Headline quoted by Mark Steyn:

Former British P.M. Tony Blair Rips Biden Afghanistan Withdrawal: Gives ‘Our Opponents A Belief Our Time Is Over’

On which Mark Steyn comments:

Well, our opponents aren’t wrong about that, are they? In fact … it’s not just “our opponents” who believe “our time is over”, but a significant percentage of the west’s ruling class. For why else would they have gone over to the other side? Our randomly selected Shill of the Day, Joe Biden’s jetsetting climate honcho:

John Kerry echoes China’s argument that human rights sanctions threaten climate talks

So many global A-listers are “echoing China’s argument” these days, don’t you find? Fauci and the public health gang, the stars and administrators of those crappy unwatchable corporate sports, Justin Trudeau, Hollywood, the WHO…

It suits China that climate change is the only Big Picture non-subterranean conversation we are permitted to have. Every minute we spend worrying about whether the Maldives will be washed away by rising sea levels in the twenty-second century makes it less likely we’ll notice that America is being washed away by China right now.

This Saturday [9/11] will provide, one would have thought, a rare glimpse of that subterranean reality. But tens of millions of Americans are so content being spectators in their nation’s eclipse that it may well be that the traditional cringe-makingly passive candle-in-the-windiness of 9/11 observances will for a few moments work its usual magic, and on its twentieth anniversary they won’t notice that the war on terror is over and America lost. The guys who toppled the Twin Towers have just been rewarded for their pains with a bazillion Humvees, Black Hawks, and more territory than they ever held back in the Nineties.

If by “us” we mean Western civilization, is our time over?

Women’s liberation has become women’s libertinism.

By nature, the human woman is a peacock. We like to be noticed. The conservative among us prefer the allure of modesty. Others don’t. On social media, women outstrip men in the narcissistic and exhibitionist departments. In TV ads, American women, fat, thin, young and old, are grinding their bottoms, spreading their legs, showing the contours of their crotches, and dancing as though possessed (or like primates on heat), abandoning any semblance of femininity and gentility, all the while laughing like hyenas and hollering hokum like, “I Own It.” …

Look, Harvey [Weinstein] is a lowlife. But Hollywood hos are not … “naive, innocent young things” … 

So Ilana Mercer, libertarian, writes at Townhall.

We quote more of her article: :

I’d like to better understand the conservative media’s orgy over Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced and disgraceful Hollywood film producer and studio executive who used his power over decades to have his way with starlets.

To listen to conservative talkers, the women affronted or assaulted by Weinstein were all Shakespearean talent in the making … who made the pilgrimage to Sodom and Gomorrah in the Hollywood Hills, for the purpose of realizing their talent, never knowing it was a meat market. …

The reason the female figure is so crudely objectified nowadays has a great deal to do with women themselves. By virtue of their conduct, women no longer inspire reverence as the fairer sex … For they are crasser, vainer, more eager to expose all voluntarily than any male. Except for Anthony Weiner, the name of an engorged organism indigenous to D.C., who was is in the habit of exposing himself as often as the Kardashians do.

The latter clan is a bevy of catty exhibitionists, controlled by a mercenary matriarch called Kris Kardashian. Kris is madam to America’s First Family of Celebrity Pornographers. (To launch a career with a highly stylized, self-directed sex tape is no longer even condemned.) Lots of little girls, with parental approval, look up to the Kardashians.

From Kim, distaff America learns to couch a preoccupation with pornographic selfies in the therapeutic idiom. Kardashian flaunts herself with pure self-love. Yet millions of her admirers depict her obscene posturing online as an attempt to come to terms with her body. “Be a little easier on myself,” counsels Kim as she directs her camera to the nether reaches of her carefully posed, deformed derriere. While acting dirty and self-adoring, Kardashian delivers as close to a social jeremiad on self-esteem as her kind can muster. Genius!

Liberalism and libertinism are intertwined. The more liberal a woman, the more libertine she’ll be — and the more she’ll liberate herself to be coarse, immodest, vulgar and plain repulsive. Think of the menopausal Ashley Judd rapping lewdly about her (alleged) menstrual fluids at an anti-Trump rally. Think of all those liberal, liberated grannies adorned with pussy dunce-caps on the same occasion. …

The phrase a “bum’s rush” means “throw the bum out!”. When it comes to Allison Williams, daughter of NBC icon Brian Williams, a bum’s rush takes on new meaning. Thanks in no small measure to her famous father, the young woman has become a sitcom star. And Ms. Williams has worked extra-hard to hone all aspects of an actress’s instrument (the body). Alison has carried forth enthusiastically about a groundbreaking scene dedicated to exploring “a** motorboating” or “booty-eating”, on HBO’s “Girls”.

The lewder, more pornographic, and less talented at their craft popular icons become — the louder the Left lauds their artistically dodgy output. (The “Right” just keeps moving Left.) “Singer” Miley Cyrus was mocked before she began twerking tush, thrusting pelvis and twirling tongue. Only then had she arrived as an artist, in the eyes of “critics” on the Left. The power of the average pop artist and her products, Miley’s included, lies in the pornography that is her “art,” in her hackneyed political posturing …

Liberal women, the majority, go about seriously and studiously cultivating their degeneracy. If Raising Skirts to Celebrate the Diversity of Vaginas sounds foul, wait for the accompanying images. These show feral creatures (women, presumably), skirts hoisted, gobs agape, some squatting like farmhands in an outhouse, all yelling about their orifices.

Do you know of a comparable man’s movement? If anything, men are punished when they react normally to women behaving badly.

Female soldiers got naked and uploaded explicit images of themselves to an online portal. The normals — male soldier — shared the images and were promptly punished for so doing. And the conservative side of that ubiquitous, dueling-perspectives political panel approved of the punishment meted to the men.

So endemic is distaff degeneracy these days that “protesters” routinely disrobe or perform lewd acts with objects in public. …

If men flashed for freedom; they’d be arrested, jailed and placed on the National Sex Offender Registry.

Talk about the empress being in the buff, I almost forgot to attach an image of this celebrity, bare-bottomed on the red-carpet. Rose McGowan is hardly unique. Many a star will arrive at these events barely clothed. (Here are 38 more near-naked Red-Carpet appearances.)

Follow those links. They are pictures of Hollywood actresses … wait, no. They are pictures of common whores selling their bodies.

Expect a feminist lecture about a woman’s right to pretend her bare bottom is haute couture, rather than ho couture, and expect the Harveys of the world to behave like choir boys around her?

We have added the question mark to that last sentence.

None of this excuses the exploitation of these silly women by repulsive, uncivilized, priapic Weinstein.

But yes, it must be said that these women are begging to be “exploited”. They are whores.

“Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three,” said the poet Philip Larkin.

Okay. We won’t dispute it. But we declare that POLITICAL SEX began in 1968.

With the birth of the New Left. That was when the Left gave up “the exploitation of the proletariat” as its excuse for destroying Western civilization, because twenty years after WWII the proletariat in the Western world was making lots of money from its “exploitation” and refusing to complain about it. Instead, the well-off well-educated soft-living New Left leaders picked on non-whites and women to act in the name of. To put an end to the “oppression” of those races and that sex, they wanted to make a revolution and establish a world-controlling communist regime. Ever since then, Racism and Sexism have characterized the Left.

“Make Love Not War” was their slogan. The only individual freedom they were for, was sexual freedom.

It was “the dawn of the age of Aquarius“; an age apparently favoring sexual copulation. They made so much love in California’s bay area – especially in San Francisco – that, doctors said, sexually transmitted diseases that had not been known to the medical profession since the middle ages were once more common, mostly among young middle-class men and women – the  revolutionaries.

There was a climate not of rape but of promiscuity – particularly on campus – set off by sex-positive feminism (women could be as aggressive in pursuit of the big O as men).

Women demanded sexual equality with men. The pill helped. Anything men could do, women could do.

Laws making work-place harassment and having “a hostile environment for women”, created a plaintiff bar. Discrimination against women – not hiring and not  promoting – gave rise to a proliferation of  law-suits. Huge class actions.

A lot of women and their lawyers filed suits for extorting settlements, including women for whom the casting couch gambit did not pay off.

Of course, the “casting couch” was used by unscrupulous men and women. It always had been. It was a time-honored tradition. That didn’t begin in the 1960s! But after 1968, women who didn’t get the part they parted their limbs for, could start a new tradition and sue.

Not all did, of course; and not all suits were successful. Had they been, everything might have been different. Marilyn Monroe pointed out that if she had said no, 25 other women would have said yes.

Hollywood is a flesh-peddler. It is not a source of  moral guidance – though it often pretends to be. It is not an oracular shrine where the higher wisdom may be sought – though it often pretends to be that too. Women stars and starlets sell their looks. And since not all great “sex symbols” have acting talent, the casting couch was useful to manipulative people of both sexes. The difference since 1968 is that Hollywood came to think of itself as “on the side of history”. Since promiscuity was IN, the casting couch ceased to be a naughty open secret and became a model of Political Correctness. Or so the arbiters of sexual mores – the Left – chose to believe. And since everyone who was anyone was on the Left, it was okay for a movie mogul – such as Harvey Weinstein – to demand sex from a pretty girl who wanted him to give her a starring role in his next blockbuster.  

That ethos of the sixties, seventies and eighties (especially among educated elites) –  “Make Love, Not War”, no shame in your body, sexual satisfaction is a right, sex is liberating, sex experimentation is mind-expanding, marriage is slavery, conventional prudery is fascism – was a great time for men. All men. (Though not such a good time for professional prostitutes who suddenly had the competition of no-charge, anytime, anywhere princesses.)

Rich, powerful and famous men have always attracted women. They could take their pick among their groupies. They could grow old and fat and still have a glamorous young wife. The difference between groupies and would-be wives is that groupies accept the sex itself as their reward – morally reinforced by “sex-positive” feminism.

The Trophy Wife (always a second or third) started by simply being  younger and more beautiful than the old wives. But the role developed, evolved. She had not only to be younger and more beautiful, she had also to have had a career, or even achieved fame and fortune in her own right. The career aspect of the Executive Woman became a selling point in itself, adding to Her price and His status when He could claim Her as His.

But there is no Big Girl, growing up in the Western world, who does not know the difference between a low status groper and a Big Boy. No Big Girl is incapable of saying no or yes to Mr. Shlub or Mr. Big. Big Girls can throw off a wandering hand without being traumatized. Big Girls know the difference between a grope and rape, a pass and sexual harassment. Big Girls (Jolie, Paltrow) do not have to squawk aloud and publicly denounce sexual harassment or groping.

And so – Big Girls who settle out of court with Mr. Rich Big, getting dollars in exchange for non-disclosure, should abide by that agreement. They have been compensated for their loss of financial opportunity (which is what “loss of face” and “loss of self-esteem” are really all about).  

Are unwanted passes irritating? Yes. Are they blows against the sanctity of women’s bodies?  No. (It was the patriarchal ownership of women that conferred a “don’t touch” taboo on them  – and which still in Islam renders them corrupted, filthy and discardable when used by non-owners. Rape is an artifact of Patriarchy.) Marriage and marriageability made Woman non-violable. What has replaced them for her protection is the politics of identity. A woman now owns herself, but only as one of  the collective of Women.

Women’s major contribution to society is no longer as the bearers of children. They are female economic units (FEUs). Feminism proclaims a battle between women and men for power. Corporations setting quotas, hire and promote women in place of men. Women must be hired as FEUs, and promoted as FEUs, but any hint of behavior that acknowledges their sex can be the basis for a law suit.

How does society know when a woman is sincerely disgusted, ashamed, humiliated, nauseated etc. by a co-worker or boss?  Sincerity is beside the point. How do we know whether the pass was hostile or amatory? It makes no difference which it is. Heterosexual desire is now immoral. The intention of the perp is beside the point. And so we see the erosion of the idea that “rape” is a horrible crime (except on school campuses, where the cry of “rape” from a malicious female can wreck a young man’s career prospects and reputation without his being allowed to defend himself). In the smart world, rape is on the way to becoming a strict liability offense. The more women are “equal”  to men, the less their bodies/persons warrant special protection. Sexual assault is now just one form of common assault – unwanted touching, of varying degrees of force.

Is a man’s exposing himself and masturbating in front of a Big Girl anything more than ludicrousness? The moral outrage at Mr. Big’s years of unwanted touching does not signal virtue. No-one in Hollywood can reclaim that sort of virtue.

No adult anywhere in the West can, thanks to the universal license supplied by the New Left in 1968.

The Left owns the culture. As a matter of ethical correctness, it teaches prurience to infants.

Pornography is the way, the truth, and the life, in fiction and reality, in the Arts and in the News. 

 From the Telegraph:

The [Warner Brothers] studio has temporarily blocked the release of the DVD version of the 1987 film Hanoi Hilton, which will feature an interview with John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, about his imprisonment in Hoa Lo prison during the war.

The film, which gave a favourable portrayal of US prisoners, will now be released on November 11 – a week after the election.

Warner Brothers’s decision is likely to raise suggestions that it did not want to aid Mr McCain’s campaign by highlighting his wartime acts. The Republican candidate, who was a Navy pilot, was tortured during his imprisonment after being shot down over North Vietnam in October 1967.

Barry Meyer, the company’s chairman and chief executive, last month attended a fundraising dinner for Barack Obama, Mr McCain’s Democratic opponent.

The move has angered Lionel Chetwynd, the film’s writer and director, who is a well-known conservative.

"Finding someone in Hollywood who says they don’t want to affect the election is like finding a virgin in a brothel," Mr Chetwynd told the New York Times.

The film-maker also complained that other film studios were willing to release and promote films with potential for political influence. W, a biopic of President George W Bush directed by Oliver Stone, is set to be released on Friday.