UPDATED: Chrissie Hynde On Skanks (Serena Williams Agrees)

Crime, Feminism, Gender, Music

Tough, quite talented and smart: Pretenders lead singer Chrissie Hynde also says what needs to be said just to keep the truth alive in the public square: Women who dress like skanks and then sue or cry rape when men come on to them are not blameless.

Where I disagree with Hynde is when she asserts that the rape of a woman who dresses and behaves like a hooker is somehow deserved. No! It’s understandable, not deserved.

Before being abducted, raped and killed by Jesse Matthew, Hannah Graham drew his attention by wondering about with midriff so bare that her crotch is almost visible. In surveillance footage she can be seen swaying as though tipsy.

Skank attire and conduct is sanctioned these days by parents of small girls. What’s in their heads, one wonders.

As for Hynde’s claim “that pop stars who call themselves feminists but use their sex appeal to sell records were effectively just ‘prostitutes'”: More crucially, most are nothing without their looks. They aren’t musicians. Auto-Tune technology is what makes a cast of vain ventriloquists like Katy Perry and other screamers what they are.

UPDATE: Another strong, sensible woman, tennis star Serena Williams, agrees. “If you’re a 16-year-old and you’re drunk like that, your parents should teach you—don’t take drinks from other people,” she said about the case of the intoxicated teen who cried rape in Steubenville, Ohio.

‘She’s 16, why was she that drunk where she doesn’t remember? It could have been much worse. She’s lucky. Obviously I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t a virgin, but she shouldn’t have put herself in that position, unless they slipped her something, then that’s different.’

Jonathan Meades Is Ever So Convincing; Much More Than Brutalism

Aesthetics, Art, Britain, Intellectualism, Socialism, The State

The little I know about Brutalist architecture is enough to make me skeptical of Jonathan Meades’ brilliantly spoken claims for it. This school of architecture seems to have been wedded to The State and, as such, to have taken on its foreboding austerity (expensive and ugly). “Governmentally sanctioned Brutalims” is indeed “the architecture of “cultural welfarism.” But a government-spawned “novelty”? Please!

However, Meades, a Briton of course, is a magnificent advocate for anything, really. His polemics are astounding in both beauty and internal logic. “… a prose style so pugnaciously cultivated, so unpredictably informative, and, enviably often, so extremely funny. …” Meades is indeed a strange experience: You might not agree with his assessment, but you love every moment of it and follow in delight.

On the 1960s cultural output: “A kaleidoscope of polychromatic vacuity.” “Enjoyably witless hedonism.” “A gluppy soap of mysticism …” “New universities busily inventing new disciplines.” Vatican Two decreeing that new churches should be churches in the round, like theaters in the round.”

Bunkers Brutalism and Bloodymindedness Concrete Poetry – Two from MeadesShrine on Vimeo.

*Image courtesy By Aurelien Guichard from London, United Kingdom – National Theatre Uploaded by BaldBoris, CC BY-SA 2.0

‘Gun Violence’? No! Goon Violence

Crime, GUNS, Reason

Thinking logically about crime is far likelier to lead to solutions than irrational, mythical thinking. This morning, CNN’s Poppy Harlow—below an amusing thought I once entertained about her—inveighed against the “gun violence” that “took” the life of poor Deputy Darren Goforth, today.

“Gun Violence”? No! Goon violence. A very dark man—safe to say black, from the images—has been taken into custody for the execution-style murder of the deputy, at “a suburban Houston gas station.”

Police have described the suspect as a male with a dark complexion, about 5-foot-10 to 6 feet tall, wearing a white T-shirt and red shorts. Authorities did not say what race they believe him to be. …

It was not an inanimate object that murdered this innocent individual, but a malevolent man with murder in his heart and a weapon in his hand. Grasping that distinction is more truthful and hence more productive than blaming an inanimate object.

Poppy bonus:

If only a woman with the wicked wit of a Margot Asquith—countess of Oxford, author and socialite (1864- 1945)—were around to put slobbering Poppy Harlow in her proper place.

When asked by American actress Jean Harlow how she pronounces her first name, Mrs. Asquith quickly retorted: “The ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow.”

From “Savoring Hillary’s Vow Of Silence.”

Bush, Obama And Hillary Destabilized The … World

Britain, Europe, Foreign Policy, IMMIGRATION

“When they destabilized Libya and overthrew strongman Muammar Gadhafi in 2011, the U.S. and its Canadian and European allies unleashed a series of events that accounts for the steady flood into Europe of migrants from North Africa.” (From “The Curse Of Col. Gadhafi.”)

The leveling of Libya courtesy of Barack Obama’s Amazon women warriors—Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power—is one source of destabilization. Another is the destruction of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan:

“A large majority of people undertaking these arduous and dangerous journeys are refugees fleeing from places such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan,” confirmed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. You know who finished those countries off: George W. Bush. He is responsible for interventions that rippled into Syria and now Europe; it is being flooded by migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Those who make it across the Mediterranean and wash up on southern Italy’s shores, then proceed inland. Some are clamoring to cross the channel into United Kingdom, via the Channel Tunnel. It is a “Camp of the Saints” scenario—“the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail envisioning an apocalyptic ‘invasion’ of Europe by successive boatloads of Third World nationals.”

Between them, Bush, Obama and Clinton destabilized the … world