A few more quick links

Victorian posy of pansiesI’ve got ten minutes before I have to leave. Let’s see what I can do with it:

In Iran, the fashion police aren’t a few mean girls and guys who say snarky things about people who’s clothes don’t measure up to their aesthetic standards. They are, instead, actual police who can and do lock women up for daring to show their uncovered heads to the world. That’s what makes these women’s baring of their heads on a Facebook page such a courageous thing to do.

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Unfortunately, a lot of Americans think they’re being brave when they hashtag popular causes. They’re not being brave; they’re being passive. And sometimes, they’re just being unintelligible. It took me a while to figure out that these Hollywood stars were castigating Boko Haram Islamists for “buying” girls. My first thought when I saw “real men don’t buy girls,” was that this was some sort of anti-prostitution public service announcement. I then thought it was a joke, a la “real men don’t buy girls [fill in the blank].” So you might say “real men don’t buy girls flowers.” Or “real men don’t buy girls crystal meth.”

I wanted to say to these bozos (1) these girls weren’t “bought,” they were stolen and (2) Islamists have been trading in African girls as free labor and sex slaves since the dawn of Islam. They are no going to be moved by little make believe men tell them that “real” men don’t do precisely what their culture’s real men have been doing for 1,300 years.

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On a different topic, one of the ways I taught my daughter to fear capitalism [yikes!  What a typo] socialism is that I told her to imagine a world in which only one store sold clothes. She was easily able to envision a limited selection of poor quality clothes sold by surly clerks . . . assuming anything was even in stock. I thought of that when I read Peter Suderman zero in on a telling statement from a Minnesota health insurer talking about how Obamacare was going to work: “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.” Yeah, that’s precisely what you have to do in a socialist economy.

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America’s white middle class has been obsessed with “white privilege” since the 1960s. It’s just that, once upon a time, you could still poke fun at it. (Warning: NSFW, because the video includes racist stereotypes as part of the humor.) Hat tip: Sadie

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More and more commentators on the right are beginning to realize that one of the hallmarks of Obama’s administration is a perpetual adolescence that reveals itself in narcissism, opposititional behavior, peer group pressure, a lack of responsibility, a juvenile obsession with drugs and sex (and do remember, that every up and coming teenage generation thinks it invented sex), etc. This is a particularly good summary of the problem.

I’ve mentioned before the theory that one of the reasons the Middle Ages were so violent was because, in the pre-modern era, so many of the people wielding power were young. Additionally, because water in urban areas was dangerous, people drank small beer and watered wine, meaning that they weren’t just young, they were vaguely intoxicated. Sounds kind of like the youthful stoner generation inhabiting Obama’s administration, doesn’t it?

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And finally, though it was useful to learn about the government’s NSA program, don’t mistake Edward Snowden for a good guy.

And now I’m off again. I don’t even have time to proofread, so I apologize in advance for the fact that there will be more typos than usual.