A Blonde Moment

I thought I'd seen it all when the manosphereans started spinning Elliot Rodger as a feminist.

Now Steve Sailer at VDare wants to persuade us that Elliot Rodger's intention to murder sorority girls was really a "race crime" against white folks, specifically against blonde white folks.

"UCSB is less than 40% white among undergrads, but that still makes it The Blond School by UC standards. For example, UC Irvine down in the Beach Boys’ Orange County is only 17.5% white. So, targeting for slaughter this sorority is an extremely intentional racial hate crime. But how much do you think we’re going to hear about that? As Sapir and Whorf might have said, if a term doesn't exist in our vocabulary, it’s hard to think about the concept."

Or, as Sapir and Whorf "might have said," Just because you invent "a concept" doesn't mean it has any bearing in objective reality, you moron.  (And also, fuck you for using that Beach Boys song, which up until now has only conjured in my head cheerful images of sun, surfing, sand, and bikinis.) 

I have to admit, while I don't necessarily believe "Blondes have more fun," neither have I worried about being targeted for violence because of my hair color.  And when it comes to Being Blonde in America, I speak with the authority of experience.  I am a natural blue eyed blonde, have been all my life, and my partner is a natural blue eyed blonde as well. (Well, at least we were until age stripped the melanin from our crowning glories, along with the last vestiges of our youthful beauty.)

Now we regret that our paths did not converge earlier in our life journeys, when we were still at our reproductive peaks, so that we could have fulfilled our duties to the Aryan race by creating more blondes, that precious subset of human diversity who are so perilously close to extinction!  (Although to be candid, it's me who's the race traitor; she has, in fact, produced a small army militia of tow-headed grandbabies.)

Apparently, saving the blonde gene demands organized political action, and we know what that means: $$$. Fortunately, it's not too late to make a tax-deductible contribution. Peter Bigelow (and his infant daughter) are in immediate need of $30,000 or else:

"Our advisers insist that the only way websites get donations is to block access to readers completely."

Now, while you're considering how generous you want to be, here's a fun fact: Did you know that all blue eyed people share a common ancestor?  The mutation occurred relatively recently in human history.  Maybe that is why my partner and I have always felt such a strong sense of, uhm, sorority. 

Students Weigh In On Elliot Rodger

I teach remedial English to students in a community college who are not native speakers.  They are mostly international students from Asia or Saudi Arabia, with a scattering of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia/Eritrea, or Mexico.

Today, when I overheard some of the "residents" chatting about the Elliot Rodger's case before class began, I was inspired to throw out my lesson plan du jour and focus on the sad story that has been so much in the news.  I am always looking for those "teaching moments," always cognizant that people remember best that which is emotionally arousing, and... I was honestly interested in their opinions. 

Had they watched Elliot Rodger's "retribution" video?  A Russian woman confessed she had not, but her mother in Ukraine had e-mailed her about the story.  She squirmed uncomfortably at the prospect of watching the video.  (She is a young widow with an adolescent son.)

Ad hoc, I hastily scrawled three questions for students to discuss in groups after they'd watched the video:

1.  Why was Elliot Rodger angry?

2.  Was Elliot Rodger "sane" or "insane" (according to the legal definition of being responsible for his own actions)?

3.  What could have prevented this tragedy?

Then, courtesy of Youtube, I played the video.  The students watched with apparent interest.  Rodger spoke slowly and dramatically, so he wasn't hard to understand, although I quickly realized that "slaughter" and "slay" were probably not within my students' lexicon and had to stop the video to define these verbs.

When Rodger spoke about how his virginity at age 22 was "a crime," many of my Chinese male students began to giggle uncontrollably.  The notion that their own (probable) virginities constituted "crimes" that merited punishment of the female sex was thoroughly risible to them.  What was Rodger's problem?  He was good-looking, he was rich, his dad worked in Hollywood...  In short, his complaints were ludicrous.  Elliot Roger was living exactly the "student lifestyle" they could only dream of. 

The middle eastern students put the blame on Rodger's family.  Clearly, his parents had not exerted sufficient control over, or provided adequate nurturing of, this wayward son.  They also speculated that Rodger had been exploited by girls who were only after his money.  One Saudi student astutely pointed out that it wasn't "sex" Rodger yearned for; it was love. 

The North African refugees viewed the issue mostly in terms of gun control.  Why had Rodger been permitted to own a gun?  Would their own children ever be safe in a country that allowed anyone to obtain firearms?  

Some of the students thought Rodger was both "crazy" and "sane."  In other words, while only a mentally disturbed person would do what he had done, he should have been held accountable for his actions in a court of law (had he lived).  I let this slide because I myself cannot reconcile the inherent contradiction between the "intuitive" and "legal" definitions of "sanity." 

The student from Cameroon was very skeptical that Rodger had killed himself; he was certain that the police must have shot him on the spot.

Only one lone Korean girl ventured that Rodger had been motivated by a sense of masculine entitlement.  She didn't use that exact language, but her message was clear:  "He kill because he think all girl must love him."

Forney Hits the Big Time

There's a certain irony that Taki's Magazine has elected Matt Forney to write a piece castigating liberal media reactions to the Santa Barbara shooting.  After all, this is a guy who feeds, literally and figuratively, on the outrage of normal decent people "liberals" and "feminists" by writing the same kind of vile, misogynistic and racist screeds that apparently helped warp Elliot Rodger's worldview. 

Forney predictably attempts to distance himself (and his manospherean cronies) from the site Rodger's is reported to have commented on:  It isn't us, it's them!  He even manages to insinuate that anti-misogynist sites such as David Futrelle's We Hunted the Mammoth and the Southern Poverty Law Center were somehow culpable for failing to warn the public of the real danger of PUAHate.  

I mean, just look how spiteful and scurrilous the PUAHate boys were, trying to dox and intimidate Matt's pals (never mind that is precisely what Matt has been doing for the past few months).

Of course, PUAHate may have been at odds with pickup artists, but they were very much part of the "manosphere" at large, that loose confederation of malcontents that are united in their shared hatred of women and minorities.  The distinctions between these factions and these individuals are virtually insignificant to anyone outside their 'sphere.  Whatever their purported aims, whether a return to patriarchy, or a pussy in every pot, the blame for the disappointing ways of the world is always to be placed squarely at one source: the autonomy of women. And they are willing to employ the most violent language and imagery to achieve dominance over those uppity western females (who really haven't understood their rightful place since either 1920 or 1420, depending on who's fantasizing talking).

How dare the SPLC name Matt Forney and his friend Roosh's blogs as "hate groups."  Didn't they see that PUAHate was just as bad?  (Waah, waah, it's so unfair!)

"Could it be that feminists ignored PUA Hate out of a fatuous “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic? If so, their negligence just cost at least six people their lives."

Not bloody likely.  Even for a paranoid manipulator of facts like Forney, this is a bit of a stretch.  If PUAHate was overlooked before the shootings, it is because it was a relatively unknown site that did little to grub for attention from the mainstream, unlike Forney himself -- an indefatigable and shameless self-promoter who basically lives and breathes on twitter, re-tweeting his admirers and his critics with equal relish -- or other, more organized or widely read hate sites like A Voice for Men, Vox Day, Heartiste, etc. ad nauseum.  PUAHate was just one of literally hundreds of misogynistic blogs, with the sole distinction that it hated the "game gurus" who had failed to deliver them the promised sex-on-demand they'd paid good cash money for, almost as much as it did the women whose favors they furiously insisted they were entitled to. 

Show me a comment left by Rodger on PUAHate that suggests he was ready to commit mass murder, and I can show you scores more on Return of Kings or The Spearhead that are even more ominous.  

All of these sites are the same, and they're all horrible.

Even a dedicated follower of the manosphere like Futrelle cannot possibly monitor them all.  (And it's hardly necessary to do so, since they are all croaking in unison in the same fetid bog.)

Rejected Incel Finally Has His Way

It seems like a parody: A good looking, articulate UCSB student sitting in his glossy black BMW, announcing plans to "slaughter" the popular blondes who have rejected him because they preferred to bestow their favors on the alpha "bad boy" losers instead of "a perfect guy... a supreme gentleman" like himself.  Except, unfortunately, it is real. Anyone who follows almost any part of the manosphere (he was allegedly an active participant on sites such as bodybuilding.com and puahate.com) will recognize the cold rage and the overweening sense of entitlement Elliot Rodgers displays as he justifies the murders he is about to commit. Yes, he will be "a god" and they will die "like animals" through this act of "restorative retribution." Too bad he didn't think of starting his own blog instead of buying a gun.  It would probably have been a big hit and then he could have had all the groupies he wanted.