Author: VD

Notes from Cicero

For some time now, I have been intending to make notes on the various bits and pieces I pick up while reading and post them here for whatever edification they might happen to offer you. And I very much recommend Mahan’s two-volume Life of Nelson; unfortunately I failed to mark any of the salient points it contained while I was reading it. But here are two little things that caught my attention in my present reading, which is the first volume of Cicero’s extant letters:

1. Those who believe in the New Economics aka Keynesianism will find it somewhat difficult to explain how despite more than two thousand years of technological development and the advancement of economic science, interest rates are still pretty much the same. As of this week, a 30-year fixed-rate mortage is around 4.5 percent. Plus ça change….

To P. Sestius in Macedonia: “In point of fact, money is plentiful at six per cent., and the success of my measures has caused me to be regarded as a good security.”

2. Deflation has not always been considered a disastrous thing by the educated classes, at least by those not beholden to the bankers. And it is ominous to note his optimistic description of Rome and compare it to the present state of our latter-day Rome on the Potomac.

To Atticus in Epirus: In short, I was cheered to the echo. For the subject of my speech was the dignity of the senate, its harmony with the equites, the unanimity of Italy, the dying embers of the conspiracy, the fall in prices, the establishment of peace. You know my thunder when these are my themes.

Feminists discover economics

Or at least, the basic concept of supply, although they remain innocent about the consequences of its intersection with demand. It’s rather like watching monkeys figure out that the bright sparkly stuff dancing on top of the wood is hot:

“There is this notion of slut shaming in the media and it happens on a more personal level among people who shame one another. There is also something that is discussed on other websites but never in the wider media – something called slut rejection. The latter is what heterosexual men who seek a life partner supposedly engage in. I have personal experience with this. My ex did not try to shame me but upon knowing more about me, he just sort of faded away. Its so wrong that women may have to lie or not say anything and either strategy is prone to backfire. I believe that if men had less alternatives, that is if most or many women had a fruitful sexual history, then that would become the norm and therefore acceptable.”

That’s quite a remarkable statement, don’t you think? The feminist solution to slut shaming is to recruit so many women to sluthood that the supply of sexually inexperienced women will disappear. Men will have their fun in college, and when it comes time to marry, their only choice will be from among “fruitful” women. It’s interesting because it’s an acknowledgement that men can’t be rehabbed into the feminist way of thinking. The Women’s Movement tore down many walls, but the male brain is the last frontier, and the feminist siege cannot succeed in eradicating this last double standard.

As we have learned to expect, the feminist reaction to unforeseen and undesirable consequences is an intrinsically fascistic one of removing options from others rather than rethinking her assumptions. Susan Walsh’s observations of this breakthrough moment in feminist intellectual history are correct. The constant attacks by anchor-jawed, furry-armed Pandagonian warpigs on what they call “slut-shaming” is little more than an attempt to reduce the supply of sexually inexperienced competitors for long-term relationship status. Seeing that forty years of constant K-BA propaganda has barely altered the male preference for female sexual inexperience in a life-long mate, they have begun to give up on the idea of haranguing men in favor of focusing on what has been a much more successful strategy of converting young women into easily accessible sex toys.

This may sound insane given what 6,000 years of written history about civilizations and their fate, and in fact it is both insane as well as societally destructive. But one must never forget that women are not only hypergamous, they are also solipsistic. In other words, most women assume that what they believe is good for them is therefore good for society, to the extent that they even recognize the existence of any society outside of their own selves. The feminist slogan “The personal is political”, which dates back to a 1969 essay in the Feminist Revolution collection does not quite do the concept justice; “the self is society” would be a more accurate description.

This is the primary difference between a nihilistic practitioner of the crimson arts like Roissy and the feminists. The male predators recognize and accept the societal destructiveness of their attitudes and behavior. The feminists not only do not recognize their societal destructiveness, they stubbornly deny it. This is the difference between selfishness and solipsism.

Needless to say, the feminist strategy of supply restriction is doomed to failure just like every other totalitarian attack on the supply of anything that Man particularly desires. As we have seen in 30 years of war on drugs, it would not work even if it were encoded into law and utilized government force. American men are already turning to foreign women who have not been rendered less attractive to them by feminist attitudes and bestial behavior; the more successful feminists are in ruining those they consider to be their competitors, the fewer American women will find American men willing to marry them or American men they want to marry. Those who still seek to marry and are deemed marriageable by women will not come to accept hard-ridden Alpha leavings any more than they do already. Instead they will either seek out non-American women who are increasingly available to them via the Internet and immigration or they will not marry at all; there is no need to commit to a woman who has been riding the copulatory carousel when one can simply insert a quarter instead.

Mrs. Walsh’s reader is to be commended, however, for recognizing a reality that so many women still fail to recognize. Every new sexual partner taken by a woman renders her marginally less attractive to men interested in permanent commitments and reduces her potential marital value.

Why publishing deserves to die

I have repeatedly urged those who would be professional writers to pursue it as a fulfilling hobby, not a lucrative profession, because conventional publishing is a dying industry. My thesis tends to be supported by the fallout from the latest Duke scandal. Read, writer, and despair:

In the last 24 hours, we’ve received several of these types of inquiries. This is from a woman at the William Morris Endeavor agency, who requested her information because they want to represent her:

We think this thesis was GENIUS! Can you help in any way? Would be amazing & much appreciated.

I’m an editor at HarperCollins publishers, where I specialize in pop culture and entertainment books. I’m intrigued and entertained by [the writer]’s PowerPoint “f*ck list,” which is making the rounds online and am wondering if you could give me her email address or forward my note of interest to her.

At least Katie Price demonstrated that she had superlative self-marketing talent in addition to her aggressive plastic surgery and willingness to take her clothes off anytime anyone pointed a camera in her direction before being handed her book contracts. This rather unattractive young woman doesn’t even have that going for her.

Et tu, Jonah

Mr. Golberg takes an astonishing position on the Obama administration’s assertion of a right to assassinate American citizens without trial:

Some civil libertarians seem to think we can never, ever kill an American citizen without a trial by jury (and perhaps not even then). That argument would have been silly during the days of conventional warfare. Now it’s plain crazy. And the Obama administration is right. This is no job for courts. Wars and how we fight them are political decisions, properly left to Congress and the president.

Jonah should know better. He is, after all, the one who built the case against the pragmatic, “it’s just this one brick” approach of progressive totalitarianism in his very good Liberal Fascism. He further compounds his error when, after being correctly called on his erroneous reasoning by a reader, he attempts to justify his position by bringing up the example of World War II.

“Surely, “the battlefield” is a very amorphous term these days. An American fighting in Nazi uniform in 1943 could be killed and even singled out for killing without a trial by jury, or at least I think that’s the case. Awlaki — like all of al Qaeda — refuses to play by the rules even the Nazis agreed to. I’m at a loss as to why they should be rewarded for it.”

Of course, the only reason that an American fighting in Nazi uniform – more likely Wehrmacht, but never mind that – could be killed on the battlefield was because no one knew he was an American. The Constitution clearly and explicitly deals with the question of treason in time of war, which makes since because it was written by men who had recently fought in the Revolutionary War, so it is ludicrous to appeal to some pragmatic sense of sobriety and sanity and claim that it supersedes the Constitution.

Article III
[Section 3.] Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Jonah isn’t one of National Review’s Trotskyites, so it is a little disappointing to see him toeing the anti-constitutional neocon line on this issue.

The consequence of female choices

I have frequently written on the way that some women choosing to work has a negative impact on the ability of other women to choose to stay home and raise their children. Despite the fact that the economic logic behind this statement is impeccable and the reality of these consequences are inescapable, many critics, especially women, have nevertheless scoffed at this and insisted that the decision of one woman to work cannot possibly have any effect on subsequent choices available to other women.

Their economically illiterate doubts make the following comments by the author of a new feminist book blaming the lack of female executive achievement on a “culture that undervalues an entire gender” all the more ironic:

The New York Times asks about the impact of women choosing to “flee” the workforce (a loaded question), Feldt explains:

They make it harder for the rest of us to remedy the inequities that remain. We have to make young women aware of how their choices affect other women. It should be acceptable criticism to point out that, although everyone has the right to make their own life decisions, choosing to “opt out” reinforces stereotypes about women’s priorities that we’ve been working for decades to shatter, so just cut it out. And, the “individual choice” women have to become stay-at-home moms becomes precarious when they try to return to the workplace and find their earning power and options reduced. If we could see child-rearing as a necessary task and not an identity, and if we could collectively recognize that facilitating it benefits us all, we would go much further in guaranteeing women’s choices than we do when we are expected to uncritically celebrate every individual’s decisions.

The amusing thing is that while Gloria Feldt asserts “We have to make young women aware of how their choices affect other women”, she is talking about the immaterial and imaginary effect of “reinforcing stereotypes” whereas I am pointing to a material decline in real wages as well as a reduced chance to marry a man who is capable of supporting a wife and children, much less is more successful than the woman interested in him.

The Lizard Queen returns

I warned you she wasn’t finished. But Obama is:

Some called a Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton pairing the “Dream Ticket” in 2008. It didn’t happen. But what about 2012? “It’s on the table,” veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward told CNN’s John King in an interview Tuesday on John King, USA. “Some of Hillary Clinton’s advisers see it as a real possibility in 2012.”

Hillary is not going after Biden, she’s going after Obama. This is just a strategic ploy to get her name back in play. Then, after the Democrats lose both the House and Senate in November – and probably even if they just lose the House in an embarrasing manners – Team Clinton will begin playing upon the fears of the surviving politicos that they will lose their jobs in 2012 if they are forced to run with the weight of the Obama administration dragging them down.

Forget 2016. She wants to run in 2012. But she can’t do so without pushing Obama aside. And given what a vindictive bitch she is, the thought of humiliating the man who robbed her of what would have been a historic presidency, and more importantly, an easy walk to a historic presidency, has great appeal to her. The main problem with this scenario is that even if Rodham-Clinton successfully convinces the Democratic superdelegates to dump Obama, she can’t seriously hope to win unless the Republican leadership provokes the Tea Party into supporting a third-party candidate by arranging the nomination of another Dole/McCain RINO.

And they would never be dumb enough to do that, would they?

Worst boss ever

I blame a deeply homophobic society. Clearly poor Mr. al Saud snapped under the pressure of the repression, prejudice and social rejection he had experienced:

A gay Saudi prince beat and strangled his male servant to death in a frenzied sexual assault at their luxury London hotel suite, a court heard on Tuesday. Saud Bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir al Saud, 34, who is a grandson of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, killed Bandar Abdullah Abdulaziz on February 15 after abusing him for weeks, the court heard.

The 32-year-old victim was found with severe injuries including bite marks on his cheeks in a bloodstained bed in the suite at the Landmark Hotel, which he was sharing with the prince, prosecutors said.

Needless to say, this incident doesn’t exactly provide evidence of the psychologically healthy state of the orientaionally challenged that a few commenters asserted the other day. On the other hand, I tend to doubt that we can conclude that Mr. al Saud strangled and semi-cannibalized Mr. Abdulaziz out of shame and remorse over his orientation either.

Foreclosuregate is the big one

At least, the biggest fraud exposed to date. And I have no doubt there will be more. Notice that as I concluded in yesterday’s column, it is the states, not the Feds, who are leading the charge on this:

The Texas Attorney General’s office called for a halt on all foreclosures today amid widespread scrutiny over the way foreclosures are processed nationwide. Notices to suspend foreclosures were sent to 27 loan servicers doing business in Texas, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co

Here’s hoping that they follow up with the appropriate prosecutions. Not only of the bankers, but their regulatory enablers such as Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner as well.

UPDATE: In which we are given a lesson in how the defenders of the banks are going to play this one:

“Judge Jack S. Cox of the 15th Judicial Circuit ruled that Attorney General Bill McCollum lacked standing to file his subpoena against Shapiro & Fishman law firm of Boca Raton, effectively blocking an investigation of that firm’s foreclosure practices.”

Notice what was ruled here – a Judge ruled that consumer protection laws do not apply if the person defrauding you is an attorney.

The Law of Rule is at work again. It’s become increasingly apparent how the courts are utilizing that “no standing” concept in order to throw out damaging lawsuits that threaten the favored classes. No doubt some court will discover that the laws don’t apply if the corporation defrauding you is a bank.

Mailvox: the homophobia hypothesis

CM was one of the few first-time emailers to write in regarding the Clementi suicide who managed to remain coherent, civil, and emotionally continent in objection to my post on the subject:

My evangelical brother told me about your blogging on the Clementi suicide. He directed me to it because he thought I had made a few observations consonant (the kid had a false sense of security, believing that official bureaucratic pronouncements matched sentiments on the ground; online coming-out is too easy and lowers the threshold for the kind of cussedness that being openly gay requires) with yours. While he cautioned that I’d still disagree with “half of it”, I wasn’t prepared to read such low snark—nor to be so misunderstood.

Poor Tyler Clementi got in over his head by bringing a man home to his dorm before developing a thicker skin. When faced with bureaucratic indifference, some revulsion or amused contempt from his dorm-mates, and possibly hostility, blame or hysteria from his lover and/or parents, he couldn’t take it. A dutiful kid, he probably naively expected support rather than to have his sense of violation compounded. It was not because he felt shame at being identified as gay or despaired over his “evil” act of sexual discovery.

You really ought to go over to Salon and read the far more thoughtful, nuanced responses to this article. They far surpass the article itself, your blog item, and the comments at your blog.

As his was a reasonable email, I did as requested and found myself actually laughing out loud at the article, although in CM’s defense, it must be noted that he was recommending the responses to the Salon article and not the article itself. The writer’s attempt to blame a gay conversion therapist and James Dobson as well as the ever notorious “society” is more than a little amusing; apparently the Boston Red Sox and Clementi himself are about the only ones whose hands are not dripping with Clementi’s blood. To quote the author: “The guilty parties are everywhere”!

That’s helpful. It would appear someone needs to let Mr. Fenton know that the man committed suicide and by definition, he is the only individual who can possibly be held directly responsible for the action. But on to those surpassing comments….

“A couple of Asian Americans college students at an Ivy League with regular tolerance campaigns hardly seem like the types to be in lockstep with the conservative Christian agenda.”

“In other words, the writer would like to see large swaths of people jailed, not becuase of their involvement in any particular crime, but because they hold beliefs that the writer opposes. Thanks for the clarification, L.M. Fenton. It is always good to know exactly where your political opponents stand. Understanding that that the left-wing and the homosexual rights community wants to criminalize their opposition for holding fast to their public views is helpful to this debate.”

“I disagree with focusing on the pranksters for the sole or even bulk of the blame. Only weak people jump from bridges and weak child jumpers belong to the ones who raised them.”

“Indeed, these are not Christo-fascist redneck southerners here, but two highly educated privileged young people at an elite liberal college, and on top of that, neither of the are white and likely neither are Christian. Most people of Indian descent are Hindu or Muslim and most people of Asian descent Buddhist or Muslim; heck, they could be atheists or agnostics for all we know. But I’ll bet neither of them are Pentecostal Christian Conservatives and I’ll bet neither Ravi nor Wei would have the faintest idea who James Dobson is. Unfortunately, like the Phoebe Prince incident, it may turn out that Mr. Clementi was already depressed and unhappy and even suicidal BEFORE this incident took place. It wouldn’t make it right — it was absolutely deplorable, ugly behavior — but it might explain why he killed himself instead of (say) beating the crap out of Mr. Ravi.”

These comments may be more thoughtful than a blog post which I admittedly scribbled in minutes, but I really don’t see much difference between what I wrote and most of the comments that don’t echo the “we are all guilty” theme. I certainly can’t say that I disagree with any of the ones quoted above. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the “homophobia kills homosexuals” hypothesis is both logically unsound and empirically incorrect. Unlike most of my hysterical critics, I happen to be somewhat familiar with recent research into suicide statistics as part of the process of responding to Richard Dawkins’s claims about the psychological damage of being raised Catholic while writing The Irrational Atheist.

The orientationally-challenged argue thusly. Or more accurately, they would argue thusly if they had the emotional continence to actually present their argument in a rational manner:

1. Homosexuality is psychologically healthy and is not shameful. Therefore, homosexuals do not kill themselves out of shame of their sexual predilection.
2. However, homosexuals are known to kill themselves at higher rates than psychologically normal individuals do.
3. Therefore, there must be some external force that supersedes their psychological normality and causes some of them to kill themselves.
4. Society, particularly Christian society, rejects homosexuals.
5. Therefore, it is the social rejection of society, especially Christian society, which is serves as that external force causing otherwise psychological healthy homosexuals to kill themselves out of shame, guilt, fear, and/or social rejection.

The logical structure of this argument is sound enough. And yet, the argument also happens to be completely wrong. If it were true, then we should be able to observe the following material consequences as a matter of course.

1. Tolerant societies that have adopted social measures such as homogamy and orientational equality laws will have lower male suicide rates, especially among the orientationally challenged, than less tolerant societies.

2. Religious societies where the orientationally challenged are most rejected will have the highest male suicide rates, especially among the orientationally challenged.

3. Male Suicide rates will have fallen over time as societies have grown more socially progressive and tolerant of the orientationally-challenged. These declines will be most marked in the most tolerant societies.

Now let’s look at the facts. We will define a tolerant society where homogamy or civil unions are recognized; here are six tolerant societies: Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, France, Sweden, the Netherlands. Next we will define moderate religious society, where homosexuality is generally considered to be wrong, but not illegal: Ireland, USA, Italy, Mexico, Honduras, Paraguay. And finally, we will define an intolerant society as one where homosexuality is illegal: Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Libya, Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda.

According to the World Health Organization, the average male suicide rate for tolerant secular societies is 21.6 per 100,000. The average male suicide rate for moderate religious societies is 9.6 per 100,000. And the average male suicide rate for intolerant societies is unknown because as it turns out, none of them publicly report suicide rates. However, in searching for these unreported rates, I did find a study that reported primary indicators of high societal suicide rates that can be used to estimate them; perhaps one day I’ll see about doing so for these countries.

One of the only countries where the specific issue has been studied is in the heavily secular and tolerant country of Norway where 20% of gay men between the ages of 16-24 attempt suicide at least once. It would appear highly unreasonable to attempt to blame either James Dobson or intolerant Southern Baptists for the self-destructive actions of young gay atheist Norwegians.

So it is clear that the first logical conclusion of the homophobia hypothesis is false. The second conclusion is unclear, but the available evidence suggests it is false. As for the third conclusion, it is also false since suicide rates are trending upward rather than falling, especially among young men.

a) “In 21 of the 30 countries in the World Health Organization (WHO) European region, suicide rates in males aged 15-19 rose between 1979 and 1996.”

b) “Canadian suicide rates greatly increased in the 1960s and 1970s and, while they have levelled out in the 1980s, they are still at the highest level in Canadian history. Between 1960 and 1978, the overall suicide rate rose from 7.6 per 100,000 population to 14.8, according to Statistics Canada figures.”

c) “Each year, almost 5,000 young people, ages 15 to 24, kill themselves [in the United States]. The rate of suicide for this age group has nearly tripled since 1960, making it the third leading cause of death in adolescents and the second leading cause of death among college age youth.”

Although the case against it is not yet absolutely conclusive, there is definitely sufficient evidence to conclude that the “homophobic society causes suicide” argument is false. The homophobia hypothesis empirically fails, and logic points to false assumptions being made the first and fifth points. This conclusion is supported by the fact that, far from being a causal factor in suicide, religion tends to be the strongest inhibiting factor known to social science. “Numerous studies have found a statistical relationship between normative religious beliefs (as indicated by church attendance, church membership, or religious sanctions against suicide) and national or regional suicide rates (e.g., Huang, 1996; Kelleher, Chambers, Corcoran, Williamson, & Keeley, 1998; Neeleman, Halpern, Leon, & Lewis, 1997). Across different regions of the United States, higher levels of Catholic Church membership are associated with lower suicide rates (Burr, McCall, & Powell-Griner, 1994). The Ukraine’s western provinces, where more people attend church, have lower suicide rates than its eastern provinces, where fewer people attend church (Kondrichin & Lester, 2002). Nations that publish relatively more religious books tend to have lower suicide rates (Cutright & Fernquist, 2001; Fernquist, 2003a).”

In addition to their flaming hysteria, one of the most amusing things about the homocritics was their frequent reference to my supposed “ignorance” when it is completely clear that they don’t know even the most basic facts about suicide or its causal factors. Even so, does the failure of the homophobia hypothesis mean that my idea about the dichotomy between shame over one’s orientation and gay rights propaganda creating a psychological disturbance encouraging one to commit suicide is correct? No, of course not. In fact, I have come across an alternative thesis that I consider to potentially present a stronger logic. But more on that in a future post.

I’m sure the science is sound

I mean, just because the man is a shameless embezzler and a thief doesn’t mean that he’s not a good and scrupulous scientist, right?

A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has vanished along with almost $2 million that he had supposedly spent on research.

Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote several key studies supporting CDC’s claims that the MMR vaccine and mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children. Thorsen’s 2003 Danish study reported a 20-fold increase in autism in Denmark after that country banned mercury based preservatives in its vaccines. His study concluded that mercury could therefore not be the culprit behind the autism epidemic.

His study has long been criticized as fraudulent since it failed to disclose that the increase was an artifact of new mandates requiring, for the first time, that autism cases be reported on the national registry. This new law and the opening of a clinic dedicated to autism treatment in Copenhagen accounted for the sudden rise in reported cases rather than, as Thorsen seemed to suggest, the removal of mercury from vaccines. Despite this obvious chicanery, CDC has long touted the study as the principal proof that mercury-laced vaccines are safe for infants and young children….

Leading independent scientists have accused CDC of concealing the clear link between the dramatic increases in mercury-laced child vaccinations beginning in 1989 and the epidemic of autism, neurological disorders and other illnesses affecting every generation of American children since. Questions about Thorsens’s scientific integrity may finally force CDC to rethink the vaccine protocols since most of the other key pro vaccine studies cited by CDC rely on the findings of Thorsen’s research group. These include oft referenced research articles published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the New England Journal of Medicine and others. The validity of all these studies is now in question.

One of the reasons I have always been dubious about the supposed safety of vaccines is the money. Not only do scientists resolutely refuse to do proper double-blind studies of the issue, but there is a tremendous amount of pharmaceutical money creating a powerful incentive for them to discover that injecting poison into infants is as safe as giving them breast milk. And I’ve never quite understood why people who grasp that tobacco money can corrupt science are totally incapable of realizing that pharmaceutical money can do the same.

It’s a good thing science is self-correcting. All it takes is for a scientist to disappear with $2 million and his colleagues will begin to think that perhaps they should consider double-checking his work.