Having sensed that my public is calling: “In fair Springfield, where we lay our scene …”
Society
Janice Fiamengo on Kamala Harris
From Yes, Kamala Harris Slept with a Powerful Man for Political Advancement:
Such is a common mode of operation for ambitious young women looking to jump the queue to career gain and influence. It deserves to be seen as the feminine side of sexual harassment and as an equally toxic, if more insidious, form of sexual discrimination.
It is almost inconceivable that Harris would have been appointed to the two board positions on her own merits. She moved ahead of better qualified and more worthy candidates, male and female, because she was involved with Brown. It’s also likely that her successful bid to become district attorney of San Francisco was in large part due to Brown’s influence in the city.
Unlike in instances of sexual harassment, there is not usually a complainant in cases of sexual exploitation. It is possible that both Harris and Brown look back on their affair with satisfaction.
But that doesn’t mean that their conduct was victimless. It was an abuse of power, and it should concern those who value merit and common fairness. Less attractive and more scrupulous people, those with integrity who might have earned the positions Harris bagged, never had a chance to compete for them on anything like a level playing field.
Furthermore, the incidents speak to Harris’s ruthlessness, lack of genuine ability, and moral corruptibility. Unlike in the case of Trump, whose “grab them by the pussy” comment never indicated sexual assault of women (quite the opposite—he was making the point that an extraordinary number of women are willingly bedazzled by powerful men), Harris spent years choosing to trade her body for political profit.
If men are to be harshly condemned for exploiting their power for sexual access—supposedly because it hurts all women and warps public culture—then why are women held guiltless when they exploit their sexual power for political and other access? Do their actions not also corrupt public culture, breeding favoritism, resentment, mistrust, apathy, and rancor?
She’s got a point.
Differences Between Left and Right Political Viewpoints
A friend of mine writes with the following thoughts, which I’ve edited for readability:
This election is highlighting a lot of the distinction between the way people on the Left and people on the Right think and feel. For the people on the Right, this election is about whether there will be a world war, whether the economy will be ruined, whether the southern border will be secured, what material steps need to be taken so that bad things will be prevented and some positive things happen. It’s about policy being implemented and government power being used in positive ways and not being used in damaging ways.
The Left is much more about personality and feelings. Identifying with Harris because she’s black and a woman, and feeling that she in some ambiguous but nonetheless important way represents some vague ideal that people care about. I have a friend whose daughter is voting for Harris, and he asked her why, and she said: Because she’s black and a woman and she’s not Trump; I don’t need to know what her policy views are.
It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. Frankly, it’s female, and I don’t like it, and it’s destructive if it’s given political power. The idea of this type of female mindset operating a system where people are arrested or people with guns show up at the door is terrifying. Such a system would be based on arbitrary female sentiments, and gestures of submission, rather than some agreed-on set of rules.
Dancing the Minnesota Walz
I think the most purely risible, ‘laugh out loud and roll on the floor’ headline of the current presidential campaign must be this one: Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans
This unintentionally hilarious take has been committed by one Frances Wilkinson, in an opinion piece for the entity known as Bloomberg.com. I do not know anything about Frances Wilkinson, but will venture a couple of guesses here: one, that she doesn’t really know any Republicans personally; two, that she is as acute a judge of what constitutes masculinity-fearing-Republicans as Rachael Gunn (the notorious Raygun of the Australian Olympic breakdancing team) is of break-dancing technique; and three, who the heck is terrified by the masculinity of a guy who looks like a live-action movie version of Elmer Fudd anyway?
The Coming Deluge?
“The official version of events in the UK media is that the murders are an isolated incident and the public must stop talking about it, let the police handle it, but the protests are a nationally coordinated far right extremist conspiracy, which must be met with aggressive force and further destruction of what few civil liberties remain.”
A comment from a guest post at Postcards from Barsoom, which can be read here: Who Speaks for the Children?
Violent protests, and even riots are happening in Manchester and other English cities, following a bloody knife attack on a children’s dance workshop by the teenaged son of Rwandan refugees. Three little girls were murdered and several more girls and their teachers badly injured – and such protests might indicate to distant observers such as myself that the native British are finally fed to the teeth with a flood-tide of migrants, and violent criminal depredations by recent immigrants that are basically excused when they aren’t outright ignored by politicians, the press, academics and activists. Popular historians often make note of social snobbery in the Victorian era – where the upper classes looked down on anyone “in trade” and sneered at the working class … but I don’t see that the Victorians thoroughly despised their fellow countrymen to the degree that the modern British ruling class despises everything about the ordinary native British working folks.