Curb your Pride

Gym bunnies, by Rabbids/Giphy.

In an astonishing and totally unexpected development it turns out that a substantial number of members, coaches, and staff members of an Indianapolis CrossFit affiliate gym, CrossFit Infiltrate, don't hate gay people! It's possible that some of them may even be gay themselves! So that, according to WTTV,

when a special workout planned by coaches at CrossFit Infiltrate in support of Indy Pride was cancelled by gym ownership[, i]n an email sent to members by gym management, it was explained that the event was cancelled because “the owners of the gym value health and wellness, and they believe that this event does not”

—they got upset, though the box's local owner, Brandon Lowe, tried to soothe them by explaining they weren't opposed to gay people, merely to pride, which is unhealthy:

Taking French Leave of His Senses

Like everybody else, gripped by the narrative of Dr. Bill Kristol and his quest to save humanity from the doom of Republicans being forced to choose between Hitlery and Hitler (the third possibility, of a tax-cutting conservative former governor who actually believes the small-government idiocy Kristol claims to believe in, being worst of all), and his tweeted promise over last weekend to unveil a fifth-party candidate:

Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate--an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 29, 2016

But when famed Village enforcers Mark Halperin and John Heilemann showed up at Bloomberg on Tuesday with the scoop from "two Republicans intimately familiar with Bill Kristol’s efforts" that Dr. Kristol's choice had settled on former Iraq combat attorney and full-time National Review hysteric David French, I literally could not believe it (neither could Mr. Pierce, I may add, whose post identified Halperin as "the world's most gullible man"). French? An author of National Review blogposts virtually unknown to anyone but the magazine's elderly shut-in readership (and us committed fans of Roy Edroso, for whom French is a source of almost unlimited delight)? A serial prevaricator who believes states should be permitted to ban all contraception and looks like a feral tree-elf? With a strong team and a what?

Comedy is war

Cherry-picking at Stella Creek in the Adelaide Hills. Or maybe a stock photo.

I wanted to say something about that very long essay on liberal smugness or smug liberalism by Emmett Rensin (apparently an anagram, for "Eminent Terms", or maybe "Mr. E. Sentiment") in Vox, which I have not had a chance to read all the way through, as I was having my ironic smile straightened.

In fact I am not planning to read it all because there's too much of it, if you want to know the truth. I'm just going to cherry-fisk, so to speak, picking on the especially offensive sentences as they pop out at me and ignoring the no doubt very significant and judicious argument that Tem Tem Sinner worked so hard to assemble in favor of the stupid argument I discern from this superficial technique, and if you want to complain about it, why don't you just bring it up before the next Blogger Ethics Panel.

But first,

Q. How can you tell when National Review's famed Iraq combat attorney ("Cover me, Jack, I'm going in there as soon as the shelling lets up, with a motion to change venue") David French is lying?

A. When he claims to have had some human experience or other.

As in this contribution on the Rensinade, where he's discussing his own sad experience of the smugness of liberals:

Cheap shots and hot pursuits

Update 4/22: Welcome Mike's Round-Up Readers! Thanks, Batocchio!

Via Wikimedia Commons, attributed to M.Z.D. Schmid.

The worst thing about Donald Trump, per David French at National Review: He encourages feminism.

The masculinity of Trump is exactly the caricatured, counterfeit masculinity of the feminist fever dream. It takes the full energy of manhood and devotes it to sex, money, and power. It’s posturing masquerading as toughness and anger drained of bravery.... he breathes new life into a feminism that is so extreme, so hysterical, that even a majority of women reject it.

That must be pretty darn extreme and hysterical, if even the wimminz are against it.

Civil Disobedience

Back in the day, when they had guns it used to be regarded as distinctly uncivil. Wonder when that changed, and what caused it? Image (May 2 1967) via CineSource Magazine.

It's David French day here at Rectification HQ:

Deranged militiamen spoiling for a fight against the federal government make for good copy, but what if they’re right? What if the government viciously and unjustly prosecuted a rancher family so as to drive them from their land? Then protest, including civil disobedience, would be not just understandable but moral, and maybe even necessary.

You are so right, and don't even talk about the guns they're toting. I mean is Oregon an open-carry state or isn't it? (It is.) So what part of nonviolent civil disobedience says you're supposed to be unarmed? I mean think how effective Rosa Parks would have been if she'd been packing when she got on that bus.

They may be a militia but they're not very well regulated. #OregonUnderAttack

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 3, 2016

Fabricating Rhythm

Illustration from Austin and Belinda French, Some White and her Calf: Lessons from the Farm (2010).

Does David French make stuff up?

David French, I mean, famed Iraq combat attorney (if you needed a brief in the trenches he was always there for you, band of brothers, for the whole ten months, November 2007 to September 2008) and National Review correspondent, who sometimes leavens his work with an interesting bit of reminiscence from his own past, as in the case, which became kind of famous over at Edroso's place a few weeks ago, when he reminisced about his own early ascent into fightin' manhood, in the course of a discussion of how "victim culture is killing American manhood"—

In one grade-school incident, I got into a playground fight with another boy and knocked him to the ground. As the teacher rushed up to separate us, she demanded to know what happened. “He said I hit like a girl,” I told her. “Is this true?” She asked my friend. Rubbing his face, he nodded. “Well then, you deserved it,” she said. And that was that. I thought of that minor playground scrap — and many others like it....

No victim culture for little David! Teachers understood something about the requirements of manhood back in the day.

So anyway, I just happened to notice that he's had a couple of occasions to remember the policemen of his childhood in recent months, and he remembers them in oddly different ways, which seem to correlate directly with the ideological point he wants to make.

So, this week, in explaining why we shouldn't be "disturbed" by the video of deputy sheriff Ben Fields of Spring Valley, South Carolina, throwing a 16-year-old girl in her high school classroom to the ground and pulling her across the floor, he recalls the cops in school as heroic defenders of the weak, against extraordinary violence, who really can't be questioned, because that's just the way it is:

Lift that barge, clutch them pearls

Update: Welcome Mike's Blog Round Up readers!

Erich Erichssohn, in it up to his neck. Via Welcome to Pottersville.

I'm about to do something I hope I'm never compelled to do again: agree about something with famed Iraq combat attorney (well, maybe that's not what it's called, but he gives the impression it's a thing) and National Review hack David French, who writes:

Approximately 98 percent of the professional politicians, pundits, and consultants embroiled in the conversation over Trump’s comments about Kelly, in which he may or may not have said that her tough questions at Thursday’s GOP debate were due to menstruation, are most assuredly not “offended” or “outraged” by his words. Quite the opposite: In the political world, there is something like an electric shock of glee that passes through the community when someone says something “outrageous.” Controversy is energizing. Consultants, candidates, and pundits immediately begin working the angles...