Heather Mac vs. College Aged Victicrats (Rape Culture)

This comes with a hat-tip to POWERLINE. More on this is just below the videos plus some past stuff posted. Enjoy…

  • “… This is campus rage manufactured in order to preserve the claims of victimhood.” – Heather Mac Donald
  • “Another example of left-wing rhetoric leftists don’t act on: The left tells us that colleges are permeated by a “rape culture,” yet virtually all left-wing parents send their daughters to college. If you were to believe any place has a culture of rape, where 1 in 4 or 5 women is raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, would you send your 18-year-old daughter there? Of course not. So how do any left-wing mothers or fathers send their daughters to college? The answer would seem to be they know it’s a lie — but that doesn’t matter, since the left views telling the truth as incomparably less significant than combating sexism, sexual assault, misogyny, toxic masculinity and patriarchy.” – Dennis Prager

More via the COLLEGE FIX:

During Mac Donald’s speech, a few students came to the front of the room and unfurled large banners, including one written entirely in Spanish and another that read “We won’t be silenced.”

A “debriefing and self-care session” was held after the talk, and the activists plan to “continue the conversation among students, faculty, and administrators at Colgate University about allowing speakers like Mac Donald to take up space on our campus unopposed.”

Mac Donald, in a statement to The College Fix, said her experience at Colgate was nothing new.

“My Colgate experience presented a more extreme version of something I have encountered in all the campus protests against me: the questions from the protesters in the hall invariably have nothing to do with my talk,” she said.

Mac Donald described the protesters’ suggestion to effectively cover their eyes or ears during her talk as “a stunningly apt emblem of the campus left’s rejection of dialogue.” She said many questions she fielded were from a cheat sheet of her writings prepared by protest organizers.

“Not surprisingly, then, the Colgate protesters’ questions were even more out of left field than usual: a large number focused on the post 9/11 war on terror, a subject I have not written about for nearly twenty years and that I certainly did not address at Colgate.”

“… This is campus rage manufactured in order to preserve the claims of victimhood.”

But the heated questions did not prompt Mac Donald to recant any of her previous statements. In fact, she also took on the ubiquitous 1-in-5 campus rape stat during parries with protesters.

“Let’s put that number in perspective,” she said. “Our most violent city, Detroit [editor’s note: my city of birth], when you look at all four of the FBI’s violent index felonies — that includes murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery — all four of those combined gets you a violent felony rate of 2 percent. So 20 to 25 percent [of campus rape victims] is a catastrophe.”

She continued that such a “sexual holocaust,” if it were really going on, would prompt a stampede of women away from college campuses, yet the opposite is true, females are now the majority on them….

Is it true that 1 in 5 women are raped on America’s college campuses? If so, what does that say about our universities and the people who run them? If not, how did that statistic get into the mainstream? Caroline Kitchens, Senior Research Associate at the American Enterprise Institute, looks at the data and explains the very significant results.

Lies of the Left

Dennis Prager reads from Heather Mac Donald’s article in from The City Journal about the “rape culture.” As usual, the left over-exaggerates… and what parent would put their daughter in AP classes to prepare them for the worse crime wave in human history, which is: one-in-five women are rapped at college. OBVIOUSLY the definition is the issue.

As society gets further away from Judeo-Christian norms more-and-more regret will rear its head from drunken hook-ups.

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis PragerI invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/

A great back-and-forth between George Will and some Democrat Senators who — as HotAir points out in George’s response to their asinine letter, these “Senators were likely faced with the difficult task of flipping back and forth to dictionary.com to translate Will’s writing, so we should probably have some sympathy.” HotAir continues:

  • For the entire time I have been writing I have cited George Will as one of the top five wordsmiths of our generation. Whether you agree with him or not whether you think he leans too far in one philosophical direction or the otherthere is no denying that Will is a master of the English language and flexes it like Mr. Olympia in the final pose-off. 

Here is more from HotAir on the fun tiff:

In case you missed the origins of this story earlier in the week, George Will took to his usual platform at the Washington Post with some words of caution regarding federal government intervention regarding sexual assaults on the nation’s college campuses. In it, he attempted to inject corrective remedies into some of the hyperbole currently engulfing the topic. Of course, in his usual fashion, Will led off with a paragraph which seemed designed to poke a stick in a few wasp nests.

Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

A careful reading of Will’s full editorial would show that he was essentially making two points. First, the “math” being cited to define the number of sexual assaults taking place was unfit for a 3rd grade Common Core tutorial. Second, Will noted that expanding and inflating the definition of sexual assaults to include micro-agressions – such as a boy staring for too long at a young coed with a low cut blouse – would tend to dilute the pool of actual assaults and diminish the seriousness of the real problem.

Such a stance brought the usual list of suspects up on their hind legs and into an immediate attack posture. This culminated in a coalition of Democratic Senators (Feinstein, Blumenthal, Tammy Baldwin and Robert Casey) penning a letter to the WaPo, chastising them for allowing Will to breath the same air as the rest of us.

After running their letter and litany of complaints, this weekend the Post ran a rare response from George Will….

Here is a larger portion of George Will’s response from the WASHINGTON POST:

The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.

I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed {link}. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”

As for what you call my “ancient beliefs,” which you think derive from an “antiquated” and “counterintuitive” culture, allow me to tell you something really counterintuitive: I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.

Read the senators’ letter here, and Will’s response in full here.

Detroit Police Chief, `Arm Yourselves`

A great admission via HotAir:

James Craig just took over the office of police chief last summer, but he’s already making waves in Detroit. A reorganization of the police force in the bankrupt metropolis has resulted in a higher clearance rate in murder cases, and the murder rate dropped almost 14% in 2013 from its two-decade high in 2012. However, Craig has some advice for his fellow citizens in Motor City if they really want a drop in crime — arm yourselves:

If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said Thursday.

Urban police chiefs are typically in favor of gun control or reluctant to discuss the issue, but Craig on Thursday was candid about how he’s changed his mind.

“When we look at the good community members who have concealed weapons permits, the likelihood they’ll shoot is based on a lack of confidence in this Police Department,” Craig said at a press conference at police headquarters, adding that he thinks more Detroit citizens feel safer, thanks in part to a 7 percent drop in violent crime in 2013.

Craig wasn’t always in favor of carry permits. While serving in Los Angeles, where permits are issued on a notoriously miserly (and some would add arbitrary) manner, Craig thought that disarmament was the answer. It wasn’t until he went to a carry-friendly jurisdiction that he understood the difference:

Craig said he started believing that legal gun owners can deter crime when he became police chief in Portland, Maine, in 2009.

“Coming from California (Craig was on the Los Angeles police force for 28 years), where it takes an act of Congress to get a concealed weapon permit, I got to Maine, where they give out lots of CCWs (carrying concealed weapon permits), and I had a stack of CCW permits I was denying; that was my orientation.

“I changed my orientation real quick. Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.”

It’s not the first time that Craig has endorsed carry permits. Two weeks ago, the Detroit News notes, he told a local radio show that responsibly armed citizens act as a deterrent, in a city that can clearly use one. Even though the murder rate has dropped, Detroit had as many homicides in 2013 as New York City, which has more than ten times its population.

[….]

At least one recent study suggests that Craig hits the nail on the head. A long-range study by a Quinnipiac University economist shows that states with more restrictions on firearm ownership and carry permits had higher murder rates by guns than gun-friendly states, and suggests that increasing restrictions on concealed-carry permits pushes the murder rate up, not down. It also showed that assault-weapons bans had no effect on murder rates.

Perhaps more police chiefs will change their orientation with this information at hand. State legislatures should get ahead of that curve.

…read more…

What Really Killed Detroit? Was It Small Government?

Via American Thinker:

….What really killed Detroit and what drove me away was the government deciding it knew how the market should operate better than the market did. The market operates on a simple concept, “An honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.” If an employee doesn’t think he is being paid enough, he can leave. If an employer is unhappy with an employee’s performance he can fire him.

Well-meaning government programs such as Unemployment Insurance, Workman’s Compensation and Wrongful Discharge (i.e. age discrimination, sex discrimination, racial discrimination etc.), that were meant to help and protect employees turned this market concept on its head. In Detroit, hiring someone became the worst thing an employer could do, and being fired became one of the best days in an employee’s life. Allow me to explain.

As mentioned earlier, when I left Detroit I had 20 employees. But, 10 years earlier I had 5 employees. As the business grew I had to hire more people. As it turned out, to get one good employee, I had to hire about 8. So to get an additional 15 people, I had to hire over ten years approximately 120 people. This is when doing business in Detroit really started to get expensive.

When an employee left my employ, whether by quitting or being fired, they immediately went to the Unemployment Office where they were given unemployment payments. Employers such as me went to great lengths to make sure that if someone was fired it was for a good documentable reason, in an effort to avoid having to pay for unemployment. In practice, that didn’t matter too much. The likelihood that the State would grant benefits was extremely high, maybe 80%. If you protested you had to appear before a state “referee,” who was, unsurprisingly, very biased in favor of the claimant.

In the financial reports I was mandated to send to the State, it was all too obvious I had not paid nearly enough to cover the costs of the benefits the State paid out. In its wisdom, the State then hit me with a surcharge to cover the costs of the benefits paid to people who the State should never have allowed to get benefits in the first place. My unemployment costs soared.

But as bad as unemployment costs got, they were nothing compared to Workman’s Compensation. Here is the way the game was played: If you were on unemployment it was understood that you were “ready, willing and able” to work. If you were on Workman’s Compensation it meant you were injured and could not work. So, an employee always went for Unemployment benefits first and when they ran out, suddenly discovered that he was injured, usually with a bad back. In Detroit, an employer almost never won a Comp case.

After a period of time, my insurance company put me in what was called the “Assigned Risk” pool. What that meant in practice was that my Workman’s Compensation insurance costs doubled overnight. Every new employee hired became a huge financial burden not in terms of wages but in terms of Unemployment and Workman’s Comp costs.

But perhaps the scariest thing that could happen to an employer was being summoned in front of the Civil Rights Commission, to face charges of “Wrongful Discharge.” Here you had to prove a negative, that you did not violate someone’s rights. This happened to me three times. If the Commission determined you were guilty, which were two out of three for me, the remedy was to pay all of an employee’s wages from the time he was separated from your employ to the time of the Commission’s finding. Since the system moved very slowly, an employer could be faced with paying as much as two years’ salary.

This was enough to get me and hundreds like me out of Detroit. I could build a stronger “fort,” but I couldn’t beat the system. That, however, wasn’t the end of what our government did to Detroit.

The final nail in the coffin came from the Environmental Protection Agency. It happened sometime in the late 1980’s. This was when by EPA decree, almost everyone associated with manufacturing in the City of Detroit, became a criminal. People who had worked honestly for years to pay for their building and property woke up one morning to find that because of the EPA, their property was worthless, or worse. Is it any wonder there are so many abandoned factories?

In Detroit, government distorted the marketplace by replacing truth and honesty with a preconceived social agenda. Because of this, things only got worse and Detroit is now bankrupt. Detroit is but the first to fall…there will be more.

…read more…

If Detroit is an example of small government-God Help Us All!!

God Help us All!!

If Detroit is an example of small government… God Help Us All!! Melissa Harris Perry forgets that Detroit has been run by unions and big government Democrats for over 5 decades, and was then bailed out and over-regulated by the current administration… how convenient.

As the Chicks on the Right mention…

….Meanwhile, back in Reality-Land, National Review’s writer Kevin Williamson gave us all the real picture of Detroit back in 2011, while it was on its path to bankruptcy, when he penned the following:

Detroit maintains 13,000 government workers but has 22,000 government retirees burrowed into the body politic, and their health-care subsidies alone account for nearly $200 million of the city’s budget. Pensions alone already account for a quarter of city spending; in three years, they will account for half. Pensions and city workers’ health-care subsidies account for $561 per year from every resident of Detroit, which has a very poor population — average monthly income of barely $1,200 before taxes, a fifth of the population in poverty, etc. The official unemployment rate is 30 percent; the real rate is much higher.

But never mind all that. The answer to EVERYTHING for MHP and all her little commie friends at MSNBC is government, government, government, dontchaknow.  If Detroit JUST would’ve had more GOVERNMENT and more spending….then it would’ve been fine, minions

Gay Patriot brought my attention to a failed prophecy of Obama’s wonderful handle on economics 101.

As Michael Barone reported yesterday in the Washington Examiner:

National Journal’s Major Garrett has an excellent column today looking back on President Obama’s 2011 Labor Day speech in Detroit. “This is a city that has been to heck and back,” Obama said then. “And while there are still a lot of challenges here, I see a city that’s coming back.” Noting that Obama cited the “advanced battery industry taking root here in Michigan,” Garrett points out that the battery firm in question, A123 Systems, received $249 million in Energy Department grants–and is now bankrupt. And of course so is the city of Detroit.

In matters economical, this man’s powers of prognostication aren’t particularly strong.

…read more…

Moonbat points out — of course — that the “official” numbers from the White House, even if true, are REAL BAD!

Barack Hussein Obama set out to be a transformative president. He has already succeeded. Presidential spokesliar Jay Carney recently credited the Regime with creating 7.2 million private sector jobs. Even if that preposterous boast were true, it would hardly put a dent in Obama’s legacy:

Since February of 2009, the first full month of Obama’s presidency, 9.5 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force. Nearly 90 million Americans are not working today!

That means that 1.3 Americans have dropped out of the labor force for every one job the administration claims to have created.

There are 15 million more Americans on food stamps today than when Obama assumed office. …

That means that more than two Americans have been added to the food stamp rolls for every one job the administration says it has created.

If we were to take how many jobs the Regime actually has created — limited mainly to the overstaffing of the largely useless federal bureaucracy — and subtract from it the number of jobs it has destroyed through ObamaCare and excessive taxation and regulation in general, the number of new jobs for which Obama deserves credit would be millions in the negative.

…read more…