[guest post by JVW]

A crybully* student recently took to the op-ed pages of The Golden Gate Xpress, a student newspaper for San Francisco State University, to unload on the recent macro/microaggression that is burdening young feminists from achieving the academic excellence in the hermetically-sealed environment that they deserve by virtue of their valiant struggle against cis-normative masculine oppression. I of course refer to the existence of the man cave. Here is the aggrieved crybully stating her case:

While I think it’s perfectly acceptable, and even healthy, to have separate spaces where one can enjoy time alone, the gendered language around “man cave” is pretty gross. It takes a passive dig at femininity. It’s as if women are such burden that they’re restricted from that zone, while still expected to readily share all other spaces.

A man cave is essentially an emotional sanctuary for men to escape their responsibilities without the interruption of women or children. It’s as if these men are victimizing themselves and require refuge to revel in their false sense of masculinity.

Sports-related paraphernalia and wall hangings that deify cheap beer are not badges of manhood or some sort of homage to a working-class collective consciousness. They’re the makings of a shrine to big business that has man-cavers nostalgic for a time when they were happy, or actually just drunk, in front of a screen cheering on their favorite billion-dollar sports team with their once single and similarly childless friends.

Stupid, backward, unenlightened men. Your man cave isn’t a pleasant escape from life’s drudgeries where you can indulge in a world of tasty malted beverages and television images of finely-tuned athletes impressing us with their skill, dedication, and pluck. No, it’s just another sad example of the commodification of private time that would best be spent reading The Nation and Ms. magazines and coming to grips with how the brutish corporatism of your own father inculcated within you an attitude of willful ignorance of the needs of collective society as you pursue your own selfish ends. But back to the op-ed piece:

Guys should get over the feudalistic idea of a man cave allowing them to be the “lord of their manor” in a room they can call their own. It bears a juvenile likeness to a tree house with a sign that reads, “No girls allowed.”

The sewing room or craft room, to which a woman might retreat, is identified by the action that takes place there. By that token, a man cave is a place where a man devolves into a grunting subhuman that leaves sexist and racist comments on message boards, then furiously masturbates to free porn.

Oh brother, she’s on to us! Here’s her final paragraph, wrapping up her vapid ideas with a patronizing solution:

The progressive solution is allowing everyone to have his or her own space. In a household where that isn’t possible, the ever-so encumbered married man could actually leave his house. He could be free of his cave and take a walk, go to the gym, take a fishing trip, relieve his stress through meditation on a misty mountaintop in China. Man-cavers can be better than ruminating within their disgusting patriarchal myth.

I have left out a few paragraphs, but you get the general drift of the piece. Though one is sorely tempted to consider this a brilliant parody of mush-minded campus feminism, this screed is apparently pretty representative of the rest of the musings of this particular writer.

But the point of this post is not so much to showcase yet another young campus ideologue spouting stale moonbattery, it’s to call out and celebrate the commenter who left the absolutely perfect response to this twaddle. Behold, my friends, this is how it is done:

* I have decided that I much prefer the new term “crybully” to the previously-employed “social justice warrior.” The former provides an adequate sense of the contempt with which these youngsters should be held, while the latter has a ring to it that is almost noble. I plan to retire my use of SJW for the new term.

– JVW

Mollie Hemingway has a great piece at The Federalist titled 16 Of The Worst Ways To Respond To ISIS’ Paris Attack. One thing I like about it is that she saves me the trouble of writing up my own response to the self-righteous morons at The Daily Beast who wrote a piece titled GOP Guvs Rely on ISIS Lies to Reject Syrian Refugees. Their thesis appeared to be that because the Syrian passport found next to one of the dead terrorists was apparently fake, then it follows that the GOP governors rejecting ISIS refugees are stupid idiots falling for an ISIS ruse. Mollie takes that argument apart adroitly:

I don’t know how this isn’t obvious to the folks at the Daily Beast, but the fact that ISIS appears to have intentionally and successfully exploited the refugee system to bust an agent into enemy territory only helps the arguments of those concerned about security and refugees. It’s not like the fakeness of the passport means that the terrorist is fake. He was all too real. And it doesn’t mean he didn’t come into enemy territory by claiming to be a refugee. He still did that. And even that Abott specifically scarequoted ‘refugee’ to point out that the terrorists wasn’t an actual refugee but one posing as such means that he didn’t fall for a “ruse.” This is really stupid analysis, in fact.

If people spent a bit of time understanding the arguments of their opponents, they’d understand that the concern isn’t that refugees are all terrorists waiting to attack but that terrorists could pose as refugees. As happened, apparently, in Paris.

Radical leftists aren’t big into understanding the arguments of their opponents; they prefer mocking them. (Oh, did I mention Gawker is becoming a political site? It plans to take a “Daily Show” approach to online political analysis, which I think we can all agree is sorely needed.)

I also loved Mollie’s piece because it introduced me to this tweet:

ISISplaining. pic.twitter.com/vYruWdts42

— neontaster (@neontaster) November 16, 2015

By the way, I have also listened to a handful of podcasts at The Federalist, which are hosted by Ben Domenech, one of the co-founders. He has a very easy style that works well for podcasting. Last night I listened to Charles C.W. Cooke talking about his new book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. (I just purchased the Kindle version with the accompanying Audible narration that seamlessly transfers between text and speech. You can do the same at the link. Bonus: Charles narrates it himself!) Cooke says his book is for that ever-increasing group of people (and this describes me) who feel like libertarians around conservatives . . . and like conservatives around libertarians. This is the future — or at least it should be.

He means “legitimate”:

Secretary of State John Kerry suggested on Tuesday that there was a “rationale” for the assault on satirical French weekly Charlie Hebdo, unlike the more recent attacks in Paris.

“There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry said in Paris, according to a transcript of his remarks. “There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that.”

Responding to bombings with violence is crazy, but targeting cartoonists for death because they insulted your prophet? Hey, that’s legit. Well, not legit, exactly. But we get it, man.

So says the country’s top diplomat.

How soon can we get these people out of there?