude, but reasonable.

  69. For those that might be interested enough to read this, I have been apart of the anti-trafficking movement for five years, combating slavery thru awareness, aftercare, and government task forces. Five years ago I would speak at events about sex slavery and no one had a concept of its existence. I’ve watched awareness do amazing things where much more of the public know these things are happening and are joining the cause. I agree with a lot of what was said, but one thing to consider: fighting for justice against trafficking is hard & lonely work. Five years of trying to get laws passed and programs funded with no one listening to us. Until recently. And even tho it’s small, part of the reason they are now is because celebrities and others are taking these “pointless” pictures. So yeah, there’s a lot more productive things people could do than be hypocritical in their complaining, take selfies, & hastaging, and I wish they did, but believe it or not, it’s actually helping.

  70. Even my brother, who buys into a lot of the leftista crap, refused to go along with this nonsense. Somebody asked him to change his Facebook thing to one of these ridiculous selfies, and he told her flat out he didn’t do pathetic and stupid.

  71. Don’t forget to visit KlanGate, cuz SFF can never promote too many sneering posts about the immorality of a “middle-age white man” and the inadvisability of “whiteness.”

    http://www.blackgate.com/2014/05/11/a-ride-along-with-the-thought-police-john-c-wright-foz-meadows-and-rachel-aaron/

    *

    Meanwhile, yaaaaay!!! Afrofuturism and “black to the future.

    http://www.spelman.edu/academics/faculty/cosby-chairs/tananarive-due/octavia-butler-celebration

    *

    Yaaay! for loving “the fact that 4/5 of the top results in that CW (Clarkesworld) poll are by non-white authors.”

    https://twitter.com/MizHalle/status/441175804290953216

    Yaaaay!! Clarkesworld and “diversity.”

  72. “911. What’s your emergency?”

    “This is the WisCon science fiction convention downtown. We have a bunch of white people in a room and they won’t leave.”

    “White people? At a science fiction convention? You mean like Star Trek?”

    “No. It’s not like that at all. This is a feminist science fiction convention.”

    “What… you mean like Miss Spock?”

    “No. No, there’s nothing like that… well, okay, actually there is – but that’s not what I’m calling about. We have these white people in our safer-space set aside for people of color and they won’t leave.”

    “Is this like a Star Wars Klan rally?”

    “What? No. It’s nothing like that at all. Why would you say that? We’re not like that.

    “Look lady, you’re calling me up saying a bunch of white people have a bunch of colored people trapped in a room. What am I supposed to think?”

    “It’s not a Klan rally, and don’t call me lady. My preferred pronouns are ‘they’ and ‘them’.”

    “Whatever.”

    “And they’re not colored people, they’re people of color.”

    “Gotcha. And they’re trapped in a safe-house.”

    “No, it’s a safer-space.”

    “Safer than what? It don’t sound too safe from my end.”

    “It’s a designated space for people of color to dialogue freely and openly.”

    “And now they’re trapped in there.”

    “No. Some white people went in there and they won’t leave.”

    “Why don’t the colored people leave?”

    “They did.”

    “And now the white people are doing what – dialoging? Did any Jews get in there?”

    “Are you trying to be funny?”

    “Would I know if I was?”

    “I suppose so.”

    “Then I’m not.”

    “We need some police officers on the scene. White people are in our non-white room.”

    “And that’s not allowed?”

    “No.”

    “You have rooms white people can’t go into? Or Jews?”

    “That’s right.”

    “And it’s not a Klan rally?”

    “No. I told you. It’s complicated.”

    “I’m sure it is. I had a cousin who was a neo-Nazi and we could never make sense of anything he said.”

    “We’re not neo-Nazis.”

    “Sorry – proto-Nazis. Well, chances are the officers on scene will be white, so that’ll be complicated too. My recommendation is you call black 911.”

    “Is there such a thing?”

    “No, but I’m white so I don’t give a shit.”

    “Now you’re just being rude.”

    “And be careful with matches. By my reckoning, the closest black fire station is in Mauritania.”

    “Listen, we need your help. We need to get those white people out of there. It’s triggering some folks.”

    “Whaddya mean – they have guns?”

    “No, they have PTSD.”

    “You’re war vets?”

    “No, people of color are sensitive to micro-aggressions.”

    “What in Hell’s Gate is a micro-aggression?”

    “Look, we need your help – we need some officers to come down here.”

    “Couldn’t you just smoke them out?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “White people are notoriously scared of smoke. They panic and stampede if they get a whiff of it. My ma says it’s cuz we were all once born in caves in volcanoes.”

    “What in the world are you going on about, officer – we need your help.”

    “Do you have any bug spray?”

    “Are you going to send some officers or not. These white people are violating our safer-space, and they’re delaying our James Tiptree bake sale.”

    ‘You’re feminists… and you’re having a bake sale… for a guy?”

    “James Tiptree was not a guy. His name was Alice.”

    “And let me guess: he jumped down rabbit holes? May the force be with you.” (click)

    1. Now I have a mental image of NK Jemisin with smoke coming out of her ears and I can’t stop chuckling. Thanks, definitely needed that on Monday morning!

  73. Given how many stories ooze out of Hollywood about pedophile producers, directors and actors raping child actors and wanna-be starlets, it seems a little weird to have a lot of hollywood outrage about a bunch of power-drunk assholes taking a bunch of young girls to feed their urges. But I repeat myself. They’re right: real men don’t buy women. Hollywood mendon’t either; just take what they want without paying a dime.

  74. “911 – What’s yer emergency?”

    “We still need some officers sent to the WisCon science fiction convention downtown. I wish to report a violation of our safer-space policy.”

    “Yeah, I remember, lady. You have too many white people in one area and you need them shifted to another. Doesn’t the hotel have forklifts on their loading docks?”

    “Oh, it’s you again. And I told you before, don’t call me ‘lady.’ I’m not going through my femme period right now. My preferred gender prounouns are ‘they’ or ‘them. We don’t define people by their gender.'”

    “Gotcha – only by their race. And the city isn’t interested in your bodily functions, ma’am, so hold off with the graphics.”

    “What? Why are you being so difficult? If you could see past your obvious privilege and examine it, you might stop making jokes and help us.”

    “Privilege? You mean seniority? Is this a union issue? Cuz we’re not going to interfere if the hotel doesn’t want you using their forklifts. We don’t cross union lines. Call the Teamsters – they’re good at shifting things about.”

    “Whatever in the world are you babbling about now?”

    “Listen, if someone’s dressed like Darth Vader, how do you know if they can go in the non-white room? And where do these colored people normally live – in bomb shelters?”

    “What? What are you talking about? I want to talk to your supervisor.”

    “I am the supervisor on this shift, ma’am, and you’re interfering with me conducting an investigation. In my official capacity representing the city of Madison, I wanna know what happens if Darth Vader goes into the non-white room. If these people in this room are scared of whites, how would they know to be scared if someone’s wearing a giant black Nazi helmet?”

    “This is exactly what I expect from cis-people.”

    “I ain’t no sissy, ma’am. I lettered in rugby in college.”

    “I’m going to report you to the mayor.”

    “Go ahead. He’s not a member of the Klan, and he don’t like Star Trek, so good luck. Anyway, like I was saying, if these people have post traumatic stress syndrome, you’re telling me they’re more scared of white people than being in a room with Darth Vader? Wouldn’t that pull their trigger?”

    “You mean act as a trigger?”

    “I’m not frickin’ Roy Rogers ma’am. All I know is you’re telling me you got colored people who get panic attacks if any white people come around a special safe-room they’re in. Apparently that situation has developed and you need immediate assistance – is that correct?”

    “Essentially, yes.”

    “Why don’t you make a citizen’s arrest and then file a civil suit for violating your civil rights for being white in inappropriate circumstances?”

    “Is that legal?”

    “How the hell would I know? You’re holding pie-eating contests for Alice in frickin’ Wonderland AKA ‘Jim’ and you want me to speak Swahili when I use the word ‘lady.’ Almost anything could be anything. What’s law got to do with it? Sounds like you make your own laws. If you don’t want white people in your non-white room, put on some Star Trek stormtroopers outfits and go in there and roust them out.”

    “Stormtroopers are from Star Wars, not Star Trek. And were holding a bake sale, not having eating contests. That’s gross. And it’s not ‘Jim’ – it’s James Tiptree. We have a Tiptree cookbook called ‘The Bakery Men Don’t See’.”

    “I’m going out on a limb here and assuming you just uttered a clever pun of some sort at me.”

    “We have auctions too. This year we’re auctioning off a hand-knitted uterus, and a kangaroo scrotum purse.”

    ‘Ma’am, did you not just use the word ‘gross’ at me? Cuz if you think that’s acceptable language to use with a 911 dispatcher, then I’m assuming your ‘safe-room’ is actually a ‘danger-room’. I’m not a bit surprised you’re having some kind of a race-riot in there.”

    “I can see talking to you is completely useless.”

    “Yeah, I know – I gotta examine my seniority.”

    “Your privilege.”

    “Yeah, that too. Right now it’s my privilege to do this.”

    “What?”

    (click)

  75. I’m left of center and I think the signs are silly. That being said, I don’t think we should send the US military into Nigeria. I can’t tell from Larry’s post if he really advocates sending the military after Boko Harram or not or is just pointing out that this is more effective than signs. Our soldiers have families and lives of their own. Just because they would go as ordered not complain is not a reason to send them.

    I have flat feet and even though I could possibly have gotten into the military they never would have let me in combat. There are limits of how much I can be on my feet. So I take the view of ‘who am I to ask others to do this if I can’t’. I’m 39 and never served so I’m well past the age anyway.

    I don’t see it as a horrible thing to prefer that military members be in non-combat roles and able to spend time with their families as much as possible.

  76. Retweeted by WisCon
    K Tempest Bradford ‏@tinytempest 46m

    WisCon POC dinner is happening again this year. RSVP & let us know your dietary requirements: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OFF31MnIWWg2iwvnB_vufmtmxXBnNDRVnjmxJKshoIc/viewform

    It’d be funny if the restaurant refused to serve them because they refused whites at their table. Kind of a Catch-22 dingle-dongle there from our lovely Orwellians. Trust me, sooner or later this stuff will bite WisCon in the ass. Apparently, businesses not serving certain races is a legal/technical thing only in WisCon’s eyes. Otherwise, if you have a restaurant, and can get away with not serving non-whites, WisCon’s got your back. But you can only schedule a conference about it in their Safer-Space if you’re not white, so it’s just a little tangled.

    1. I’m tempted to reply that I’m a strict carnivore and the sight of vegetables offends me. Also that I’m bringing my rifle, Sasha who is on a very strict lubricant only diet.

  77. Thank you for stating the obvious. My comments on the yahoo news articles about this not being an isolated incident, and arming teachers and students in schools, haven’t been well received.

    1. They’d have to go pretty dam far. Slavery has existed since people have existed. You go back and change that, you’re going to whack all of human history out of shape and end up being your own great-grandpa or something.

  78. “911 dispatch – what’s yer emergency?”

    “I’m calling from the WisCon science fiction con… Oh, Sweet Sappho, is that you again?”

    “‘Fraid so, ma’am.”

    “Are you the only 911 dispatcher in the entire city of Madison?”

    “No, but as a supervisor, I get the special cases routed back to me once a pattern’s been established with a certain caller ID.”

    “What do you mean by ‘special’?”

    “Our term for it here in the office is a ‘lunatic sandwich,’ lady.”

    “I am not a lunatic. And didn’t I ask you to not call me ‘lady’? It’s triggery.”

    “I wouldn’t know about that, ma’am. I was never much good at math.”

    “What?”

    “What?”

    “People are more than their gender.”

    “How much more?”

    “What?”

    “What?”

    “I’m pretty sure it’s against the law for you to say I’m a lunatic. You don’t even know me.”

    “The state declares people mental cases all the time, and I represent the state.”

    “You can’t make a diagnosis on the phone.”

    “Sure I can. I’m a cop. I can do anything I want. I could arrest you for heresy or sneezing if I wanted to. Whaddya gonna do: call another cop? And whaddya wearing right now, lady? Are you dressed as a space alien?”

    “What does my Queer-Gender-Clone of Saturn costume have to do with anything?”

    “Right. That’s what I thought.”

    “The state of Wisconsin doesn’t refer to people as ‘mental cases’; that’s ableist.”

    “I dunno. I’ve never read much Lincoln. I’m a WW II buff myself. I really like reading about the Battle of…”

    “Officer, you’re babbling.”

    “Sorry, ma’am. What can I do for you?”

    “You can stop saying I’m a lunatic. It disorients me. I have SID.”

    “Put him on the line, but I’ll tell ya right now I’m not changing my mind about coming down there and prying any white people out of a non-white room.”

    “‘SID’ is not a he, ‘SID’ is an ‘it.'”

    “Ma’am, you have me so confused with your pronouns that I really don’t have any idea of what you’re saying. Put SID on the line, maybe ‘it’ will make more sense than you, though I’m not hopeful.”

    “‘SID’ is a disability I have, you moron.”

    “‘Moron’? Did you just do an Abe Lincoln on me? Anyway, have you tried pinching your nose and blowing out your ears?”

    “What? I have Sensory Integration Dysfunction.”

    “I can well imagine that’s the case, ma’am.”

    “You make me want to run away.”

    “Into a safer-space?”

    “No. The safer-space is for people of color. I go to our ‘Quiet Place’ room. There’s no talking and they have neck massages, hair-braiding, and comfy chairs.”

    “If there’s no talking, how do you ask for a neck massage or hair-braid? Do they read your mind through sheer sympathy or do you use sign-language?”

    “You make me want to go there now.”

    “Sorry about that, ma’am.”

    “You are so binary.”

    “Like a star system? I’m assuming from the tone of your voice that’s bad.”

    “Oh, my – the cis-male has read a science book and made a joke. I feel like we’re going in circles.”

    “Like a star system, ma’am? That’s so binary.”

    “Sappho save me from middle-aged white men – you are clueless.”

    “Not at all ma’am. I understand the situation perfectly: you’re dressed as a gay alien at a Star Trek convention for girls and the white ones have overcome the colored ones and now a bitter stalemate has ensued and the white girls have barricaded themselves inside a safe-house in protest of your racist policy. You want a S.W.A.T team to come in and strategize a hostage negotiation/rescue scenario so your leg-shaving contest to raise money for the estate of Lewis Carroll cuz you like ‘Lord Jim’ can get started on time. Is that about it?”

    “You are really an ass.”

    “Is that a micro-aggression?”

    “As a member of the white patriarchy, you don’t qualify.”

    “Gee, really? Whoda thought?”

    “We need the police. Are you going to help us?”

    “Would I know if I was?”

    “Oh, Sweet Sappho – strike this cis-het dead.”

    “I’m not Egyptian, ma’am. And it is against the law to refuse service to people based on their race, or to call down death curses on city officials from imaginary beings. You do understand that, don’t you? What do you want me to do: bring dogs and hose down the white people?”

    “You used to do things like that.”

    “Somebody somewhere may have. We didn’t, and we’re not a revenge squad, otherwise we’d be kickin’ Italians in the nutsacks for Roman slavery and using our nightsticks on Japanese tourists for Pearl Harbor.”

    “We’re not offering services in that safer-space, officer, so we’re not breaking any law.”

    “Do you serve tea or coffee in that room, ma’am?”

    “Well… yes.”

    “And white people can’t drink it?”

    “Well…”

    “Uh-huh. And do you allow people to reserve time slots for specific purposes?”

    Well…”

    “Uh-huh. And can white people do it? No. That’s what I thought. You’re offering a service you are denying to whites. You’re screwed.”

    “That’s a sexist remark. And we’re a private organization, officer, so we’re not breaking the law.”

    “Segregated off-campus high school proms are private. Are you in favor of them?”

    “No, but that’s….”

    “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Listen, Miss Double-Standard, please don’t call here again, or you’ll be routed straight through to the state mental institution, or maybe even carted off.”

    “Officer, this is interfering with our entire schedule. Our PoC dinner is tonight.”

    “What? A what dinner?”

    “Just… our dinner…”

    “You said ‘PoC’. Is that ‘People of the Cross’?”

    “Well… no…”

    “Oh, keeee-rice-tees. You mean you got a colored people dinner too? Man, oh, man, oh, man. What in the Sam Hill is up with you people? Are you just frickin’ crazy? What is it – what’s the deal? Tell me. I’m all ears. And let me guess: you want me to set up a perimeter around the restaurant with sand-bagged machine gun emplacements and tripwire – is that is? Cuz I’ll tell ya right now, I’m not gonna.”

    “Listen: we’re tax-payers and we need police assistance down here at the convention space.”

    “No, I wanna know about the colored people dinner now. I’m assuming the restaurant has white waiters and white customers that could smear themselves all over your colored people at any moment. So there’s no excuse it’s a safer-space. Unless they’re going to use some giant Cone of Silence or drop a plexiglass box over the table, let’s call this what it is: racial segregation.”

    “People have the right to free association, officer.”

    “Really? Like when 10 white people in a room are a frickin’ Klan rally?”

    “That’s different thing, officer. There are power structures and a postcolonial history of systemic white supremacy to consider.”

    “Klan dinner, Klan dinner, Klan dinner.”

    “You are as childish as a baby, officer.”

    “I’m a white straight male. What did you expect – ancient wisdom?”

    “I’m writing a letter to the governor after the convention.”

    “Good luck, he’s not in the Klan either. But he does wear a pith helmet and a monocle with a red coat and says ‘Pip, pip,’ and ‘Cheerio’ all the time and eats postcolonial pancakes for breakfast. I gotta go, lady. I have to go bang a window sill on my head.” (click)

    1. That was awesome. I FEEL dispatch’s frustration.

      It’s like you’re a writer and stuff, Fail! Excellent.

  79. FailBurton, I will buy your first book if it is under $5 and over 100 pages. Kindle, Raw HTML, paper, I don’t care.

  80. “911 dispatch – what’s yer emergency?”

    “Huh, you again. I insist on talking to someone in authority this time. We have a problem at the convention space that needs addressing and I am not letting you stop me again.”

    “You may consider me the final authority, gatekeeper, Solomon, your daddy, and all other wise things that resemble a big door you can’t open, ma’am. We’re not coming down to crowbar white people out of your bomb shelter just so you can bake James Tippecanoe Madison Zingers and sell ’em to finance colored dinner parties, and that’s final.”

    “Save your pathetic racist patriarchal remarks; I’d like to report a medical emergency. We need some paramedics.”

    “We can get right on that. What is the nature of your medical emergency, ma’am?”

    “We have people hyperventilating over this ruckus. Many of them are crying.”

    “Yes, I remember: Roy Rogers and Trigger Syndrome. Crying and hyperventilating could be caused by any number of things, ma’am. Given the nature of your previous calls, having a white person moving from one part of a room to the other wouldn’t in and of itself be considered an emergency.”

    “Now you’re going to make medical diagnosis over the phone, officer?”

    “I am allowed a wide discretion in these matters, lady. That prevents me from arguing and you from being wrong.”

    “How many times have I asked you to not call me ‘lady’?”

    “Under the Freedom of Information Act, you are within your rights to access these phone logs and do whatever calculations you see fit to, ma’am. It is not within my purview as a police officer to mentally keyword my own conversations and give such estimates, nor am I permitted to allocate precious municipal city emergency services in order to hold the hands of people inordinately affected by whiteophobia.”

    “There’s no such thing as ‘whiteophobia’.”

    “Then why do you have a bomb shelter to keep them out?”

    “It’s not a bomb shelter. It’s a safer-space so people of color can hold discussions without being goggled at like zoo animals.”

    “What about white people who’ll goggle at them at the colored banquet in a public restaurant? Is the restaurant going to ask white people to avert their eyes?”

    “It’s not a banquet. We’re going to unveil the Octavia Butler bust made out of Milky Way bars to honor her color, and her gender and galaxy-spanning science-fiction.”

    “Sounds fascinating. And what are they going to do to stave off their whiteophobia – burn sage?”

    “No, we set off the sprinkler system last year and Octavia melted. This year we’re having a 1/24th Dakota Sioux First Nations shaman named Mary Chief-Goose come from the Jackpot Bear Casino and Golf Resort to work a charm of invisible feminine peace around our table. And there’s no such thing as ‘whiteophobia’.”

    “Oh yes there is ma’am. My wife is studying law at the U of W and they’re making her take gender studies. I’ve gotten an earful about ‘homophobia,’ ‘Islamophobia,’ ‘xenophobia,’ ‘fear of a black planet,’ women crying on Twitter about television comedians, and they’re always going on about making the campus safer for anyone who’s not a white guy. I’m surprised my wife still talks to me. Fortunately, our civilization has not yet fallen to the point we send out ambulances every time a dangerous white person goes into a bombshelter you’ve designated ‘non-white’, so you’re out of luck.”

    “Why do you ramble on so when I have women crying and gasping for breath here? It’s not from ‘whiteophobia’.”

    “Given the nature of your calls and the fact my uncle has an inordinate fear of clowns, we’re going to have to agree to disagree. He’s terrified of them. One day we…”

    “Listen officer: I know you think you’re being clever but the QUILTBAG community is not going to take this lying down.”

    “How do you usually use quilts: standing up? Given the nature of your calls, that wouldn’t surprise me, ma’am. I admit to being ignorant when it comes to making Star Trek sleeping bags. Are they made for using standing up cuz of zero gravity like that movie with Sandra Bernhard?”

    “You mean ‘Bullock’.”

    “Whatever. She floated around a lot. She never even fought any aliens like that lady in the bikini panties.”

    “Why am I not surprised that’s the part you remember about a fierce woman like Ripley?”

    “Well, at least she wasn’t covered in a quilt.”

    “Whatever in the world are you babbling on about sleeping bags? You’ve never heard of the QUILTBAG community?”

    “No, ma’am, but my gramma crochets some pretty nifty beer can hats. She gets together with other old bag quilters on Sundays after church and they listen to the Polish-Time Polka Music radio show and…”

    “Your snarky remarks stink of white male privilege and misogyny.”

    “What’s ‘misogyny’?”

    “It’s when men hate women just for being women.”

    “Like when you just now indicated you hate me cuz I’m a man? What’s the word for that? Or is this just another of the million and one double standards you hold conventions for and make rules that only work for women? Good thing we men don’t make laws that way, cuz you’d be at the ‘Lady Internment Convention’.”

    “You did make laws like that.”

    “No, I didn’t. I think you’re confused about how law works, ma’am. You see, if some white guy steals a cow in the 17th century, you don’t come knocking on my front door unless rules of evidence take immortality into account, which they don’t. For example, I’m not going to file a civil suit against a Turk for 18th century white slavery, and if I see some colored bag quilting feminist robbing a car, I won’t come down to your convention and throw any non-white female wearing Ace bandages on their knees into a line-up.”

    “No, you’ll search and frisk us. You cis-scum stop men for ‘driving while black’.”

    “Ma’am, your ignorance of the law is showing again: it is not against the law anywhere in America for people to drive while simultaneously being black. If they were juggling tennis balls or something I could see…”

    “You stop transgender over nothing.”

    “Lady, if we stop freeway traffic it’s for a good reason, but there’s no turnpike system like that in Wisconsin so it would be out of my jurisdiction. You might be thinking of the Trans-Canada Highway which runs from…”

    “Please just stop. We need medical attention, and right away.”

    “Ma’am, given the nature of your remarks, the idea of finding volunteers to go down there and give mouth-to-mouth to feminists stuffed into Supergirl outfits isn’t an idea our emergency teams are likely to dote on.”

    “No one gives mouth-to-mouth anymore, you idiot. You use chest-pumping.”

    “Your Abe Lincoln quote aside, it’s even less likely one of our guys is going to invite a lawsuit by manipulating the carcasses of angry feminists who don’t particularly like them. If those Danskins leotards they use to make their space-girl outfits weren’t stretched to the limit, they might not have so much trouble breathing.”

    “You don’t have women who work your emergency response teams? Typical.”

    “Nothing that would be in the nature of an Amazon brigade, I’m afraid. No.”

    “If one of these women has any medical repercussions as a result of your intransigence, the city of Madison is going to be liable.”

    “‘Intransigence’? Lady, I take showers every day. And consider puncturing those Danskins outfits they wear. That’ll help them breathe. You don’t need a medical degree for that. They’ll probably end up suing themselves for wearing those outfits.”

    “We’ve already put Danskins on notice for the dangerous materials they use. There’s no give in the fabric.”

    “That’s because no fabric has yet been invented that can be stretched to the thickness of two molecules.”

    “How in the world do you get into work every day? Does a monkey dress you?”

    “Yes. My monkey ‘privilege’ is at my beck and call. It invents a lot of cool stuff and can land a Hot Wheels car on Mars on a dime ‘n’ shit.”

    “Yes, well, that’s changing; space isn’t just for white men anymore.”

    “Yeah, I know. Lady Admirals and ninja Amazon brigades are going to terrify the universe in star-destroyers if you can ever tear yourself away from gender studies and go down to the draft office and demand diversity. That’d actually be even crazier than a science-fiction movie since no one’s ever seen you do that, but we actually do have space ships. That puts front-line female assault troops and dragons on an even keel. Maybe if you hold signs, a female armored division will invent itself out of sheer shame. After that the rest’ll be easy. I’m looking forward to ‘Pie-Chart Wars: Revenge of the Cis’.”

    “Are you going to send a medical team down here or not?”

    “That a negative, lady.”

    “I’m going to write a letter to the First Lady.”

    “Great. I’ll call the Secret Service and let them know a ‘lunatic sandwich’ is on the menu. That’ll put you in Dutch right off the bat. Live long and property, or whatever it is you dingbats say.”
    (click)

    1. That is so hilarious I’m tempted to go to the next Wiscon just so I can post notices that my room is a “white cismale heteronormative unsafe space.”

  81. The number of girls kidnapped changes with each new story. Did this actually happen? Doesn’t it make more sense that the US Government is just looking for a new battleground and wants its lefty liberals on board?

  82. “Wisconsin State Mental Institution. How may I help you?”

    “Wha…? I was trying to reach 911 emergency services.”

    “I have the number for that right here, ma’am, if you’d like it. Hold on a second.”

    “Wait, you fool, I know th… Oh, Sweet Medusa and Lesbos. What is wrong with these people?”

    “Sorry about the delay, ma’am. I have that number you requested right here – it’s 911.”

    “I know that, you idiot. Everybody does. I’ve been talking to them half the afternoon.”

    “No need to get personal, ma’am. I was just trying to be helpful.”

    “I’m sorry. You’re right. I apologize. I’ve had a trying afternoon with an insane white man with a full set of micro-aggressions.”

    “No problem. What are micro-aggressions? Are you a jeweler?”

    “You work in the mental health field and you’ve never heard of micro-aggressions?”

    “No, ma’am. Crazy people make up new stuff faster than we can keep track of them.”

    “The concept of micro-aggressions was not made up by crazy people. It is as solid a social science as white privilege.”

    “White what?”

    “Never mind. I don’t want to get into that now. I’m having a very triggery day.”

    “You’re taking a math exam?”

    “What?”

    “What?”

    “I have no idea what you just said.”

    “Fair enough, lady.”

    “And please don’t refer to me as ‘lady.’ My preferred pronouns are ‘they’ and ‘them’.”

    “Gotcha, lady. We have a retarded lady here who says the same thing, so I understand. Claims she’s neither a man nor a woman. Some time she skittles around like a crab. She has a really big beard. Great poker player.”

    “Are you trying to be funny?”

    “Would I know if I was?”

    “Probably.”

    “Then I’m not.”

    “You don’t happen to know anyone who who works for Madison emergency dispatch do you?”

    “No, ma’am. If you’ve been talking to 911 all day, why are you calling here? Do you wish to institutionalize yourself? We get a lot of referrals from 911.”

    “No, I do not wish to institutionalize myself. I am calling from the WisCon science fiction convention in downtown Madison. We have a serious situation here where white people have gone into a room we have designated as being ‘safe’ for people other than white.”

    “Does that include animals, or only humans who self-identify as such? We have a lot of people here like that. One guy thinks he’s Noah and wants all the other patients to get into his invisible boat. You know, like that movie with the Harry Potter girl?”

    “Please do not mention that movie to me. I find the whole thing deeply offensive, with its white cast.”

    “We understand things like that here, ma’am. We have one guy who fears tinfoil.”

    “I do not fear white people. America is not a safe place for people of color. White men have created an ingenious system allowing them to dominate most of the planet. Diabolical… but ingenious.”

    “Kinda like ‘War of the Worlds’.”

    “What?”

    “Like that movie where the Martians come to Earth and march around in those tin cans and eat people and take over the planet. That’s pretty diabolical.”

    “That’s another movie with all white men. Hollywood’s obsession with white casts… it’s like they can’t even see they’re doing it. Where are the people of color?”

    “You mean colored people?”

    “The preferred term is ‘people of color’. At least among those on the right side of history. And don’t get me started on Dr. Who.”

    “I promise I won’t. So what about this non-white room? Is it actually like a giant safe you keep colored people in?”

    “No. It’s a safer-space.”

    “Safer than what?”

    “If you were a woman of color you’d understand. Our political system was BUILT to rob black people and control women. People of color have no privilege; that takes its toll. Surely in your profession you’ve dealt with the mental health of women of color exposed to white supremacy?”

    “Not really. We have a lady from Malaysia who’s scared of minnows. Are you a colored woman?”

    “No, I do not have that privilege.”

    “I thought you just said colored women don’t have any privilege.”

    “Well… you misunderstand, young man. I am white. I am born with privilege. I have discovered that I am racist. It shames me. I once had food delivered and the Latino delivery guy spoke perfect English. I was stunned.”

    “Were you in Mexico?”

    “No, it was Chicago.”

    “Then why were you surprised? People in America have been speaking English since they came here. Are you an immigrant?”

    “No, I simply wasn’t used to diversity.”

    “How old were you – like 6?”

    “I was 37.”

    “Did you live in a cave, like one of those hippie composts?”

    “I lived right in Chicago.”

    “Yeesh. You must not get outside much. I don’t know if I’d say you were a racist though. Ignorant maybe. So when are you coming in to be examined?”

    “I do not wish to institutionalize myself, young man, and I am not ignorant.”

    “Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. But if you don’t mind me saying so, you fit the profile of most of the people we have here, what with having panic attacks over expecting a pizza guy to speak indecipherable gibberish and a fear of white people and all.”

    “I do NOT fear white people, young man.”

    “We have a guy here who writes ‘I am not afraid of soap’ hundreds of times a day, but if you show him a bar of soap he screams and passes out.”

    “I do NOT fear white people, young man. How many times do I have to say it?”

    “I dunno. Do you ever write that down? Like mebbe a thousand times?”

    “No. And I resent the implication I fear white people.”

    “There, you did it again. Sorry, but you’ve already said that about 20 times, so it makes me wonder. Where did you say you were?”

    “Why do you ask?”

    “No reason. We’d just like to send someone around and make sure you’re safe from white people. What address are you at?”

    “I do NOT fear white people and you are NOT sending someone around to make sure I’m safe. Are you a boob?”

    “No. It’s just that we have a nice safe space here all ready for you. We can make sure no white people, delivery guys, Dr. Who, or movies sneak up on you. We have a medical team on the premises ready to come and pick you up. Harry, go get Lionel and Barry ready. We got a live one.”

    “What was that? Who were you talking to just now?”

    “No one.”

    “I just heard you talking to someone, young man. Please don’t lie to me.”

    “It was the radio.”

    “You are lying, young man. I clearly heard your voice. Do you talk at your radio?”

    “Oh that. I was just mentioning the weather. It wasn’t to anyone white or diabolical. Just stay on the line, lady. We’re sending someone around to help. We have your location and we’re sending a mobile safe-room to pick you up. It’s safer than anything. You’ll be all tucked in, nice and safe. The orderlies we’re sending are very dark-skinned and not at all white, so don’t worry about a thing. ”
    (click)

  83. “Wisconsin FBI – Madison field office. How may I help you?”

    “Officer, I’m calling from the WisCon science fiction convention in downtown Madison – I’d like to report a breach of the peace.”

    “My title isn’t ‘officer’ ma’am. You may refer to me as Agent Success.”

    “I understand. Observing proper titles is important. My own preferred pronouns are ‘they’ and ‘them’.”

    “Understood. What’s the nature of this breach of the peace, lady?”

    “Oh, Sappho give me patience.”

    “Are you on another line, ma’am? Who’s ‘Sambo’?”

    “Are you trying to be funny officer?”

    “Would I know if I was?”

    “Certainly.”

    “Then I’m not.”

    “Listen – officer – some of our white people are holding a protest and it’s gotten out of hand.”

    “Is this a neo-Nazi thing, lady – cuz the FBI takes a dim view of such gatherings and using words like ‘Sambo’. We have a special civil rights division that teaches us about hate speech.”

    “It is not a ‘neo-Nazi thing’ and I am NOT engaging in hate speech you idiotic cis-person. Why would you say that?”

    “Calm yourself, ma’am. I don’t take kindly to being called a sissy. I lettered in jai alai in college.”

    “I’m sorry, I’ve had a very trying day, but I told you: it’s a science fiction convention.”

    “For white people.”

    “No – for feminists.”

    “Okay. Does this have anything to do with the inter-state trafficking of white children? They’re a high-ticket item these days.”

    “That’s because PoC have no value in this society, officer.”

    “Don’t I know it. I lost my shirt back in ’08.”

    “Whatever are you talking about?”

    “I lost a bundle on Pacific Iron Ore Corp. POC dropped like a rock in ’08.”

    “‘PoC’ aren’t a commodity, officer, though I’m not surprised a privileged white cis-male would think of them like that.”

    “I don’t know anything about the inner workings of the minds of stock brokers, ma’am, although I find it fascinating you can see me through this phone.”

    “I didn’t say you did, officer. I was talking about privilege. And I didn’t need to see you to know you’re white.”

    “‘Agent’, ma’am.”

    “What?”

    “You can refer to me as Agent Success, ma’am. I’m not an officer. And my seniority’s not all that high. Why do you think I’m answering phones instead of being out in the field? And our seniority system is based on date of graduation, not race, so you’re out of line there.”

    “I was referring to your privilege.”

    “Is that what Teamster’s call it? I’m not a Teamster, ma’am. So you’re telling me this is something of a white-collar crime involving pork-bellies?”

    “What in the world are you babbling about?”

    “The FBI doesn’t ‘babble’, ma’am.”

    “We have a problem with white people in our safe-space. It has traumatized people; they’re having trouble breathing.”

    “I see. If you have some people trapped in a bank vault, I recommend you call 911. I have that number right here. Let me put you on hold.”

    “Wait, officer, I… oh, cis peeeoooople!”

    “Sorry for putting you on hold, ma’am. Thanks for your patience. I have that number for you. It’s 911… Hello?”

    “I’m right here, officer. I was practicing some tantric breathing exercises to calm myself.”

    “‘Agent’, ma’am.”

    “What?”

    “I’m not an officer, ma’am. You may refer to me as ‘Agent Success’.”

    “Yes, of course.”

    “Now what’s all this about a ‘safe-house’?”

    “It’s a ‘safer-space’ for non-white people, officer, and right now it’s causing a disruption in our science fiction convention.”

    “Sounds more like a ‘danger-space’ to me, lady. Is this like that holo-thing on Star Wars?

    “You mean a ‘holo-deck’. And that was Star Trek, the Next Generation, not Star Wars.”

    “I wouldn’t know about that, lady. I haven’t watched monster movies since I was 13. Then I discovered girls.”

    “Typical.”

    “Are you re-creating the Battle of Rorke’s Drift or something – with the Zulus and everything – like Star Wars does in that safer-deck?”

    “What in the world are you going on about now? This has to do with getting people out of our safe-space.”

    “Ma’am, I think you need to talk to our Wisconsin Bureau of Investigation. They handle jurisdictions on the state level, and they have some ex-safe-crackers experienced with bank vaults. Handy to have around. Talk to an agent there. Lemme see… Hu’s over on First Street.”

    “Who?”

    “Yes, ma’am.”

    “What?”

    “Ummm… Waat’s over on Second Street.”

    “I’m sure I don’t know, officer. Who’s at First Street?”

    “Yes, ma’am.”

    “I mean the fellow’s name.”

    “Hu.”

    “The Agent on First.

    “Hu.”

    “The Agent.”

    “That’s right.”

    “I’m asking you who’s on First Street, officer.”

    “That’s the man’s name.”

    “That’s who’s name?”

    “Exactly.”

    “Well go ahead and tell me.”

    “That’s it.”

    “That’s who?”

    “Yes.”

    “Listen, officer. You have an Agent on First Street.”

    “Certainly.”

    “Who’s on First?”

    “That’s right.”

    “Officer, you are passing this case on to who?”

    “In my opinion that’s the best course of action.”

    “You’re aggravating my SID.”

    “Is he recording this conversation, ma’am? Cuz that would be against FBI protocols.”

    (click)

  84. “Wisconsin Bureau of Investigation. This is Hu.”

    “This is Aurora Areola. I am calling from the WisCon science fiction convention in downtown Madison. I am speaking with who?”

    “That’s correct, ma’am.”

    “You’re who?”

    “Yes, ma’am. What can I do for you?”

    “I don’t under… What?”

    “No, ma’am. He’s in the next building over. Let me connect you. Hold on a sec.”

    “Wait, I…”

    “Waat speaking. How may I help you?”

    “Well… I’m not sure.

    “Hu passed you along?”

    “Why.. I don’t know.”

    “Well, Hu’s line is blinking on my phone.”

    “I have no idea.”

    “Then how did you get patched over to me?”

    “What?”

    “Yes, ma’am?”

    “Who was on the phone the first time?”

    “Yes.”

    “What?”

    “Yes, ma’am. I’m still here.”

    “Oh, Sappho… who can help me with this?”

    “Depends. I’ll patch you right through. Let me put you on hold.”

    “Wait, officer, I…”

    “You’ve reached Hu.”

    “Well… how would I know that?”

    “By cleaning out your ears and listening to me, ma’am. This is Hu.”

    “I’m Aurora Areola. I spoke with you a few minutes ago. You put me through to – well… I don’t know where…”

    “Hold on, ma’am. I’ll put you through immediately.”

    “Weir here. What’s your situation?”

    (click)

  85. “Balzi residence. I like pie and foul aromas. John speaking.”

    “Oh, hi, John. Clever as always, I see. This is Aurora from WisCon.”

    “Oh, hi, Aurora. How’s the con going? Got a tight lid on that sexual harassment stuff?”

    “No problems there – white men fear us. But we have another problem and I was wondering if you could help us out?”

    “Gee… I’m kinda on a tight schedule. I’m writing a sequel to ‘The Stars My Destination’.”

    “Ugh. You mean that rapey book where a woman of color is assaulted?”

    “Well, there were a few scenes besides that one.”

    “What are you calling it?”

    “‘The Farts My Destination’.”

    “Oh, well… heh-heh, of course. You’re such a great artist I’m sure you’ll find some way to make that work. I’m taking it on faith there are no rapes.”

    “Only if you consider making people break wind against their will a form of rape.”

    “Well, that’s problematic. I’d have to consult our Geek Feminine Anti-Charm School Chart. Anyway, John – we’re having a problem with our safer-space for people of color, and we could use your help.”

    “Aren’t Say Sadford and Miss No from ‘White-Right the Other’ wrangling that thing? What’s the problem?”

    “Well, No’s had one of her white supremacy panic attacks and didn’t bring an extra drool bucket. Sadford’s trapped in her ‘black to the future’ Ancillary Justice costume. There’s no give in that idiotic fabric. We’re writing letters to Danskins after the con.”

    “Huh. Try wearing a Regency dress with a spare tire. The ball ‘n’ chain had to call a glass company to get me out.”

    “A glass company? Why in the world would… never mind. Let’s stay on focus here. As you can well imagine, white privilege is on the march and some sour dough-faced clever-dinks have occupied our safer-space for PoC.”

    “And what do you think I can do about it. Why don’t you call the police?”

    “I have – they are awash in corruption and cis-male privilege. You have great influence in cyberspace over white people and I thought if you left some choice Tweets the situation might resolve itself. You know white people: those smart-phones are glued to their hind ends. No doubt they’re online right now, bragging about what they’ve done.”

    “Have you tried holding some signs and then taking a picture and posting it to cyberspace? That’s a sure-fire thing. I heard the First Lady herself vectored a drone right onto a Boko Haram position. I guess those Christians disguised as Muslims thought it was a ‘safer-space’. Hahahahaha. Unfortunately it killed most of the girls. But the medium’s the message – that’s the important thing. I learned that when I majored in philosophy, literature, and soup-tasting in college.”

    “Right you are. Those girls were too doused in postcolonialism to appreciate their own sacrifice. We at WisCon will act as surrogates for their conscience.”

    “I’m not sure what you just said but you’re an expert at social justice, so I in all ways bow, defer, kowtow, and bend the knee to you.”

    “Just so. So you’ll get right on those Tweets?”

    “I’ve already done it while we were talking. Here’s one: ‘Get outta there, don’t touch their hair, Burma Shave’.”

    “Excellent, John, excellent. Keep up the good work.”

    “No prob. If my feminism ain’t intersectional it ain’t nuttin’.”

    “Your skills are complete.” (click)

    1. My co-workers are looking at me because I can’t laugh quietly. I hope you’re satisfied with yourself, you cismale gendernormative laugh merchant!

      Also, I will never be able to see Scalzi’s name without thinking “John Balzi” and doing a Beavis & Butthead laugh. Never.

  86. “Jimmy Shines here. Googly-eyed hugs and goblin-kitten farts. What’s yer thinkum dinkum?”

    “Hi, Jimmy. This is Aurora Areola at WisCon. How are things? Have you finished your Guest of Honor speech for the Continuum Racial Self-Flagellation Convention in Australia?”

    “Yeah. Googly-goos. I love the chance to talk about science fiction and fantasy, so the speech will be all about rape. Ozzies rape each other a lot. I’m thinking about hiring a body-guard.”

    “It’s a white colonialist continent mostly inhabited by pigs with two legs. What did you expect? Jimmy, speaking of whites, we have a Level Five Privilege situation here in the official WisCon safer-space Say Sadford and Miss No put together. We’re putting out an alert: Code ‘whites in the hen-house’, Jimmy. We have N.K. Jemisin in a pope-mobile for safety.”

    “I understand. Gee whiz and a fart-blossum, Aurora. I hope that won’t interfere with the bake sale. I’m looking forward to the ‘Pack My Chip’ chocolate cookies and some Vagina Cake. Alice Tiptree was awesome sauce and the whole squee nine cards.”

    “That’s ‘James’ Tiptree, Jimmy. Be careful how you talk about her. And it’s ‘yards’, not ‘cards’. We’ve changed up the menu this year. We have ‘Your Fingers In A Dike Blanket” petit-fors and ‘Ass-Clams’.” Plus there will be the always popular ‘Vagina Coin Purses’ we give away at the door.”

    “Swelly-Delly, Aurora. I still have my WisCon Sacred Pubes headband from last year.”

    “You’re one of our greatest allies in the fight against white capitalist patriarchy, Jimmy Shines. Once we’ve Oprah-ed all men globally, we can go onto the next stage: The Stepford Geld.”

    “Hahahaha. Oogly-Googs. I’m glad I converted voluntarily and pre-gelded. I don’t like being held down as much as I used to. It gives me the runs.”

    “I understand. When the safer-space was breached the PoC evacuated themselves in fear. The smell is terrific. Sadford is trapped in an engine-nacelle costume with her own droppings, and as you can imagine, there’s a lot of them. That brings me to the reason I called. We could use your help with some shaming-tweets. Just general ‘whites are asses’ stuff. Your inquisitions are marvels of fawning and insipid vacuity, just the thing we need to right this boat.”

    “Arfally-barfally. I’ll get right on it. Maybe something like a Harry Potter spell would be googly-eyed rainbow fun. Let’s see. ‘Repello albino, privlegium absurdum.’ Ha-ha. I am so fun and quirkity-shrimps.”

    “Yes, you are Jimmy, yes you are. Keep up the good work.”

    “I will, I will. I have post going up tomorrow about how white men are like noxious worm-swine who crawl underneath the earth in their own filth.”

    “No orcs, Jimmy?”

    “Oh no. I would never do that. Cross the scrotum on my shelf and hope to googly-gop-doo. I wrote it down in my Sailor Moon diary so I wouldn’t forget.”

    “Good. No orcing, Jimmy. Remember that. And don’t mention Jews, Jimmy. Just throw them in there with the whites.”

    “Goggly-goobers okay, Aurora.”

    “Jimmy, did you throw away that Lady Antebellum CD like I told you? I don’t ever want to hear that on your answering machine again. Why didn’t they just come out and call themselves ‘Lady Slave Camp’? Southern racist animals. That entire part of the U.S. is lost to us, Jimmy, and most of the northwest. We’re surrounded, Jimmy. We’re surrounded on all sides. I have constant nightmares of being dragged behind a humvee driven by rodeo clowns.”

    “Gaggly-waggly, Aurora, I scratched that CD all over with my fingernails and threw it in a lake. This won’t affect unveiling the Octavia Butler Milky Way bust, will it? It got kinda runny last year I hear. Gee, I wish I wasn’t banned from attending. It must be awesome to see how PoC talk when their googly thoughts are free and unfettered.”

    “The one true cross is safe and sound in the coldest area in WisCon, Jimmy: the Joanna Russ freezer. Le Guin, Jimmy Shines. I must be off.”

    “Le Guin, Aurora.”

    (click)

    “Idiot.”

  87. “911 dispatch – what’s yer emergency?”

    “This is Steve Ballshaft, Teamsters Local 200. I’m at the Concourse Hotel downtown. We got us a situation here on our loading docks.”

    “What can we do to help, sir?”

    “Well, we were wondering if you could send down a ‘Jaws of Life’. We got some kinda contraption stuck in the doors to our loading dock. It’s kinda like that Popemobile thing the Pope used in D.C. a few years back.”

    “What’s all that screaming I hear in the background, sir?”

    “There’s some black lady yelling something about confessing something or other. Ya ask me she’s got a few loose marbles, if you know what I mean.”

    “Where is this woman yelling from, sir?”

    “She’s trapped in this plexiglass thing on the back of a Toyota pick-up. It’s got ‘mobile safe-space’ written on the side. The whole thing’s stuck in our doors.”

    “Is this woman injured, sir?”

    “No, no. She’s perfectly fine. It’s just that the loading dock doors jammed the top of this thing she’s in a little bit and she can’t get out. It’s kinda like a see-thru Port-A-Potty. Got a seat ‘n’ everything.”

    “Uh-huh. Mr. Ballshaft, is anyone there dressed in funny costumes?”

    “Now that you mention it there are quite a few goofball dames running around in weird outfits. They’re really upset; I think some of them have shit themselves. They’re way too fat to be strippers. I think they’re having a Star Wars party or something.”

    “Uh-huh. I think I know exactly who…”

    “Give me that, you fool. Who am I speaking to? Is this the police?”

    “Howdy, ma’am. I see your plan to spread feminist peace and love at the Concourse Hotel is right on schedule.”

    “YOU again. What unlucky star was I born under to have to YOU on the line when our Guest of Honor is in danger of her life?”

    “A binary one, ma’am?”

    “You are very funny with your jokes, officer. Nora’s life is at stake. There’s no air to breathe in there, and our Ass-Clam Raffle must go off on time.”

    “You mean your Popemobile is airtight?”

    “What would you expect? We’re taking no chances. We had an outbreak of cholera at the convention a few years ago as a result of our Buttock Soup so naturally our mobile safe-space is proofed against noroviruses.”

    “Naturally.”

    “Miss Nora has already defecated herself and it’s imperative we get her out as soon as possible. The smell must be terrific. And she has an important speech to deliver about white restitution and confession. We want to infuse wiscon with PoC energy. Diversity is our watchword, officer.”

    “Naturally.”

    “Is that all you can say, officer? You sound like a parrot.”

    “We’ll send down some adult diapers and ‘Nice-‘N-Clean baby wipes as soon as possible, ma’am. Meanwhile, just drill a few holes in the plexiglass so she can breathe and the Jaws of Life will be there directly.”

    “What’s a ‘Jaws of Life’?”

    “It’s like a giant pruning shears. It’ll cut yer guest of colored people right out of that baby.”

    That’ll destroy our mobile safe-space. Do you have any idea what it cost us, how much female energy went into those bake sales? Can’t you send a locksmith?”

    “Ma’am, locksmiths don’t straighten crumpled metal. Just relax; everything’ll be just fine. Men are on the way. We’ll have yer PoS out in no time.”

    “I can see your deploying sexist stereotypes to shame women who speak out about sexism.”

    “Men AREN’T on the way? Would you like me to call them back while you hunt down an all-female fire brigade?”

    “You cis-swine-herd. We aren’t damsels in distress, and we don’t need to be rescued.”

    “Then you don’t reject my male help.”

    “Pah! You’re a useful tool – nothing more.”

    “Inventing tools in useful too.”

    “That is a micro-aggression. A community where it’s normal to analyze and reject microaggressions is invaluable.”

    “Speaking english is valuable too. By the way: how did you avoid the sweeper team from the state mental institution?”

    “Hah! I’m very light on my feet officer. Outthinking half-witted men is a snap.”

    “Oh, really? Where does your table salt come from?”

    “Well… I… nevermind. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you officer? Straight white cis-cretins like you are immune to lovely, supportive energy. I intend to write a letter of protest to the United Nations about our treatment at the hands of Madison’s law enforcement when this is all over.”

    “If there’s any chance that means you’ll boycott Madison then I’ll sign yer white people confession right now.”

    “Your insane patriarchy is going the way of the dinosaurs, officer. Angry White Men are so boring and so near extinction that it doesn’t seem worth even noticing their feeble last gasps.”

    “I wonder when being as crazy as a June day is long is going out of style?”

    “What’s you’re name, officer? I going to report you.”

    “Ya gotta pen and paper, ma’am?”

    “Yes I do. Proceed.”

    “My first name’s ‘Jack’. My last name’s spelled ‘S-H-I-T’.”

    (click)

  88. If someone wants a reason to go to war, rather than make pouty faces, I’d be most pleased to sign up to go to war over this:

    http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/05/16/international-outrage-grows-for-sudanese-woman-sentenced-to-death-for-apostasy/?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl2%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D477355

    Flog then hang the wife and mother of two of our citizens? I’d be happy to Christianize motherfuckers from Kartoum to the Egyptian border.

    1. The deal-breaker there is Islamic religious cultural custom and practice (sharia) trumping secular law. Born to a Muslim man, under sharia, she is a Muslim.

      Since Obama’s father converted to Islam, that same Sudanese judge would judge our President to be Muslim under sharia rules. It would be interesting to see what Cairo’s Al-Ahzar mosque/university – the final arbiter of international Sunni sharia law – would say were the case of Obama put to them. It is of no practical relevance since Obama lives outside Islamic jurisdiction and has a-bombs.

  89. Why not invade Wiscon for making N.K. Jemisin their Guest of Honor this year?

    “N. K. Jemisin ‏@nkjemisin 21h And still thinking abt what SFF reconciliation would look like. Political models incl confession, restitution. What’s appropriate for lit?”

    You read that right, and she has support, and they’re organizing panel discussions. What a surprise. Jemisin and the PC squad are pondering whether white SFF authors should apologize for decades of their white authorial racism plus pay a fine. I don’t know if Balzi and Jimmy Shines would have to apologize or not since they’ve already confessed to their nefarious sins and probably don’t look PoC directly in the eyes. That’s assuming they’ve ever actually met one outside their Whitesville compounds.

    I’m willing to hold a sign that says “I’m sorry you’re completely insane.”

    I also have a sign for terrorists to stop blowing up people in Nairobi to go with the sign for Boko Haram on the other side of Africa. Makes Jemisin claiming Australia wasn’t safe for PoC all the more laughable. Africans are actually killing themselves drowning on boats and at borders to get out of Africa. That’s when other Africans aren’t doing it at home for them. Africans dream of going to dangerous Australia.

    I should just make one sign for PC and WisCon to just please go away and take their clever James Tiptree scrotum purses with them.

    1. Hmm… what *would* SFF reconciliation look like?

      It’s not that I’m opposed to the idea, but I have a suspicion that “reconciliation” would be a full blown Princess Bride moment…

      …that word… I do not think it means what you think it means.

      1. I think FB’s description fits: “Jemisin and the PC squad are pondering whether white SFF authors should apologize for decades of their white authorial racism plus pay a fine.” Why am I not surprised that a collectivist like her would think of taking someone else’s money?

      2. *Sigh*

        Ask yourself how, if you *wanted* to marginalize yourself *on purpose* what would be the best way to go about doing so and you’d get…. that.

        It’s easy to laugh, but it’s actually not very funny. Science fiction really would be better if it continues in an *inclusive* manner but that’s another Princess Bride moment… “Inclusive”… that word… I do not think it means what you think it means.

      3. Rather than targeting the authors, who can’t help being born who they are, they really should target the publishers, who decide who gets published. Why, I can just imagine how successful the movement would be at gaining equity after they burn Tom Doherty in effigy….

        Oh, wait….

    2. Maybe I should set up a Wiscon booth selling hair shirts. There seems to be quite a market for them with this lot, and as long as they want to throw their money away, they might as well throw it at me.

      1. set a a booth tosign a petation to end women’s sufferage, see how many femist you can get to sign up

    3. @Fail Burton-Don’t be silly a sign isn’t going to stop terrorists. Not by itself anyways. You also need to make a twitter hash-tag and get a bunch of random celebrities to post selfies with your sign. Thinking a sign could stop terrorists. Ha! How ludicrous.

  90. “Reconciliation” to the PC means Burroughs to Correia are white, AKA “racists” and need to apologize to noble PoC for racist blacklist that prevented them from expressing their nobility that would’ve been genre-busting genius stories told from a point of view whites have no access to by virtue of being white because nasty because noble PoC want to see noble PoC in stories because too many white saviors make Jack, AKA “racist” a dull boy and Yaaaay! Afrofuturism and ‘black to the future’ but please no Yaaaay! Eurofuturism cuz racist.

    I am working on my apology right now but there’s too much room on a single molecule and am switching to an atom.

    I am working on financial restitution too and wondering if Jemisin has change for a nickel or if she might accept some copper rust I found on a rock. I don’t think PayPal takes copper shavings so the SFWA needs to set up a #sendyourcoppershavingsto hashtag.

    I’m taking a wild guess and figuring WisCon will be the first to put together the wording of an official apology and that Balzi will extort any convention that won’t read it out loud by threatening not to attend. That sounds like a joke but just watch and see. The pressure from our QUILTBAG femmes will come and I’ll bet money ReaderCon will officially issue such an apology. Any convention that doesn’t will have the goad AKA public shaming put to them. Any convention that doesn’t issue the apology will be branded racist and on the wrong side of history. Of course Jimmy Shines will be at the head of the pack too and publicly apologize for being white on his blog. He’s already admitted to being a racist there, so why not.

    I have to admit I am really looking forward to this campaign and I will bet solid money it is coming and that it will play out the way I’ve suggested. To say it will be a laugh riot of stupidity and stinky inquisitions is an understatement.

  91. Human trafficking is everywhere. It’s honestly one of those crimes where there is no left or right…everyone agrees it’s horrible, and it’s HERE in america, not just in some far off third world hellhole. My wife helped found an organization here in Texas to help recover and rehabilitate victims of trafficking, minors in particular. If you want to actually do something to help fight this instead of just posting selfies like the idiots Larry’s talking about, check us out at http://www.thekey2freetx.org

  92. Sunil Patel, an SFWA member who recently Tweeted “how many of you refuse to watch/read something if it’s about Yet Another Straight White Man?, Tweeted this photo which attacks Larry Correia using the SFWA logo, apparently at an SFWA event – the Nebulas.

    https://twitter.com/ghostwritingcow/status/467441947783610368

    It’s nice to know the anti-racists have everything locked down tight.

    Don’t read literature by heterosexuals who are male and white is anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-bigotry. Once again I am astounded by the clueless upside-down Orwellian world these people live in. Any more questions about what “diversity” really means to these folks?

  93. Well, here’s the thing about Patel. There’s this state in India called Goa. And it’s full of naughty places like Vasco da Gama Point, Palolem Beach, Miramar, Alto Porvorim, Sangeum, Portem, and Canaguinim. A lot of people have last names like the corrupt racial turncoat traitor conservative Dinesh D’Souza, who was born in Mumbai to Portuguese-Catholic Goan parents.

    So naughty colonialist Portuguese authors who today benefit from the 16th century naughtiness must be called out for the obvious cause and effect of privilege. Too many Portuguese sitting at one table brings back trigger flashbacks of postcolonial stress syndrome and dry heaves. So don’t read their books. They’re all Portuguesey.

    Down with Vasco da Gama, which shamefully tied Flamengo 1-1 last Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro. I burned my Vasco da Gama soccer shirt. The tentacles of Portuguese colonialism stretch everywhere. Hail Hydra! Cut off a soccer shirt and two more will take its place.

  94. Today in smugly satisfied racist quotes:

    “Mary Robinette Kowal ‏@MaryRobinette 3h At @SFWA’s #NebulaAwards, only one award went to a white male and that wasn’t one of the ones voted on by the membership. #diversityinSFF”

  95. Today in smugly satisfied racist quotes:

    “Sunil Patel @ghostwritingcow · 4h Not a single white man won an award tonight. OPPRESSION. #NebulaAwards”

  96. Why is the official SFWA Twitter feed retweeting links to a Twitter feed that has racist remarks like triumphantly proclaiming “Not a single white man won an award tonight” and “The first 20 minutes of this panel was basically white people complaining…” and “how many of you refuse to watch/read something if it’s about Yet Another Straight White Man?”

    “Retweeted by SF&FWritersOfAm.
    Sunil Patel @ghostwritingcow · 4h Out of 32 #NebulaAwards nominees, 22 are women, half are new nominees, and an LGBT nominee is represented in every category.”

    https://twitter.com/ghostwritingcow/status/467875106987843584

    Sunil Patel must be bounced!!

    1. Don’t you have to have actually sold a book to get INTO the SFWA? I doubt Sunil qualifies. But who is the evil SFWA racist USING the official account to do the retweeting, that is the question!

      1. I was joking. I meant out of the awards. He’s not a member. He’s a hanger-on wannabe author with nothing authored. I’ve no doubt he will be a member. Perfect place for a racist nowadays.

        Have you read “Wakulla Springs,” which lost to the amazingly badly written Kaftan winner? I can sum up WS: white people are bad, black good, and it’s only about 10,000 words too long. And WS is neither fantasy nor SF. Surprise. Who cares; it has Tarzan, Florida and Jim Crow.

        Ellen Klages is the lady with the slicked back hair and tux who emceed the awards and co-authored WS. She’s the one who auctioned off the kangaroo scrotum and knitted uterus at WisCon. That’s right: reality is satire.

        And the Kaftan? Incans good Europeans bad. The racial revenge stories never stop. Hell, they were going “Woo Hoo!! No white men!!!” They claim Golden Age SF did that, and that’s what they’re reacting against. Never happened. They’re just racists and man-haters.

        1. At least we can console ourselves with the fact that they will never breed. Unfortunately, they instead lay their eggs in the heads of our children when they’re in school like a parasitic WASP.

  97. Have you read the Nebula-winning “The Weight of the Sunrise” by Vylar Kaftan? It is the worst and most amateurish first person prose I’ve ever seen. I mention that because Damian Walter from the Guardian savaged “Opera Vita Aeterna” while Tweeting a link to Kaftan’s story in apparent approval. The fact Kaftan won a Nebula is a testament to how much a PC agenda is more fun than art. The ending is a marvel of gagging PC. It’s also up for a Sturgeon Award but apparently not Sturgeon’s Rule.

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