[A nos lecteurs francophones -- bievenues sur le site. On traite du journalisme
deux-poids/deux-mesures, en partant d’une banale affaire de gosses dans l’état
d’Ohio, en Amérique profonde; et passe au fétichisme tiers-mondialiste.
Mise à jour concernant les viols collectifs en Inde en bas de la page.]
[Prefatory note:
The present essay is principally concerned with the way the media mold
our perceptions, and the disconnect between actual (messy,
hard-to-characterize) events, and the way they are packaged and spun. Only accidentally does it concern
cases of gang-rape (again, most recently a story that hit the world press just
today, discussed at the end of this post). If, therefore, it is principally the politics and theory of
sex that interests you, rather than the mind-games of journalism, the following
is recommended as an alternative:
If, on the other hands, the journalistic interest is
foremost, then some of the essays in this series might repay attention:
It is generally
not worthwhile to bother with blather, whether of the P.C. or Tea Party
stripe. But the New York Times is
the nation’s flagship newspaper; the Sunday edition stands at the head of the
week; the Sunday Review is, in principle, its most serious section, since it
allows essays not restricted to police-court reporting of whatever happens to
have happened the day before; and
the front page is the blazon of that. So when a well-known longtime columnist (Nicholas
Kristof) publishes an article that is packaged as a moral equation of sexual violence in America and in the
Third World, a response is in order.
Note that I say: packaged; spun, by the editors and publishers. For the actual contents of the article largely refute its
own headline. The headline
reads:
Umm…. Yes. To
begin with, the showcase crimes-of-the-moment (which being each an individual event, are
hardly probatory, but they are, after all, the police-blotter ‘hook’ on which
he hangs his bigthink essay) are different. One involves sexual activity of which the victim has no
memory; the other was gang-rape
plus murder : one of the attackers
shoved an iron bar inside her and ripped her guts out, then threw her out onto
the street to die. One of
the Steubenville louts was video’d guffawing, over and over, “She’s so dead!” but he was being metaphorical -- dead
drunk, maybe. In the New Delhi
case, the victim was unmetaphorically, really most sincerely dead.
[Update 17 March 2013, 11 a.m. Breaking news
-- for the Ohio footballers case, the verdict is in. The feminists get their revenge:
And indeed, the actual facts
presented in the article, the statistics that go beyond this case or that,
resoundingly refute the implication of the headline. “In South Africa, a survey found that 37 percent of men
reported that they had raped a woman.”
Reported, that is; the actual
percentage of perpetrators may well be higher. Nor does the writer mention the motive for some of these
rapes, a motive peculiar to South Africa:
apart from mere lust, there has been the folk-belief that you can get
rid of your AIDS by passing it on to someone else. -- As for America, “Few people realize it, but Justice
Department statistics suggest that the incidence of rape has fallen by
three-quarters over the last four decades.” So where is your story?
Indeed, if we leave the protected playground of the Sunday
Review goodthink, and delve inside the news section, we find (p. 11) that India
is especially known for crimes almost unheard of here, such as splashing acid
into the face of your daughter-in-law.
And this is not the rare, Steubenville-style case:
In India, “Anywhere from
25,000 to
100,000 women a year are killed over dowry disputes.
Many are burned alive…”
Nevertheless, the headline-writer for Kristof’s essays adds
these subheads:
Rapists keep raping,
and Congress keeps ignoring it.
Wh-Wha-?
What is needed is good police work. Do you really want even more
pointless grandstanding by this Congress?
And best of all:
Americans should look
in their mirror before denouncing barbarity elsewhere
Oh, please.
When I look in the mirror, I see a man who has been thirty-six years in
a faithful Christian marriage, and who has neither thrown, nor knows anyone who
has thrown, nor (to my knowledge) knows anyone who knows anyone who has thrown,
acid into the face of their daughter-in-law, over greed for an even bigger
dowry.
[Note:
The
point of this post is not to beat up on Indians;
they have a hard row to hoe, and I wish them well.
The point is rather to counter the
false equations of corrupt journalism motivated by PC/post-modernist
self-laceration.]
[Update 20 June 2014]
It turns out Kristof got the headline-writer he deserved, since he is
actually a repeat offender in this area, having been one of the chief shills
for the Cambodian P.C. con-artist Somaly Mam:
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
[Update -- Sunday afternoon -- this just in] There has just been yet another horrific
nightlong mass rape involving a bus passenger in India:
A French reader offers the following interesting comment:
La France est 25
fois moins peuplée que l'Inde et pourtant nous avons chaque années nos affaires
de tournante dans les caves de cités, ici c'est encore pire car ces tournantes
sont racistes ce qui n'est pas le cas en Inde. Pourquoi se focaliser sur 'Inde
et étouffée les centaines de faits similaires en France, il y a un tabou bien
plus grand en France, les médias ne veulent pas stigmatiser donc ça passe sous
silence.
Now -- superficially, this reader might seem to be making
the same point as our headline-writer:
Watch not the straw in thy neighbor’s eye, but the beam in thine
own. But a décryptage of the euphemisms here makes rather the reverse case, and is
anything but a comfort to the hawkers of political correctness.
First, "les caves de cités" refers to the cellars of the massive taxpayer-subsidized housing-projects that encircle Paris, given over almost exclusively to African immigrants.
Next: Tournante means
basically ‘gang-bang’: but of a
sort peculiar to France. Thus:
Au début des années
2000, la société française a découvert avec consternation que la montée
constante de la délinquance ne se limitait pas aux seuls feux de voitures. Elle
s'accompagnait de la banalisation de crimes particulièrement abjects que les
médias allaient baptiser des "tournantes", reprenant le
terme d'argot utilisés par les jeunes des cités pour désigner des viols
collectifs. Le viol collectif, certes, n'est pas en soi une nouveauté et aucun
peuple n'en a le monopole, mais ce qui allait particulièrement choquer les
Français, c'est à la fois sa banalisation, la jeunesse des criminels mais aussi
leur parfaite indifférence et leur absence de remord vis-à-vis de leurs
victimes, souvent des adolescentes ou des pré-adolescentes. Si la majorité des
victimes de tournantes sont des françaises de souche, on en trouve dans tous
les groupes ethniques et elles sont de toutes les couleurs de peau. Il convient
de donc de préciser que dans les exemples cités ci-dessous, les victimes ne
sont pas nécessairement de souche européenne.
Néanmoins, les liens
entre l'immigration afro-maghrébine, la haine envers les Blancs - ou l'occident
- et la recrudescence de ce type d'agressions est indéniable : des chiffres,
des faits et des témoignages le confirme.
Now we can understand what the commentor meant when she said
that the French media suppress reportage of such events, for fear of “stigmatising” (a lexicographically transitive verb, here used de-transitively out of euphemism). The commentor herself suppressed the
implied direct-object of the verb, because no-one who follows French events --
in samizdat, s’entend, since the MSM shy away -- needs to be told whom we are
talking about here.
*
Travaillant au noir,
le détective se
trouve aux prises
avec le Saint-Esprit
*
~ ~ ~
Let us emphasize the importance of the fact of this
packaging. Major
events go on in the world, and in this age of readily-shared information,
cannot be passed over in silence forever;
but the way the medium spins things, reveals their agenda. And at the New York Times, the
folks who provide the fluff -- headlines and captions and artwork -- frequently
push the atavistic post-Modernist agenda.
Thus, to take an equally prominent example from the very
same morning’s newspaper: the
front-page review by the well-known columnist David Brooks, of Jared Diamond’s
new book: The World Until
Yesterday: What Can We Learn From
Traditional Societies?
Now, already in the title, there is a P.C. sleight of
hand. After all, Victorian England
and Troubadour France were traditional
societies, though they allowed for effervescence and creativity within
them. What Diamond means here is
not that: he means primitive societies, savage societies. Brooks picks a more neutral term, but
does report the facts: “The most
obvious difference between us is
that pre-state tribal societies are
just a lot more violent.”
Nevertheless, the large headline over the review reads:
Tribal Lessons
clearly implying that there are some; and the sub-head (page 20):
Traditional societies have much to teach us about child-rearing, the
treatment of the elderly, and dispute resolution.
So-o, what might these useful lessons be? Well, the very first paragraph of the
review offers this heart-warming
anecdote:
The custom among the Pirahã Indians
of Brazil is that women give birth alone. The linguist Steve Sheldon once saw a
Pirahã woman giving birth on a beach, while members of her tribe waited nearby.
It was a breech birth, however, and the woman started crying in agony. “Help
me, please! The baby will not come.” Sheldon went to help her, but the other
Pirahã stopped him, saying that she didn’t want his help. The woman kept up her
screams. The next morning both mother and baby were found dead.
Nice! Keeps
those male-chauvinist ob-gyns out of the delivery-room. Empower yourself, practice
self-midwifery.
And what of the elderly?
The anthropologist Allan Holmberg
was with a group of Siriono Indians of Bolivia when a middle-aged woman grew
gravely ill. She lay in her hammock, too unwell to walk or speak. Her husband
told Holmberg that the tribe had to move on and would leave her there to die.
They left her a fire and some water and walked away without saying goodbye.
Even her husband had no parting words for her.
Oh-kayyy… lesson
learned! Throw grannie under the
bus!
Ah, and widows:
we learn of one tribe in which “widows insisted on being strangled just
after their husbands passed away”.
A sort of quick-and-easy variation on the more elaborate practice in
traditional India (look up
suttee).
And how about dispute-resolution?
The problem is that the warfare was
constant, and over time the casualties added up. Between April and September
1961, 0.14 percent of the alliances’ total populations was killed in this war.
As a share of total population, that’s a higher casualty rate than Europe,
Japan, China or America suffered during the world wars.
The signature method of dispute-resolution in the Third
World is nothing so patriarchal
and unfeeling as a decision in a court of law, but vendettas that can last for
decades.
[Nota bene: I am not here traipsing about
picking-&-choosing faits-divers from police blotters around the world,
which indeed would be pointless, but simply quoting paragraphs from the very
article that, according to the editors and headline writers at the New York
Times, is supposed to make out the case for the exemplary nature of
tribalism. The point of this essay is not to wring
our hands over conditions in partibus
infidelium; if that is all you
are getting out of it, you are reading it wrong.]
As for child-rearing, the author marvels that primitive
mothers actually breast-feed.
Bravo:
so does any mother
in our own society, with an ounce of sense.
But the Third World offers some curious child-rearing
techniques that are sadly absent from our shores:
look up
infibulation and
clitoridectomy in the
encylopedia.
The magazine then holds up for our admiration, for such
lessons as we may glean, a photograph of the aptly-named New Guinea
mudmen, no less.
Nostalgie de la boue …
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Relief for
beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
~
Thus, in both cases, a prominent writer has published a
not-very-good but not-terrible-either essay, which the headline-writers spin
into an absurdity, into a celebration of primitivism and a slur against the
West. This matters, since most newspaper-skimmers will only take in the headlines, subheads,
pictures and captions: that is the
takeaway for them.
We have here to deal with two
different types of journalists;
and the man who writes the headlines I will not dare to describe; for I have not seen him except in dreams.
-- G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw
in America (1922)
Now, there are whole sections of the Sunday Times devoted
almost exclusively to what we shall delphically allude to as
la mouvance paraphile, notably the Style
section, and to some extent even the Magazine (today’s cover is a pink
monstrosity devoted to
Lindsay Lohan.)
Fine, let that be their sandbox.
But when the sullage spills over into
the News sections, it is time to sound the alarm.
[For further linguistically-alert observations on media spin, click
here.]
Thus, consider the article that is featured, not simply on
the front page of the Week in Review, but above the fold, titled
The headline falls into the genre of
Freud-bashing and “
What Einstein Got Wrong”, pandering to the self-satisfactions of those who never
actually bothered to read deeply in the literature of Natural Selection, or
Psychoanalysis, or Relativity.
And the article itself takes a cheap shot at Darwin, to tickle the
fancies of those who like to take at swat at traditional English society:
In “The Descent of Man, and
Selection in Relation to Sex,” Charles Darwin gathered evidence for the notion
that, through competition for mates and sustenance, natural selection had
encouraged man’s “more inventive genius” while nurturing woman’s “greater
tenderness.” In this way, he suggested that the gender differences he saw
around him — men sought power and made money; women stayed at home — weren’t
simply the way things were in Victorian England. They were the way things had
always been.
Cheap, because it suggests that the man led a blinkered
existence in an overstuffed armchair;
whereas in fact, he cut his teeth in Patagonia, and (as anyone who dips
into The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex or The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals can swiftly verify) was
well-read in the ethnology and ethology of his day.
Now:
I have
more than once broken a lance against the occasional excesses of the
ultra-Darwinists;
but Darwin himself is sound.
The writer focusses on two topics that are of sociological
interest to be sure, but extraordinarily unlikely to overturn Darwin.
First: the
relative tendency to promiscuity among men vs. women. He goes into the weeds, as such articles tend to do,
without noticing one elementary arithmetical fact: Each time a man has slept with a woman, a woman has slept
with a man. It’s like the north
and south poles of magnets: count
them however you like, they will of necessity be equinumerous. It is astonishing that columnists never
seem to realize this, though one reader-commentor on this article did point it
out.
Second: Various
amusing experiments are described, in which, if you load the dice right, people
will (temporarily, during the artificial conditions of the experiment) act
differently from the way they do in real life. And you can so pre-set things that your results will flatter
those who imagine that sex differences are not part of nature, but result from
(scheming, white, patriarchal, Western) cultural conditioning. Whereas if you acquaint yourself
with history and ethnology, you soon see that it is precisely Western
civilization which has freed the species from some of the age-old distinction
of roles; in any savage society
whatever, the roles of men and women are starkly distinct.
Thus, in the speed-dating improv (as we shall call it, so as not to dignify it with the title
of “experiment”), it is unsurprising (especially to a Freudian) that, placed
into a normally masculine role and given license by the experimental milieu,
women might act out their fantasies, and the men might play along: even outside of the ‘experimental’
situation, such techniques are sometimes used in flirting (witness "Sadie Hawkins day"). But it is no more telling for Darwinian
theory than is the Woody-Allen/Diane-Keaton shtick in “Sleeper”, in which they
respectively channel (with convincing authenticity) respectively Blanche du
Bois and Stanley Kowalski.
[Click
here for convincing proof that the genders are
freely interchangeable:
So -- All in all, a thin and throwaway essay.
And to his credit, the author does
quote
Steven Pinker in rebuttal.
But our quarry lies elsewhere:
in the meta-message, in the packaging.
And here, long after recollection of that forgettable
article has faded (if indeed the audience even read it past the first
paragraph), the gigantic artwork that surmounts it -- taking up more than half
a page, right at the top of the front page -- may leave its sticky subliminal traces.
 |
The Mask of the Beast
|
In ugly colors, and against a jungle background, it depicts
what at a first hasty glance may appear a heterosexual couple engaged in a
kiss.
But wait -- no -- the figure
of the man is wearing a skirt and high heels, while the woman is wearing
trousers.
The top half of
the man has been sliced off and placed upon the lower trunk of a woman;
the upper half of the woman has been
perched atop the legs of a man:
as
much as to say, that the sexes are literally interchangeable.
(More darkly still, it hints at
the fantasy of the invert
dépeceur.)
More chillingly still, what from a distance resembles a
kiss, is something truly repugnant: for these creatures are more than mere centaurs:
the heads have blended into each other -- the faces have entirely
disappeared. The resulting monstrosity -- neither woman, nor
man, nor good red herring -- appears the product of an imperfectly
divided zygote; and the triangular area where the faces should have been suggests the visage of a bat or a goat,
crowned by outsize feral ears:
the Mask of the Beast.
~ ~ ~
Ever since the earliest preserved literature -- from a time
which to us, would itself appear as Classical Antiquity or a Golden Age --
there has been a myth of things having been once much better. (Start with Eden
and Genesis, in fact.) The idea
has had many forms, and may even be spiritually akin to that mathematical
Platonism which I myself espouse;
the instantiation characteristic of our own present Western civilization
is the Myth of the Noble Savage, which developed during the Romantic period. It is lurking behind the spin put
on the facts reported above.
Thus, take our same author Jared Diamond.
He won fame by his earlier book,
Guns,
Germs, and Steel (1997).
It is
a wide-ranging, deep-delving book, chocked with fact and curiosa, engagingly
written, and well-argued.
Yet in the very prologue to the book -- the initial spin-setter, the “Please
don’t hate me for what I have to say” section -- as though to forestall the
vituperation that (witness
Pinker) must be the lot of
anyone who trots out an abundance of facts and cool analysis, since
these jar against the ambient bath of popular fantasies, he writes, of himself
and his New-Guinea best-bud:
He and I both knew perfectly well
that New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans.
Now, as semanticians, and analysts of rhetoric, let us lay out what this sentence (call
it sentence “A”) literally and plainly implies.
(1) There is a proposition (call it P, namely “New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as
Europeans.”) whose truth is
uncontroversial -- not really open to discussion, even. (That is what is meant by the phrase
“know perfectly well”. -- And
indeed, if you are a competent speaker of English, you know that semantic fact
perfectly well yourself, though your brain might resist it in this case, since
you can sense where this is going, and you don’t want to go there.)
P in turn implies
two propositions:
(2a) It is possible
that the various races differ in
average intelligence. (The pragmatic
implication is actually even stronger -- more like “likely” or “almost
certainly”. Again, your brain might refuse to process this
assertion in the present context;
if so, simply replace “smarter” by “taller”, and “New Guineans” with “Dinka”.)
(2b) If such is the case in the New-Guinean/European matchup,
then it is the New Guineans who come out on top.
These are straightforward logico-pragmatic entailments of
Diamond’s original assertion; yet
we may doubt whether he would acknowledge this if pressed. His sentence was possibly
intended as propitiatory, not meant to be examined or taken literally: lip-service, as in a politician’s
speech.
And indeed, but a few pages later comes a startling fact
that rather casts doubt upon (2b). For whereas Europeans, in order to exchange the
gifts of tradition and the ferment of new ideas, erected Latin into an
international language for such discourse, and used it for centuries (now English
fills that role), these brainy New Guineans, all on their little island there,
apparently found little to say to one another, for:
Of the modern world’s 6,000
languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea.
Thinking their great thoughts silently, no doubt.
Yet it is precisely for such statements as A, rather than for the minutiae of plant
domestication and prevailing winds, that Jared Diamond has been grasped to the
bosom of the P.C. media -- in particular, in a three-part PBS television
extravaganza, in 2005, dutifully following him as he traipses around the
world. Reviewing this for a scientific journal, Machael Balter
writes
Diamond’s thesis is one of the most
widely discussed big ideas of recent years … For one thing, it is an explicitly
anti-racist explanation for social and economic inequalities on a global level.
-- “Is This How the West Won?”, in Science,
8 July 2005, p. 248
Short version:
(B) It’s not in the genes,
it’s the geography, stupid.
The reviewer demurs:
There are scholars who disagree
with his thesis. Nor are any of
these dissenters ever interviewed, though a number of other experts and
personalities appear in the film
to bolster Diamond’s viewpoint.
This imbalance is a disservice.
-- id.
I have neither the time nor the qualifications to weigh
Diamond’s arguments in detail:
but the point here is that, whatever the book’s merits (and they are
many, whatever you think of B),
neither does the general reader nor the media producer have the least interest
in getting to the bottom of things:
they’re just putting on a show, or watching the show. In a similar fashion, the immense
popularity of Albert Einstein among the American public had little to do with the details of
his tensor equations. These, like
Diamond’s detailed examples, are functionally mere window-dressing on the public square.
[Update 2 September 2013] For more on the cultural wonders
of New Guinea, check this out:
«Schwarzer Jesus» gelyncht und
geschändet
Er nannte sich Black Jesus und soll
Kannibalismus betrieben und mehrere Frauen vergewaltigt haben. Jetzt haben
Dorfbewohner den Sektenführer auf Neuguinea ermordet.
Ein als «Schwarzer Jesus» bekannter
Sektenguru ist auf Papua-Neuguinea von einem wütenden Mob gelyncht worden.
Steven Tari hatte zuvor mehrere junge Mädchen als Opfergabe getötet, wie die
Zeitung «The National» am Montag berichtete.
An infamous Papua New Guinea cult
leader known as “Black Jesus” was castrated by an angry mob after being hacked
to death for killing young girls as sacrifices.
Steven Tari, a convicted rapist who
was suspected of cannibalism, was killed in a remote PNG village.
[Update 19 November 2013] Cf. now this, in the London Review of Books, taking apart
Jared Diamond’s recent The World until
Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
It’s a good bet a culture is in
trouble when its best-known intellectuals start ransacking the cultural
inventory of its ancestors and its contemporary inferiors for tips on how to
live. The malaise is all the more remarkable when the culture in question is
the modern American variant of Enlightenment rationalism and progress, a creed
not known for self-doubt or failures of nerve. The deeper the trouble, the more
we are seen to have lost our way, the further we must go spatially and
temporally to find the cultural models that will help us. In the stronger
versions of this quest, there is either a place – a Shangri-la – or a time, a
Golden Age, that promises to reset our compass to true north.
~
[Update 18 January 2013] A reader sent me this link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-21059681
under the subject-line “Rape is not just a problem in India.
It's also a problem in the UK”.
And indeed, the opening paragraph is truly horrific:
A 12-year-old girl who was
repeatedly raped by a group of men was also made to have a back-room abortion
after falling pregnant, a court has heard. She is one of six alleged victims of nine men accused of
grooming children and exploiting them for sex in Oxford.
She was also "branded"
with the initial of a man who claimed to "own her".
This is as much of what comes out of the Third World. So -- are the Oxford dons, or
whoever it may be, on a moral par with the subcontinental diabolists?
Well, no. Read
on, see the names and pictures of the accused, and you realize, this is the Third World; these men are in England, but not of it.
The account continues:
The men deny 51 charges including
rape, arranging child prostitution and trafficking relating to girls aged
between 11 and 15 from 2004 to 2012.
Jurors at the Old Bailey heard the
victim, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was "sold" to
Mohammed Karrar when she had just turned 11 to "cure her bad attitude".
The nine men are demons. But a detail slipped into that last sentence, and
never expanded-on nor explained, is actually more chilling. “Sold” …. by whom? Her family? If so, we have to deal, not simply with (as it were) some
rabid dogs who strayed into a neighborhood and terrorized the populace … but a
populace of curs.
* * *
Tired of marinating
in a rehash of such squalid shenanigans?
Then bail out and
read something timeless instead:
(For those not opting
to do so --
We now return you to
the folly of life here below.)
* * *
[Update] Still
stunned, I searched for further details of the case, and found this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/girl-was-sold-aged-11-drugged-and-raped-by-child-sex-ring-court-told-8456041.html
A
14-year-old girl who went to the police after allegedly being beaten up and
repeatedly raped by a member of a child sex trafficking ring was persuaded to
drop her complaint by another girl who was “seeing” her attacker, a court heard
today.
So, yes:
We have here to deal, not with a handful of demons on one side, and the
innocent on the other, but a whole infected culture in that milieu.
Now -- What milieu are we dealing with here? Neither the BBC nor The Independent is
inclined to breathe word of this.
It is sad when you have to turn to the tabloids to get the real deal,
but here it is:
Seven men of Pakistani origin and
two from North Africa are accused of 79 offences against six vulnerable white
British girls. The charges include child rape, sexual trafficking and child
prostitution.
From the age of 12 the girl was sold to groups of
Asian men who violently raped her in private homes and guesthouses around
Oxford and elsewhere. Sometimes she was injected with heroin or given date
drugs to ensure she complied with the gang’s sick demands.
~
There is a highly curious aspect to this latest case, quite
different in its dynamics from the familiar crime and disorder of Third World
life, involving rather Cultures in Contact -- but a contact basically at the
level of the Unconscious. To
pursue this would take us out of sociopolitical territory, and into the
psychoanalytical. Perhaps,
if I come to understand it better, I might blog about it, under the rubric
Bluebeard
and the Little Drummer Girl
Readers wishing to have a glimpse of the sort of thing this
involves, in a CT context, might profitably dip into an extensively researched and grippingly
written thriller (only, it’s not fiction) by John Follain, Jackal
(1998), the saga of the charismatic terrorist Carlos, who somehow excited many a Bartholin's gland.
In
an earlier essay,
Pride and the Laws of Motion,
we examined the thesis that
Superbia, at least as much as the
factors considered by Marx, was essential to understanding the psychodynamics
of the subaltern.
This mostly
involves the depth-psychology of the male.
This other dynamic, less often explored in a political
setting, depends principally on the depth-psychology of the female.
Deep waters, where we fear to wade.
[Update 27 January 2013] Latest reflection of the Bluebeard
syndrome:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-linda-pugach-20130127,0,6094929.story
Linda Riss went on to marry Burton
Pugach, who in 1959 hired a goon to splash lye on her face. Their baffling but
long-lasting union fascinated the media.
[Update 16 Feb 2013]
And now another:
 |
| The eligible bachelor ... and the blushing bride |
The enigma of a
woman’s heart,
finally espied by a Private Eye,
for less than the
price of a Valentine …
This Rose
[Aug 2014] And another:
http://madame.lefigaro.fr/societe/star-25-ans-sapprete-epouser-tueur-charles-manson-190814-900495
~
[Update 16 March 2013]
The latest, from central India:
a bike-ride gone bad.
Une touriste suisse a été victime
d'un viol collectif hier soir dans le centre de l'Inde, a indiqué aujourd'hui
la police. La victime se promenait à vélo avec son mari dans le quartier de
Datia, dans l'état du Madhya Pradesh, quand sept à huit hommes les ont
attaqués. Ils ont attaché l'homme et violé la femme en sa présence, avant de
leur voler leurs biens, a précisé la police. Huit suspects sont actuellement
entendus par les enquêteurs.
As always, a cauldron of comment boils behind the bland
wire-services account. In the
columns of todays’s Le Figaro, much the same debate plays out (“What’s
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” vs. “C’est un poids, deux mesures”)
as in the New Delhi case treated above. Representing the first camp, a reader writes (I normally
don’t include the poster’s name, even though these are quite public, but in
this case it is necessary for comprehension of the second reply below):
NADIA GENJI
Ca suffit le racisme. C'est quoi
ces internautes qui ont la langue plus rapide que leur cerveau et qui font des
"bug"....
Petit rappel pour un retour à la triste réalité :
1/ Tous les 8 minutes une femme est victime de viol en France.
2/ Tous les 3 jours une femme meurt sous les coups de son mari ou compagnon en
France.
Representing the second:
Vous répétez des chiffres erronés
et issus de la propagande associative.
Certaines associations féministes ont décidé pour mieux marquer les esprits
de considérer en dehors de toute réalité statistique que les viols déclarés ne
représentent que 10 % des viols en France. Cela nous donne la statistique choc
de 1 viol toutes les 8 minutes rabâchée depuis des années.
--
et quand on sait que les
prisonniers sont aux trois quart vos
coreligionaires, il n'est pas difficile de faire le lien avec ces 200 viols
*
Si cela vous parle,
savourez la série
noire
en argot authentique
d’Amérique :
*
And now, an exact parallel in the German press,
where a reader comments
aus irgendeinem Grund greift die
Presse solche Fälle nur auf wenn sie sehr weit weg passieren. Vor einigen
Wochen gab es beispielsweise eine Massenvergewaltigung in München, ausserhalb
der Lokalmedien hat man hiervon allerdings nichts lesen können, und selbst da
wurde, wie üblich, die Herkunft der Täter verschleiert.
*
Falls Sie im
Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium
weiterblättern
möchten,
Bitte hier
klicken:
*
For further essays and stories, check this out:
~
[Update 30 March 2013]
The latest piece of particularist piffle, from the reliably wool-headed
Washington Post, appeared prominently featured on their Website, written by a couple
of women.:
White men with guns
Our nation must confront why they
perpetrate so many shootings.
To point out the obvious would be churlish.
[Update 20 April 2013]
More from India’s bulging police-blotter:
NEW DELHI — The case of a
5-year-old girl who was kidnapped, repeatedly raped, starved and tortured has
provoked a protest
[Update 4 June 2013]
Ho hum, another one:
An American woman was apparently
gang-raped by three men in the tourist area of Manali in India’s mountainous
northern state of Himachal Pradesh
Well, you may say, these things happen, you can always pick
up some oddity from the police blotters by trolling around. But what makes this an
indictment of India, specifically, rather
than of just a handful of rural louts, is this:
Cases entering the legal system can
take years, even decades, to resolve.
So, good luck getting any justice.
Once again: The
attempt by the New York Times to smear America and bring it down to the
level of India in matters like this, is contemptible.
[Update 13 Aug 2014] From the world of fashion, a degenerate Western response to the India outrages:
http://madame.lefigaro.fr/societe/photos-de-mode-inspirees-dun-viol-collectif-suscitent-lindignation-inde-120814-900110
But what do you expect, from the world of fashion.
[Update 27 Aug 2014] On the mass-rape issue, more re Swedish political-correctness,
now with a new relevance, given this:
