James Kirchick: Vapid, Bloviating Troll

This about Society, tagged , , , was written by for on August 26, 2013

james-kirchikHe got invited to RT to talk about Bradley Manning and his impending sentence. The gay journalist James Kirchick got invited to argue his viewpoint that Manning wa a traitor who deserved to be put to death. (I wonder what his newfound liberal groupies would make of that?).

Instead, he used his airtime to go off on a tirade about how Russia has criminalized homosexuality (no, it hasn’t – but who cares about facts?) and to recycle all the canards about how RT is a Kremlin mouthpiece.

His rant lasted a whole two minutes, before RT’s host – having failed to steer Kirchick back on topic – finally kicked him off the channel. After rudely hijacking the show, the troll even had the gall to complain that RT wouldn’t pay for his taxi ride back.

There are many things one can say of this episode. One can highlight Kirchik’s sheer rudeness, chutzpah, and presumption. One can point out that Kirchick is only preaching to his own crowd here, while doing his utmost to validate the stereotype of the hystrionic homo as far as people who don’t much like homosexuals and need to be persuaded otherwise – that is, the majority of Russians – are concerned. Alternatively, one can note that Nikolai Alexeyev, the leader of Russia’s LGBT movement, basically calls him out as a hypocrite and then pens an article for RT with his own, far more nuanced views on the challenges facing the LGBT community in Russia.

I for one will note that if cutting off someone for incessant trolling makes RT a Kremlin mouthpiece, then…

… what does this make the “free” Western media?

Translation: Provincial Court Grants Victory to Gay Partners

This about Society, tagged , , was written by for on August 4, 2013

The Gryaz city court in Lipetsk oblast has voided a Saint-Petersburg registrar’s refusal to accept the intention of Dmitry Chunosov and Jaroslav Yevtushenko to get a same sex marriage.

In the Lipetsk region gays win a court decision in their favour

Today the Gryaz City Court declared the refusal to register a same-sex marriage to be illegal.

Today the Gryaz City Court held a hearing in the civil case of St. Petersburg residents Dmitry Chunosov and Jaroslav Yevtushenko that challenge the refusal of a St. Petersburg registry office to accept their declaration of intent to marriage.

Before starting the process, it turned out that in fact today in Gryaz were being heard two lawsuits made by supporters of same-sex love. 21-year-old Ilmira Shayhraznova and 23-year-old Elena Yakoleva had also tried to apply for a marriage in Moscow, but were refused and decided to challenge this in Gryaz, their registered place if residence.

Today in Russia will be filed another lawsuit to ban same-sex marriage. It is expected that it will take place in a Moscow court.
There was also was also awaiting Chunosov and Yevtushenko another surprise at the Gryaz city court: paratroopers tried to get into the building, claiming that the both the legal action and the people that had submitted it were obnoxious. However, none of the paratroopers, who were celebrating Paratroopers Day, had no passport, and were not allowed into the court. 10 paratroopers remained outside in the street, where they intend to picket the court.

The correspondent of portal Gorod48.ru has stated that at the end of the trial LGBT representatives called a taxi to the Gryaz court entrance.

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Translation: Russia in for a Gay Revolution?

This about Society, tagged , , was written by for on July 8, 2013

A report from Izvestia by Sergey Podosenov alleging that gay protests in Russia are organized from abroad.

Political Experts Predict a Russian Gay Revolution

Such a scenario described in Centre for Political Information report.

Foreign-funded LGBT organizations could prepare a gay revolution in Russia that would plunge the country into a new period of chaos similar to that of the 1990s. This conclusion is contained in a report made by the Centre for Political Information, Homopoliticus.

The document notes the activation of sexual minorities in the Russian political arena. One of the future goals of this activity that the report refers to is the creation of an LGBT party.

“At its present stage, the LGBT community should focus its political efforts primarily on stimulating interest in gay issues, and only be ready to prepare for the, so to say, coming-out stage of the party” the document says.

Therefore, the political activities of LGBT activists have been targeted primarily at the younger generation. They “consider it essential to introduce in Russian schools work so as to educate pupils about these issues”. Accordingly, experts consider the authorities justified in their efforts to legislate a ban on the promotion of homosexuality among youth. Homosexual experts have named as another object of ideological attacks the Russian Orthodox Church, which is regarded as the main ideological opponent of the LGBT movement. One of these attacks on the Church was the Pussy Riot “punk prayer” in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral, Moscow.

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No Rainbow in Russia – Opinion Polls on Homosexuality

This about Society, tagged , , , was written by for on May 18, 2013

More than 20 years after the fall of the USSR, Russia – and the other republics, too – remain deeply averse to the public expression of homosexuality. The Russian Spectrum makes available the results of two Levada polls, from March and May of this year, in an attempt to quantify this “homophobia” over the years.

Public Opinion about Homosexuality

Basic Attitudes

In your opinion, homosexuality is primarily…?

russian-polls-on-homosexuality-levada

In your opinion, how should homosexuals be treated? {Translator: Three different versions of the answers have been offered for this question over the years)

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Translation: The Sacrificial Victim and the End of Russian Homophobia

This about Society, tagged , , was written by for on May 14, 2013

Analogizing to the Pussy Riot affair, journalist Oleg Kashin argues that the grisly murder of a gay man in Volgograd may soon shame – or rather, frighten – the Kremlin into dropping its gay-baiting campaign.

The Sacrificial Victim and the End of Russian Homophobia

This question is either for the intellect, or for general erudition: How many beer bottles can fit into the rectum of an average Russian citizen under the condition that his life isn’t worth anything? To be perfectly honest, I had never given this thought, especially since the experience of Kazan’s Dalniy police station suggested that even one – though true, a champagne bottle – is perfectly sufficient to kill someone. But now we also have Volgograd’s experience – two and a half bottles. “Two bottles went in completely, while the third one only partially,” clarified a local news site.

The incredibly brutal murder of a gay man, for being gay. In fact, this could have have become the cause for some huge demonstration against homophobia in the center of Moscow – this case is too unprecedented, even by our standards – but even grumbling about it is already kind of awkward. There is no tradition of mass rioting for any reason in Russia, but there is a tradition of riotous commenting on social networks. Today many people write that the Volgograd murders were a direct consequence of state homophobia, and direct accusations are aired against Saint-Petersburg’s Milonov and Moscow’s Muzilina – they are our chief homophobes, and who can now prove that it was not their speeches and legislative bills that, at the level of Volgograd’s streets, became for three local gopniks a manual for action? Like that Soviet anecdote about the citizen who beat up two Jews after hearing news of the Yom Kippur War: “Listening to the radio, they are approaching Cairo; going out onto the street – they are already standing at the Metro.”

The man killed in Volgograd was unlikely to have ever become an LGBT activist, and besides the entire story as we currently understand it appears to be one of those that first provoke widespread outrage before somebody confusedly mutters that everything isn’t all that simple. But even allowing that the homophobic motive and the victim’s sexual orientation are only known to us from the words of one of the detained suspects as reported by the local media, we can already say that the man killed in Volgograd was a sacrificial victim, in the most direct sense of that hackneyed expression. A man died, and his death may well play a role in Russia’s political history in the nearest future. Deputy Milonov will quieten down, and relations between gays and the state may at least return to what they were before Milonov came along, a neutral state of affairs in which gay parades weren’t permitted – but neither was the LGBT movement fought against.

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Why Homosexuality Shouldn’t Be Promoted

This about Society, tagged , , was written by for on February 17, 2013

I knew that gays had a maybe five or even ten times higher chance of getting AIDS and other STD’s than heterosexuals. I didn’t know the differential was actually more like 50.

Something like 20% of the US gay population (which makes up 3.5% of its total population) is HIV positive. It is 5% in the UK. But as of 2009, according to the CDC “male to male sexual contact” (see pp.58) accounted for about 57% of all HIV transmissions in the US (and of 75% of all HIV transmissions among men). “Heterosexual contact” among men accounted for a mere 8% of all HIV transmissions. Basically, if you’re gay, you should take far, far more precautions during sex than your straight counterparts – though in practice, it seems the precise opposite is taking place (“Carlos estimates that he has already had several hundred sex partners; he eagerly awaits the day when he tests HIV-positive – at which time his erotic interest, Carlos says, will then turn toward infecting another person – which is known as “gift-giving””).

The result is that back at the height of the epidemic in the 1990’s, life expectancy for gays was something like 20 years lower than for straights (those are risks far greater than for smoking). Assuming the gay population to be 3% of the male total, Canadian homosexuals had only a 32% chance of living from the age of 20 to the age of 65, far less than the 78% for the average Canadian man (or equivalent to a Canadian man in 1871). The study in question, however, was carried out at the very height of mortality from AIDS; since then, medical improvements have sharply reduced it, e.g. from more than 50,000 deaths in 1995 to a constant 20,000 or so from 1998 on. So I suppose the life expectancy penalty is now somewhat better than being a heavy smoker or an alcoholic (both about 10 years).

In other words, it’s a valid public health policy to make homosexuality culturally unattractive, as opposed to glamorizing it. And while it is certainly true that it does not apply to the vast majority of homosexuals, the statistics also destroy yet another liberal canard: That there is no connection between homosexuality and pedophilia. In reality, studies indicate that 2-4 girls are abused for one boy, even though there are about 30 straights to every gay (the vast majority of sex abusers are of course male). Even allowing for necessary caveats – e.g., groups of male children are far more likely to be entrusted to males for supervision than groups of girls – that still strongly indicates that homosexuals are, on average, considerably more likely to be pedophiles than heterosexuals.

A corollary is that I am quite okay with Russia’s new law banning propaganda of the homosexual lifestyle to minors, the mewlings of human rights organizations and other putative do-gooders regardless. Funny how an hour or so of Internet research can destroy so much mainstream liberal “wisdom.”

It’s A Culture War, Stupid

This about Society, tagged , , , was written by for on August 8, 2012

One of the things that most annoys me about Western coverage of St.-Petersburg’s law against homosexual propaganda to minors, the case against Pussy Riot, etc., is how it is almost always presented as a show-down between “liberated” and “creative” Russians and the macho dictator Putin.

In reality, of course, it’s a culture war – and as a result the majority is on the conservative side of the spectrum and the government merely accedes to this fact. This is the case with Pussy Riot. It is also the case with the anti-homosexual laws. According to the polls, which no Western journalist cares about for all his feigned concern for the opinions of “ordinary Russians”, 14% of Russians support homosexual marriages, 84% oppose; 8% want to allow gay parades, 82% are against. Three quarters consider homosexuality to be a deviancy, a disease, or a mental illness.

A honorable exception to this rule is Sam Bollier, whose recent piece for Al Jazeera I highly recommend: Madonna to sing out on ‘gay propaganda’ law.

Yet whatever their own ideological leanings Western journalists pay no mind whatsoever to these elementary realities. Liberal Guardianistas believe that most Russians think just like them when they are oddballs even in Britain. One might think Conservatives might have a more nuanced view, but that is not the case. As noted by Kononenko, they pass off the prosecution of Pussy Riot as a political punishment for their song “Holy Mother of God, chase Putin out!”; whereas as meticulously documented by Alex Mercouris there is nothing tying Putin to the case (indeed one wonders why Putin would wish to involve himself at all with those freaks with colored bags over their heads) and the prosecution is for a hooligan act that is in contravention of Russian laws that are not dissimilar from laws in numerous European countries*.

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In Which I Appear On The Stark Report

This about Human Biodiversity, tagged , , was written by for , on May 22, 2012

You can listen to the 56 minutes of my interview on The Stark Truth about race realism, IQ / human capital, and economic development here. (That, or read the posts linked to therein if you haven’t already. I didn’t say much new).

Many thanks to Robert Stark, and the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network which does sterling work in publicizing alternate viewpoints.

Evolutionary Roots Of Homophobia?

This about Human Biodiversity, tagged , was written by for on April 15, 2012

Russia is in something of a homophobic fever. Four regions (including Saint-Petersburg) have banned the dissemination of “gay propaganda” to minors, it may yet go federal, and disassociated itself from a G8 statement on gay rights. It’s obviously not like in many Middle Eastern countries where homosexuality is illegal (as in the USSR) but attitudes do resemble those of the US or the UK in the 1980’s.

This got me thinking on another tangent, however. Why would a straight person be homophobic anyway?

From the POV of straight dudes, more gays means less competition for chicks.  (Lesbians are mostly bisexual so it doesn’t apply in reverse, and besides, homophobia tends to focus on gays anyway). That is one reason why I don’t mind gays apart from my general live-let live attitudes. The incentives for chicks aren’t as clear-cut as for dudes, as they’d have to try harder to find permanent partners, but upside is they are much less likely to wind up with a closet homosexual.

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