Comments on: Anti-Feminism AND Paranoia!

By: orange

orange — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:41:52 +0000

Ah, I sent her a thank-you note, letting her know that since she’s invented an anti-feminist theory so stupid it refutes itself; I’ll have that much more time to spend on my pro-choice activism.

Tin. Foil. Hat.

By: kate

kate — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 03:45:08 +0000

I would tend to agree with Doc Science and David on the possible mental health issues connection with this woman. I wonder if the manuscript came in a bunch of well-worn spiral bound notebooks with the writing varying from all caps about an eighth of an inch high to passages in cursive about two inches high, with many many exclamation points and ‘quote’ marks thrown in like pepper in biscuit gravy.

Of the many pearls there to pick, I find this really evident that this woman truly has not only a weak grasp on reality, but knows absolutely nothing about that which she speaks:

The mental health complex has now arrived in every American school, and they are now arriving in America’s daycare centers. The main impetus for the mental health “advocates” is to screen and profile America’s families to see if they are religious, procreating, and if they are mainstreaming into new government citizens.

In the world I live in children suffer and often die of abuse and neglect because underfunded protective agencies haven’t the resources to do their job. In my world, sidewalk repair and sports arenas can easily trump funding for even basic community mental health outreach. Methinks Ms. Levant serves as proof of that.

By: KH

KH — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 21:30:06 +0000

OK, a disorientated, eldery remnant of the conspiracist fringe of the mid-century right. Her themes – fear of communism, internationalism, the UN, cosmopolitan elites, financial capital, Jews (not just a gratuitous slur: Google her & follow the links), public education, psychiatry, floridation, precious bodily fluids, etc. – seem as remote as the 14th century, even to contemporary rightists, but lost souls like her were the raw material from which a governing political movement was constructed. How we got from people like her to George W Bush is a big part of recent US political history. Her version of lunacy will die with her generation, but presumably she didn’t outsource her own reproduction. Q: How are her children’s politics continuous with hers, & how have they changed?

By: bmc90

bmc90 — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:39:29 +0000

I know this is just a minor chunk in the entire pile of vomit, but I can’t stop laughing at the outsourcing female functions. I guess she took her own advice and never took a history class. Historians of the middle ages document wet nursing as a widespread profession used by all above the lowest classes, and even when my mom was growing up in the south, nursing your own children was considered low class. It was considered “white” and higher class to be so thin and delicate that one did not really have enough of her own milk. And I guess she’s never heard of a governess or nanny either (oh yeah – didn’t George Bush have one?) or the common practice of apprenticing out especially male children to learn a trade, which involved them leaving home at 12 or so (see the historians of the Middle Ages again). By all accounts, civilization in the south my mother was raised in should have come to a screeching halt because my grandmother outsourced childcare and housework by paying a black person a few dollars a week so she could go teach and support her kids as a widow, and so did all her friends who were not in such dire financial straights, because actually washing your own dishes was well, not white people’s work. Now I guess it’s not men’s work so we have to come up with a big raft of BS to support THAT point fo view. Lovely how easy it is to turn a blind eye to recent American history, and the history of the rest of Western Civilization.

By: David

David — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 17:38:37 +0000

No, you can’t diagnose schizophrenia from a single piece of writing – but certainly this article is one bit of evidence towards such a diagnosis. I had the unhappy experience a few years ago of watching a close friend descend into schizophrenia – and Levant’s ideation is too close for comfort.

By: zuzu

zuzu — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:56:29 +0000

Do they not recognize medical insanity when they see it?

You know, I wouldn’t be down with an actual psychiatrist making diagnoses of mental illness based on writings or public statements without an examination (yes, I’m looking at you, Charles Krauthammer). Certainly not an editor. Though an editor could certainly bounce her for incoherence and poor writing skills.

By: Doctor Science

Doctor Science — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:52:16 +0000

The question, then, is “who is *American Chronicle* and why are they publishing someone who is *literally* insane?” Do they not recognize medical insanity when they see it? Are they medically insane themselves? Have they grown so used to rhetorically flinging “crazy talk” about that when someone shows up who is seriously in need of medication they don’t recognize it?

By: zuzu

zuzu — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:55:36 +0000

Be that as it may, her article has appeared in a right-wing publication and vomits up a lot of the same themes that have been put forth by the right wing noise machine recently. Really, the only one she’s missing is oxytocin.

By: Doctor Science

Doctor Science — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:04:11 +0000

I don’t actually see much point in talking about this woman’s politics, because she’s clearly a schizophrenic who refuses medication — the combination of wide-ranging conspiracy theories, over-complex vocabulary, and putting scare quotes around “mental health” looks fairly diagnostic to me. (disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor) I also think it likely that she was told not to get pregnant while on her meds. Her book comes from a vanity press, as well.

This kind of thing is only interesting if the schizophrenic person picks up followers or supporters who do not have major chemical inbalances in their brains. Until that happens, I pity Levant more than anything else — schizophrenia is a real, serious illness, and I truly do not think she’s morally responsible for everything she’s saying.

By: ako

ako — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 05:33:53 +0000

The main impetus for the mental health “advocates” is to screen and profile America’s families to see if they are religious, procreating, and if they are mainstreaming into new government citizens. All children who fall short are then redirected to the mental health industries, which then feed the big pharma complex, which 1) drugs children, and 2) determines who will be “fit” to reproduce in the future

So the government’s supposed to make sure we do practice religion, procreate, and become new government citizens? Or that we don’t do any of that? And are these nefarious mental health “advocates” trying to drug children into or out of religion and procreation? Personally, I’m for the whole “children not procreating” thing. I’m also intensely confused trying to decrypt that paragraph.

I think I figured out the whole dialectic thing, though. Dialectic means Communist, and Communist means bad. So talking about the dialectic means that feminism is evil Communism.

Do I win?