Category Archives: Feminism

UPDATE II: It Takes A Village Idiot: The Latest On Hillary Clinton’s Culpability In Benghazi

Democracy, Feminism, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Homeland Security, Intelligence, The State

Today came confirmation, in the form of a promised comprehensive progress report on Benghazi, of what I had prognosticated back in November, 2012.

“In the fullness of time … it will transpire that the woman who crack[ed] the whip at Foggy Bottom had decided to leave the U.S. embassy in Libya undefended.
The open community center [Hillary Clinton] was running there was meant to signal that the war on Libya, Hillary’s special project, was a success. (Recall, Libya was a war of the womb, a product of the romantic minds of three women who fantasized about an Arab awakening. This estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids began, as in Greek mythology, with the Gorgon sisters. Medusa’s posse included Samantha Power, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. They helped Hillary devise the casus belli for the war.)”

It takes a village idiot, and state immunity, to run an “open community center” in a country you’ve turned into Jihad Central.

Released today and reported by Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin, the Benghazi report, which will likely be ignored by most media, is so fresh and damning—that it is still unavailable online.

I will post a link as soon as one becomes available. Send one if you have one.

UPDATE I: Via Fox News: “Report: WH Altered Benghazi Talking Points to Protect State Department”:

Researchers for five Republican-controlled House committees have come out with a scathing indictment of the Obama administration’s response to the September 11, 2012 terror attack in Benghazi.
Jennifer Griffin reports that the 46-page progress report concludes that the administration’s response was a concerted attempt to insulate the Department of State from blame following the attack.

“Findings in the report include”:

“Prior to the Benghazi attacks, State Department officials in Libya made repeated requests for additional security that were denied in Washington despite ample documentation of the threat posed by violent extremist militias.”
“Reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton.”
“In the days following the attacks, White House and senior State Department officials altered accurate talking points drafted by the Intelligence Community in order to protect the State Department.”

UPDATE II: Text of the “Interim Progress Report,” with thanks to Mr. Love on Facebook.

Unscrambling Libertarian Scripts

Feminism, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Politics, Ron Paul

Here I answer my pal Myron Pauli, who, while a fierce individualist, all too often falls into the blasé libertarian, collective group-think, whereby only Ron Paul escapes blame for his imperfections (such as the incessant noodling about Congress’s need to declare war—as if the imprimatur of cockroaches turns unjust wars into just ones—or calling a focus on immigration in tough economic times a function of xenophobia; cleaving to the left’s tack on so-called endemic racism, being a career politician, on and on).

Myron’s Facebook comment below is a response to this week’s WND column, where I very specifically home in on Maggie Thatcher’s manifest individualism and cerebral acuity, not her policies.

Writes Myron Robert Pauli:

As a libertarian nerd, I will often claim that the most beneficial people are often anonymous innovators who come up with a medical or device breakthrough to benefit the world (who invented the thermostat?)…. – on the other hand, politicians are mostly parasitic – the best benign politicians like Thatcher are the ones who foil the MALIGNANT designs of the Footes, Galtieris, and Brezhnevs. Hence, she was a Giantess in a field of pygmies (of course, she might have accomplished more had she stayed in chemistry or took over her father’s store- a great lady nonetheless).

MY REPLY: Thatcher was no pigmy, however which way you slice it. Be it in her role in a laboratory, bringing us one step closer to the delights of soft-serve ice-cream (the left denies her involvement, naturally), or smashing the unions and keeping the England she loved out of the EU.

You are repeating the usual libertarian echo chamber/mantra: Apply a single analysis to each politician other than Ron Paul, of course, whose every indiscretion is ignored, and every endeavor, even parasitic, is elevated.

The independent, unaffiliated writer should fight for intellectual virtue against the Idicoracy and the mediocrity. Without those intellectual standards, there can be no liberty. For those attributes, Mrs Thatcher is to be lauded. It is careless to dismiss these gifts of hers so rare in the populace and the people, for these attributes were enormously influential at the time.

Pundit-cum-philospher Jack Kerwick once observed how virtually impossible it is to reduce the size of the state. As a practical matter, it is well-nigh impossible to choke the modern, Western managerial state without a coup, or without shedding blood, as Thomas Jefferson advised.

Let’s see the brave theoreticians, confined to their safe theoretical perimeters, waffling into the ether, accomplish what Mrs. Thatcher accomplished: smash the unions, defend Britain from Brussels, privatize so many of Britain’s Sovietized industries, prohibit subsidies to industry, on and on.

Was she flawed? Most assuredly. (As a longtime antiwar libertarian, I’d be the first to say so.) But even more flawed are those who dismiss her with the pat libertarian analysis of, “Oh, she didn’t achieve a market anarchy. I can go back to snoozing, rather than apply my intellect to an assessment of what she did do.”

More crucially, and that was the focus of “Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist”: Any woman who thought and spoke as she did is inspiring because so rare and getting rarer by the day.

“Big hair, an overbite, Botox and mind-numbing banalities”: that’s the contemporary role model of womanhood that infests TV.

Updates to the original Margaret Thatcher blog post are here.

UPDATE III: Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist (Republican Teletwits R Feminists)

Britain, EU, Europe, Feminism, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Reason

“Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist” is the new column, now on WND. Here is an excerpt. Read the rest on WND:

“Feminism is a form of collectivism. The sludge of feminist thought was as foreign to Margaret Thatcher’s supple mind as originality is in the collective consciousness of Dana Perino and Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Big hair, an overbite, botox and mind-numbing banalities: These best describe the female hosts on Fox News’ ‘The Five,’ a current-affairs panel, on which Lady Thatcher’s achievements were being claimed for womanhood.

To be fair to the pair from ‘The Five,’ a procession of equally vacuous panelists, plonked on other God-awful, dual-perspective chat forums—now multiplying on TV—had all rattled on about Margaret Thatcher qua woman.

The solipsistic sorority known as feminism was alien to Mrs. Thatcher, who was a methodological individualist, if ever there was one. The ‘Iron Lady’ would have had nothing but contempt for the mediocrities claiming her achievements for their communal sisterhood.

The causes of the late Mrs. Thatcher—who served as the United Kingdom’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and passed away this week—were those of “individual men and women” and their families.

As Lady Thatcher famously averred, feminism was poison. ‘No! No! No!’ The Lady was not for feminism. Within parliament, Prime Minister Thatcher had disavowed “little sir echo’s” acquiescence to the colossal collective of the European superstate. From without parliament, she would have extended the same scorn to little miss echo’s campaigns for gender-driven sectional interests.

The force of Mrs. Thatcher’s thinking and leadership flowed from a fierce independence of mind that precluded an affinity for the black hole of feminist thought—the collapse of which becomes increasingly likely as its center of gravity grows heavier. (Yes, women—especially feminists—risk vanishing into self-centeredness and self-preoccupation.) A bona fide feminist at the Guardian got it right. Mrs. Thatcher, she fumed, had no empathy for woman-centric whining, preferring the company of men.

Such was Lady Thatcher’s individualism that she even hand-bagged Thomas Jefferson for what she perceived as his flawed expression of the American Mind …”

The complete column, “Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist,” is on WND.

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UPDATE I: No To The EU. It says a lot about collectivism’s historic, unstoppable momentum that Margaret Thatcher was ousted as prime minister of Britain, in 1990, because of one of her most prophetic and patriotic insights: that against the European superstate. She famously insisted that, “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

UPDATE II: Libertarians will and should continue to debate whether Margaret Thatcher truly reduced overall government outlays. While economic growth outpaced government growth during the Thatcher years, as The Spectator’s Jonathan Jones observed, “Government spending actually rose by 17.6 percent in real terms under Thatcher.”
We might, in addition to all else, ponder why, given the privatization Thatcher accomplished—National Freight, steel, gas, telecoms and water—Mrs. Thatcher failed to tackle Britain’s National Health Service. Alas, there is so much one woman can do. To ignore her towering intellect and her patriotism, so unusual today among the Anglo-American traitor class, is worse than stupid.

UPDATE III: “Milton on Maggie.”

UPDATE IV (4/12): The Republican Teletwits are Feminists. Jeff P writes:

Ilana,
Very well written piece capturing so many of the essentials of Lady Thatcher. However as regards the two ladies of The Five, I didn’t at all sense that they were/are leftist feminist supporters and am of the belief or at least the impression that they would agree with your statements about Lady Thatcher vs liberal feminism. I do want to tell you however, that I believe you do the quality of your essay a disservice with the ad hominems of “botox, big hair, and overbite.” I think it is within bounds to draw the analogy of the feminist sludge to Thatcher’s supple mind as originality to the collective consciousness of Perino and Guilfoyle. Just my thoughts.

Sincerely,
Jeff P.

Reply:

Dear J.,

Never said they were leftist; but they are neocon-Republican feminists. Which, I suppose, is left, in my book. All Republican TV tarts (bar Malkin and Coulter who are serious commentators, but are not invited on panels b/c too smart for their hosts) are feminist lightweights. Think about what individualism versus feminism involves. The constructs deployed by the many Dana Perinos and Kimberly Guilfoyles, festooning panels all over the networks, are invariably gender-centric.
The two were incapable of addressing Mrs. Thatcher’s thinking, other than to chirp on about her contribution to making them feel better as women; brightening their prospects as females. Well, she should not have, because Mrs. Thatcher was nothing like them.
In any case, their discourse is feminist, not individualist.
As to the bite. Writing has to be biting and sharp, not boring and agreeable. If you back up the bite with facts, and I do my best—then one should have some fun. Those two broads are thick. Why are they there speaking to the nation? Why are all these panels bedecked with such silly sorts? Because these women will never say anything remotely provocative or original. Never have, never will.

Here is another one.

UPDATE II: CNN Leads The Day’s ‘News’ With Death Of A … Mouseketeer (Margaret Thatcher’s Magnificent Mind)

Ancient History, Britain, Conservatism, Economy, Education, Feminism, Free Markets, Gender, History, Journalism, Media, Propaganda, Reason

The one and only Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, passed away today of a stroke. She was 87. CNN led its piss-poor hourly programing—activism, really—with news about the death of mouseketeer Annette Funicello.

What comes immediately to my mind is that Margaret Thatcher stood for the gradualism of Ronald Reagan, when it came to delivering South Africa to the sainted Nelson Mandela’s communists. As noted on page 147 of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”:

…public intellectuals … thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. Any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a handbagging. The Iron Lady ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to ‘living in cloud-cuckoo land.’

Tell me that fools are not attempting to redefine, à la postmodernism, the very definition of news. And why not? Academics have similarly broken down the ancient concept of the intellectual discipline.

“Intellectual disciplines,” historian Keith Windschuttle has written, “were founded in ancient Greece and gained considerable impetus from the work of Aristotle who identified and organized a range of subjects into orderly bodies of learning. … The history of Western knowledge shows the decisive importance of the structuring of disciplines. This structuring allowed the West to benefit from two key innovations: the systematization of research methods, which produced an accretion of consistent findings; and the organization of effective teaching, which permitted a large and accumulating body of knowledge to be transmitted from one generation to the next.” (The Killing of History, Keith Windschuttle, Encounter, pp. 247-250)

Failing to lead the news with coverage of Mrs. Thatcher’s passing is in-itself big news.

UPDATE I: MSNBC’s odious Martin Bashir, a Briton, is dismembering Thatcher. His correspondent’s source of analysis: Meryl Creep’s depiction in “The Iron Lady.”

As I said, disciplinary breakdown.

Of course, many of Thatcher’s moves I‘d oppose, however it is undeniable that she was perhaps the only true great female leader other than old Golda Meir. I cannot think of a woman with a Thatcher-like intellect in international politics. Golda didn’t have that intellect, but she was quite the character. Both were nothing like today’s whiny, idiot fems.

UPDATE II: Don’t bother searching the articles penned by the presstitutes in the UK and the US, about Baroness Thatcher. Her remarkable oratory they call simple—to these cretins plain-spoken reason is counter-intuitive and hence, simplistic. The so-called 10 best quotes from Mrs. Thatcher’s are really stupid things said about her by her intellectual inferiors in Labor.

Here is Mrs. Thatcher displaying that incisive intellect of hers:

“…What the honorable member is saying is that he would rather the poorer were poorer, provided the rich were less rich.”

Watch the above bit of parliamentary flyting as only the British can do, and tell me the woman was not brilliant. Even her opponent delights in her retort.

“I detest every one of her domestic policies,” the Member tells the PM. To which she replies without flinching, in that crisp beautiful English:

“The honorable gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of East Europe who’ve experienced it have.”

On the famous U-Turn:

“For those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catch phrase the U-Turn, I have only one thing to say: ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.'”

The exchange below with the pompous Peter Mansbridge of CBC is particularly relevant to the empty talk about “compromise” infesting current debates:

What perturbs Peter Mansbridge, a Canadian institution in his own right—a stuffy, ossified, yet rather able lefty journo—is what he calls “the uncompromising style of Thatcherism.” A liberal doesn’t like a debate about substance, for it demands intellectual argument. Rather, the liberal is compelled to make silly points about style for those allow for an emotional approach (“Baroness, you make me feel bad; you hurt my self-esteem”).

Mrs. Thatcher offers up a gorgeous metaphor for the pursuit of truth: “When you’re starting a journey over the seas, you steer by stars that are always the same in the heavens. If you haven’t any stars to steer by, then it’s a pretty nondescript journey. …consensus doesn’t seem to be a very good star to steer by.”

Exquisite.

And Mrs. Thatcher’s coup de grâce: “Why are you so interested in compromise and consensus? Why are you not interested in having clear objectives; and having been elected on clear objectives, knowing full-well that the difficulties would emerge first and the benefits later?”