In addition to writing for David Horowitz’s NewsReal Blog, I’m also contributing to a recently launched sub-blog called The Feminist Hawks’ Nest.  Here are some of my most recent posts (which I know I’ve been terrible about linking to):

The Sleep-Deprived Housewives of Victimhood County

Feminism: The Masquerade

Arrest of Duke Rape Accuser Exposes the Left’s Insincerity & Lies

Here’s an explanation of the Feminist Hawk concept from NRB editor David Swindle:

What does it mean to be a Feminist Hawk? Why do we use that term? The meme originates in a single issue: Islamofascist misogyny. This New York Times article identified David Horowitz and FrontPage Magazine as examples of Feminist Hawks. According to the Times‘ piece to be a Feminist Hawk was to take a hardline on Islamist regimes because of the Muslim world’s mistreatment of women. The Godmother of Feminist Hawkdom, Dr. Phyllis Chesler, was unfortunately not mentioned — an unacceptable injustice akin to ignoring Albert Einstein were one talking about physics — though she wrote about it here in a must-read essay which further defined the term. Robert Spencer, another crucial figure in this developing movement, also blogged about it here and listed numerous articles he’d written on the subject.

Here at NRB we want this to only be the starting point, though for what it means to be a Feminist Hawk. To be a Femininst Hawk is not only to champion this vital cause but also to adopt a style and an attitude. Feminist Hawks are confident, aggressive, and confrontational. They fight and will not be bullied. And our Feminist Hawk superheroine is meant to both symbolize and inspire these sentiments.

The Feminist Hawks’ Nest won’t focus exclusively (or even primarily) on Islamic gender apartheid. The idea is that the contributors embody the Feminist Hawk spirit no matter what they’re writing about, be it reality show antics, Alinskyite political tactics, or faux feminism.

Big thanks to Bosch Fawstin for an outstanding job on the Feminist Hawk graphics, and Dr. Phyllis Chesler for being kind enough to promote The Feminist Hawks’ Nest on her Chesler Chronicles blog.

“She’s an extremely remarkable person. The world needs more Eve Enslers,” he said, championing her global activism. “I found my inner vagina.“

Jason Rzepka, it’s time to turn in your man card.

I have no idea if Jason is straight, but pretending to discover his  “inner vagina” sounds like one of the saddest attempts to get laid I’ve ever seen.

This week, I wrote a piece for NewsReal about filmmaker Kevin Smith getting tossed off a Southwest Airlines flight because the crew determined he was to fat to fly in the single seat he had purchased.  I enjoy Smith’s films and think he’s a talented writer, but his huge sense of entitlement rubbed me the wrong way.

After making the case that flying is a privilege, not a right, I wrote:

Right now we only have Kevin Smith’s side of the story, and it’s unclear whether the flight attendant used appropriate discretion in approaching him about her safety concerns. I certainly have no desire to see an overweight person shamed for being fat, and I hope that wasn’t the intention.

But a little personal responsibility goes a long way. If Smith had simply paid for a second seat as required by airline policy, he could have avoided the embarrassing situation.  And according to Southwest’s “Customer of Size Q&A,” there’s a 98 percent chance the price of the extra ticket would have been refunded.

Smith went on to complain that because of the airline’s “size-ist policy” he was “being profiled.” I guess flying while fat is the new breaking-and-entering while black.  Beer summit, anyone?

You can read the rest at NewsReal.

The piece received a lot of traffic, and comments were pretty evenly divided on the issue.  Several people made the case that the airplane, owned by a private company, was actually public transportation (thus proving my point about people feeling overly entitled.)  One of those comments was particularly despicable:

According to your unscrupulous logic, Rosa Parks should have moved because it was the Bus drivers choice. Like you said – public transportation “is a privilege, not a right”.

Yes, this person actually had the gall to equate a hero of the black civil rights movement with a fat celebrity demanding that he be allowed to potentially compromise the safety of other passengers on a private airplane.

There’s no comparison between Rosa Parks and Kevin Smith. It just isn’t there.

And you know what else? Being fat isn’t the same as being black.

I can’t believe I had to write that. This is why I don’t spend too much time reading comments – if you’re not careful, the trolls will make you lose your faith in humanity.

The Misfits are still my favorite band of all time, so I’m excited that Bobby Steele, one of the first guitarists for The Misfits, is now writing for Parcbench.  And not only that, he’s conservative on health care.

It’s like Halloween in February!

Anyway, check out Bobby Steele’s piece on health care reform, and how his childhood experiences as a spina bifida patient gave him firsthand insight into the insurance and medical industries.

This fangirl moment has now concluded.

Here’s what I wrote at NewsReal:

In 2009, Ileana Jiménez asked her class of high school juniors and seniors to write letters to President Obama about “the ways in which feminism might be addressed in the curriculum.”  Earlier this week she shared one letter on her blog, Feminist Teacher.

It is understandable that teachers cannot be expected to cram decades of struggles into 12 years of study. I just feel that there should be more time in the curriculum starting in the lower grades (if they can learn about the slave trade, they can learn about feminism) dedicated to learning about feminism and the goals behind it.

To do that, I propose that by fourth grade, students be exposed to basic feminist ideas.

Note that the student’s interest isn’t in ensuring that women’s experiences are adequately represented in history texts.  She’s proposing the indoctrination of nine-year-old children into a political movement.

She doesn’t define “basic feminist ideas,” but here’s a list of the top priorities of a representative feminist group, the National Organization for Women:

1. abortion rights/reproductive issues
2. violence against women
3. constitutional equality
4. promoting diversity/ending racism
5. lesbian rights
6. economic justice

How many of those “basic feminist ideas” would you teach to a fourth grader?

Visit NewsReal to read the rest of my thoughts on this kid’s letter.

From my article at NewsReal earlier this week:

Incensed by the completely innocuous Tim Tebow Super Bowl commercial, sports editor Dave Zirin blogged his fury at The Nation yesterday. He admits the ad was “about as vanilla as an Andy Williams Christmas Special.”  But it’s not the actual content of the ad that angers Zirin.

It’s the pesky free speech.

He’s infuriated that CBS would even consider offering a platform to Focus on the Family, an organization Zirin says has “shadowy connections to to open hate groups.” He believes allowing Focus on the Family to pay for “this kind of a mammoth public forum is an absolute disgrace.”

So what’s his solution?

Zirin insists CBS execs should have to make amends for their complicity in advancing the pro-life agenda.  “They should offer free commercial time to Planned Parenthood,” he proposes.

Please visit NewsReal to read the rest.

Last week, noted feminist Keith Olbermann implied that the women of Fox News are only hired because they’re attractive.  In response, The Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher posted a photo gallery of women who work for MSNBC. When he got to Rachel Maddow, Treacher wrote, “Whoops, how did that one get in there? Sorry, man. I mean dude. I mean Rachel! Sorry, Rachel.”

Similar jokes have appeared in a column by Treacher’s colleague Matt Labash, prompting a writer at Jezebel to lecture “Tucker Carlson’s minions” that they must never, ever suggest that a woman looks masculine in appearance.

Making fun of women for looking or acting mannish is a time-honored way of belittling them, of trying to keep women out of both men’s clothes and men’s roles, and just because the woman in question is an out lesbian doesn’t mean jokes about her aren’t part of this misogynist tradition.

But if a Jezebel writer wants to insult Ann Coulter’s femininity? Oh, that’s totally cool:

Ann Coulter Finally Explains What’s Behind That Adam’s Apple

Please visit NewsReal to read the rest.

In my latest piece for NewsReal, I wrote about a feminist diversity cop who complained about the dearth of “colored women” in Vanity Fair.  Yes, she actually used the phrase “colored women,” as in, “There is not a single colored women [sic] gracing your pages this year!”  Welcome to 2010.

After my piece appeared, her editor issued a correction. I hope the change would have been made with or without my prodding, but let’s just pretend that my mission was successful. That way I can gloat.

If you get a chance, please check out my other NewsReal pieces from this week:

Introducing the Naomi Wolf Award
I take feminist writer Jill Filipovic to task for her defense of the burqa as a mere article of clothing rather than a tool of subjugation.

Lord of the Rings Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky
A quick link to a very funny satire at McSweeney’s.

Slate Magazine Reintegrates Womenfolk
Nine months after Slate’s women writers went off to the virtual menstrual lodge, the magazine has found that separate but equal doesn’t pay the bills.

Comments are always appreciated.

Masquerading as a news organization, WND peddles conspiracy theory as fact.  The company has sponsored Where’s the Birth Certificate? billboards and published hundreds of articles questioning Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility to serve as president.

WND founder and editor-in-chief Joseph Farah is essentially a cult leader, encouraging his followers in their crazy-eyed obsession with President Obama’s birth certificate and furnishing them with whatever tinder he can manufacture to fuel the birther fire.  Farah’s nagging demands for Obama to produce his “long-form” birth certificate have destroyed any credibility he may have once had.

Friday night, Farah serenaded his cult of birthers during a dinnertime speech at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

Farah started fine — heaping praise on the constitution, and urging America’s leaders to be faithful to it. He ended well, too, with a stirring exhortation to “take the offence in this struggle.”

But these flourishes were merely the bread in a lunacy sandwich — the filling of which were 10 solid minutes implicitly questioning whether Barack Obama is an American citizen. In 2012, he declared, every single election lawn sign should say: Show me the birth certificate.

Seen in the best possible light (and I’m being very generous), birthers are a group of people who simply cannot reconcile Barack Obama’s American citizenship with policies and beliefs they perceive as fundamentally un-American.  The cognitive dissonance is too much to bear, causing them to become unhinged eligibility truthers.

Or they’re guano crazy. Take your pick.

Either way, the culture of conspiracy promoted by the birthers should be unequivocally rejected by every mainstream conservative.  And right now, the best woman for the job is Sarah Palin.

Palin is delivering the keynote address at the Tea Party Convention Saturday night.   This is a perfect opportunity to put principle before politics. With just a few carefully chosen words, she can distance herself and the tea party movement from Joseph Farah’s distracting cult of birtherism, once and for all.

A chance like this won’t come again. Will she take it?

When I launched this blog in 2008, I mentioned Wikipedia on my About page:

If you use a link to Wikipedia to “prove” something, there’s a strong possibility you will not be taken seriously.  By anyone.

That was wishful thinking on my part. Plenty of people will still take you seriously because they take Wikipedia seriously. But should they?

There are two main reasons I don’t link to Wikipedia:

Verifiability, not truth

According to Wikipedia policy (my first and last link to Wikipedia!), “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth.” Objectivity be damned! If a piece of information has appeared somewhere at some time, that’s good enough for Wikipedia.

Granted, Wikipedia policy suggests citing reputable sources, but a quick search tonight turned up numerous entries that referenced conspiracy Web sites like Infowars and Prison Planet.  Apparently “reputable” is in the eye of the beholder.

Truthiness

Wikipedia is a punchline. Literally:

I’ve said it before: Who is [Encyclopaedia] Britannica to tell me George Washington had slaves? If I want to say George Washington didn’t have slaves, that’s my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it’s also a fact.”

That was Stephen Colbert speaking truthiness to power.  Here’s a screen capture of some truthiness I found on the Wikipedia entry for “Islamic Sexual Jurisprudence.”

“There are no slaves nowadays in any islamic country.” No bias there, huh? Since when is it even controversial to suggest there’s a problem with slavery in Darfur?  It seems that the requirement for “verifiability” can be fulfilled with a quick “citation needed” note when inconvenient facts diverge from opinion or propaganda.

That’s not to say that Wikipedia isn’t useful. If you’re a careful reader with a firm grasp of how to evaluate information, Wikipedia is a great point of departure for Internet research.

But ultimately, it comes down to an epistemological question: how do we know what we know?  With Wikipedia, in some cases we know what we know simply because some other guy said he knows what he knows.

Is that good enough for you?