Welcome to Civilization 3.0...

...where the left is beyond mere human ability to parody...

...because using the intellect is an artifact of patriarchal, colonial racist, cisgendered, homophobic oppression but feeling passionately about an issue is all that matters.

//This is gross. And also sad. Progressivism continues its inevitable descent into complete parody.

According to Right Wing News, a few n’er do wellers on 4chan had a brilliant idea: see if they could convince people to, “publicly piss/sh*t their pants in the name of ‘Equality?'”

For these types of things to work, pranksters start a hashtag usually by attaching it to other well trafficked ones, then the intended marks take it from there.

#PissForEquality is not first outlandish hashtag used to successfully troll self-described feminists. Last year, 4chan started the #EndFathersDay hashtag, but with even better trollistic success. Professor Jacobson wrote:

There is a strange lack of connection of so many progressive manias to reality, that it’s hard to know what is real or not. Even for progressives.

There was a major trolling of leftist feminists and Gender Studies types on Twitter, with the hastage “#EndFathersDay.” It was started at 4Chan, but feminists ran with it apparently believing it to be true. Some of the tweets were hysterical — but impossible to tell if part of the group trolling or the leftist feminists who thought it was real.

Ask the Internet for idiocy and idiocy ye shall receive. These tweets being an indicator, 4chan’s trolling managed to rope in a few takers.//

It is all about moving the Overton Window in their direction.

And, yes, it is unhinged.  That's the point.

//Hunt's crime was to make a not-very-funny gag during an after-dinner speech at a conference on women in science in South Korea earlier this week.

"Three things happen when [girls] are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry," he said. According to one of the attendees, the joke was greeted by a "deathly, deathly silence."

In a normal world, a world which valued the freedom to make a doofus of oneself, that should have been the end of it. Seventy-two-year-old man of science makes outdated joke, tumbleweed rolls by, The End.

But we don't live in a normal world. Certainly we don't live in a world where people are allowed to make off-color comments. And so with tedious, life-zapping predicability, Hunt fell victim to the offence-policers, to the machine of outrage being constantly cranked up by self-styled guardians of what we may think, say, and even joke about.

Twitter went into meltdown. Journalists kicked up a fuss. His comments were branded "shocking and bewildering." (You find a silly joke bewildering? You really should get out more.) And then came the denouement to this latest outburst of confected fury: Hunt "resigned" from UCL, where he was honorary professor.//

As the Far Left becomes the Mainstream Left, it blurs the distinction between reality and Parody.

Zombietime analyzes the "Slutwalk" phenomenon.

"Again, SlutWalk as a concept walks this impossible tightrope between promiscuous hyper-sexuality and testicle-shriveling gender wars."

"I mentioned above that we’ll get back to the topic of the Middle East. Now, read the sign above. Replace “Christian Fascists” with “Arab culture” and we’re starting to get somewhere. You know what would really be brave? Holding a SlutWalk in, say, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. You know what’s a waste of time? Holding a SlutWalk in San Francisco. Because nobody blames victims here, but in other parts of the world, they actually do. It goes even far beyond that: Much of repressive Islamic culture revolves around and is based on suppressing and punishing women’s sexuality. They don’t just “blame the victim” in the Middle East; they kill the victim.

Ah, but no, it’s the “Christian Fascists” who are perpetuating an anti-woman culture. Silly me for thinking otherwise!"

Reading the commentary and looking at the pictures is like watching a trainwreck; you are horrified but can't stop watching.

Feminism means equality...

...and women should be more equal than men.

Feminist professor says women should not be put in jail.

Somehow, this looks very patriarchal.

In a world where transgendered men and radical environmental lesbians argue about whether "people who can get pregnant" should be called "women"....

...and African-American leaders in Fresno can oppose the hiring of a White Cultural Studies teacher because he is white....

...some women are saying "to Hell with all that."

Women against Feminism.

NRO story.

The arrogance, stupidity and indifference to the question of truth is blinding.

Well, hey!, if a totally forgettable feminist narcissist says so, consider it done!

Feminist Huffpo blogger has some suggestions for Pope Francis:

5. Leave behind the Virgin Birth. Good Catholic women have two choices: they can be virgins or mothers. Embodying both, the Virgin Mary is a sterling, unattainable emblem of womanhood. That idea -- of a mother unsoiled by sex -- is a terrible burden for Catholic women who can never measure up. But this myth survives, despite the Biblical references to Jesus' siblings (vehemently denied by church fathers who are loathe to admit that Mary ever had sex) and the widely held view that the virgin birth was incorporated into early Christianity to win over converts from the pagan/goddess religions who already accepted divine progeny springing from all manner of human/spirit couplings.//

Was Rush Limbaugh right about Feminism?

According to England's the Daily Mail - in an article that would get its offices burned if it was headquartered stateside:

Forget ambition, financial security and that first-class degree.

A controversial study has concluded that the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married.

The research team, made up of three women and two men, said that when men are thin on the ground, 'women are more likely to choose briefcase over baby'.

As with most Social Science studies, the conclusions were based on an interview of a relatively miniscule number - 87 women in this case.

Make of it what you will.

More liberal totalitarianism, but this time it's found among conservatives.

James Taranto stops to actually think about some of the things that Rick Santorum has been saying about contraception - rather than reflexively engaging in knee-jerk condemnation - and finds that while Santorum may be wrong, the points he is making have substance. Taranto also considers why there is such a knee-jerk reaction against Santorum among the center-right and discovers the fact that they are "liberal totalitarians":

Rubin proclaims herself puzzled as to how Santorum can "square" his attitudes toward birth control, on which he would not impose his religious views through legislation, and abortion, on which he would. But Santorum explains that right off the bat: The latter but not the former, in his view, is "the taking of a human life." That's Romney's position too, and the position of every Republican presidential nominee since Reagan.

In the video Rubin scorns, Santorum actually makes an entirely reasonable and fairly sophisticated argument, and he says nothing cringe-worthy. He doesn't appeal to the authority of the church or "family values." He doesn't say that people who fornicate are going to hell or ought to be ashamed of themselves. Nor does he deny that it is prudent for them to use birth control.

What he says is that birth control has greatly expanded sexual freedom, and that sexual freedom has had consequences that are harmful to society and to women in particular. Again, one may disagree whether, on balance, these harms outweighed the benefits. But what is so upsetting about the idea that they might have? What in the world explains Friedersdorf's and Rubin's overwrought emotionalism?

Here's our attempt at an explanation: In liberal metropolises like Los Angeles, Washington and New York (homes of Friedersdorf, Rubin and this columnist, respectively), a high proportion of conservatives have internalized the assumptions of feminism. One of those assumptions is that female sexual freedom, an essential component of sexual equality, is an unadulterated good. Santorum's statements to the contrary challenge this deeply held view.

Furthermore, contemporary feminism is, as we recently argued, a totalitarian ideology, by which we mean one that tolerates no divergence between the personal and the political. If you are not a feminist, you can enjoy a lifestyle of sexual freedom and also take seriously the idea that sexual freedom is bad for society. If you are a feminist, that is a thoughtcrime. Thoughtcrimes are enforced through cognitive dissonance, which produces the departures from rationality that we have seen here from Friedersdorf and, to a lesser extent, from Rubin.

We say "to a lesser extent" because Rubin's bottom line, that Santorum's personal opinions about birth control make him unelectable, is not outlandish and could be true. But to the extent that Friedersdorf and Rubin support that hypothesis, it is by example rather than by logic. That is, if their emotions are typical of those of independent voters in swing states, then Rubin's conclusion is probably correct. But like this columnist, they are members of a rarefied class--media professionals living in highly Democratic areas--so the premise is counterintuitive to say the least.

Totalitarian ideologies sustain themselves in large part through fear, and feminism has been particularly fearsome of late, as the Susan G. Komen ladies and the Catholic bishops can attest. But our intuition is that this is a sign of weakness, not strength. The fearful reactions to Santorum's heresies against sexual freedom reinforce that sense.

This column has its differences with Rick Santorum, but we admire him for his fearlessness in challenging feminist pieties. "One man with courage makes a majority," Andrew Jackson is supposed to have observed. Is Rick Santorum such a man? If not, let's hear a reasoned argument to the contrary.

A "reasoned argument"...now there's an idea.

A "reasoned argument" was all I was looking for from Dude 1, and a "reasoned argument" was the one thing missing from his responses.

Bare, ruined choirs, Canadian division.

One congregation in Canada's United Church has taken Christian liberalism to its logical conclusion - they have completely eliminated Christ from their Christianity:

That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah, this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.

But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”

Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.

Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.

There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.

And:

She wants salvation redefined to mean new life through removing the causes of suffering in the world. She wants the church to define resurrection as “starting over,” “new chances.” She wants an end to the image of God as an intervening all-powerful authority who must be appeased to avoid divine wrath; rather she would have congregations work together as communities to define God – or god – according to their own worked-out definitions of what is holy and sacred. She wants the eucharist – the symbolic eating and drinking of Jesus's body and blood to make the congregation part of Jesus's body – to be instead a symbolic experience of community love.

Right...because nothing replaces the eternal yearning for the transcendent - what St. Augustine described as the reason for why "we have no rest until we rest in thee" - quite like placing one's faith in finite, created goods that will eventually pass away.

And good luck on the whole "perfectibility of man through changing society" idea. That's really quite a novel idea, although I understand that the Soviets were this close to getting it right when Communism collapsed in 1989.

Ultimately, once everything is reduced to feeling good about oneself, the question has to be asked why not find that good feeling of community at a football game on Sunday rather than a church?

In the merry land of whatever-you-say-three-times-is-true, you can fall from the top of a skyscraper and land on your feet and pretty unicorns eat rainbows and poop butterflies....

...you can sensibly have a news article report that a "man" became a "woman" "but kept his vagina."

Here is the full context:

An Oregon man who used to be a woman says he is pregnant with a baby girl.

Thomas Beatie's first-person story appears in a recent issue of The Advocate, a Los Angeles-based newsmagazine for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered people.

According to the story, Thomas was born a woman but decided to become a transgender male and legally changed his sex to male. He had his breasts surgically removed and started bimonthly testosterone injections, but kept his vagina.

Now identifying as male, Thomas legally married Nancy, the story says. The pair wanted a biological baby but Nancy was unable to carry a child. So they decided Thomas would.

"How does it feel to be a pregnant man?" Thomas writes in the article. "Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child . . . I will be my daughter's father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family."

Before getting pregnant he stopped injecting testosterone, and his body "regulated itself after about four months," he writes in The Advocate.

In the real world, however, a member of the human species that can get pregnant is called a "woman."

Such a person is called a "woman" even if when that person is no longer able to get pregnant.

Hence, a woman who surgically mutilates herself because of a psychological disorder that makes her want to pass as a man is still gramatically referred to as "her" or "she", notwithstanding how many times she says otherwise.

[Via Mark Shea.]

Update:

Wesley Smith's take on the subject:

They will be a family, but he is not really a man. She is a woman, biologically. That's why she is capable of having a baby. So, the facts are that a woman, who identifies as a man, is having a baby. That's not the same thing at all as a man having a baby. We can redefine all we want, we can say that legally she is a he, but that doesn't change biology. A woman is having a baby and that is not remarkable at all.

Just remember...

...she said it; not me.

A man could get lynched for saying these kinds of things.