The Origin Of All Political Power Is In The Barrel Of A Gun

thesenecaeffect | The Monastic order of the Templars (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), was founded in 1119 as a military force to defend the Christian holdings in the Holy Land. In time, the order evolved into a financial structure: the Templars became bankers and they developed a sophisticated money transfer system that helped pilgrims and warriors to move to and from the Holy Land and to transfer money from Europe to Palestine and back. They have been termed "the first multinational corporation" in history. 

As you may imagine, the Templars were rich, despite the term "pauperes" (poor fellows) in their name. They had land, castles, palaces, and, of course, plenty of gold and silver. The problem was that, with the loss of the last lands controlled by the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land, at the end of the 13th century, they had become useless: no more crusades, no need of a banking system to finance them. 

At that point, the Templars attracted the attention of the king of France, Phillip IV, in dire need of money, as kings normally are. In 1307, he ordered the arrest of all Templars and the confiscation of their properties.  Most of the leaders were burned at the stake after that they had confessed under torture all sorts of evil misbehaviors: spit on the cross, deny Christ, engage in indecent kissing, worship the devil, and other niceties. 

As exterminations go, this one didn't involve large numbers: we read of 54 executions in France in 1310. Probably there were more in other countries, but the total cannot be higher than a few hundred. Nevertheless, it had a big impact: it is said that the fame of Friday the 13th as an unlucky day originates from the date of the arrest of the Templars: Friday, October 13, 1307.

The question is, of course, can it happen again? How about our class of hyper-rich, the "100 billion dollar club," that includes well-known names such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a few more? They are clearly going to become trillionaires in the near future. But a house full of gold is hard to defend, as we read in the Tao Te Ching. Could our Internet barons follow the destiny that long ago befell another class of financial tycoons, the Templars?

As usual, the key to the future is in the past. Examining the destiny of the Templars, we may understand the factors that may lead to the extermination of a powerful (but not enough) financial guild. 

First of all, why were the Templars exterminated? I argued in previous posts (one, two, and three) that certain categories of people can be exterminated and their possessions confiscated when they are 1) wealthy, 2) clearly identifiable, and 3) militarily weak, The Templars clearly satisfied the first two rules but not necessarily the third: after all, they were a military order. Yet, when the King of France descended on them, they didn't even try a military reaction. It may be that the prowess of the Templar Knights was much overrated: they were more like a private police force for a financial organization, not a real military force. But it may also be that it was exactly the presence of this force that hastened their downfall. Sometimes, a little military power may be worse than none at all, since it invites a decapitation strike. This is probably what happened to the Templars, exterminated just to make sure that they would not become a threat. 

The story of the Templars is just an example of a power struggle that has very ancient origins. One of the earliest written texts we have was written by the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna who complained with the Goddess that her temple had been desecrated by a local warlord. Enheduanna does not say if the warlord was after the temple's money, but we know that, at that time, temples were also banks, a tradition that remained unchanged for millennia. For instance, as late as during the first century AD, we have the record of a local leader who raided the temple of Jerusalem and attacked the resident bankers, most likely in order to finance an armed insurrection against the Roman governor. 

Temples and warlords remained in an uneasy relationship with each other during the Roman Empire, but a few centuries later, raiding Pagan temples became the normal way to finance the Roman armies, a tradition started by Emperor Constantine 1st ("The Great") during the early 4th century AD. Less than a century later, Emperor Theodosius 1st ("The Great") was the last emperor who still could find Pagan temples to raid for their gold and silver. Then, no more temples, and no more Roman Empire.

Chastity Made The Church Grow Fondlers (Pope Francis Is Kicking Their Asses)

turcopolier  |   I used to spend quite a lot of time with Catholic clergy and prelates in the US, Europe and the Levant when I was involved in charitable works in the ME.

The clergy and hierarchy in the US are, in my experience, in the main, vain, careerist homosexuals hiding from a largely heterosexual world. They cultivate each other from an early age, seeking the kind of "mentorship" that involves a lot of fawning and sucking up, one way or another,

That is not to say that there not a good many godly men who sacrifice a lot personally in the hope of following Jesus. I knew quite a few like that in the chaplainate of the Army, but there are more of the others. I will never forget a sermon preached on Memorial Day at the Presidio of Monterey by an Army Chaplain.

See my "Dear Hearts Across the Seas" for that.

In the ME, the age old practice of simony continues in the clergy. A Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, a Palestinian, had to be removed from his see some time back because he installed his nephew as auxiliary bishop of Nazareth, and then they shared the "loot" together. Eventually his sins became too great to ignore.

Teddy McCarrick was very, very queer all his clerical life and the corruptor of many young men. He was always like that. Clergy and Religious in and from the Archdiocese of New York would laugh sadly and say that if he had not made a pass at you , you must be really ugly. I was always careful to sit at the opposite end of any table in the fear that I might not be ugly or aged enough to escape his attention.

Pope Francis is accused by Archbishop Vigano of apostasy in the matter of doubting the reality of Transubstantiation and of various other heresies, including a confession and justification of his own homosexuality to a gay priest.

Nevertheless, it appears that he wants to shovel out the Church's stables.

When You Don't "Do The Work" Or Know How To "Do The Work"...,

nakedcapitalism |  Peggy McIntosh has described how she stumbled upon the reality of her white privilege. She began to brainstorm about what privileges she had that her black colleagues did not, but encountered fierce resistance from her unconscious mind.

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

McIntosh was thus reluctant to see herself as having unearned advantages relative to her black colleagues, and this reluctance stemmed from a more fundamental commitment to believing that one’s life is “what one makes it” and that doors open for people due to their “virtues.”

She persevered, however, and understanding finally came. She was unable to keep silent about what she had learned, and her talk in essay form was soon being eagerly read by others; in the words of one facilitator,

[…] “white privilege,” was popularized by the feverish, largely grassroots, pre-World-Wide-Web circulation of a now famous essay by my now-equally-famous friend and colleague, Peggy McIntosh.

Readers followed in McIntosh’s footsteps, coming to grips with previously hidden and painful truths about their own privilege, and the rest is history.

But what actually happened cannot have been this simple.

A problem of chronology

Three years earlier, McIntosh had given a talk about how decent people often perceive “fraudulence” in

the myths of self-realization which go this way: “I came up from nothing, rags to riches, from pink booties to briefcase on Wall Street. I did it all myself. I knew what I wanted and I was self-reliant. You can be, too, if you set your sights high and don’t let anything interfere; you can do anything you want.” Now it seems only honest to acknowledge that that is a myth.

Did she at that time believe racial disparities were a thing of the past?

Women and lower caste or minority men are especially few in the tops of the hierarchies of money, decision making, opinion making, and public authority, in the worlds of praise and press and prizes, the worlds of the so-called geniuses, leaders, media giants, “forces” in the culture.

Let’s summarize.

In 1985, McIntosh proclaimed that meritocracy consisted of clearly “fraudulent” claims, noted how it was in conflict with racial and gender equality, and urged undermining belief in meritocracy as essential for the survival of humanity; in 1988, she said that she had been fiercely reluctant to accept that she was unfairly advantaged by being white because it entailed “giv[ing] up the myth of meritocracy.”

We could try to rescue this chronology by postulating, for example, that McIntosh composed her privilege lists and acknowledged her white privilege before 1985. She then… kept silent about it for years, perhaps because she was still embarrassed about white privilege? But wasn’t embarrassed about her opposition to meritocracy, which she shouted from the rooftops? This seems a bit… strained.

Or we could conclude, with Amber A’Lee Frost, that she is full of shit.

I will propose a more charitable alternative, which I think is also more likely.

Suppose McIntosh did experience a sort of epiphany in 1988, which involved new ideas and the renunciation of important previous commitments. If sufficiently traumatic, this experience could have played havoc with her sense of time, and of her past self – a development which has been amply documented in similar contexts.

To see whether this is at all plausible, we should look at what the pre-1988 McIntosh believed. For this, we do not have to rely on what McIntosh says she believed. There is in fact extant one piece of writing by McIntosh from prior to 1988. Maybe only one, although it is a difficult to be sure; according to Frost, McIntosh is “incredibly protective of her intellectual property.”

It is a talk from 1985, about a dozen pages long in text form, entitled Feeling Like a Fraud. It is, to say the least, fascinating.

Why I Intuitively Adopted Aggressive Black Partisanship Instead of Submissive Intersectionality...,

nakedcapitalism |  If we consider modern privilege discourse as a sort of semi-animate entity, a part of its genius lies in its ability to convince its adherents that questioning it means claiming that no disadvantages distributed unfairly according to collective patterns exist.

Or that questioning it means denying the existence of subtle conventions that make certain people feel unwelcome in certain settings.

Or, closer to home, that critiquing McIntosh’s œuvre means dismissing all of her ideas.

I believe, on the contrary, that there are important questions that should be asked about all of these topics. Privilege discourse doesn’t exactly encourage asking them, but that doesn’t need to stop us.

First, the lateral/vertical world distinction is worth thinking about. The way in which the distinction is partially overlaid on gender in McIntosh isn’t really essential, even to her own treatment of the idea.

Real questions arise at this point. To what extent can things smacking of meritocracy be done away with? To what extent can the vertical world be marginalized? 

To what extent can people, even well-meaning people working towards similar goals, discuss ideas without sometimes tearing the social fabric? 

The lateral world seems less uncomplicatedly good than McIntosh suggests. The secretary praised by her for “keeping everything going” might be working for an elementary school, but might instead be working for an arms dealer. In a case like the latter, the lateral world’s relationship with the vertical world is not conflictual but symbiotic.

One thought I’ve had is that I think people respond better if treated as individuals who are potentially involved in larger group patterns, rather than as exemplars of groups, fighting an uphill battle in any effort to be seen as single people.

One way in which privilege discourse has been “efficient” is by separating the process of classification of something as a privilege from the process of assigning it a moral charge. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with trying to look at advantages as a single large category. But from this starting point, it seems clearly important to make distinctions about where these advantages come from, what they signify, and what can be done about them.

In the spirit of McIntosh’s vertical/lateral distinction, we could make a (not at all hard and fast) distinction between “vertical” and “lateral” advantages. Vertical advantages would include things like money, where people generally feel like having more is preferable. Lateral advantages would include things like speaking French versus speaking English, where either one can be preferable, depending on the milieu.

One problem, in fact, with classifying lateral advantages as “privileges” (and therefore presumptively bad) is that they are more or less coterminous with culture. If the goal is to make it so there are no environments where some people are more confident and others less confident, I don’t see how to do this without leveling all cultural distinctions. After all, one name for a place where a particular group of people feel disproportionately comfortable is home.

Queer Academic and Clerical Slug Trails DEMAND Cleansing Blue Fire

newyorker | This is academics doing their job: engaging with things in great complexity. Discussions of #MeToo cases in other areas haven’t been up to this task. We certainly can’t expect it from Hollywood, whose job is to make stories palatable and simple. Writers, who on the subject of #MeToo have often practiced either avoidance or positional warfare, have been able to advance the conversation only so far. But this rare moment, when a wider audience is briefly interested in what academics have to say for and about themselves, might give us a chance for complicating the conversation. They can bring us back to some under-deliberated questions. In the #MeToo revolution, does the focus on identifying bad actors distract us from breaking down the structures that enable them? What is justice in terms of #MeToo, if not merely public disgrace and professional exile for the perpetrators? And how can justice be achieved?

As it happens, many of the scholars apparently most invested in the Ronell case have spent their professional lives studying power. That may give us a chance to finally acknowledge that there are power imbalances in all relationships, and that both parties in two-person interactions exercise some sort of power. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who is firmly convinced of Ronell’s innocence, argues that it was Reitman who was using Ronell. This sort of assertion is perhaps easier to make because the accuser is, in this case, a man, but also because Žižek has made a career of making shocking arguments.

What Žižek’s take does not acknowledge, however, is that even when it seems that everyone has behaved badly, it doesn’t mean that everyone has behaved equally badly, or is equally responsible for the bad relationships that have been created. This is where Duggan’s question, about the boundaries in the relationships between graduate students and their advisers, becomes crucial. The same blog on which Žižek’s post appeared, Theory Illuminati, posted a video of Jeremy Fernando, now a fellow at the European Graduate School (where Ronell is a professor), delivering a talk called “On Walking With My Teacher.” In the video, from 2015, Fernando, seated in front of a large projected photograph of him and Ronell, says, among other things, “My dear teacher Avital always reminded me that movement of thought and our bodies are potentially entwined.” For nearly forty minutes, he talks about love as a precondition for teaching and learning and bodies as the location of both knowledge and love. The talk is, clearly, full of love.

Ronell employs the psychoanalytic term “transference” to describe intense relationships with her students. She is not the first feminist postructuralist scholar to have done so, nor is she the first to get in trouble for it—or to take it too far. Twenty-six years ago, two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee filed sexual-harassment complaints against the scholar Jane Gallop, who was eventually found to have violated a rule against consensual amorous relationships, though the university found no evidence to support other claims . (A contemporary account of the case, by Margaret Talbot, is eerily relevant.)

A different take on Ronell’s pedagogy came in an anonymous quote that circulated on Facebook. (I don’t know the name of the author, who declined to communicate with me, citing, through an intermediary, the fear of retaliation.)

We don’t need a conversation about sexual harassment by AR, we should instead talk about what AR and many of her generation call ‘pedagogy’ and what is still excused as ‘genius.’ When people talk about sexual harassment it’s within the logic of the symbolic order – penetration, body parts – I doubt you will find much of this here. But AR is all about manipulation and psychic violence. . . . AR pulls students and young faculty in by flattery, then breaks their self-esteem, goes on to humiliate them in front of others, until the only way to tell yourself and others that you have not been debased, that you have not been used by a pathological narcissist as a private slave, is that you are just so incredibly close, and that Avi is just so incredibly fragile and lonely and needs you 24/7 to do groceries, to fold her laundry, to bring her to acupuncture, to pick her up from acupuncture, to drive her to JFK, to talk to her at night, etc. . . . All I am saying is: the AR-case is not about a single case of sexual harassment, it’s about systematic manipulation, bullying, intimidation, pitting students against each other, creating rivalry between them. . . . I agree the concept of “Avital Ronell” is a great one: I too would love to be friends with a smart, hilarious, queer, Jewish, feminist, anarchist theorist!

Duggan calls for looking at harassment as an issue that is neither limited to sex nor rooted in “bad apple” individuals—rather, it is a function of power structures. Closed Title IX investigations are not a good way to address harassment, she suggests. “Perhaps we should begin to think about a restorative justice process that would center in departments, be transparent, hold faculty responsible, and assess the question of boundaries in local context?” she writes. “Perhaps impose confidentiality as the exception, not the rule—to be invoked when a need is demonstrated.”

What Would These Degenerate Twerps Be Without A Young and Literally Captive Audience?

jezebel  |  By many accounts, the New York University professor Avital Ronell—a German and comparative literature scholar and a superstar in her corner of academia— is a brilliant woman and a sought-after advisor. Former students who have taken her classes describe her as “original” and “inspiring.” Ronell, who is in her 60s and has taught at NYU for more than two decades, inspires a kind of admiration that some have called “mystical.” She is the kind of professor whose classes students don’t want to end.

But, for the past year, Ronell has also been the subject of a sexual harassment investigation by NYU’s Title IX office, initiated after a former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman, alleged in a complaint filed last September that she had sexually harassed him over a period of several years. On August 13, the New York Times reported that after an 11-month investigation, the university has found Ronell responsible for sexually harassing Reitman while he was earning his Ph.D. The university has suspended her for a year without pay and has also mandated that any future meetings she has with students will be supervised upon her return. Reitman and his attorney are considering filing a lawsuit against NYU, as well as Ronell.

News of the sexual harassment complaint against Ronell surfaced earlier this summer, after a group of prominent academics—including the noted feminist scholar Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and Gayatri Spivak—sent a letter of support to NYU officials, rallying to Ronell’s defense and decrying what they describe as a “legal nightmare.”

The letter, which was never meant to be public, was subsequently posted on the philosophy blog Leiter Reports, with the title, “Blaming the victim is apparently OK when the accused in a Title IX proceeding is a feminist literary theorist.” It is likely that without the publication of this letter, and without the signatures of so many influential and feminist scholars, many if not all of the details of Reitman’s complaint would have remained confidential—it is almost certain that much of this now very public and increasingly messy case would have been swept under the rug (a situation that I suspect NYU officials would have preferred).

In the letter, dated May 11, 2018 and addressed to NYU President Andrew Hamilton and Provost Katharine Fleming, the signers acknowledge they had “no access to the confidential dossier,” but believe that Reitman was waging a “malicious campaign” against Ronell and that “the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence.”

Like Kryptonite To Identity Politics

theatlantic |  When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”

If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.

Perhaps, then, the most dangerous piece of “common sense” in Peterson’s new book comes at the very beginning, when he imparts the essential piece of wisdom for anyone interested in fighting a powerful, existing order. “Stand up straight,” begins Rule No. 1, “with your shoulders back.”

None Dare Call It An Organized Criminal Conspiracy...,

bbc  |  The 18-month investigation graphically detailed numerous instances of Catholic clergy members raping and molesting children in several Pennsylvania dioceses, which in total represent about 1.7 million Catholics.

"Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all," the 1,300-page report found.

The horrific allegations include:

• One priest forced a nine-year-old boy to rinse out his mouth with holy water after abusing him.
• A boy was made to confess his sins to the priest who had abused him.
• A priest who was accused of abuse by three boys was later hired by Disney World after receiving a positive job reference from the church.
• A priest raped a seven-year-girl when he visited her in hospital after she had her tonsils out.
• One child was made to pose naked, like Christ on the crucifix, as priests photographed him. Priests gave that boy a gold chain with a cross so that other predator priests would know he had been abused.
• Repeated abuse by a priest left one boy with lasting back injuries. He became addicted to painkillers and died of an overdose.

Obamamandius - Peak Globalist Bullshitter

ChicagoTribune |  “We have a sense of urgency about this project (and) when we started, we wanted the public to know we would break ground as soon as possible,” said Michael Strautmanis, the vice president for civic engagement for the foundation. “But we also knew there were some things that were not in our control. We insist on going through the process with integrity and without rushing.”

READ: Federal lawsuit accuses Obama center organizers of pulling an 'institutional bait and switch' »

Before the presidential center can be built, the federal government will review its impact on Jackson Park, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and evaluate the project’s environmental effects. Any impact that the review highlights will have to be resolved before construction can be allowed.

There have already been two public federal review meetings. A third was scheduled in June, but then it was delayed until July. Now it has been delayed until late summer, according to the city of Chicago’s website.

The federal review process has to be conducted because of Jackson Park’s historic status and because it involved closing and expanding major streets.

The news of the delay comes just a day after activists gathered on the South Side at a meeting to discuss placing a community benefits agreement proposition on the February ballot.

“We have a new window of opportunity before the next election to protect the most vulnerable people in our community,” said Parrish Brown, an activist with the Black Youth Project 100 Chicago Chapter, in a written statement. “We’re gathering to make sure Mayor (Rahm) Emanuel and the local aldermen do the right thing, or we’ll have to elect people who will.”

The coalition wants an ordinance that would require that 30 percent of all newly constructed housing near the presidential center be set aside as affordable housing. They want a property tax freeze for the longtime homeowners closest to the site and an independent monitor to make sure local residents are hired to work on the project. In addition, they are now calling for a community trust fund and support for the neighborhood schools.

Toxic Femininity

quillette |  Calling good men toxic does everyone a deep disservice. Everyone except those who seek empowerment through victim narratives.

For the record: I am not suggesting that actual victims do not exist, nor that they do not deserve full emotional, physical, legal, medical, and other support. I also do not want to minimize the fact that most women, perhaps even all, have experienced unpleasantness from a subset of men. But not all women are victims. And even among those women who have truly suffered at the hands of men, many—most, I would hazard to guess—do not want their status in the world to be ‘victim.’

All of which leads us directly to a topic not much discussed: toxic femininity.

Sex and gender roles have been formed over hundreds of thousands of years in human evolution, indeed, over hundreds of millions of years in our animal lineage. Aspects of those roles are in rapid flux, but ancient truths still exist. Historical appetites and desires persist. Straight men will look at beautiful women, especially if those women are a) young and hot and b) actively displaying. Display invites attention.

Hotness-amplifying femininity puts on a full display, advertising fertility and urgent sexuality. It invites male attention by, for instance, revealing flesh, or by painting on signals of sexual receptivity. This, I would argue, is inviting trouble. No, I did not just say that she was asking for it. I did, however, just say that she was displaying herself, and of course she was going to get looked at.

The amplification of hotness is not, in and of itself, toxic, although personally, I don’t respect it, and never have. Hotness fades, wisdom grows— wise young women will invest accordingly. Femininity becomes toxic when it cries foul, chastising men for responding to a provocative display.

Where we set our boundaries is a question about which reasonable people might disagree, but two bright-lines are widely agreed upon: Every woman has the right not to be touched if she does not wish to be; and coercive quid pro quo, in which sexual favors are demanded for the possibility of career advancement, is unacceptable. But when women doll themselves up in clothes that highlight sexually-selected anatomy, and put on make-up that hints at impending orgasm, it is toxic—yes, toxic—to demand that men do not look, do not approach, do not query.

Young women have vast sexual power. Everyone who is being honest with themselves knows this: Women in their sexual prime who are anywhere near the beauty-norms for their culture have a kind of power that nobody else has. They are also all but certain to lack the wisdom to manage it. Toxic femininity is an abuse of that power, in which hotness is maximized, and victim status is then claimed when straight men don’t treat them as peers.

Creating hunger in men by actively inviting the male gaze, then demanding that men have no such hunger—that is toxic femininity. Subjugating men, emasculating them when they display strength—physical, intellectual, or other—that is toxic femininity. Insisting that men, simply by virtue of being men, are toxic, and then acting surprised as relationships between men and women become more strained—that is toxic femininity. It is a game, the benefits of which go to a few while the costs are shared by all of us.

Food is a Substitute for the Female Body

QZ |  Original recipes in a cozy home kitchen, intimate details about family life and domestic bliss—and painstakingly arranged food that oozes sexual overtones. These are the features of a successful food blog.

Often referred to as “food porn,” the trendy phenomenon highlights the seeming contradiction between femininity and feminism while also allowing women to shape the possibilities for women’s identities in online spaces. In contemporary social culture, women are encouraged to be feminists and pursue professional ambitions while still maintaining their femininity and domesticity. Their chief value in society is to reproduce and feed their families while denying their own appetites. These blogs reflect the digital identities of women who have been required to embody multiple contradictions—and look delectable while doing so.

In the food blogosphere, some of these sexualized conventions include the overabundance of “oozing” food, including runny egg yolks that are captured dribbling over neat vegetable beds, chocolate lava cakes with molten centers that drizzle over porcelain plates, and frosted cakes depicted with glazes dripping down their tall sides. There is also something sexually tinged about many food blogs’ penchant for “cheeky peeks,” a photographic motif that peers inside the hidden layers of elaborately decorated cakes. Examples of this include cakes stuffed with candy, desserts whose batter is painstakingly dyed and assembled to reveal ombre and checkerboard patterns when sliced open, and an array of gravity-defying layer cakes.

Pornographic imagery is built upon women offering their bodies to the male gaze, but food porn recognizes and appreciates the creative and technical skills of the woman behind the camera. In this way, food is used as a substitute for the female body; food bloggers offer intimate domestic details from their kitchens, rather than their bedrooms. Food porn can therefore be seen as a way of recognizing the active and creative capacities of women’s bodies rather than the more passive and objectified positions of traditional erotica.

Food and Dieting Negotiate Hegemonic Masculinities in American Popular Culture

emilycontois |  The Dudification of Diet: Food Masculinities in Twenty-First-Century America examines how the food, advertising, and media industries have constructed masculinities through food in the twenty-first-century United States, particularly when attempting to create male consumers for products socially perceived as feminine. Employing the tools of critical discourse analysis to examine food, dieting, and cooking, I consider a diverse array of media texts—including advertising campaigns, marketing trade press, magazines, newspapers, industry reports, restaurants, menus, food criticism, blogs, and social media. Case studies include diet sodas (Coke Zero and Dr. Pepper Ten), yogurts (Oikos Triple Zero and Powerful Yogurt), weight loss programs (primarily Weight Watchers), and food television (namely Food Network star, Guy Fieri).

More than just companies jockeying for market share, these food phenomena “for men” marked a moment of heightened gender anxiety and the rise of a new gender discourse—dude masculinity. Partly created by the food marketing industry, dude masculinity sought to create socially acceptable routes into and through the feminized terrain of food and the body. As a gender discourse, it celebrates the “average guy,” while remaining complicit in hegemonic masculinity’s overall structure of social inequality.

Beyond gender performance, dude masculinity articulates apprehension for how consumption reconfigures notions of citizenship, bodily surveillance, and nationhood. Dude masculinity tells a larger story of the United States’ very recent past, one rooted in perceived social chaos, concerned with terrorism, border control, immigration, same-sex marriage, race relations, new media, and neoliberalism. Despite decades of resistance and progress toward gender equality, these recent social shifts have resulted in the reactionary shoring up of gendered categories, a complex and contradictory sociocultural process that I read through dude masculinity, food, and the body.

Previous scholarship has treated these areas of culture separately and considered food and gender largely in terms of femininity, domesticity, and care work. I synthesize feminist studies of media, food, and the body and apply them to masculinities, centering discussions of power. Bridging theory and practice, this dissertation also informs how entities like advertising campaigns, food packaging design, public health programs, and weight loss studies can rewrite gender scripts to promote equality and justice.

Maxine Waters NEVER Caped This Hard For A Black Constituent

thehill |  Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) on Saturday called on her supporters at a rally to confront Trump Cabinet officials in public spaces like restaurants and department stores to protest the administration's policies. 

"I have no sympathy for these people that are in this administration who know it is wrong what they're doing on so many fronts but they tend to not want to confront this president," Waters said at a Los Angeles rally on Saturday. 

"For these members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him they're not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they're not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they're not going to be able to shop at a department store, the people are going to turn on them, they're going to protest, they're going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they're going to tell the president 'no I can't hang with you, this is wrong this is unconscionable and we can't keep doing this to children,'" she continued.

Waters' call comes as the Trump administration faces major backlash over the handling of its "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which has resulted in the separation of immigrant families. 

Protesters confronted Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., last week, yelling “shame” at Nielsen and “End Texas concentration camps.”

Demonstrators in a separate incident on Friday blasted audio of crying migrant children who had been separated from their parents outside Nielsen's home. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has also faced public backlash for her work in the administration, recently being told by one of the owners of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., to leave due to her role in the administration. 

“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson told The Washington Post. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”

How Did Degenerate POS Jeffrey Epstein Escape #MeToo?

DailyBeast  |  But the Weinstein Effect seems to have spared one Jeffrey Epstein—a 65-year-old billionaire and convicted sex offender who’s palled around with former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, and other high-flying friends whose names were revealed in his “little black book” and flight logs for his private jet. Many of them enjoyed jaunts to Epstein’s private Caribbean island and mansions in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida. 

Even President Trump was among the deviant philanthropist’s admirers. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Jeffery’s “social life,” according to police and a score of lawsuits, involved a pedophile ring of dozens of underage girls, whom he groomed and then loaned out to powerful friends. But aside from a minor conviction in Florida—for which he served a mere 13 months—Epstein has emerged remarkably unscathed. New York authorities have never charged him with any crime, and he still drops into his Upper East Side mansion, where women have been photographed coming and going, according to tabloid reports. His sex offender registration lists his primary address as St. Thomas.

The mysterious financier’s sick world was unmasked in March 2005, when the stepmother of one 14-year-old victim phoned police and said a wealthy man had molested her child. She’d received a call from a schoolmate’s mom, who overheard her own daughter discussing “how [the victim] had met with a 45-year-old man and had sex with him and was paid for it,” a police report said. Around that time, a teacher found $300 in the girl’s purse.

Palm Beach detectives would soon unearth five girls who claimed that Epstein had lured them into a ring of sexual abuse. By the time Epstein inked his plea agreement, the feds had identified 40 victims. Police said Epstein was enlisting his employees and other young women to recruit underage girls—many of them underprivileged or from broken homes—for massages at his home. One recruiter told police that Epstein advised her, “The younger, the better.”

Corporate and Social Media Mediated Vigilante Justice Ostracism

Physorg |  A: The commercial realm offers an interesting perspective. Businesses can act swiftly and unilaterally, without the need for coalition building required by legislative bodies. In crisis communication, one concept we look at when determining strategy is "locus of control." If the organization itself is at fault, then it bears more responsibility for righting the perceived wrong than if the situation was caused by an external actor. And of course, there's a big spectrum in between.

Rosanne Barr's highly successful television program was canceled just a few hours after she posted a series of racist tweets. There was nothing illegal about her statements, but the network made a business decision that the continued revenue would not be worth the reputational damage that might result from appearing to support her positions, even tacitly. In this case, the locus of control for the crisis was clearly Barr herself, and the network decided to sever ties immediately to distance themselves.

Distancing is harder to accomplish when the locus of control clearly rests within the organization itself, such as when a company creates an ad campaign that many find objectionable. The cosmetics subscription box service Ipsy recently came under fire when its online ad video, intended to celebrate Pride Month, was instead seen by many as using transphobic language. The company removed the ad and apologized, but not before it had arguably worsened the situation by, allegedly, spending the first couple of days deleting negative comments and responses from trans customers. The marketplace of ideas moves very quickly these days, but consequences tend to come more swiftly when the cause is an employee or third party.

Q: Let's flip this. Can this scenario also be used as a powerful force?

A: I think the continued effects of the #MeToo movement remain an excellent example of how powerful a force this kind of response can be when it crosses over from online into offline domains, and develops capacities as well as signaling. Actress Asia Argento, one of Harvey Weinstein's accusers, made a formidable statement at this year's Cannes (Film Festival) warning that powerful people will no longer be able to get away with workplace sexual misconduct as they have in the past. And Netflix canceled the U.K. press tour for the latest season of "Arrested Development" after a cast interview with "The New York Times" went awry. Actress Jessica Walter received massive social media encouragement for describing, in tears, the verbal abuse she had suffered on set from co-star Jeffrey Tambor—who had been fired from the Amazon series "Transparent" for sexual harassment claims. Her male co-stars, on the other hand, were excoriated for minimizing her pain and rushing to the support of Tambor.

Nothing that happened in the interview crossed into the realm of illegality, and Netflix operates on a subscription model that shields it from the risks of advertising-driven network television. And yet, even they took some steps to limit their exposure on this issue.

These incidents both happened months after the most recent wave of the movement began last October. That suggests this is not an ephemeral phenomenon that can be dismissed as mere online outrage, but a lasting shift in our collective consciousness and expectations, even without any kind of formal organization.

What's changing is who has power, and who is willing to use it. We just need to try to thoughtfully adapt our structures and systems alongside these changes, to reduce the risk of institutionalizing hasty decisions.

Neoliberal Identitarianism - Race Discouse Displaces Political Economy

nonsite |  Black political debate and action through the early 1960s focused on concrete issues—employment, housing, wages, unionization, discrimination in specific venues and domains— rather than an abstract “racism.” It was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, after the legislative victories that defeated southern apartheid and restored black Americans’ full citizenship rights, that “racism” was advanced as the default explanation for inequalities that appear as racial disparities. That view emerged from Black Power politics and its commitment to a race-first communitarian ideology that posited the standpoint of an idealized “black community” as the standard for political judgment, which Bayard Rustin predicted at the time would ensue only in creation of a “new black establishment.” It was ratified as a commonsense piety of racial liberalism by the Report of the Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—popularly known as the Kerner Commission, after its chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner—which asserted that “white racism” was the ultimate source of the manifold inequalities the Report catalogued as well as the pattern of civil disturbances the commission had been empaneled to investigate.

Reduction of black politics to a timeless struggle against abstractions like racism and white supremacy or for others like freedom and liberation obscures the extent to which black Americans’ political activity has evolved and been shaped within broader American political currents. That view, which oscillates between heroic and tragic, overlooks the fact that the mundane context out of which racism became a default explanation, or alternative to explanation, for inequality, was a national debate over how to guide anti-poverty policy and the struggle for fair employment practices in the early 1960s. Left-of-center public attention to poverty and persistent unemployment at the beginning of the 1960s divided into two camps. One, represented most visibly by figures like Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, Senators Joseph Clark (D-PA) and Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN), United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, and black labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, argued that both phenomena stemmed from structural inadequacies in the postwar economy, largely the consequence of technological reorganization, especially in manufacturing. From that perspective, effectively addressing those conditions would require direct and large scale federal intervention in labor markets, including substantial investment in public works employment and skills-based, targeted job-training.

The other camp saw poverty and persistent unemployment as residual problems resulting from deficiencies of values, attitudes, and human capital (a notion then only recently popularized) in individuals and groups that hindered them from participating fully in a dynamic labor market rather than from inadequacies in overall economic performance. In that view, addressing poverty and persistent unemployment did not require major intervention in labor markets. A large tax cut intended to stimulate aggregate demand would eliminate unacceptably high rates of unemployment, and anti-poverty policy would center on fixing the deficiencies within residual populations. Job training would focus on teaching “job readiness”—attitudes and values—more than specific skills. Liberals connected to the Ford Foundation and the Kennedy and Johnson administrations saw chronic poverty as bound up with inadequate senses of individual and group efficacy rather than economic performance. That interpretation supported a policy response directed to enhancing the sense of efficacy among impoverished individuals and communities, partly through mobilization for civic action. The War on Poverty’s Community Action program gave that approach a militant or populist patina through its commitment to “grassroots” mobilization of poor people on their own behalf. In addition, Community Action Agencies and Model Cities projects facilitated insurgent black and Latino political mobilization in cities around the country, which reinforced a general sense of their radicalism. At the same time, however, those programs reinforced liberals’ tendencies to separate race from class and inequality from political economy and to substitute participation or representation for redistribution.

Both camps assumed that black economic inequality stemmed significantly from current and past discrimination. A consequential difference between them, though, was that those who emphasized the need for robust employment policies contended that much black unemployment resulted from structural economic factors that were beyond the reach of anti- discrimination efforts. To that extent, improving black Americans’ circumstances would require broader social-democratic intervention in the political economy, including significantly expanded social wage policy. As Randolph observed at the 1963 March on Washington, “Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white? We want integrated public schools, but that means we also want federal aid to education—all forms of education.” The other camp, in line with then Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan’s Negro Family jeremiad, construed black unemployment and poverty as deriving from an ambiguous confluence of current discrimination and cultural pathologies produced by historical racism. For a variety of reasons having to do with both large politics and small, the latter vision won.

Why Is Pinker Anti-PC Okay - But Peterson Anti-PC Not Okay?

WaPo |  Ontario has been hit hard by the ravages of global economic policy and should be a prime location for emerging, radical action. Instead, Canada’s most populous province has produced the English-speaking world’s most controversial, right-wing surrogate dad: Jordan Peterson.

Peterson cloaks his anti-progressive opinions in folksy, common-sense advice. He is a master at inventing an enemy and offering young men a solution to various straw men. Peterson has perfectly tailored his self-help style to the individual, no doubt a holdover from his days as a clinical psychologist, which he mentions a lot when he talks.

Self-help alone isn’t dangerous, but it becomes dangerous in the way that Peterson uses it as the solution to the myriad problems that young people face. He argues that the left is dangerous and destructive because of the emphasis it places on “group identity.” In a trailer for a video called “No Safe Space,” to be released in 2018, Peterson argues that “group identity” is really what killed tens of millions of people under Stalin’s Communism and Hitler’s Nazism and then, remarkably, concludes, “and I’m concerned because the universities are so overwhelmed by this, that I can’t see how they can extract themselves from it.”

Therefore, supremacy of the individual is the only way to stop global war and mass murder.

Peterson’s message fits perfectly with the prevailing ideology that has driven public-policy debates in North America since the 1980s: People should be able to succeed on their own, without help from the state. This message intentionally erases systemic barriers that perniciously remain and instead demonizes anyone who understands that collective advancement is the key to improvement.

MSDNC Circles The LGBTQIA Wagons For Its Busted Corporate Intersectional Negroe Whisperer

ROTFLMBAO..., Broke, busted. and cain't be trusted Joy Reed has now been cast as the face of progressive "evolution". Lil'Pookie and the whole and entire MSDNC rainbow coalition was out in force this morning in mock indignation to very mildly toast the ultimate hypocrisy and flagrant lying of Comcast's star #NeverTrump interrogator. 

(scared to death of what's past that signpost up ahead under President Mike Pence - so - good, old fashioned Guyanese disgust with degeneracy doesn't hold a candle to the formalized de jure clampdown to come if the Deep State prevails in its attempted coup on Trump)

MisoHorny Terrorists Rubbing, Rubbing, Rubbing UNTIL ITS TIME TO GO KILL SOMEBODY!!!

NYTimes |  Alek Minassian, who plowed a rental van through a busy Toronto sidewalk on Monday, left little doubt as to why he killed 10 people, most of them women. Minutes before his attack, he posted a message on Facebook lauding the mass murderer Elliot O. Rodger and warned of an “incel rebellion” — a reference to an online community of “involuntarily celibate” men who believe women unjustly deny them sex.

Mr. Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, recorded YouTube videos raging against “spoiled, stuck-up” women he called “sluts” who sexually rejected him. And before Mr. Rodger, there was George Sodini, who killed three women in a Pennsylvania gym in 2009. He left behind an online diary complaining that women ignored him and that he hadn’t had sex in years.

Despite a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the attackers as “lone wolves” — a mistake that ignores the preventable way these men’s fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.

Here’s the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism. Until we grapple with the disdain for women that drives these mass murderers, and the way that the killers are increasingly radicalized on the internet, there will be no stopping future tragedies.

Over the past decade, anti-women communities on the internet — ranging from “men’s rights” forums and incels to “pickup artists” — have grown exponentially. While these movements differ in small ways, what they have in common is an organized hatred of women; the animus is so pronounced that the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center tracks their actions.

The other dangerous idea that connects these men is their shared belief that women — good-looking women, in particular — owe them sexual attention. The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.

Her Unadulterated African DISGUST Brings Me Much wait for it JOY!!!

mediaite |  The author also repeatedly advocated against gay marriage on the site by criticizing liberals deemed too far left on the issue. Cable news host Rachel Maddow, who is openly gay and now works with Reid at MSNBC, was a recurring target in these Reid Report posts.

Other comments include making gay jokes about dozens of figures in politics, media, and entertainment. The following list includes the names of people the author either accused of being gay — satirically or not — or made a gay joke about, aside from the previously mentioned Aiken and Cooper:

Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and his son, conservative pundit Michelle Malkin’s son, Republican consultant Karl Rove, actor Tom Cruise, singer Rob Thomas, Fox News host Sean Hannity, disgraced ex-lawmaker Mark Foley, late actor Heath Ledger, former vice president Dick Cheney, former president George W. Bush, talk show icon Oprah Winfrey, news personality Gayle King, Senator John McCain, boxer Laila Ali, artist Queen Latifah, former White House counsel Harriet Miers, comedian Eddie Murphy, Congressman Charlie Crist, actor Jake Gyllenhaal, former TV host Keith Olbermann, lawmaker-turned-CNN pundit Rick Santorum, and Mediaite‘s own Dan Abrams.

The author even lobbed a gay joke at Reid’s now-MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews, who was accused of “loving” Bush in the same sexual way Saudi Prince Abdullah was accused of loving the former president.