Via Ratak Monodosico.

Wow! Worse than NYC.

This week’s major viral hit is the video below documenting how an average-looking, not-especially-sexily-dressed woman receives 100 instances of street harassment in the course of a ten-hour stroll through New York City.

————————————

My millennial Facebook friends from Yale circles were righteously a-buzz over this one yesterday. One girl after another testifying that she, too, was constantly harassed by men. It is all about power, they agreed. I offered the consolatory reflection that none of them will have this problem any longer after just a couple of decades. But the girls did not particularly appreciate hearing that one.

It was not very long, however, before the thoroughly-conditioned youngsters, just like Hannah Rosin at Slate, identified a highly problematic subtext in the Hollaback! video: “the video also unintentionally makes another point, that harassers are mostly black and Latino, and hanging out on the streets in midday in clothes that suggest they are not on their lunch break. As Roxane Gay tweeted, ‘The racial politics of the video are f*cked up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?’ ”

Today’s young people simply cannot tolerate viewing, hearing, or reading anything uncomplimentary to the groups they have been trained all their lives to regard as sacred. Their noses twitch, their hairs stand on end, their heads go up, and they reflexively cry: Racism!

Once the material is identified as racist, that is it. It is not only bad, it is ipso facto false, and must be dismissed out of hand. It doesn’t matter if the questionable content is perfectly true. It is still false because it is wrong, cosmically, absolutely, utterly WRONG. In the minds of today’s young, nothing is, nothing can possibly be so unutterably wrong as Racism. And Racism is not necessarily some kind of concrete theory of the characteristics and relative inherited inferiority of certain groups. Racism is merely saying anything whatsoever negative about certain groups.

————————————

The mandatory racial witch hunt having concluded, the Internet Community then turned its attention to poking fun at the Hollaback! Sexual Harassment video.

Funny or Die! gave us this (non-embeddable) 1:56 video of 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man.

————————————
And Tumblrland responded with this:

via Ratak Monodosico.

Sophie Gilbert, in The Atlantic, makes the case against Carrie Matheson.

Carrie is a terrible spy. If this weren’t a television show, she wouldn’t be allowed within 10 miles of Langley. Sirens would go off if her car so much as entered the GW Parkway. Yes, she has a history of mental illness that has seen her institutionalized and forcibly medicated; yes, she suffers from a related lack of impulse control, and is a narcissist with a complete lack of sympathy for anyone who isn’t herself. But she’s also insanely unprofessional and sloppy in a way that’s more grating in Homeland’s fourth season than ever.

In her relatively short and extremely stormy tenure at the CIA, Carrie has slept with her boss (Estes) and broken up his marriage, seen one asset (Hasan) executed in Pakistan, lied to another (Lynne) that she was under CIA protective surveillance (after which Lynne was promptly assassinated), illegally spied on a returning Marine (Brody), slept with said Marine and given him information that helped him beat a polygraph, gotten another asset (al-Zahrani) killed by a briefcase bomb during a meet, gone rogue on the streets of Beirut, slept with Brody after she knew he was hatching terrorist plots against the U.S., gotten pregnant by Brody after she knew he helped assassinate the vice president, and then helped Brody escape after a bombing she failed to predict that ended up killing almost 200 people at Langley. And that’s just the first two seasons. …

Carrie’s incompetence matters because her only saving grace as a character is the oft-repeated assertion that she’s professionally extraordinary. “I missed something once—I won’t do that again,” is her mantra, both in the show’s opening credits, and in life. “She means well, and she is kind of a superhero,” is how Danes once described her character to The New York Times. But she also embodies the ugliest stereotypes about women in the workplace: that they’re hysterical, brittle, rude, entitled, inefficient, and governed by emotions rather than logic. Instead of earning her promotions, Carrie either fails her way up the CIA ladder (after practically everyone else is killed by the Langley car bomb) or threatens people into giving her what she wants. Her current position in Islamabad was achieved by blackmailing CIA chief Lockhart. …

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

————————–

Anne Hathaway’s SNL Homeland Parody

Clarice Feldman strikes her lyre and proceeds to read an ancient scroll containing the record of a story that might sound strangely familiar.

The father of the Emperor was said to be a god from an ancient land across the sea who often imbibed too much mead and had many wives. Others whispered his real father was the pedophilic poet who lived on the other side of the island with his wife. These people said the Emperor’s mother made up the story about the father god. In any event, the Emperor never lived with either man. The man from across the sea sailed away soon after his birth. …

The Emperor’s education was also remarkably strange. True, he was sent to the island’s most expensive lyceum, but his free time was mostly spent with his grandfather and the island lowlifes. He smoked a lot of choom, the weed of strange dreams, and was educated to despise order and thrift, diligence and competence. Natural-born genius leaders of men have no need of such characteristics. His teachers and friends and family led him to believe that the people of his island were responsible for all the ills of the world, that want and disease were caused by the islanders’ greed.

Read the whole thing.

Via Theo.

White House Intruder Route gif by Adam Baumgartner

Lisa Schiffren describes this CBS News story:

Well, isn’t this embarassing. The female Secret Service officer who first encountered the intruder was overpowered by him. Because…reality. Physical reality. And the White House is a gun free zone? Political correctness has its limits.

FTA Gonzalez then proceeded to run through the entrance hall to the cross hall of the White House, past the staircase that leads up to the first family’s residence.

He was confronted by a female Secret Service agent, who he overpowered, and made it all the way to the East Room, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told CBS News, citing whistleblowers.

———————————-

Andy Borowitz reports: Obama to Move to Doorman Building

———————————–

Tom Maguire:

We’ve lost control of the Texas border? Compared to what – the White House border?

No wonder Obama has no confidence in fences or guards. And since you ask, I deplore the criminal characterization of White House intruder Omar Gonzalez; surely he should be described as an “undocumented resident”.

Via Barking Crayon.

“Art enthusiasts admire Newstrom’s paintings and sculptures at the Schulberg Gallery in New York.”

The wags at CBC.Canada photoshopped a stock image and wrote up an amusing news story satirizing modern art.

27-year-old artist Lana Newstrom says she is the first artist in the world to create invisible “art.” In this documentary we traveled to her empty studio to learn more about Lana and her unusual artistic process.

“Art is about imagination and that is what my work demands of the people interacting with it. You have to imagine a painting or sculpture is in front of you,” says Newstrom.

Paul Rooney, Lana’s agent, believes she might be the greatest artist alive working today: “When she describes what you can’t see, you begin to realize why one of her invisible works can fetch upwards of a million dollars.” said Rooney.

Listen to learn more about Lana Newstrom and her invisible art.

6:53 audio

The story was just a little too good to be true, and I made a point of searching for the “Schulberg Gallery” and other confirmatory material before swallowing this one whole.

——————————————

They did fool a number of bloggers though.

Moonbattery: “Lana Newstrom’s Invisible Art”

Tea Party News Network: “The Sheer Stupidity of Useful Idiots on Full Display; Looks Like the ‘Intellectuals’ Aren’t So Smart”

Barstool Sports: “NYC Artist Selling ‘Invisible Art’ For Millions”

Even Richard Fernandez (who is a very smart guy) bit: “The Unseen”

Unfortunately, the spoof story was only too plausible in today’s cultural climate.

Hat tip to Christopher Buckley [Facebook].