Abnormal Psychology Exists: You Are A Woman If You Give Birth. Period.
Monday, February 1st, 2010Woman who wants to be an ugly man will be giving birth. This time in Britain:
Congratulations, it’s a boy – who will give birth next month.
Two proud papas are expecting a baby boy in February, London’s Daily Mail reports, in what will be the world’s second known case of birth by a “pregnant man.”
“We know some people will criticize us, but we are blissfully happy and not ashamed,” Scott Moore told the newspaper.
Moore and his husband, Thomas, were both born female and have undergone surgery to change their sex. The transgender California couple is legally married, as Moore still has his female birth certificate.
Baby “Miles” has two brothers waiting for him, 10-year-old Logan and 12-year-old Greg, Thomas’ children from a previous relationship with a woman who has since passed away.
Moore, born Jessica, told the paper he first realized he wanted to be a man when he was 11.
“When I told my family, they thought I was crazy, but they gradually realized I was serious and allowed me to start taking male hormones when I was 16 years old,” he said.
His parents eventually paid for him to have his 36DDD breasts removed, the paper reports, but he could not afford the high cost of full sex reassignment surgery.
Moore still has female reproductive organs, and got pregnant using the sperm of a friend in June 2009, the Daily Mail reports.
You know, there is such thing as abnormal psychology. This is NOT NORMAL. It is one thing to move to Funky Town. It’s another thing to start a family there and bring children into this disordered environment.
Pretending that this is not so is akin to the government pretending that a dude with the name Mohammed who acts weird, says he wants to blow things up and then does it, isn’t a terrorist.
Society cannot function if we don’t have some agreement on what is acceptable social norms. Freaks do not tend to build society, they tend to be around the edges eating away at its success.
Now, I’m libertarian enough not to want to get in this lady’s business, but I also don’t equate tolerance with approval. I don’t approve. No one should. It’s not good for her body (it’s self-mutilation on a massive scale). It’s not good for her children. It’s not good for society.
Is Yelling The New Spanking? Yes.
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009Morally superior Gen X moms and dads seem entirely reasonable until they see the limits of “limits” like time-outs, banal blabbing and gentle cajoling. Kids regard their parents with utter contempt. Well, some do. Depends on the kid’s personality. And parents, once exasperated, go there. No, they might not spank their child. They’ll yell. Or arm yank. Or threaten. Or push. Or thump (thwack in the head with fingers). Or pinch. Something, anything, to reorder the disordered relationship–the one where the kid is running the show, and the parent feels drug around by the nose by a two and half foot troll.
The New York Time’s takes on the “overachieving” parents’ angst via Instapundit:
Parental yelling today may be partly a releasing of stress for multitasking, overachieving adults, parenting experts say.
“Yelling is done when parents feel irritable and anxious,” said Harold S. Koplewicz, the founder of the New York University Child Study Center. “It can be as simple as ‘I’m overwhelmed, I’m running late for work, I had a fight with my wife, I have a project due — and my son left his homework upstairs.’ ”
Numerous studies exist on the effect of corporal punishment on children. A new one came out just last month. Led by a researcher at Duke University’s Center for Child and Family Policy, the study concluded that spanking children when they are very young (1-year-old) can slow their intellectual development and lead to aggressive behavior as they grow older. But there is far less data on the more common habit of shouting and screaming in families.
Something jumps out at me: as the child of parents who viewed spanking as their Christian duty (spare the rod and all that), I can assure the researchers it is not like yelling is new. Yelling happened in the bad old days, too.
Re: parenting styles: Kids are resilient. An occasional “losing it” moment isn’t going to scar a child for life.
However, when a parent creates an environment where he or she is consistently out of control, where he chooses to respond to a child in anger, rather than reason, the child realizes the child is in control. Someone owns the buttons. Either, the parent is controlling the nuke button or the kid is. I would suggest that the kid will grow increasingly insecure when he can’t count on mom or dad to be in charge. He doesn’t want to be in charge. He wants to relax into well-known boundaries.
So, parents need to keep an eternal guard on their emotions. Some kids are very smart and manipulative and get a kick out of mom and dad being as easy as a wind-up toy. Teenage boys seem to especially enjoy spinning old mom like a top. The parent teaches disrespect for both himself and the child.
I hate to burst the bubble of New Agey parenting types who scream at their kids for not eating the lentils, you’re no better than the out-of-control spankers of yore. The key is who is in charge? Screaming just declares your impotence just as reckless spanking indicated a desire for immediate control without thought. In both cases, it’s the easy way.
Parenting is brutally difficult. It is a constant personal challenge. The big picture: What is right for the kid? is lost in a personal haze of fatigue, hormones, blood sugar, emotional misery or whatever. Every parent realizes his personal limitations almost immediately–a crying, inconsolable infant is often the first test of many.
So yellers need to knock it off and grow up. Someone has to be the parent. It should be the parent.
Standards of Decorum: Real World & Internet Version
Wednesday, October 14th, 200987% of Houstonians polled say that politicians should be held to a higher standard when it comes to rhetorical decorum. Turns out that Rahm Emmanuel has a potty-mouth and Joe Biden routinely says “f*ck”.
And then there is the internet. I have passed along “adult” language tweets. When I write on Twitter, I assume a more adult audience. That is, while I don’t want to be foul, sometimes language can be…flowery. That has lost me followers here and there who are averse to a little salt. One expressed shock and said that I wasn’t kid-friendly. Why are kids following my Twitter stream? Personally, I don’t think kids should watch the nightly news. It gives such a false and skewed perspective on the world…no bad words necessary.
This is what one blogger at Suburban Oblivion said about a chiding mom:
I received a message on a social media site recently asking that I tone down the language on my blog. Seems she feels what I write is not fit for young eyes.
Hey please watch the profanity i have young kids in my family that are on facebook and are on my page and i dislike being chewed out by there mothers and fathers for profanity on my page.
thanks for understanding, B
First I started to laugh. I have NEVER claimed what I write is child-friendly. Given the number of times a day I use the word ‘fuck’ on Twitter alone, I think it’s pretty clear I will never hit less than an ‘R’ rating. My humor is for adults, not children, clearly.
Then she follows with this:
As a parent, it is your job to keep your children from reading adult content on the internet.
As a parent, it is your job to not visit sites containing said adult content if you cannot keep those children from hanging over your shoulder and reading.
As a writer, it is not my job to censor myself so you don’t have to do your job (see above).
Seriously people..grow the fuck up and parent your kids, and quit expecting everyone on the internet to change their way of doing things just so you don’t have to.
So, I’m wondering. Is there two different standards? I’m pretty much the same in the real world as I am online. Every once in a while I’ll say ass or shit at home and get a scolding from my kids. Same thing happens online.
And while everyone is kvetching about naughty words, I think it’s important to have some perspective. This is an example of real nasty language. Bad words might be offensive to some, but what should really bother people is disgusting lies, obfuscation, and purposeful disseminating of disinformation.
Spanking Lowers I.Q.
Friday, September 25th, 2009Well, that will disappoint some of the readers here. Oh wait! Not that kind of spanking. Here’s the study:
The results of a survey of more than 17,000 university students from 32 countries “show that the higher the percent of parents who used corporal punishment, the lower the national average IQ,” Straus wrote in his presentation.
In looking at spanking just in the United States, Straus and a fellow researcher reviewed data on IQ scores from 806 children between 2 and 4 years old and another 704 kids aged 5 to 9.
When their IQs were tested again four years later, children in the younger group who were not spanked scored five points higher, on average, than did children who had been spanked. In the group of older children, spanking resulted in an average loss of 2.8 points.
“How often parents spanked made a difference,” Straus said in a news release from the university. “The more spanking, the slower the development of the child’s mental ability. But even small amounts of spanking made a difference.”
I think the study writers were beaten as children.
First, when looking across cultures, how does one control for something like spanking? All Australian children eat vegemite, or however you spell it. Does that make an IQ difference? Do spanked children who eat vegemite have higher or lower IQs?
Not to mention, this statement, an obvious one, invalidates the whole study:
Those findings are plausible and make some sense, Briggs said, but she added that it’s difficult to tease out all the other factors that could play a role in IQ scores — including poverty and parental education.
Ya think? How about the parents being morons themselves since IQ is highly heritable?
Second, the presumption is that spanking a child is an out-of-control parenting experience:
Dr. Stephen Ajl, a child abuse pediatrician, director of pediatric ambulatory care at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and medical director of the Jane Barker Brooklyn Children’s Advocacy Center in New York City, said that “spanking and other forms of corporal punishment mean that someone has lost control, and if that goes on on a chronic basis, it may affect some part of children’s psychological well-being.”
And though some people believe that they can use spanking as a form of punishment without losing control, Briggs said that’s very difficult to do all the time.
“When you’re physical with your child, you open that floodgate, and the likelihood that it could veer into where you don’t have as much control increases,” Briggs said. “Plus, if you’re just spanking, you haven’t taught your child anything.”
You can’t tell me the culture of beating a kid with a stick for every response is the same as a parent who spanks a kid for running into the street. Even if the second parent is out-of-control or angry, sometimes it’s not bad for a kid to get “rebooted” now and again.
This study was put forth for political reasons. Liberals don’t like spanking. They think it’s barbaric. They also believe everyone can be rehabilitated. Ironically, the children who never learn consequences as a kid grows up to being surprised, and in jail, dealing with consequences.
Can a child grow up without ever being spanked and turn out fine? Yes. Can a child receive corporal punishment and turn out fine? Yes. The bigger thing is love being the foundation.
Also: Spanking is NOT hitting. There is a huge difference between the two. Beating is another whole level of abuse. Liberals like conflating these things because nuance scares them. They want a rule for parents to follow, but the fact is, every child is different. Family personalities are different. Parents must make different choices with different kids.
Bottom line, libs need to butt out.
Podcast: The President, Little People, The Press, Levi’s Palin Penis Johnson
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
Stephen Green joins me to discuss the Obama-Education talk controversy. He takes on AllahPundit with wit and style. [I would have asked AllahPundit to be on the show had I thought the man would come out of hiding.] We talk about Obama’s cult of personality. We also discuss The Moment President Obama’s presidency went off the rails.
Brandon Vidrine also joins me to discuss the evolution of news online and the new tools to keep people informed.
Finally, Levi Johnson’s …johnson. Sorry, couldn’t help it. I talk about the press’s Levi-erotica. It ain’t pretty. And then, there’s the Cougars. Growl….
To subscribe on iTunes, just click here!
When Melissa isn’t on the radio, you can find her at melissaclouthier.com and on Twitter. Her username is MelissaTweets.
– Also, don’t forget to check out our other shows on Take That! –
*** click here to grab the latest Out in Right Field show ***
Inglourious Bastards Basterds–UPDATED
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Inglourious Bastards might be Quentin Tarantino’s best movie so far. As expected, it’s full of gruesome violence, gratuitous splattering blood, and revenge fantasies. For the subject, it’s all to the good: Nazis die.
Tarantino has some messages for everyone though and they aren’t politically correct. First the trailer. Here are some of the lessons from the movie:
1. Enhanced Interrogation works: The reason William Wallace from Braveheart fame was so remarkable was because he didn’t break. Nearly everyone, eventually breaks. When one gets a bad guy to spill the beans, good guys get saved. It ain’t pretty. But sleep deprivation, psychological discomfort, and in Tarantino’s case, a public head bashing are very effective means of extracting information.
2. There are bad guys. Now, in this politically correct world, only the Nazis may be used as bad guys. Don’t mention the barbary of Native Americans or current slave traders, or Hugo Chavez. Hell, don’t mention the barbaric acts of actual barbarians–the Barbary pirates. These days, the only acceptable bad guy is of German extraction. Anyone who is labeled “bad” is labeled Hitlerian. For fun though, when you go see the movie, just put an Islamist in the place of the Nazi. Every time. Just imagine a freedom hating terrorist biting it hard. It’s profoundly satisfying. If Tarantino were really that edgy, he’d have chosen a more relevant bad guy, but in these times, naming evil is passé.
The movie wins points artistically. The dialogue amusing. Among the blood, guts and nonsense, the story pushes forward with anxiety-producing anticipation.
What made me love the movie most, though, didn’t occur on the screen. The packed theater that made my vengeance-loving heart glad.
So, Americans still hate villains. Americans still want evil doers to pay. After years of mushy, morally ambivalent tripe like Crash, a movie comes out that’s pure good and evil. Well, not so pure. Because war isn’t pure. It’s messy, bad things happen, good people die and sometimes the best soldiers are just this side of normal. Righteous vengeance though, is satisfying. People want evil, innocent-killing psychos to pay–preferably with their lives.
Primal? Uncivilized? It’s pretty to think so. More like, normal people recognize that tolerating evil encourages evil. You know, like the Iranians who repeatedly raped a young boy who defied the Iranian leadership during the protests. That evil.
So, while I’m still waiting for Quentin Tarantino to show some real courage and portray the monstrosity that is Islamofascism–the psychotic Muslim element who carry around Mein Kempf for moral encouragement–I’ll take what I can get. And right now, a movie where the bad guys get incinerated is profoundly satisfying.
It’s nice to see the good guys win. It’s nice to see the bad guys suffer and die. I’m hoping that Inglourious Bastards starts a trend. Now, to choose a more timely enemy.
P.S. Brad Pitt is hot. And the way he says “Nazis” makes me smile. I’m saying it that way from now on. Nat-zees.
P.P.S. This is why I feel no shame about vengeance fantasies. There is no death painful enough to balance the inhumanity of what some evil bastards will do in the name of their despicable cause.
The moral equivalence crowd can shove their sanctimony up their collective ass. There are people right now who loved seeing Americans die in the World Trade Center. They relished it and still do. The Lockerbie bomber, Al Qaeda, the Taliban all glory in their death cult. No reasoning, no gentleness will change their black souls. Just as Nazis felt justified in their abject cruelty, so do the Islamofascists who carry out their modern mission of freedom killing violence.
The only solution? Kill the killers.
After reading Rachel’s post, I’m going to screw up my courage and go visit the site of the Twin Towers. Even though just typing this post makes me angry enough to cry at the injustice, I will see it. And when I go to Germany, I’ll do that heinous visit, too.
There is a reason America continues to fight this pesky foe. It’s us or them. Let it be them.
UPDATED AGAIN:
Actual, real live Inglourious Basterds courtesy Winston Churchill. I love him even more:
Some were in the Brigade – a unit set up by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1944, made up of more than 6,000 volunteers. He said: “It seems to me indeed appropriate that a special unit of the race which has suffered indescribable treatment from the Nazis should be represented in a distinct formation among the forces gathered for their final overthrow”.
The following year, the Brigade was in the front line for the Allies’ final push against the Nazi menace and worked with the rest of the British Army in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Official orders dictated that any Nazis captured should be interrogated, not executed. But the revenge squads within Brigade ranks had other ideas.
Go read the whole thing to get an idea of how the Nazi hunters exacted justice.
By the way, to the liberals out there: Was World War II a revenge fantasy? Because technically, the European theater wasn’t “our” war. I mean Germans didn’t attack us. And that war cost a lot of money. And hell, we still have troops stationed in Europe. I mean, it’s like totally a waste, ya know?
I do not regret that America took the war to the terrorist murderers. A sense of moral outrage should determine foreign policy. Barack Obama’s bland indifference to the people of Iran is telling. Should we go to war there? That can be disputed. But what cannot be disputed is that Iran is a totalitarian, fascist regime that wants to exterminate a whole race of people. IT IS EVIL. To not be affronted by their disgusting philosophy and actions is to show indifference to innocent, freedom-loving people.
The left resisted efforts to get involved in WWII. They didn’t want to see the atrocities of Japan, Germany and Italy, especially, because it didn’t fit their never ending selfish narrative.
Either freedom or tyranny is on the march. It is never static. And freedom must be bought or lost.
UPDATED:
The U.S. declared war on Japan December 8, 1941 in direct response to being attacked. Revenge? The next day, Germany declared war on the U.S. FDR offered monetary support to the British, stepping away from neutrality before this. However, one could argue that going to Europe was taking the fight to the enemy. Perhaps America should have simply played defense. It was not as though Germans were storming Manhattan en masse.
Also, for the “brown people” straw man argument: By defending the Iranian people against their psycho tyrant, I’m suggesting defending “brown people”. What did the war in Iraq become, if not a defense of brown people against Saddam Hussein and his sons and minions? What was the war against Iraq to begin with but a defense of the brown people in Kuwait?
Good grief. There’s evil people of every color. That racism card, though, that trumps everything.
UPDATED AGAIN:
In praise of the Bear Jew:
An old friend just attended the wedding of Eli Lake’s younger brother. I wrote my friend:
Do me a favor, really. Shake Eli’s hand and say thanks to the “Bear Jew” from another Brooklyn Jew, me. He did it Brooklyn style, the way I grew up. Some may have f**ked with me, but none came away unhurt, and never did again.
My old friend sent me this email:
Bruce,
I read your email to Eli and his parents- they all loved it and
that led to the handshake pictured here.
Also, I wrote a follow-up review of Inglourious Basterds here.
Reading Attention-Span Demanding Books In A Digital ADD World
Monday, August 10th, 2009James Joyner writes that he reads books less, now, and non-fiction at that, because he is reading all day in front of the computer:
I read non-fiction almost exclusively and have gone from being a book person to an article person. The efficiency of getting 85 percent of the point in eight pages that I would get in 300 pages has made it so that I seldom read books cover-to-cover. Even very fine books, such as David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerilla, are hard to finish because my inner editor quickly says “yeah, yeah — you’ve already said that in a slightly different way in the previous chapter.” To be sure, each new case study reveals additional nuances. But everything beyond the introductory chapter presents a very high work to reward ratio.
His whole post is worth a read. Ha!
Here’s what I’ve noticed: Now, I have to force myself to read outside of my computer time. Since working, writing and blogging on the computer, I find salient information more easily but the over arching big picture can get lost. That is, it is very easy to major in the minors when immersed online.
To step back, I’ll read non-fiction, sure. Before my intense online time, that’s almost exclusively what I read, but I have found my mind craving a different sort of information. When in Chiropractic college, majoring in the minors was also a problem. My intellectual life was broken down into biochemistry, microbiology, anatomy, physiology, embryology, pathology, etc. Likewise, today, my intellectual life is broken down into health care, taxes, economics, energy, and a myriad other policy choices. What I need is big picture.
Big picture ideas often come from two sources now–fantasy literature and magazine reading. What magazines? Certainly not Newsweek which has all the information of any propaganda. I lean toward magazines like Architectural Digest and Scientific American. Seems unrelated, right? But really, there are “big” ideas in both. What is new and different? What expands my world view? That’s what I hunger for in the age of bytes and bits.
So while I do feel my attention span has changed, I will sit for a good book or a good picture or a well-thought out article that expands my thought-scope. My patience for shoddy writing has dwindled. I just don’t have time to sit through a marginally good book. (I will read culturally relevant books on vacation–I should have been paid money to read the Golden Compass trilogy, for example. And those books won awards. Blech.)
Far from destroying my reading ability (except for limited time), the internet age has refined and shaped my leisurely reading desires. The internet has made me expect more.
And People Wonder Why Sarah Palin Stepped Down
Saturday, August 1st, 2009I won’t link to the abomination about Sarah and Todd Palin. Let’s see, it’s a New Media trifecta: unsourced, no confirmation, no eye-witnesses. Lots of innuendo, next some backtracking and finally, the denial from the person involved, Sarah Palin.
Why do they do it? Fear and loathing.
There is not one politician on this planet who has been harassed, harried, and harangued like Sarah Palin. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie must be breathing a sigh of relief. All the scum and scoundrels in the media salivate over the lives of strangers. What the hell is wrong with people? The Palins are human beings. They live, breath and have feelings.
The excrable Firedoglake features Lisa Derrick’s salacious joy at the thought, with the post titled, “Sarah Palin is Quitting AGAIN: Now, It’s Her Marriage?!?!”:
“And the family has had a lot of stress and media exposure. Kind of like John and Kate Gosselin, but with fewer kids.”
And making a comparison to Jon and Kate…as if Sarah Palin’s goal is to exploit her children.
This whole episode says more about the amorality of the Left than it says anything about the Palin family. When a political threat exists, the Left, with one accord, grabs the metaphorical pitchforks and readies the stake. They’ve had the fire burning for Sarah Palin for months. Now, all they need is the Scarlet letter and they’ll feel justified in doing what they’ve wanted to do all along-burn her to a cinder. Well, they’ve been doing that anyway. What they need is justification for their actions.
A friend told me that Sarah Palin Hate reveals so much about the hater. Yes it does.
Ace struggled with whether to write about it, since its such unsourced garbage and blogging would give oxygen to the growing flames. But these flames continue if not fought with fire.
Really, I figure the blogs and press will get more vicious, the more Sarah Palin goes around them. I love that she issued a denial through Facebook. I love that they’re irritated that she hasn’t even Tweeted for a week. They need headlines! Can’t they see that by stepping down and using alternative new media outlets, the press is deprived of the circulation numbers a woman like her generates?
The solution, then, is to make stuff up. And on the day she resigned, she chided the press for making stuff up. The press got offended. So, they make more stuff up and prove her point. If it weren’t so pathetic, it would be comical.
We’re All Mothers Now
Monday, June 15th, 2009A friend of mine likes to quote that saying when she wants to provoke her husband. Works every time. The saying came to mind again when I read an article about the necessity of smart phones–to stay connected and working. From the New York Times’s Steve Lohr a week ago:
Such a digital connection can have its downside. The perils of obsessive smartphone use have been well documented, including distracted driving and the stress of multitasking. CrackBerry, a term coined years ago, is telling.
The smartphone, said Mr. Meyer, a cognitive psychologist, can be seen as a digital “Skinner box,” a reference to the experiments of the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner in which rats were conditioned to press a lever repeatedly to get food pellets.
With the smartphone, he said, the stimuli are information feeds. “It can be powerfully reinforcing behavior,” he said. “But the key is to make sure this technology helps you carry out the tasks of daily life instead of interfering with them. It’s about balance and managing things.”
James Joyner muses:
The social — and, increasingly, professional — expectation of being constantly available, however, is much more bane than boon. I’m generally more than happy to take a couple minutes out of my evening or weekend to help someone out with a quick question so they can continue progress on whatever they’re doing without waiting until 9 am the next workday. But, for many people, it has become more than that: a culture where one is never truly off work. While I have no idea what to do about it, that’s not a positive development.
Eh, I don’t know why these people are complaining. Moms are never off the clock. And there’s always a kid interrupting, bugging, and harrying the mother during her tasks. I’ve breastfed. The smart phone has got nothing on a 3 month old.
With smart phones, we’re all mothers now.
Via @Armano
Republicans Trusted More Than Democrats…..Now
Monday, June 8th, 2009Americans trust Republicans on 6/10 key issues according a Rassmussen poll. James Joyner says:
Now, I’m not going to get too excited about this until we see it replicated over time and across polling instruments. Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, the results of any given poll can be junk. (It’s more complicated than that but, essentially, the probability that any given poll is completely off the charts is around 5 percent. It has to do with confidence intervals and math that only Nate Silver understands.)
Still, this result isn’t fantastically unbelievable. Yes, Bush and the Republicans made a lot of mistakes. But the Dems have had the Congress now for more than two years and the White House for several months. At some point, regardless of what they’ve inherited, they own this thing.
Further, Obama, Pelosi, Geithner, and company have not exactly covered themselves in glory. The various bailout packages are looking like the fiascos many of us predicted they’d be. And performance is, in many cases, less than the worst-case scenarios Obama’s team put out.
Oh bleh.
Voters are fickle pickles. Give. Me. A. Break.
Voters ignored the Democrats ignominious record of tax and spend.
Voters ignored the Democrats history of appeasement.
Voters ignored the Democrats statist policies and desires.
Why?
Because voting for Barack Obama seemed “hopeful” and was a new “change” and voters wanted to believe he was some sort of moderate. In fact, I bet these same exact voters would rate the President as The Best President Of The World Ever if the poll included the question. Such is the disconnect with Obama and his policies.
Still, I saw the liberal guests on Hannity look and talk a little panicky at the thought of a nuclear Iran and the implications for what President Obama’s moral equivalizing really means. It’s a double-bind extraordinaire.
And now, everyone is seeing what a head of cabbage could see about the economy: Spending a gazillion dollars to save our indebted hides will be a disaster; is a disaster.
A few months late, geniuses. Voting for President Obama was the feel-good vote. Hope everyone’s self-esteem is doing well, because your pocketbooks and your freedoms will diminish every day the man is in office.
