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A new technology and random thoughts (and open thread)

May 22, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Truly random thoughts about computer dictation, poverty, race relations, and women hurting women for cultural reasons, and an open thread.

Dictation to a computer dictating randomI’m trying something new today. After years of avoiding the technology, a series of conference calls in which I need to participate precipitated my buying a headset with a microphone. Then, just today, Windows 10 automatically updated itself and one of the tips it gave me was to tell me that I could use my microphone to dictate in any program. This sounded good to me because I have been a bit dilatory about typing of late. Part of this is because I’m struggling with ideas, and part of it has been that I am having some (temporary) pain in my hand which makes typing difficult. Articulating the ideas without going through the labor of typing seemed very tempting.

This, therefore, is my first fully dictated post. I’m wondering if it has a different “voice” then all of my previous posts, which are typed. I’d love to hear from you about this question. I also wanted to throw out some random thoughts that have been running around in my head lately.

The first random thing I want to talk about is the Tenement Museum in New York, a place I have talked about before. I first (and last) visited it around a decade ago, maybe more, and was absolutely blown away by it. I’m thinking about it now because I’ll be visiting again next month.

In my travels over the years, I have seen so many amazing homes throughout America, Europe And Southeast Asia. Except for the pretty farm houses relocated to various open air museums, these homes are almost invariably where the rich lived. Indeed, the only “ordinary” person’s home I can remember seeing is Mozart’s apartment in Vienna.

The Tenement Museum, however, is something completely different: it is where the poorest of the poor lived. It gives you a visceral sense of the abysmal poverty that immigrants to America faced at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Even though the tenement is clean, deodorized, and empty, and sits on a clean, modern, relatively empty street, it punches you in the gut. The hallways are dark, the stairs are steep, the apartments are microscopically small and held both huge families and functioning sweatshops, and the running water and plumbing are not only primitive, but only existed during the second half of the tenement building’s useful life.

In terms of creature comforts, there were none. Contrast this with poverty in America today. I am not trying to say that there’s anything pretty or comfortable about poverty, whether today or yesterday. But the fact remains that today’s poor people have plumbing (often dirty and poorly functioning, but it’s still there), electricity, smart phones, clothes, and an adequate, if not healthy, food supply. The abysmal situations in which they live are less from material poverty — although they are definitely materially poor compared to other Americans — but from spiritual poverty.

America’s poor live in worlds compounded of failure, fear, substance abuse, welfare dependency, crime, economic despair, and mental illness that leaves no room for optimism or social mobility. What I wonder is whether it’s harder to fight spiritual poverty than it is to fight economic/material poverty. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Open Threads Tagged With: Female Genital Mutilation, Islam, Poverty, Race Relations, Tenement Museum

Why are Modern Feminists Such Wimps? — a guest post from Lulu

April 27, 2017 by Bookworm 19 Comments

Modern feminists protest loudly and without risk about “rape culture” and abortion, while ignoring the horrors that Islamic countries inflict on women.

Modern Feminists and Islam

The suffragettes who literally risked life and limb to get women the right to vote were heroes who began the process of achieving equal rights for women at a time when many basic rights were denied. Women didn’t have the right to control their own money, they lost custody of their children in the event of a divorce, married women could not work, women could be legally battered by their husbands, and women were widely regarded as a mentally weak sex and inferior to men intellectually.

Authorities in both American and Britain severely persecuted the suffragettes. When suffragettes protested arrests that violated basic civil rights, the authorities responded by force feeding them with energetic brutality. Suffragettes from all walks of life knew that their family, friends, and community would stigmatize and abandon them for the stands they took. Yet their moral clarity and bravery prevailed in the end.

Modern feminists today should take note. The women protesting so vigorously a hundred and more years ago were heroes.

Today, it is easy to see that modern feminists have lost their way in every sense. They no longer fight to defend women in need, here or abroad. They fight fake fights against safe targets that will back them up (universities, university men), or safe targets that are too vulnerable to fight back (unborn babies or university men due to Title IX).

Feminist displays are certainly dramatic. Take for example the young woman at Columbia University who carried her mattress around as a school project for an entire academic year as a statement against a rape charge that was so unbelievable that even Columbia’s administration did not take it seriously. Nevertheless, was allowed to continue her protest at Columbia and received national acclamation from a fawning media.

Another example of modern feminists run amok is the Rolling Stone story alleging a vast culture of fraternity gang rapes at the University of Virginia. That the Rolling Stone reporter never bothered to verify the story highlights the fact that whether these incidents actually occurred was less important than the message that women should always be believed.

Finally, what could better symbolize how far modern feminists have fallen from the suffragettes than the thousands of women who marched in Washington DC, and around America, wearing pink pussy hats and vagina shaped headgear to speak symbolically on behalf of vagina power and, utterly without the saving grace of irony, to protest against their claim that America objectifies women All these events had either shock power or high emotionality. In the end, though, all stood for nothing —  neither a particular pressing need for women, or the truth. The women who marched with vagina hats were not shackled suffragettes, they were fruits of the suffragettes labor. They were empowered, emboldened, lucky women who sadly were fighting for absolutely nothing.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Feminism, Islam Tagged With: Abortion, Female Genital Mutilation, Feminists, Honor Killings, Islam, Modern Feminism, Sexual Slavery

Jewish virtue-signalling about Muslim immigration is suicidal

February 15, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

Muslim ImmigrationIn last week’s L.A. Jewish Journal, editor Rob Eshman celebrated the fact that his wife, Rabbi Naomi Levi, sent out a huge virtue-signal about Muslim immigration: Bring ’em on; I’m not afraid!! After brooding on that bit of suicidal idiocy for a few days, my friend Lulu was moved to write a rebuttal, reminding Eshman, Levi, and any other virtue-signaling Jews (and Christians) out there that we have ample real-time proof the Muslims desperate to get into America are no like any other immigrants America has ever welcomed. I think you’ll find that, as I do, you agree with Lulu:


After the shock of 911, I realize that my response was to do something different than the vast majority of people in my liberal town/state. Instead of reading about how frightened Muslim-Americans felt about the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash (which never happened) from journalists who didn’t seem to know much about Islam, I went straight to the source, or as close to the source as I could as a non Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, or other Muslim majority country language speaker. That is, I went to YouTube and to Memri.org and I listened to what Muslim people tell each other on their own television shows, news shows, and in their newspapers. Memri translates all this without judgment. They just expose the mentality, values and trends of parts of the world we must know more about. Some of the clips are horrifying. Some messages from reform minded people are hopeful. But what is obvious is that the cultures and values are hugely, enormously different than our own.

I saw television clips of preachers giving lessons on the proper techniques of wife beating. I saw discussions and sermons promoting the murder of apostates and infidels (that is, non-Muslims). I saw the basest of anti-Semitism, including blood libels, promulgated. I watched young Palestinian children on kiddie shows being encouraged to become suicide martyrs and murder Jews. I saw the defense of honor killings, female genital mutilation and support for the denial of rights for women as normative and right.

We all know how the Internet works. One link leads to another. I then saw articles about the pedophilia in Afghanistan, the kidnapped young boys forced to dance for men and perform sexually for them. I saw articles about young female children, under the age of ten sometimes, married to grown men or middle aged men who raped them. I read about young wives locked in their homes, so miserable and desperate to end their suffering that they literally set themselves on fire as their only means to escape. Picture after picture reveals the horror. I read about Christians burned, beaten, and stoned to death, their daughters kidnapped and forced to serve as sex slaves. I read about young couples who dared to fall in love dragged out of prison (jailed for being together) and beaten to death by lynch mobs. I read and saw pictures of gays tossed off buildings and hung in public squares. I read about the horrible mistreatment of animals; beasts of burden, dogs, bear baiting.

I would look at these source materials and think, how can America’s journalists not be aware of this? How can they be so naïve? But no one really wanted to look at these readily available films, photos and articles. They were uncomfortable, painful and challenged cherished points of view that all cultures were equally good or bad, we all worship the same God, and other Coke commercial clichés.

So I have watched with horror and dismay as Sweden, perhaps the most self-congratulatory nation on the planet, in a noble experiment and to atone for Swedes’ blond hair and fair complexions, took in an enormous number of people, primarily young men, from these precise cultures . . . expecting what to happen, exactly? Beautiful integration? Sexually outré Swedish metrosexuals sipping coffee with people who viewed them with contempt? No, the Swedes embraced their immigrants with wide open arms and assumed they’d be reciprocated with gratitude and worldwide accolades. Instead, Sweden has become known as the rape capital of Europe. Values collide. Just a few weeks ago, a group of Afghan asylum recipients filmed themselves on Facebook-live gang raping a young Swedish woman. Tack sa mycket, Sverige!

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Immigration, Islam Tagged With: 9/11, Anti-Semitism, Female Genital Mutilation, FGM, French Jews, Ilan Halimi, Islam, Jewish Journal, Koran, Malmo, Muslim Immigration, Muslim Refugees, Muslims, Naomi Levy, Pedophilia, Rob Eshman, Rotherham, Taqqiya, Virtue Signalling

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