SJW Attacks Taylor Swift for Being a Blonde

Because She Doesn’t Like Blondes? @ahzimm Attacks @taylorswift13

. . . Amy Zimmerman, is a recent graduate of Columbia University, so maybe she’s desperate to prove her traffic-generating prowess to her editors at The Daily Beast. Also — and there’s probably no delicate or politically correct way to say this — Amy Zimmerman is a swarthy Jew who seems obsessed with Taylor Swift’s gentile blondeness. This is not irrelevant to the content of Zimmerman’s attack:

As a pretty white girl who has written songs that rely heavily on fiddles, Swift undoubtedly counts a healthy handful of Trump supports among her fan base. In fact, the so-called alt-right has crowned Swift as the Aryan prom queen of their burgeoning neo-Nazi movement. The Daily Stormer—deemed a “neo-Nazi website” by The Southern Poverty Law Center—has published articles like “Taylor Swift, Avatar of European Imperialism,” “Aryan Goddess Taylor Swift: Nazi Avatar of the White European People,” and “Aryan Goddess Taylor Swift accused of Racism for Behaving Like an Ape in a Music Video.” Andrew Anglin, the site’s white supremacist founder, explained that, “Taylor Swift is a pure Aryan goddess, like something out of classical Greek poetry.” . . .
If you’re not overtly on board with the resistance, then you’re tacitly chill with being proclaimed an Aryan goddess. If you refuse to denounce your “alt-right” supporters, you risk alienating all of your queer, trans, black, Latino, undocumented, Muslim, and indigenous fans. Taylor Swift’s patriotic one-pieces might transition well to Donald Trump’s America, but her penchant for opting out of the political discourse is already passé.

 Meow!

WHOA!

Is it Taylor Swift’s fault she’s got neo-Nazi fanboys?

Or rather, is it Taylor Swift’s fault she’s a blue-eyed blonde?

These two phenomena are related, you see. The neo-Nazis like Taylor Swift for her blondeness, and it’s her blondness (“a pretty white girl”) that makes Taylor Swift suspect in the paranoid mind of Amy Zimmerman. Therefore, Taylor Swift must get “on board with the resistance,” or else she will stand accused of being pro-Nazi.

Or maybe she just prefers to shut up and sing, and not offend half her potential audience?

Linked in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links at Pirate's Cove. Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Making Anime Great Again" and "FMJRA 2.0: Late Night With Crazy Horse Edition" up and running at The Other McCain.

I Learned a New Word Today

Yamila Diaz - melanchroi

Actually two, xanthochroii and melanochroii: From Dieneke's Blog:

Natural selection in Britain during the last 2,000 years

The latest ancient DNA studies from the British Isles (Schiffels et al and Martiniano et al. and Cassidy et al.) support continuity over the last 2,000 years. Sure, there were continued migrations like the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, but these were very similar groups in the grand scheme of things.

But, while ancestrally the modern Briton is probably a descendant of the Britons of 2,000 years ago with some admixture from similar continental European groups, he is not the same, as (apparently) substantial genetic adaptation has continued to operate in Britain over the same period. A new preprint by Field, Boyle, Telis et al. makes the case for adaptation in a variety of traits in the ancestors of Britons over this period. Mind you, the genetic underpinnings of many important human traits known to have high heritability are currently unknown, but there is little doubt that selection would have affected traits beyond those detected in this study. I am quite curious to see whether the striking efflorescence of cultural achievement in Britain over the last half millennium could have (at least in part) a genetic underpinning.

Candace Swanepool - Xanthochroi

Depigmentation is a trait whose genetic architecture is as well as understood as any. The results of this study might surprise writers of decades and centuries past who supposed that the spectrum of pigmentation of modern Europeans was the result  of admixture-in varying measure- between Xanthochrooi and Melanchrooi races of primordial antiquity. All indications seem to be that depigmentation of hair, skin, and eyes did not co-occur in such a hypothetical race, but rather in different parts of the Caucasoid range, only reaching a high combined frequency in northern Europe to form the distinctive physical type that is distinctive of the natives of that region. It would be quite interesting to see how these traits evolved in Fennoscandia and the Baltic, regions that sport an even higher depigmentation than the British Isles. Traditionally, these areas were viewed as refuges of the Xanthochrooi but it may very well turn out to be that for whatever reason selection has acted in that area as well, as it did in the Eastern European plain where rather dark Bronze Age steppe groups gave way to rather light pigmented living eastern Slavs.

Kelli McCarty - mixed

OK, I sort of got what he meant from the context, but let's consult the wiktionary just to make sure:

Xanthochroi: A division of the human population having fair skin and wavy blond hair.

I'm not quite sure what the slight difference in spelling means, but maybe plural? Anyway, I think you can figure out melanochroi from there.

It's interesting that the three distinctive features of the "Nordic" type, blond(e) hair, fair skin, and blue eyes appear to have originated (or at least originally proliferated) in different parts of the European peoples, but found a center in the north in which selection pressure for all three traits was so strong as to become predominant in the people of that region.

We think we know why light skin is favored in cold, dark regions and dark skin in tropical areas. Sunlight destroys folic acid in the skin, while it makes vitamin D. In areas where maximum clothing is necessary, and sunlight is minimum, fair skin allows production of adequate vitamin D with minimal skin exposure. In the tropics, minimal clothing is necessary for heat, but dark skin protects from folic acid degradation.

We're much less sure about the proliferation of fair hair and blue eyes. Human men, or maybe just American men appear to have developed a taste for women with both, so "sexual selection" is one hypothesis. Sexual selection is the force that has some male bird wearing fancy feathers and bright colors that make them more susceptible to predators, but that are favored by the females of the species.

Late Night With Rule 5 Monday done come on Tuesday (our time) at The Other McCain, thanks to Wombat-sochos participation as a delegate to the Nevada State GOP convention in Reno.

Average American Men Prefer Blondes

We've been told that gentlemen prefer blondes, but what about average men? As reported in this British, and therefore highly accurate (the extra 10 IQ points conferred from a Cockney accent transfers even through the print media) newspaper article, average American men prefer women with blonde hair, blue eyes and graduate degrees!

According to new research, the average American male would describe their 'perfect woman' as having blonde hair, blue eyes and - perhaps surprisingly - a graduate degree.

The survey, which was conducted by dating auction website WhatsYourPrice.com, also revealed that the majority of men prefer non-smokers, and, in an ideal world, would rather that their date was more of a social drinker, rather than someone who indulged in alcohol on a regular basis.

Yes, I can see where non-smokers and light drinkers would be preferred over a smelly drunk.

Each of the 145,000 men who took part in the poll, were asked to attach a specific financial value to each attribute in order to come up with a total 'cost' for their ideal first date.

For example, blonde hair was valued at an average of $59.31, while a slender body came in at $55.43.

Personally, I find red heads strangely intriguing, but having no souls is a bit of  disadvantage, unless you like Chicago (the band). And slender is good, up to a point. Kate Upton isn't exactly willow slim anymore, and her stock just seems to keep climbing. As Capt Ed once commented, she jiggles in all the right places.

But the most valued attribute of all was a graduate degree; the average price men were willing to pay to date a woman who had boasts a post-graduate qualification was a whopping $59.90.

Now just a damn minute.  Any graduate degree; even a masters in man-hating feminism? That just doesn't make any sense.  Oh yeah; that's why they're "average" American men.

Wombat-socho has the grand summary "Rule 5 Sunday: Cinnamon Girl" ready at The Other McCain.

Kirstin Gillibrand is a Big Fat Liar

Kristin Gillibrand standing in female bullshit

Kirsten Gillibrand’s Phony ‘Courage’

Kirsten Gillibrand is a Democrat and a liar, but I repeat myself. In her new book, she claims that male Senate colleagues sexually harassed her, but refused to name names, which means either:

A. The harassers were Democrats, and Gillibrand is protecting these sexist swine for partisan reasons;
or
B. She’s lying.

You can believe what you want to believe, but I never believe anything any Democrat says, unless it is independently corroborated, and we have no way to corroborate Kirsten Gillibrand’s stories:

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is giving more details, and dropping f-bombs, about her experience with sexist comments she’s received about her weight, saying she couldn’t tell a male colleague “to go f—- himself.”
“At that moment, if I could have just disappeared, I would have. If I could have just melted in tears, I would have. . . 

On the other hand, it does sort of sound like something Joe Biden might say.

Ann Althouse posts a poll on whether she's lying or merely feathering her own victim bed:

Why won't Kirsten Gillibrand name the men she says harassed her?

1. She wants to focus attention on the general problem of "how women are treated in the workplace... undervaluing women... and chronically paying them less and treating them poorly and not valuing them." . . .

2. She wants to present herself in a good light, so she's filtered the story so that people see her as an ordinary woman who struggled with her weight and got harassed about it, rather than as an extraordinary woman who received an appointment to her seat in the Senate in part because she was a woman — because she was replacing a woman, Hillary Clinton — and because she had excellent feminine attractiveness. . .

3. If she named the men, she'd have to tell the whole story, and we'd have to see things from their perspective too. The nameless men were mean to her, but if she named them, she might seem mean. Was she unfair? What was the actual context? Maybe it was a friendly, chummy environment where everyone teases everyone else and it was part of being considered one of the guys. Maybe she had drawn attention to her weight gain and expressed worry about it and they were mirroring her remarks supportively or just saying they like her however she looks. . .

4. She wants to protect the men she hasn't named. They're her political allies, perhaps quite well-known characters. I think we can assume that they are all Democrats, since we haven't heard otherwise and she probably would have taken the opportunity to ding Republicans, and since Republicans would be more likely to maintain formal politeness with her and not to assume that they could take liberties.

5. Maybe it didn't happen. There are no names named because there are no
names to name.

 In any event, what she's not telling is the truth, and that makes her a big fat liar.

Excuse Found for Blondes

From Dieneke's: A molecular basis for classic blond hair

A molecular basis for classic blond hair color in Europeans

Catherine A Guenther et al.

Hair color differences are among the most obvious examples of phenotypic variation in humans. Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have implicated multiple loci in human pigment variation, the causative base-pair changes are still largely unknown1. Here we dissect a regulatory region of the KITLG gene (encoding KIT ligand) that is significantly associated with common blond hair color in northern Europeans2. Functional tests demonstrate that the region contains a regulatory enhancer that drives expression in developing hair follicles. This enhancer contains a common SNP (rs12821256) that alters a binding site for the lymphoid enhancer-binding factor 1 (LEF1) transcription factor, reducing LEF1 responsiveness and enhancer activity in cultured human keratinocytes. Mice carrying ancestral or derived variants of the human KITLG enhancer exhibit significant differences in hair pigmentation, confirming that altered regulation of an essential growth factor contributes to the classic blond hair phenotype found in northern Europeans.

The original article is illustrated with this:

 Where I might have chosen:

But then, there may be some bleach involved.  Additional examples of the mutation below if you need more. . .

So Let's Really Have a Conversation About the Zimmerman Trial

If you only read one thing on Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman today, read Althouse:

"Why are black boys expendable?" is the heartwrenching question on the front page at the Washington Post.

Eugene Robinson is, of course, one of WAPO reliably liberal columnists.  Kind of like E. J. Dionne, but blacker, and less clever.  I rarely read him, and when I do, I feel that it's been a mistake and a waste of a few precious minutes, so it's not a great surprise that I skipped over his column this morning, seeing in the first paragraph that it was going in the predictable liberal, fact free direction, and decided to look at something less polemical, like the Tom Toles cartoon...

However, in a fit of masochism, Ann Althouse, law professor at University of Wisconsin in Madison, and frustratingly unpredictable in her politics (Obama in 2008, ? in 2012), actually read the horrid thing and reacted to it...

..."This is the conversation about race that we desperately need to have — but probably, as in the past, will try our best to avoid."

Okay, let me attempt that conversation, Mr. Robinson.

Here's my response to what you just said. I think our society demonstrated great care toward Trayvon Martin, even to the point of putting Zimmerman through a trial that should not have happened. That is, it was an excess of care for Martin, a bending-over-backwards to show that we care about Martin and all the young men he was seen to represent. And now, after an extensive, careful trial, and a jury verdict that clearly hewed to well-honed instructions about evidence and burden of proof, you still want to use it to assert that we don't care. If that's the kind of conversation we get when we try to respond to the invitation to have a conversation, can you see why it's something we avoid?

Now, just there, I did not avoid. I tried to be game about conversation, and I said what I truly think, which is probably what other conversation-about-race avoiders think. If you really mean "conversation," then let's continue, with a fair response to that. If what you really mean by "conversation" is let me lecture you until you humbly accede, then could you please stop calling it a "conversation"?

Reading further into the article, I see I've got to take back my overly optimistic statement "I'm sure Robinson knows that." I'm not sure, because to say I believe that Robinson knows that — "If Trayvon Martin were on trial for beating up George Zimmerman and had argued that he acted in self-defense, the jury would have had to view Zimmerman as guilty until proven innocent" — is to say that Robinson is deliberately deceiving when he writes:

The assumption underlying [the jury's] ho-hum approach to the case was that Zimmerman had the right to self-defense but Martin — young, male, black — did not. The assumption was that Zimmerman would fear for his life in a hand-to-hand struggle but Martin — young, male, black — would not.

That assumption is either ignorant or shamefully deceptive. The accused is the one whose rights are systematically protected in the criminal process. Is that too boring? Ho-hum?! Ho-hum for all the rights of the criminally accused! Even if all Robinson cares about is how young black males are treated, young black males — the ones that still live — need these rights too. If the police — who had already been called — had arrived before Zimmerman saw fit to shoot his gun, if they had caught Trayvon Martin on top of Zimmerman, pinning him down, and knocking his head into concrete, they would have arrested Martin, and Martin would have benefited from those rights you think are ho-hum when they protect Zimmerman.

I'm tired of people telling me we need a conversation about something, and then telling me to shupt up.

Gentlemen Don't Actually Prefer Blondes

A tough choice

But what about us non-gentlemen?

Why being blonde might not be so fun after all

A study found that men see women with dark hair as "deeper" and "more sensible" than their blonde counterparts.

It also emerged that men think brunettes take better care of their apearance, make better cooks and are more proficient at keeping the house clean.

Possible exception to brunettes rule

We clearly need affirmative action for blondes.  Clearly, the bad press they've been getting in the media is starting to ruin their reputations and self-esteem.

Other "wife-like" attributes men think brunettes are likely to possess include being more experimental in the bedroom and being better with money.

"Men obviously have their opinions about the colour of women's hair, said a spokesperson for Superdrug, who conducted the research.

"But our sales tell us that when it comes to hair dye women are more likely to change their shade when they see a celebrity switch shade than any other reason.

In the process of collecting material for Rule 5 posts, I've noticed that many celebrity women change their hair color with some frequency.  I do occasionally wonder what that's all about.  I would think hair color would be an important aspect of "branding" for celebrity women, but many of them seem to still be seeking the perfect look.

"This research turns our hair stereotypes on their heads.

The study of 1,000 men showed 54 per cent would choose a brunette to be their wife, 16 per cent would opt for a lady with fair hair, while 30 per cent don't have a preference.

And when it comes to getting a girlfriend, 48 per cent chose girls with brown hair, one in four chose blonde and 27 per cent said neither.

 Count me among the 27%, as I have a distinct preference for gingers, despite the soulless issue,  the bad temper, and the odd physiology.


Wombat-Socho at The Other McCain came through with 2 weeks worth of Rule 5 posts at "Rule 5 Sunday: Super Double Coverage Illness Makeup Edition."  Also linked at The Classic Liberal in "Take It Off!"