"Therapy didn’t work for you. But church does," said Usha to JD Vance.

Quoted in JD's new memoir, "Communion" (commission earned).

Did he need therapy and what's the story of its not working on him?

My traumatic childhood had made me resentful and left me with awful conflict management skills. I would overreact or withdraw—fight or flight!—over minor transgressions.... Because of Usha, I attended a few therapy sessions at the Yale student health clinic. The therapist I spoke with was a good guy, but I found therapy too uncomfortable. I didn’t like to talk to my own girlfriend about how crazy my homelife was, so why would I talk to a stranger? But there was a deeper problem with therapy as I encountered it. It was divorced from any sense of responsibility or guilt. In one session, we explored an incident that I’ve since discussed publicly: Driving with my mother on a relatively rural road, she loses her temper. She accelerates the car, threatening to crash and kill both of us.... Experts tend to describe unresolved trauma as when a person experiences “disruptive physical and emotional reactions in the present as their body and mind continue to defend against” threats they faced in the past. The gist is that my fight-or-flight response, my temper, and my general resentment about my feelings of insecurity were consequences of trauma I had experienced and hadn’t properly “processed.” And of course, part of that processing was understanding how trauma across the generations was linked. The trauma I experienced at the hand of my mother was connected to the time my grandfather got drunk and beat her. And of course, my grandfather didn’t have it easy growing up in the deep poverty of Kentucky coal country. I resisted this for a couple of reasons. The first is that the framing turned me into a victim rather than an actor.... The therapist’s framing... removed the moral dimension from human conduct.... I was searching for a more satisfying accounting of wrongdoing and responsibility. Of temptation and willpower. Of virtue and guilt.... [M]ost of all I wanted to be a better person. I wanted to be worthy of this woman I was madly in love with. And I began to fear that the past was a prologue: that whatever happened to my mother, whatever destroyed marriages and friendships in my family, would eventually destroy what I had with Usha....

"... the anile, demented echo chamber of social media."

A phrase I found — in a 2016 National Post article about Justin Trudeau’s "sunny Liberalism" — when I looked up the word "anile" in the OED.

A Wordle spoiler follows. "Anile" is not the answer, but "anile" was accepted as a guess, though after getting the right answer, I was told that "anile" would never be the answer in Wordle.

Why not?! "Anile" is a perfectly good word. It means, the OED tells us, "Of, belonging to, or characteristic of old women; resembling an old woman. Chiefly derogatory with connotations of foolishness, senility, or decrepitude."

"Trump defense suggests he was shakedown target, not hush money schemer/During contentious questioning of Stormy Daniels lawyer Keith Davidson, Donald Trump’s lawyers portray their client as the victim in the case."

 A headline at The Washington Post.

In the most contentious testimony yet in the criminal trial, Los Angeles lawyer Keith Davidson denied accusations that he flirted with extortion when he negotiated settlements with celebrities to keep potentially damaging stories out of the public eye.

By accusing him, Trump’s lawyers displayed a key element of their defense strategy: getting jurors to focus on the lawyers and middlemen....

Trump’s lawyers... tried to use Davidson to show that he was well versed in squeezing money out of celebrities, and that Daniels thought her chances of getting paid for her story would vanish after the 2016 presidential election, which she expected Trump to lose.

Fortunately, something of Trump's side of the story is coming out, but I do not trust mainstream media to tell us the story straight. We're not able to watch the trial, and we don't even get a transcript, just whatever the media see fit to report. And yet there seems to be this idea — among the Trump antagonists — that we the voters will allow this trial to substantially manipulate our opinion of the man. The case was brought to manipulate us. The presidential election is at stake. Give us a transcript. 

[CORRECTION: Even though I read the news every day, I had not noticed that the New York court system announced, back on April 22, that it would provide transcripts: "The court system is taking the novel step of posting the daily transcripts of the trial proceedings on its public website.... 'With current law restricting the broadcasting of trial proceedings and courtroom space for public spectators very limited, the release of the daily transcripts on the court system’s website is the best way to provide the public a direct view of the proceedings in this historic trial,' said Chief Administrative Judge Zayas."]

Back to the WaPo account of Trump's lawyer, Emil Bove, cross-examining Davidson:

"He's not a victim. I am a victim."

Says the woman who assaulted a MAGA-hat-wearing man:



Based on the video, I think this looks like a sense of female privilege. She's an attractive woman in a bar, and she seems to think that she can take physical liberties with a man who's just sitting there — that she can wrap her arms around him and grab at his hat. Watch the video. Note that she did the same thing again in front of the police.

11 things I learned from the WaPo article about Jordan Peterson.

(Here's the article that went up yesterday.)

1. Kanye West seems to have put up a photo of his computer that showed he had a tab for a Jordan Peterson video, so either he was watching a Jordan Peterson video, or he was considering watching a Jordan Peterson video, or he or somebody touching that computer wanted to make it look as though he was watching a Jordan Peterson video. The Jordan Peterson/Kanye West combination is awesomely exciting/terrifyingly powerful/mindcrushingly lame.

2. Video is the key to Peterson's success because — these are Peterson's words — "it turns out that people can listen to things they can’t read." People who won't read "challenging books" — WaPo's words — will, for some reason, listen to Peterson lectures that go on for hours.

3. Peterson is speaking to men. Women can listen in and try to get some useful tips, but the intended audience is men, men, men, those little weasels, those "weak... [s]louchers, slackers, chumps, low-status dudes who have amassed."

4. Some developmental psychologist was found to deliver the accusation that Peterson "takes a really simplistic approach toward gender inequality" and gives what "feels like a dressed-up version of misogyny." How does one get to be "simplistic" and "dressed up" at the same time? The text on its face is hinky.

5. Peterson's Rule #1 is "Stand up straight with your shoulders back," but he's "slow to offer direct eye contact, prone to gazing downward" and "seems too immersed in big thoughts to be bothered by what’s in front of him" and, "[d]uring the photo session in the park," he "semi-slumps."

6. Peterson sometimes moves himself to cry and leaves the "unwiped tears" on his face. We're told he's subject to "severe depression" and has been on antidepressants.

7. The selected item of evidence in support of the proposition that Peterson "appears temperamentally incapable of picking his battles" is that he attacked Elmo — "I always hated that creepy, whiny puppet." But — I just checked — Peterson doesn't randomly attack Elmo. He's telling a story about an inept father who complains about his inability to get his son to go to sleep at night but has been rewarding the child's recalcitrance by putting on an Elmo video. The sideswipe at Elmo was a bit of comic relief. The main problem was the father and his decision to show any video to the child, but the fact that the father showed Elmo gave some color to the story. Lest we think Elmo was at least good choice if you're going to show a child a video, Peterson calls Elmo "creepy" and "whiny" and — WaPo left this out — "a disgrace to Jim Henson’s legacy." I presume Peterson could speak for an hour on that topic.

8. Despite efforts to connect Peterson to the right wing, WaPo highlights his opposition to what Donald Trump supposedly represents. It quotes the one mention of Trump in the "12 Rules" book: "If 'men are pushed too hard to feminize,' he writes, 'they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.' He argues that 'the populist groundswell of support for Donald Trump in the U.S. is part of the same process.'"

9. Peterson gave up religious belief when he was a teenager but he lectures at immense length on the “Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories."

10. He's very sensitive about food and believes he got off antidepressants by changing his diet, which seems to be "meat, salad and water... with only turmeric and salt for flavor." His daughter promotes the diet on line, here. He calls the diet "ridiculous," and I agree. The only fruit on the diet is olives!

11. The highest-rated comment at WaPo is: "As soon as I read Kanye was a fan, I could have stopped reading. Unfortunately, I kept reading. Victimhood is a left wing problem? Trump and the alt-right thrive on victimhood. I am a white male. I enjoyed a great advantage in life. When I started my professional life, 'girls' still had to prove themselves the equals of men. No, I am not that old. This was the 1990's."

A top aide to the Texas Attorney General had to resign after sharing (on Facebook) that much-shared "Can We Be Honest About Women?" piece in The Federalist.

The NYT reports.

You know the Federalist piece? I didn't share it, but I certainly noticed that it was hitting a sweet spot for some people. Maybe it said what you wanted to say:

We can’t always assume women are hapless damsels in distress horrified by how they’re objectified.

Here’s a little secret we have to say out loud: Women love the sexual interplay they experience with men, and they relish men desiring their beauty. Why? Because it is part of their nature....

Women have their natures and their sin. Part of their sexuality, their feminine nature is beauty and the allure of sex. Their sin is exploiting it to abuse and take advantage of men, to reduce themselves to objects instead of cultivating their minds and souls, and to focus so much on the outward parts that they forget the value of inner virtues....

And it was written by a woman, D.C. McAllister, so that might make a man feel empowered to express an opinion he suspects he probably shouldn't say directly.

Now, the man who lost his job, Associate Deputy Attorney General Andrew D. Leonie, didn't merely share the article and allow McAllister's relatively elevated statement to speak for him. He spiked it with his own blunt words:

“Aren’t you also tired of all the pathetic ‘me too’ victim claims? If every woman is a ‘victim,’ so is every man. If everyone is a victim, no one is. Victim means nothing anymore.”

That was posted in the middle of the night, and by the end of the next day he was out.

The NYT notes that Leonie describes himself on Twitter as "Deplorable & Irredeemable Texas Christian Tea Party Republican Constitutionalist Conservative Libertarian." He doesn't seem to have tweeted since his resignation.

The official statement from the attorney general's office was: "The views he expressed on social media do not reflect our values. The O.A.G. is committed to promoting and maintaining a workplace that is free from discrimination and harassment."

Who are the women who accepted the deal as offered by Harvey Weinstein? Will their names be kept out of the press? Should they?

I'm listening to the NYT podcast, "The Daily," and today's subject is "Harvey Weinstein’s New Accusers."

The NYT reporter Jodi Kantor described listening to the stories told by Weinstein's accusers:

It's like watching the same movie again and again and again. It appears to have been a system. It was facilitated by so many people. Executives. Very low-level assistants who had to do some of the dirty work. There were a lot of logistics involved. In every case that we documented, according to the women, Weinstein asked to meet with them for a work reason. And in some of the stories we've heard, what the women describe is a very explicit work-for-sex quid pro quo. Other women say that just as Weinstein put the moves on, he essentially name-dropped. He said, Look at what I've done for this one. Or that one. He implied: If you want to succeed in this business, this is what you have to do. If you get intimate with me, I'll be able to make a big star like such-and-such.

Who is such-and-such? Will such-and-such's name be withheld? Obviously, Weinstein could have lied. He could have named the biggest star without it being true that the woman did what he said was a necessary step for a young, beautiful woman to get a role in one of his movies. Indeed, the intimacy test could have worked the other way: If you're pliable enough to give your beautiful body to a horrible man like me, you don't have what it takes.

The very next topic in the podcast is Gwyneth Paltrow, who was Weinstein's biggest female star at that time. We're told she rejected Weinstein's offer.

In quid pro quo, you get what you bargained for, but what if you give and don't get? You can't sue to force Harvey Weinstein to make you a star. Some women who've made accusations got monetary settlements, but these women had to give even more (in the form of nondisclosure agreements). And they seem to have rejected the sex or had it forced on them.

Did anyone accept the arrangement, give the sex willingly, and expect Weinstein to fulfill his end of the bargain? We haven't heard the name of anyone in that position. I assume there are lots of names in this category. Notice that we don't know what they got. Did anyone enter the bargain with eyes-open, deciding it's worth it, and get what she was led to expect?

Weinstein's modus operandi wouldn't work if the open secret included the knowledge that the women who said yes got little or nothing. If Weinstein were lying, using names of women who didn't in fact take the offer, then he was slandering the women he named. Those stars — such as, perhaps, Paltrow — could have brought lawsuits, but there's little reason to believe that the potential for a defamation lawsuit would have stopped a man who was committing so many legal wrongs and getting away with it for 20+ years.

So much silence facilitating so much harm! Should the women who took the bargain and got what they wanted out of it be regarded as victims and entitled to keep their names secret, or are they part of a system that hurt many others, and subject to outing?

"But let’s be clear what is happening here. This is a cynical media witch hunt from people who don’t care about children."

"They care about destroying me and my career, and by extension my allies. They know that although I made some outrageous statements, I’ve never actually done anything wrong. These videos have been out there for more than a year. The media held this story back because they don’t care about victims, they only care about bringing me down. They will fail. I will be announcing a new, independently-funded media venture of my own and a live tour in the coming weeks.... Don’t think for a moment that this will stop me being as offensive, provocative and outrageously funny as I want on any subject I want.... I’m proud to be a warrior for free speech and creative expression."

From the transcript of Milo's press conference.

I blogged the press conference yesterday, here, with just the video, and there are 200+ comments over there. I'm blogging again because I'm seeing a transcript for the first time, and I wanted to forefront that passage.

And let me propose a thought experiment, in the style of my Trump hypotheticals, 2 posts down.

What if there were a young, handsome, smart, funny provocateur who'd spiked into popularity spouting left-liberal politics, stirring up young people on college campuses and irking older liberals who didn't think he knew enough or had served his elders long enough to deserve his place in the spotlight? And what if then his antagonists dropped some edited audio of late-night podcasts he'd recorded some years ago in which he revealed that when he was 14 he'd had a sexual relationship with a 24-year-old priest but that he refused to think about himself as the victim and he displayed his rationalization of the victimhood experience by characterizing himself as the sexual aggressor and by claiming that the priest had actually helped him?

How would Leftist Milo be treated?

Milo speaks, embracing victimhood, seriousness.

"Cornell University Students Vote Against Intellectual Diversity, on Grounds It Would Harm Diversity."

A funny headline on a piece over at Reason.com by Robby Soave. At Cornell, the Student Assembly voted down a resolution that called for a committee to look into the lack of political diversity in the Cornell faculty. The arguments against the resolution were summarized as:

(1) conservatives have not been historically oppressed as have other groups; (2) spending resources on intellectual diversity diverts resources from promoting other forms of diversity; and (3) conservative students are free to speak out in class if they find something disagreeable or wish to argue their own point of view....

The headline isn't very fair to that 3-point objection to having this committee. It focuses on #2 and distorts even that. I rather doubt that the cute, clickable headline was written by Soave, because he disapproves of campus conservatives acting like leftist students by "playing the victim" and inviting speakers who are "provocateurs" and not serious experts in "philosophy and policy."

I don't agree with Soave's disapproval. I think you can have philosophers and policy wonks and also lively provocateurs, and I think it's worth exploring victimology — who's really the victim? I've spent enough time around conservatives and libertarians to know that their pretensions about neutral, egg-headed reason feel hollow and deceptive much of the time to those of us who aren't already on their side. I believe it's unreasonable to deny that emotion is part of human reason, and I have seen Reason magazine philosophy/policy types boil over with anger at the expression of that belief.

But I want to get back to that headline, inapt as it is for Soave's brief essay on the Cornell committee that was not to be. It seems like an argument through stating a paradox: They voted against diversity on the ground that it would hurt diversity. (It's reminiscent of that old Vietnam War line: "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.")

But it occurs to me that there are some ideas that are destructive of intellectual diversity. I don't mean ideas put into practice, such as censorship or discrimination based on viewpoint. I mean the ideas themselves. Within a free-speech approach, you can argue that censorship or viewpoint discrimination is a good idea. It would be censorship or viewpoint discrimination to exclude those ideas. People can see those arguments in the marketplace of ideas and decide for themselves if they want to buy them. You might say, but if people do accept those ideas, they might put them into practice, but if you believe in the overarching idea of free speech, you are trusting people to consider and reject the bad ideas, and you think the idea of free speech will win in the marketplace.

But there is one type of idea that just as an idea is destructive of the diversity in the marketplace of ideas. Do you see what it is? It's an idea that is so good it wrecks the market for all the competing ideas, the completely convincing idea. There are many ideas like that — problems where the solutions have been discovered. We needn't puzzle over the possible answers anymore. We know (or feel sure that we know). That's the one type of idea that you should exclude if intellectual diversity is your most sacred goal. That shows why intellectual diversity can't be your highest goal. Why would you exclude the most devastatingly obviously correct ideas?

I'll pose one answer to my question and let you decide whether you want to buy it: You'd exclude those ideas when you have other ideas you want to protect from competition. So then there's this corollary: To genuinely love intellectual diversity and to want to exclude one of the ideas is to admit that it's devastatingly better than those other ideas.

And, yes, yes, of course I know that "they" do not really love intellectual diversity. It's a hypothetical. Assume genuine love for intellectual diversity. Assume it is really and truly your highest value. If you had 10 ideas about how to solve a particular problem and a new idea came along that was so obviously true that no one would bother with the other 10 anymore, you would suppress the 11th idea, so that you could continue to benefit from the vibrancy of 10 living, breathing ideas.

If that's all too abstract, think it through in the context of a culture with 10 thriving religions and the question whether to ban the discussion of atheism.

"Should Bill Clinton’s sexual misdeeds be an issue for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy?"

The NYT does one of its forums on this question, asked of 4 women and one man.

1. Katha Pollitt says there's "no evidence that Hillary actually did 'enable' Bill’s philandering" or that she "slut-shamed Paula Jones or any of the other women who accused Bill of sexually aggressive behavior." She muses "What is enabling, anyway?" Is it really so different from "love, loyalty, credulousness, naivete, practicality, forgiveness, saving the marriage, protecting the children, just getting on with life"?

2. Kristin Collins Jackson (a poet and writer) mildly concedes that Hillary's "victim-shaming" "deserves attention"  for its inconsistency with her "platform that prioritizes women's issues and combating sexual assault on campus."

3. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist, says Hillary's "alleged attempts to discredit the women with whom her husband cheated may not be considered a good form of sisterhood, it certainly could be considered a reasonable act of motherhood." He says we've overinflated the idea of "romantic love" and offers respect to Hillary for staying with her husband instead of reacting in the "more destructive" way he's seen in some of his patients.

4. Cathy Young observes "the ambiguity of [Hillary's] status as a hybrid of modern female politician and traditional political wife" and "the greater paradox... that she is being hurt by the same feminist revival from which her campaign has sought to draw strength." Young puts some blame on "modern feminism" for going "to unhealthy extremes on fetishizing victimhood and conferring absolute credibility on self-proclaimed survivors" and likes the idea that Hillary's current trouble may move some feminists to back off from these extremes.

5. Nona Willis Aronowitz, a Fusion editor, says: "Even I, a progressive feminist, tend to think of Bill Clinton as a sleazy ex-boyfriend I can’t stop drunk-texting but not, you know, a rapist. He’s one of us, after all. One of our dudes." But she's looking critically at that tendency: "Those of us not married to Bill Clinton should ask ourselves why it’s so hard for us to accept that he might be brilliant, likable and a misogynist all at the same time?"

"As I used to say to my students in class, as soon as you tell people you’re gay, they’ll tell you what you think. Just from the fact that I’m gay..."

"... people assumed I endorsed all their positions about whatever," said Allen J. Frantzen, the medieval scholar, who's getting a lot of criticism for his blog post "How to Fight Your Way Out of the Feminist Fog."

I haven't read Frantzen's post yet. I'll get to that. I'm just amused by this idea — which I saw somewhere else recently too — that gay men are presumed to be female-friendly. I remember when gay men were presumed to hate women. When did that flip?

I got to that first link via Instapundit, who observes that "it’s often the gay men who are leading the way." The way... where?

Out of whatever this "feminist fog" is, I guess. I'm going to have to read Frantzen's post....

Frantzen uses the term to refer to "the sour mix of victimization and privilege that makes up modern feminism and that feminists use to intimidate and exploit men." So it's not feminism, per se, but the form it has taken recently and the way it's currently being used. Ironically, Frantzen is assuming the victim position to fight his purported oppressors, the sad new substitute for fighting fire with fire.

Men today live in femfog, a thick mist of anti-male propaganda. 

Help! I'm trapped in a mist!

The man has visualized the oppressor as a low-hanging cloud.

Many men don’t know how to fight it and some don’t even realize that they are fogged up. 

You know, I take metaphor seriously. In my mind, fighting a cloud looks very silly.

"It's absurd to say [Ben Carson is] 'blaming the victims.'"

"He's either right or wrong about what a victim should do in such a situation. That depends only on whether his strategy would actually be effective, not whether he's 'blaming the victims.'"

The blaming-the-victims concept has grown ridiculously beyond its proper place.

We need to stand up and not be victims of the fear of being accused of blaming the victims. It's one thing to be sympathetic to people who have been victimized and not to confront these individuals with our hindsight-assisted advice about what they could have done to avoid injury. It's quite another to stifle creative thinking about what we can do in emergencies that might arise in the future.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read My Beloved World.

In a piece titled "Royalties and Teaching Help Fill Bank Accounts of Justices," the NYT reports:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not report any book earnings in 2013, though she received nearly $2 million in advances in 2012 for her memoir. Sales may not have exceeded the advances.

Oh, really?

How many copies of the book "My Beloved World" would need to be sold to cover a $2 million advance?

Is it ridiculous to think that such a book would sell that much? Maybe not. Look: It sits atop Amazon's "Best Sellers in Hispanic & Latino Biographies" list. Doesn't it fit the agenda of public schools that have been assigning "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" all these years?

I'm thinking about "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," not because of the recent death of the author, Maya Angelou, but because there was a post up at Andrew Sullivan's place yesterday titled "Do Critics Really Matter?," which quotes a Evgenia Peretz Vanity Fair piece about Donna Tartt's book "The Goldfinch":

When is it okay to say "I know you feel that you’re a victim... If you would be more careful, maybe you wouldn’t be victimized as frequently"?

Will we ever get back to old-school victim-blaming?

The quote is from Claire McCaskill.

The context is of course nothing anywhere near advising women to take precautions and learn how to defend against sexual assaults, which is why I stripped out the context to expose the abstract concept of demanding that people activate themselves to deflect the offenses of others.

The actual context is Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has talked about products on his TV show but doesn't (he says) authorize the use of his name, his image, or his quotes as these products are marketed. He testified this week at a Senate hearing on weight-loss scams, like green coffee extract, which Dr. Oz called "the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat." Asked "why you need to say this stuff [when] you know it’s not true," Dr. Oz said something inane about challenging the "orthodoxy" of scientifically tested medicine with "alternative medical therapies," which he likened to "the power of prayer." He offered people hope, he insisted, and he said he doesn't make money on the sale of these products:

"I do not endorse any products or receive any money from any products that are sold... I have never allowed my image to be used in any ad."

Claire McCaskill, the Democratic Missouri senator who chaired the hearing, was not having any of that. “I know you feel that you’re a victim,” she said. “If you would be more careful, maybe you wouldn’t be victimized as frequently.”

This hardcore resistance to the plea of victimhood is context-specific for McCaskill, who has vigilantly policed statements about women and rape. Remember, she won reelection in Missouri by demolishing Todd Akin over something inept he said about rape.

"Female journalists... can get away with explicitly sexist attacks on their male colleagues."

"Last August, after getting into an on-air spat about U.S.–Russian relations with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, New Republic senior editor Julia Ioffe penned an article titled 'Dear Lawrence O’Donnell, Don’t Mansplain to Me About Russia.' In January, Marjorie Ingalls, a columnist for the online Jewish magazine Tablet, derided male reviewers who were insufficiently impressed by Disney’s latest animated feature 'Frozen' as 'boys' who miss the film’s girl-power message because they are 'writing with their penises.'"

So writes Cathy Young... with her... computer...  in Reason, in a piece called "Is There a Cyber War on Women?" 

Wouldn't it be fun to use such casually absurd and unfair literary fillips when writing about women? But you'd get in trouble. The feminists would be on your case. I'd say about that: 1. Mockery of the group that's been, traditionally, subordinated feels different and is going to be disapproved of long after many or most people are ready to say we've reached the condition of equality, 2. Mockery of the traditionally up group — males, white people, etc. — acknowledges their power and doesn't feel subordinating, so it actually does seem like fun, 3. Men (and white people) can put their efforts into claiming victimhood and insisting that we respect their dignity by refraining from sexist tropes like "writing with their penises," but 4. When all the writers submit to the calls for civility and treating everyone — including the powerful — with respect and gender-and-color neutrality, we will all be less free and more bored.

There's a lot more at Cathy Young's article, including this paragraph that mentions me:

While the political blogosphere, like punditry in more traditional media venues, skews male for many complicated reasons, the female presence in the new media is strong and thriving. Currently, the top-rated blog according to Technorati is the female-headed Huffington Post and the most popular independent, one-person blog belongs to University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse. Althouse’s take on the issue of woman abuse online can be summed up as “report serious threats to the cops; otherwise, grow a tough skin.”

"A somewhat dismissive response."

Instapundit says, somewhat dismissively. 

I suspect he wouldn't want to hear my truly dismissive response, but if you search the comments at my somewhat dismissive response... and over here... you can extrapolate what it would be. I'll cherry-pick some clues as to what I would say if I chose to go hard-core on this subject.

"There are not many groups of people that can get a meeting with any senator they want, whenever they want."

"These are smart, articulate people, who don’t have a scintilla of Washington about them... But they virtually cannot be denied a meeting."

Victimhood has its privileges.

IN THE COMMENTS: rhhardin writes: "Mitchell and Webb the victim's opinion story questioned." Great link!