Dr. Jeffrey Goodman, PhD has written an interesting explanation of the famous prophecy in Ezekiel about the last days, based on his study of Biblical archaeology:  Chapter Nine, Comets of God.

Satoshi Kanazawa in The Scientific Fundamentalist:

“First, modern feminism is illogical because, as Pinker points out, it is based on the vanilla assumption that, but for lifelong gender socialization and pernicious patriarchy, men and women are on the whole identical.  An insurmountable body of evidence by now conclusively demonstrates that the vanilla assumption is false; men and women are inherently, fundamentally, and irreconcilably different.  Any political movement based on such a spectacularly incorrect assumption about human nature – that men and women are and should be identical – is doomed to failure.

Further, modern feminism is unnecessary, because its entire raison d’être is the unquestioned assumption that women are and have historically always been worse off than men.  The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women.  However, in the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare – longevity and reproductive success – women are and have always been slightly better off than men. In every human society, women live longer than men, and more women attain some reproductive success; many more men end their lives as total reproductive losers, having left no genetic offspring.

It is also not true that women are the “weaker sex.”  Pinker documents the fact that boys are much more fragile, both physically and psychologically, than girls and hence require greater medical and psychiatric care.  Men succumb to a larger number of diseases in much greater numbers than women do throughout their lives.  The greater susceptibility of boys and men to diseases explains why more boys die in childhood and fail to reach sexual maturity and why men’s average life expectancy is shorter than women’s.  This, incidentally, is the reason why slightly more boys than girls are born – 105 boys to 100 girls – so that there will be roughly 100 boys to 100 girls when they reach puberty.

Another fallacy on which modern feminism is based is that men have more power than women.  Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception.  It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige.  They do, because they have to, in order to impress women.  Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to.  What do women control?  Men.  As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.

Finally, modern feminism is evil because it ultimately makes women (and men) unhappy.  In a forthcoming article in the American Economic Journal:  Economic Policy, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania show that American women over the last 35 years have steadily become less and less happy, as they have made more and more money relative to men.  Women used to be a lot happier than men despite the fact that they made much less money than men.  The sex gap in happiness (in women’s favor) has declined in the past 35 years as the sex gap in pay (in men’s favor) narrowed. Now women make as much as, sometimes even more than, men do.  As a result, today women are just as unhappy, or even more unhappy than, men are.  As I explain in a previous post, money does not make women happ.

The feminist insistence that women behave like men and make as much money as men do may not be the sole reason for women’s rising levels of dissatisfaction with life; a greater incidence of divorce and single motherhood may also contribute to it.  At any event, the culpability of modern feminism in making women steadily unhappy, because it is based on false assumptions about male and female human nature, is difficult to deny.  Men’s happiness has not declined in the last 35 years, because there has not been masculinism; nobody has insisted on the radical notion that men are women, although, as Christina Hoff Sommers documents, this may be happening in our current war against boys.  For anyone who is looking for an effective antidote to modern feminism, I highly recommend Danielle Crittenden’s 1999 book What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us:  Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Women.”

Brandon Ambrosino in The New Republic admits that homosexuality is a choice, not an identity:

“One of the reasons I think our activism is so insistent on sexual rigidity is because, in our push to make gay rights the new black rights, we’ve conflated the two issues. The result is that we’ve decided that skin color is the same thing as sexual behavior. I don’t think this is true. When we conflate race and sexuality, we overlook how fluid we are learning our sexualities truly are. To say it rather crassly: I’ve convinced a few men to try out my sexuality, but I’ve never managed to get them to try on my skin color. In other words, one’s sexuality isn’t as biologically determined as race. Many people do feel as if their sexuality is something they were born with, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. But as I and other queer persons will readily confirm, there are other factors informing our sexualities than simply our genetic codes.”

Well, yes.  The Human Genome project has been completed and there is no gay gene. Of course, there isn’t a clear heterosexual gene, either.

Sexual roles are both biological and sociological. They are genetic, congenital, and socially constructed.

But not so constructed that you can just turn a man into a woman by castrating him and raising him as a girl, as the tragic case of David Reimer illustrates.

But since it makes good political sense to invent a category of identity and appropriate the moral high-ground of civil rights activism, gay activists invented one.

Tim Wise analyzes and explains the flaws in the use of statistics on crimes by racialists who argue that the extent of black-on-white crime indicates a “race war” by blacks against the majority population.

[Lila: Note, while his analysis makes many good points, Wise seems to be a grand-stander on racial issues. A Tuckerian humanitarian, maybe?]

Here are some of Wise’s main points:

1. Blacks make up a smaller part of the population than whites, so the chances of a black person encountering a white person are much higher than the reverse. Thus, whites would be more likely to be victimized by black offenders than the other way around.

2.  There are proportionately more crimes of any sort committed by blacks than by whites, so the likelihood of more inter-racial crime being committed by them is also higher.

3.  A large number of the whites being victimized by blacks are Hispanics who live in proximity with them, so that whites who don’t live near blacks are even less likely to be the targets of black perpetrators than the numbers might suggest.

4. The disproportion in inter-racial crime is most evident in robbery, which suggests that the motivation for the crimes is pecuniary, not racial.

5.  A small proportion of offenders (7%) commit most offenses (70%), meaning that the actual number of inter-racial offenders in either group, black or white, is much smaller than it would seem at first glance. Thus, the evidence of racial targeting becomes even less meaningful.

Wise writes:

“Even if we assumed a random and perfectly mixed white and black population — such that whites and blacks encountered each other at rates relative to their population percentages — the much higher black homicide offending rates alone would predict that there should be 6.7 times more B-W murders than W-B murders. But in fact, as we saw, there were only about twice as many B-W murders as W-B murders. And when we consider the above-mentioned data on relative rates of interracial encounter, the numbers are even more striking. Even if we assume that 5 percent of all persons encountered by whites are black (an increase of 2/3 from prior and clearly documented data), and that only 63 percent of persons encountered by blacks are white (an increase of only 10 percent in the same period), we would expect 12 times more B-W homicides than W-B homicides in a given year. In a community of 3 million people, for instance, in which whites outnumbered blacks 6.7 to 1 (as is the case in the real world) there would be roughly 2,610,000 whites and 390,000 blacks. If 0.02 percent of blacks committed a murder, this would mean that we could expect 78 black homicides that year, and 63 percent of these (or 49 homicides in all) would involve white victims. If 0.003 percent of whites committed a murder that year, this would predict a similar number, roughly 78 murders committed by whites, of which only 4 would involve black victims. In other words, given relative rates of homicide offending along with relative rates of interracial encounter, we could expect 12.25 times more B-W homicides than W-B homicides in any given year. But in fact, in 2010, B-W homicide was only twice as numerically prevalent as the opposite. In other words, B-W homicide is roughly 1/6 as common as random chance would predict.

And given the relative population percentages of whites and blacks, blacks are actually more likely to be interracially murdered by a white person than vice-versa. After all, as for homicides where the race of the offender is known, 447 B-W murders as a share of the white community is 2/10,000ths of 1 percent (0.0002) of all whites killed by blacks, which is 1 in every 500,000 white people who will be killed by a black person in a given year; meanwhile, 218 W-B homicides as a share of the black community is 5.5/10,000ths of 1 percent (0.00055). So although interracial homicide is incredibly rare in either direction, any given black person is more than 2.75 times as likely as any given white person to be interracially murdered, with roughly 1 in every 180,000 black persons being killed by a white person in a given year.”

A criticism of part of Tim Wise’s use of the DOJ statistics can be found in this piece at “Feminist Critics”:

“The problem for Wise is that according to the DoJ figures, there are nearly three times as many black on white crimes of violence as there are white on black, from which it follows that, in any encounter between blacks and whites, the black is nearly three times as likely to victimise the white, than the white is to victimise the black. 31% of this excess can be explained by the higher overall crime rate for blacks. For the interracial victimisation rate to be higher than this, at least one (and possibly all three) of the following statements must be true:

1. Whites victimise blacks less often than chance would suggest.
2. Blacks victimise whites more often than chance would suggest
3. Blacks have a much higher per encounter offending rate than whites. To put it another way, it’s much more dangerous to meet a black than it is to meet a white.

No amount of playing around with encounter rates can alter the fact that at least one of these must be true. If, as Wise argues, 1 and 2 are false, then 3 must be true, a proposition which is as likely to be as unpalatable to him as it is agreeable to the racists.

And at Breitbart.com, here is a criticism of Tim Wise, for handing progressives the ammunition that lets them win every argument with conservatives:

“In fact, what Wise has done is taken a vicious subjective prejudice that ascribes the worst motives possible–racism–to his political opponents and declared it to be an accurate diagnosis of everything that motivates them.

This tactic allows progressives to drape themselves in the mantle of a “Hero” who is fighting “Ultimate Evil” in the form of evil racists who want to destroy black people. It legitimizes the role-playing they want to be able to do, so they do not even seriously question what Wise is saying.

This is why discourse with progressives often gets so heated. They are role-playing a fantasy in which they are combating Ultimate Evil. Why would you hold back when fighting Ultimate Evil? Ultimate Evil deserves no quarter!

What results from this is a Republican who thinks he is discussing policy differences with an opponent who has a solution that simply will not work, while the Democrat thinks he is trying to save civilization from the New KKK.”

Update: This news is being contradicted on several sites, including Media Matters:

The right-wing narrative is also contradicted by an official statement from the FBI. In a statement to The Daily Caller, and FBI spokesperson said:

“Upon review, the Civil Rights program only provides links to resources within the federal government,” an FBI spokesman told The Daily Caller. “While we appreciate the tremendous support we receive from a variety of organizations, we have elected not to identify those groups on the civil rights page.”

The FBI’s statement makes sense, given that – as Bedard’s own report noted – a link to the Anti-Defamation League, which focuses primarily on combating anti-Semitism, was also scrubbed from the FBI’s “resources” page.”

Lila: However, as I scrolled through the different pages of the FBI website, I couldn’t find any links to either the SPLC or the ADL, so if indeed the FBI is still continuing to rely on them, they aren’t advertising the fact any more. They used to be mentioned on this page – Hate Crime – Overview.

They aren’t any more. Neither are they on this page on Hate Crimes.

They used to show up on the overview page, as this trace on Google indicates:

• published on: 2007/04/27, Last Modified on: 2010/09/24

• FBI — Overview
  http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/hate_crimes/overviewThese groups include such organizations as the NAACP, the Southern Poverty
  Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, the National Asian Pacific American …

  Published on: 2010/08/30, Last Modified on: 2013/05/01

So maybe the liberal blogs are just trying to spin this to look better for them….

ORIGINAL POST

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which supposedly monitors anti-Semitism, but more often provokes it, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – which does the same for other kinds of allegedly “hateful” beliefs – have both been scrubbed from the website of the FBI, after complaints from Christian groups to the Justice Department:

“The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has labeled several Washington, D.C.-based family organizations as “hate groups” for favoring traditional marriage, has been dumped as a “resource” on the FBI‘s Hate Crime Web page, a significant rejection of the influential legal group.

The Web page scrubbing, which also included eliminating the Anti-Defamation League, was not announced and came in the last month after 15 family groups pressed Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey to stop endorsing a group — SPLC — that inspired a recent case of domestic terrorism at the Family Research Council.”

Extensive white paper on Russia’s gay legislation, which has been distorted by the neocon war-machine

The new law does not criminalize gay behavior. It simply prevents anyone (no mention of gays, specifically) from initiating contact with underage children to propagandize them about non-traditional sexual life-styles.  From the history, the law appears to have resulted from activism modeled on American strategies, and it appears to target corporations, more than individuals.

The very smart, shard-tongued Ilana Mercer follows up on her brutalist critique of the Tucker-Reisenwitz thesis that Ludwig Von Mises was some kind of Austrian Betty Friedan (thoroughly rebutted at EPJ by Robert Wenzel):

Comment:

Doesn’t that just show you how pointless the whole brutalist thesis was?

What’s on a blog or website – this is writing, you know, a form of expression –  doesn’t really define the writer so easily.

People don’t fit into neat boxes.

The ones with the smoothest public personas are often not the nicest but simply the most opportunistic or most ambitious. The ones who seem rough around the edges perhaps got that way honestly.

Even honorably.

No one knows. So let’s not buy into self-serving distinctions.  We are all humanitarians and brutalists (if you must use that language).

Very often, at one and the same time.

From the comment section at EPJ, an interesting insight into Jesus’ advice to “turn the other cheek,” a real problem for me, as I see that it usually leads to “getting it in the neck”:

“Cowardice is scarcely a term one associates with Jesus. Either he failed to make himself clear, or we have misunderstood him. There is plenty of cause to believe the latter.

Jesus is not forbidding self-defense here, only the use of violence. Nor is he legitimating the abandonment of nonviolence in order to defend the neighbor. He is rather showing us a way that can be used by individuals or large movements to intervene on behalf of justice for our neighbors–nonviolently.

The classical interpretation of Matt 5:38-42//Luke 6:29-30 suggests two, and only two, possibilities for action in the face of evil: fight or flight. Either we resist evil, or we do not resist it.

Jesus seemingly says that we are not to resist it; so, it would appear, he commands us to be docile, inert, compliant, to abandon all desire for justice, to allow the oppressor to walk all over us. “Turn the other cheek” is taken to enjoin becoming a doormat for Jesus, to be trampled without protest. “Give your undergarment as well” has encouraged people to go limp in the face of injustice and hand over the last thing they own. “Going the second mile” has been turned into a platitude meaning nothing more than “extend yourself.”

Rather than encourage the oppressed to counteract their oppressors, these revolutionary statements have been transformed into injunctions to collude in one’s own despoiling.

But that interpretation excluded a third alternative: active nonviolent resistance. The word translated “resist” is itself problematic; what translators have failed to note is how frequently anthistenai is used as a military term.

Resistance implies “counteractive aggression,” a response to hostilities initiated by someone else.

Liddell-Scott defines anthistemi as to “set against esp. in battle, withstand.”

Ephesians 6:13 is exemplary of its military usage: “Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand [antistenai, literally, to draw up battle ranks against the enemy] in the evil day, and having done all, to stand [stenai, literally, to close ranks and continue to fight].”

The term is used in the LXX primarily for armed resistance in military encounters (44 out of 71 times).

Josephus uses anthistemi for violent struggle 15 out of 17 times, Philo 4 out of 10.

Jesus’ answer is set against the backdrop of the burning question of forcible resistance to Rome. In that context, “resistance” could have only one meaning: lethal violence.

Stasis, the noun form of stenai, means “a stand,” in the military sense of facing off against an enemy.

By extension it came to mean a “party formed for seditious purposes; sedition, revolt.” The NRSV translates stasis in Mark 15:7 as “insurrection” (so also Luke 23:19, 25), in Acts 19:40 as “rioting,” and in Acts 23:10 as “violent dissension.”

In short, antistenai means more in Matt. 5:39a than simply to “stand against” or “resist.”

It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection.

Jesus is not encouraging submission to evil; that would run counter to everything he did and said.

He is, rather, warning against responding to evil in kind by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition. Perhaps most importantly, he cautions us against being made over into the very evil we oppose by adopting its methods and spirit. He is saying, in effect, Do not mirror evil; do not become the very thing you hate.

The best translation is the Scholars Version: “Don’t react violently against the one who is evil.” “

That last part bears repeating (TL;DR version): “Do not mirror evil; do not become the very thing you hate.”

H/T to No Ma’am blog.

John Martin at OpEd News describes the Irish slaves forgotten by history:

“The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.”