A headline from Fox News:

 Playboy model Crystal Hefner admits she was never 'in love' with late husband Hugh Hefner.

Gosh, what a shocker. 

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLV. At War With Nature and the Metaphysical

At war with God. 

We are at war with God.

Joseph Stalin, caught in tape commenting to Molotov.

I don't pay any attention to the Grammy's anymore.  I never much did. Anymore, however, nobody pays much attention to them.  The same has become true of all the other big awards in entertainment that once meant so much.  Now, heavily politicized in a PC fashion, they're really not very interesting and people pretty much ignore them.

Therefore, I ignored the flap over Sam Smith's performance when it came out, even though with Douthat commented on it I started to take a little note.  But then I noticed something else.

It's no secret that a certain segment of Western, liberal, society is at war with our existential nature, which calls into mind, for a believer, Stalin's quote.  And well it should. Communism claimed at first to act in accordance with man's nature, but soon saw it that it couldn't force the nature that it wished for, so it decided to make a new Communist man that was the antithesis to real men in some ways.  It failed.

That's what we have going on now.

Sam Smith is a homosexual.  While Pope Francis is certainly correct that making homosexuality illegal, as it actually is in much of the world, is wrong, celebrating it is nonsensical, just as celebrating hetrosexuality would also be.  It is a deviation from the genetic norm. In spite of that, however, and particularly post Obergefel, now a person can hardly even point that out.

And as people who were well attune to development and trends pointed out, the Obergefel decision was going to inevitably lead to a full scale assault on normality and nature itself, which has busted out in the transgenderism craze.  It was claimed that this would not occur, but with the guardrails down, it pretty much had to.  Not surprisingly, he collaborates with German songwriter Tim Petras, a man who was chemically and probably surgically mutilated as a very early teen, and who goes by the name of Kim Petras and affects a female appearance.

In Smith's performance, he affected a Satanic visage and gave what can only be called an open embrace of what that entails.  Perhaps fully unwitting, Smith has exposed openly what most in his camp have hidden, perhaps for the better.

And by so doing, he joins Stalin in that category. For all his defects, Stalin was a genius and his comment was not only open, I don't believe it to be metaphorical.  At least he had the courage to admit what he was up to.

Of course, like all such efforts, it failed.

It's worth noting that this argument still prevails even for those who claim not to believe or doubt.  Most of the general fundamentals of Christianity in regard to men, women, and what they do and interact, are not only Christian principles, they're principles of every religion, and exhibited in every natural society.  That's why, we'd note, that Communism works no better in North Korea than East Germany.  It's contrary to human nature, as is what these performers are exhibiting.  

You can be at war with nature, but you won't win.

It's interesting to note. . .

Related to the above, that in the commentary in Playboy documentary that aired one of the models flat out stated that she believed Hugh Hefner to be possessed, and that a girl who was a centerfold or "bunny", I can't recall which painted something essentially stating the same thing prior to her committing suicide.

It was really Kinsey, and his bogus report, that started us down this road, although I've blamed Hugh Hefner, justifiably, a lot.

During World War Two, Alfred Kinsey, with colleagues, was busy studying the sexual habits of perverts who were incarcerated, resulting in a text entitled Sexual Behavior In The Human Male, which would have been better entitled Sexual Habits of Incarcerated Perverts Who Couldn't Be Drafted.  It's one of two examples of 1940s "studies" being really results driven.  I.e, a report that isn't a study, but a conclusion being justified subsequently by a report, the other being SLAM Marshall's Men Under Fire.

Both texts have done a lot of damage.

Taken objectively, it turns out that really gross perverts act perversely, which didn't stop Kinsey and his associates from actually arranging some acts that should be regarded as solicitation, or prostitution, or just weird.  Anyhow, their conclusions were erroneous, as is now well known, but so damaging and influential, they're still regarded as persuasive.

In reality, the overwhelming majority of men and women actually had very limited numbers of, as we like to say now, "partners".  Most men and women had no sexual experience at all of the really intimate type until they were married, and it was universally regarded, irrespective of not everyone keeping the standard, that sex outside of marriage was morally wrong.

Enter perversion fan Kinsey and this began to weaken, followed by Hugh Hefner.  Not too surprisingly, we are at where we now are, at war with nature.

99 Luftballons

The entire Chinese balloon flap has been very interesting.  I'm sure that we're not going to know the truth of it for many years.

What we know is only the basics. The Chinese have been flying spy balloons over the United States, and in this case, although barely noted, over Canada as well.  The choice of the two nations together may be simply atmospheric, perhaps that's how you get a balloon over the continental US, or it may be strategic, that flies it over and through NORAD.

It would not appear that the NORAD, American or Canadian response has been stellar. This was apparently, if we're being told the truthy, and we very well might not be, the first time a PRC spy balloon was detected, which if true is a shocking admission of a major NORAD failure.  And the entire story of waiting it so long to shoot it down doesn't pass the smell test at all.  This thing could have been dropped anywhere from the Aleutians to Wyoming harmlessly, but wasn't.  The story about not wanting to damage stuff on the ground simply isn't credible.  They were probably more likely to hit a boater where they took it down than they were to hit a human over much of its course.

Which means somebody is probably fibbing.

We now know that U2s accompanied the balloon nearly its entire route over the US. The high altitude spy plane was spying on the balloon, likely picking up anything it emitted, and perhaps messing with its own emissions.  That alone may be sufficient justification, justification that can't be admitted, for not dropping it until we did.

Chances are good, I'd note, that U2s are flying near the one now in the Southern Hemisphere.

The big question is why are the Chinese doing this?

Well, one reason is that they got away with it so far, and it did a good job of testing NORAD.  We overflew quite a few places with U2s until we simply couldn't, and it was never our intent to test air responses in doing it. We probably also intruded on Soviet waters with submarines for various spying reasons, and the Soviets and Russians probably still do that in some locations.

Nations spy.

But spying in this manner is really interesting.

They may have been able to pick up a lot of electronic data from the ground that a satellite simply couldn't.  And, importantly for a nation that is preparing for war with the United States, and it is, testing NORAD made sense.

A new Cold War?

This question came up on all the weekend shows. Are we in a new Cold War.  Nobody would say yes.

Well, we obviously are.

One analysis, that the level of trade was too high to support that claim, is nonsense. We didn't have a lot of trade with the Eastern Bloc countries, as they had nothing we really wanted to buy at the time.  China has been different, and intentionally so. The real model is the trade level between the Western combatants in World War One, prior to the war.  It was enormous, none of which kept the war from happening.

And this war will go hot.

Are the Chinese going to attack Taiwan?

Probably. 

Well, rather, they will probably try. 

I'd give it about 70% chance of happening by mid-decade.  I.e., we're close.

It'll also be an epic fail.

Crossing the Taiwan Strait will prove beyond them, their casualties will be massive, and their government will fall.

Liars.

Fox news crew with the network.

To nobody's really surprise, unless they chose to be completely self-deluded, Fox News personnel privately acknowledged that they knew Trump hadn't won the 2020 election.  Indeed, privately, some, notably Tucker Carlson, blasted him.

In spite of this, they just keep on keeping on.  If Fox had any honor, all of these people would go, and go right now.

But they won't.  And they'll just keep shoving the crap they're shoveling.

Lying about being Jewish

It's interesting that there is now some political cache, apparently, to being Jewish.

We've long had Jewish politicians in the United States, and even before that.  Francis Salvador, for example, served in the South Carolina provincial legislature at the time of the Revolution and hew as Jewish.  But it can't be doubted, additionally, that being Jewish was once a serious hindrance to obtaining higher office.  While Salvador was undoubtedly an exception, by and large successful 19th Century Jewish politicians in the US, and there were some, came from districts where their constituents at least partially had the some background.

Exceptions started in the 19th Century, however.  Portland, Oregon had back to back Jewish mayors starting in 1869.  Washington Bartlett was the Jewish Governor of California starting in 1887.  And so on.

Be that as it may, Jewish Americans being quiet about their religious identity, in some instances, was pretty common well into the 20th Century.  Indeed, most Jewish actors in American films changed their names, if they had a name that might identify them as being Jewish.

Now that's changed so much that we apparently have two freshman members of Congress claiming Jewish identify when they have none. George Santos is one, and now Anna Paulina Luna is another.  Luna claimed to be raised as a Messianic Jew and that she’s part Ashkenazi Jewish, but has now converted fully to Christianity.

In actuality, she's always been a Christian and one of her grandfathers, a German immigrant, served i the German Army during World War Two.

What's up with this?

Last Prior Edition:

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist. XLIV. Pope Francis writes Fr. James Martin, S.J.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgiest Part XXVIII. The juvenile or nearly so femme fatale edition. Plus, the example of monarchy, Robbing trains, Expats and politics, M&M's, Tucker Carson and Carson Tucker.

Prince Andrew stripped of military titles and duties

I don't really know what his duties actually were, but whatever they were, he no longer has them.  Nor does he have his military titles any longer.

This, of course, because he's been sued by Virginia Giuffre who alleges that he sexually abused her, when she was a minor, age 17, and part of the creepy sexual net that Jeffrey Epstein had going.

By all accounts, Giuffre lead a horrific early life, having been a sexual abuse victim before that period even.  Following prior horrors at age 14, she was reunited with her father, who worked at Mar-A-Lago. . . yes that Mar-A-Lago. She was found there by Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein's procurer.  She claims she was supplied by Epstein to Prince Andrew.

We should be careful not to assume that Giuffre is telling the truth.  Her story has changed over time, and she also claims that Epstein supplied her to Alan Dershowitz, which I find unlikely for some reason.  Anyhow, she does show up in a photo with the Prince, and the fact that he wasn't able to get the lawsuit she's filed in New York dismissed was apparently the last straw for the Royal Family.

Anyhow, this story is interesting for a couple of reasons.

One thing is, I think, that it shows the Royal Family, indeed all Royal Families, just need to go. They're beyond being an anachronism. What purpose do they really serve?  Wrapping the whole thing up with the UK, which itself is becoming a bit frayed at the margins, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II seems like a fitting and dignified ending to an institution that, frankly, has frequently been undignified.

On that, followers of certain lines of thought on Reddit will frequently find really radical traditionalist arguing for the return of monarchy pretty much everywhere, often stating that it establishes as set of (Christian) values for a nation.  Apparently, such people are wholly ignorant of real monarchies.

If Prince Andrew did bed Virginia Giuffre, and I don't know that he did, it would have been wrong on every level, but it would have been pretty much par for the course for the male members of royal families throughout history.  Finding a King, for example, that didn't have courtesans in addition to a wife is, well, difficult.  The upper classes always knew this.  The peasantry didn't, all the time, except when they did, and then they tended not to care too much, as monarchy was relatively irrelevant to their real lives.

What would Alfred the Great think?  Well, while Alfred married once and had all legitimate children, he probably would have found Andrew's conduct rather the norm for princes.

Other creepy groomers

I've never heard of Sondra Theodore, but apparently she was one of Hugh Hefner's various concubines, oops, um, prostitutes, . . . um, oh, uh "girlfriends". That's right, girlfriends.

Oh heck, concubines.

It's sort of the Epstein story, and sort of not.  Basically, he started . . . well. . .when she was 19.  He was 50.

That's creepy, but she was an adult.  She can't really complain that much, as basically, well, she was prostituting herself to Hefner, like many others. She was an adult, albeit a young one, which Giuffre was not.

It does get creepier, however, as apparently Hefner, one of the architects of the destruction of the moral society, used her as a procurer for additional concubines. . um, prostitutes, or whatever, um bedmates, for her perversions.

Should we feel sorry for her?

As a human, certainly.  Indeed, we should pray for her redemption, which hopefully has arrived.  And, in the Catholic tradition and moral thought, even for Hefner's, which in no way reduces the path of destroyed lives, and indeed destroyed souls, he left in his disgusting wake.  We may be in a period of reckoning, but we have a long ways to go before Hefner's damaging legacy is in the historical dustbin, as opposed to Hefner himself, who is, and his instrument of destruction, the print edition of Playboy.

Speaking of self-promotion through photographic concubinage. . . 

Not Theodore, or Jenner.

Kylie Jenner reaches 300,000,000 viewers on Instagram

That's a lot of  views.

They aren't viewing her for her vast intellect, although I don't doubt that she has one.

More particularly, that's a lot of cheesecake views.  Jenner is, really, a modern pinup and a famous one.

At least she isn't 17.

Or 19.

But the image she portrays isn't exactly of a mature women either, now is it.

This cast of characters

May we say it?

Ooo, ick.

Hefner, Trump, Cosby, Prince Andrew.  

Blech.

All men with reprehensible relationships with women to some degree, although in fairness Prince Andrew, at least so far, has the least icky, assuming the latest accusations do not prove to be true.

And all celebrated and powerful, and to some degree, save for Andrew, still celebrated.

The Train Robbers

Thieves are robbing Union Pacific trains in Los Angeles to such an extent that . . .

 the railroad is considering ceasing to serve the city.

News footage shows the rail line littered with the packages of thousands of stolen items.

Let's admit it, Los Angeles is simply beyond repair.

California darned near is.  The Golden State, after decades of financial problems and after decades of unrestrained population growth, ended up just where you'd think a locality featuring those things would.

Los Angeles, as we recognize it, dates back to a Catholic mission founded there in 1771, which was founded by St. Junipero Serra.  Like all things moral, he's under attack in California today, which is part of the reason that California in general is the titanic mess it is.  In 1841 it was made the capital of Alta California.  It was one of California's premier cities for decades.

World War Two victory parade featuring Californian George S. Patton.

Hollywood is one of its suburbs.

It's all a mess now, as is California in general. And because California is an overgrown bloated festering sinkhole, its population with means, which is much of it, is leaving the state.  In the last census, California lost population.  This is a problem for the rest of the country, as its fleeing residents tend to bring California with them, wherever they go.

Expats and politics

In  the state's politics, I frankly wonder to what extent that we're hearing the voice of expats.  More specifically, a lot of the current political tone doesn't resemble the sort of tone Wyoming used to have.

Wyoming's politics have traditionally been unique.  They've been conservative in a quasi libertarian way but not populist.  The state had a strong, if minority, Democratic Party up until the 1990s.  The ethos of the state tended to be "I don't care what you are doing as long as you don't ask me to approve of it".

Things have really changed.

The state's politics always tend to show some influence of recent migrants when they swing in, in numbers.  Usually they swing back out, in numbers as well.  It'll be interesting to see what happens as oil starts to wind down here, which it will, but at any rate, you would think we'd be seeing some result of that exodus now. 

Of course, we're really not for a variety of reasons, one of which was COVID.  While I hate to admit it, the pandemic brought in a population that sort of followed in the wake of and added to the strong southern influences that oil booms have tended to.  This has brought in the new populist politics and it's taken over the local GOP.

Or maybe it's just the times.

The state has always featured a lot of near state immigration.  You don't have to go too far to find people who are from the neighboring states.  But it is the case that in recent years things have been different.  You'll run into people who will proudly proclaim, "I'm from California and . . . " emphasizing how they left the state where they made their money and lives, and fled it to come here.  

Economic boosters often fail to realize what this sort of thing can mean.  People like to complain about what Colorado has become, for instances, but Colorado campaigned to become that.

One interesting undercurrent to this is that the state has experienced its third wave of Hispanic immigration, or fourth really.  The first Hispanic immigrants came into the state from New Mexico in the 1840s to work for the Army as builders near Ft. Laramie.  They stayed and farmed, but for some reason their farms on the Mexican Hills near there didn't establish a permanent population.  

The second wave did, however, with that brining in a group of New Mexican Hispanics who worked in the rail industry and shepherding in from the 30s through the 50s.  Their descendants are still here.  The next group came in during the 70s during the first big wave of illegal immigration, although not all of them were illegal by any means.  Many of them left, but some stayed.  And then there's the current wave that has been going on for the past fifteen years or so.

This population is demographically significant, and there's no reason to believe that its Republican.  It'd be a natural Democratic demographic, but the Wyoming Democratic Party has become so small that it tends to be populated only by WASP leftists anymore, who can't really seem to actually see Hispanic voters.  They instead tend to imagine the entire world as if it's Greenwich Village for some reason.  This will become obvious, again, when the Democrats finally start to nominate some candidates for the 2022 election, as they'll all be white, probably, and at least one of them will surely check all the current WASP Left boxes.

A smart Democratic Party would pick up where Lynette Grey Bull left off and try to test the field a bit with a candidate who reflects a broader base.  Fremont County, due to the Reservation, retains a real Democratic Party.  If that party reached out to the now statistically significant Hispanic community, which probably is a little scared with all the rhetoric it may be hearing from the more hard right elements of the  GOP, it might be able to capture a surprising number of voters.  The candidate would have to cross over to capture moderate Republicans as well, but the GOP might aid it in doing that. A party that claims Liz Cheney is a "RINO" is doing a good job of that already.

Cement structures at Ft. Laramie, built by migrants from New Mexico.

M&M's

The Mars candy of fame, which was battle born, has caused a flap by changing the footgear of its cute cartoon version of itself.  Or at least the footgear of one of the cartoon figures.

Forrest Mars Sr. got the idea for M&M's from Smarties, a British candy that was popular in the Spanish Civil War for the same reason that M&M's are, their shell keeps them from being a gooey mess.  The first big customer for the 1940 introduced candy was the U.S. Army.

At some point in the last few decades, the company introduced advertising that featured talking cartoon M&M's.  A female M&M was among them, wearing go-go boots.  Now she's going to wear tennis shoes, in an effort to update the character and be more inclusive.

Of course, in an era when everything is deemed to have a massive sexual and political meaning, this has caused a flap.  It's been commented on by, who else, Tucker Carson.

American soldier giving candy to French girls, July 4, 1944, when candy had no overt gender or political message.

Journalism?

I had to look up Tucker Carson to try to figure out why he's such a big deal.  I still don't know, although his bio read is a little wild.

Journalism, and by that I mean journalism everywhere, has always had its personalities and wild characters, so much of the "decline in journalism" commentary is actually wrong.  It's a return to its status quo ante.  After all, it isn't as if the drawing that Frederic Remington submitted of a Spanish officer detaining a stripped Cuban woman was drawn from life.

In this, however, I think the Press has followed the same track as the law.  By the early 20th Century the institution was disgusted with its own conduct, as the law was with it, and worked to reform itself. By the teens, it was already doing better than it had in the late 19th Century. By World War Two it very much was, and when television came on, and we had only three networks, the news was presented in a very dignified manner.

Well, cable television and then the internet ended that, and we returned to the days when you bought your journalism from somebody who you know is reliably likely to have a more extreme version of your own opinion.  The Carson's and Maddow's are good examples of that.  And it dovetails the decline in legal professionalism perfectly.

Pitty poor Carson Tucker, an individual with the same names, but in reverse order.  He's a baseball layer with the Arizona Complex League Guardians.

Carson's father was, for a time, a gonzo journalist, of which this is the symbol.

Maybe the biggest unanswered question about the Harvey Weinstein story is. . .

how can all this creepy conduct go on for years before somebody takes notice?

Sort of reminds me of the Bill Cosby story, maybe.

Shoot, on that latter one, even Hugh Ossified Freak Hefner came out with "I'm shocked, shocked that somebody who would come to my Creep Parties would be a creep".  Really Hugh?  Wasn't the entire enterprise basically dedicated to creepy conduct? Come on.

I suppose, as the Cosby story hasn't played all the way out yet, we should leave some room for the chance that he's not really guilty, although by now it seems pretty obvious that his personal conduct didn't quite match that of Dr. Huxtable's anyhow.

Now Weinstein I'd never heard of, but it seems he's a pretty widely celebrated movie industry figure and was responsible for some pretty significant works.  It seems that his aggressive sexual conduct was pretty widely known in that industry however. 

Which leads me to this.  It's easy enough to do the dog pile thing now and decry, "what a creep". But as widely known as this apparently was, why didn't somebody say something before?

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Ross Douthart of the New York Times says what I did, more bluntly.

It's not everyday that I beat Ross Douthat of the New York Times to the punch, or press, or whatever the proper phrase would be, but with this entry below:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

I did.

Indeed, the title of my entry, one of the original Latin versions of the phrase counseling that a person not speak ill of the dead (literally, "of the dead not ill, only good") was informed from the same phrase that Douthat's is, which was Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner.

I beat Douthat by only one day, I'll note, and while I thought my entry risked being too blunt, I can't hold a candle to Douthat in those regards.  He noted:

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

Right on Ross!

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing rocks at Hugh Hefner . . . I'm not alone in that.

Just a couple of days ago I posted this about the passing of Hugh Hefner:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh:   Yes, this is the third time I've run this photo.  I just like it.  Two young couples.  Migrant farm workers in Louisiana and thei...

Folks who may have thought, and probably still do, that I was a bit off base by going after the recently departed Hefner and essentially condemning him as one of the worst products of the 20th Century may be disturbed to know that I wasn't the only one.  Of course, I'm cheered to know that myself.  Maybe there's some hope out there.

One of Time's columnists, in fact, did much the same thing.  Op ed writer  Jill Filipovic, who shares two of my three vocations with me, did the same but from a female prospective, starting off her article with:

Hugh Hefner loved his things: his silk bathrobes, his palatial mansion, his vintage cars. And of course, he would be quick to say, his girls — those interchangeable blondes all below a certain age, with their Barbie-shaped bodies and smiles that never moved their eyes.

Hefner claimed to "love women." He certainly loved to look at women, or at least the type of women who fit a very particular model. He loved to make money by selling images of women to other men who "love women." He certainly met a lot of women, had sex with a lot of women, talked to a lot of women. But I'm not sure Hefner ever really knew any of us. And he certainly did not love us.

And it goes on from there.  Well worth reading.

She notes:

What Hefner and Playboy never did was present women as human, or consider us anything like men. Hefner made female sex objects more relatable and accessible — the Playboy centerfold was the girl next door, not the famous movie actress —but this wasn't so much an elevation as a downward shift: social permission for men to look at all women through the zipper in their jeans, and not even bother to pretend it was otherwise.

Quite right.

Slaves and Objects

I've run a series of items recently that have been probably somewhat calculated to offend. Well, as some say, if you aren't offending somebody with your commentary, you are probably doing no good.

The first of these would be the one that dealt with the decline in the standard of dress.  The second one had to do with how women are increasingly treated like objects.  Whether these topics offend or not, they apparently do interest people, as the the dress story, for example, had way more hits in a day than most of my entries here every have, ever.  It isn't in the top ten list yet, but if the trend continues, it might make it.

The reason that some might find these offensive is that people don't like to be told what to wear, they don't like being told how to behave, they don't like being told that something they're doing may be having a negative impact on others, and people generally don't like bad news if they're somehow participating in it.  I haven't received any negative comments so far, but most people don't comment anyhow.

Okay, so that's how I probably offered offense.

Now, I'll increase the offense, going back specifically to my comments on viewing women as objects, and how marketing and magazines have caused us to do that.  I'm going to relate that behavior as being in the same category as what ISIL is doing to women in Iraq and Syria.

And what is that?

Well, mass assault and the most primitive horrific slavery imaginable.  Field hands in the Old South were subjected to horrors no less unimaginable to what is happening to non Muslim women in those suffering lands.

Now, no doubt, up in arms, people are saying "are you saying that's the same thing as my buying Old Ossified Freak's Rag?

No, I'm not, but I'm saying that those rags swim in the same pool.  Maybe in the shallow end, but in the same pool nonetheless.

Hugh Ossified Freak's genius in taking what was clearly trash and marketing it as something that should be a male dominated norm managed basically to enormously expand the over the tracks part of the mental city, so that all girls ended up living there to some extent.  Prior to the publication, there were women in the occupation of vending their services, but over time, Hugh put them all there, except even the market place aspect of that exchange disappeared, and it became an expectation, wanted or not.  When that occurs, the value indeed is gone, and we've seen the results.  Women not only have been personally objectified in this fashion, but now their image is everywhere, offering the same, in support of the sale of everything.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his adherents share that view, except that their view of their right of expectation is modified to include only non Muslim women.  They're acting physically on their view, over thousands of non Muslim women in the region, and as we now know al-Baghdadi himself did so with American Kayla Mueller. The Mueller story is tragic in the extreme, but it's shared by numerous nameless women and girls who have been reduced to slavery by their ISIL masters.

The common thread here is how these women are viewed.  In spite of its claims to later be in the forefront of "liberation" of women, Hugh's rag held them out, and still holds them out, as toys for men.  Any man who bought the magazines was entitled to view the women featured in them in the same physical fashion that ISIL's combatants view non Muslim women.  Indeed, the secular Hugh was offering a paper variant of what the religious ISIL combatants feel that they will gain in the next world, and endless supply of exactly what's portrayed in the magazines.  Indeed, a critical element of those magazines is that their portrayal, at least at first, did not portray the subjects as fallen, as prior magazines had, but rather the opposite. Special, in more ways than one, just for you.  

The sole real distinction, therefore, is that the creepy ossified purveyor of the print version of this view in the United States, and now around the globe, takes a violently secular view of things.  He's hedonistic and in it for right now, and his justification for the objectification is accordingly not only thin, but darned near non existent.  It's the most primitive justification imaginable, "I'm a man and I get what I want."  Al-Baghdadi and his adherents, however, justify their violence in this area upon the Koran, which, no matter what its apologist may claim, specifically allows the campaigning Islamic fighter to do just what they're doing, take slaves and do what you will with them.

Now, I'm not claiming, anywhere, that the majority of people who have shoved cash at Hugh all these years have done something intentionally to enslave women. But I am saying that the impact of it is wrong and it serves to reduce them to objects.  I'm also not saying that the majority of Muslims now, or at any time, have held this view about assault. Indeed, I'm confident that even in the periodic episodes of violent Islamic expansion, most don't.  But I am saying that this stuff is going on right now, and that its symptomatic of a view of women that's simply intolerable in this or any other age.  And, by extension, if this sort of conduct bothers a person, they ought to act up on that, whatever that means for them personally.