Author: VD

Lucas Roebuck apparently wishes utter devastation upon the GOP:

Although guiding voices come and go as the currents, ebbs, and tides of history bring the right voice for the right moment, I believe these five individuals — more than anyone else — represent the voices that will build the foundation for a new conservative movement in this new year.

1. James Taranto
2. Newt Gingrich
3. Jonah Goldberg
4. Bill O’Reilly
5. Michelle Malkin

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the architects of the permanent minority! About the only way it could get worse is to substitute Andrew Sullivan for James Taranto and Jon Podhoretz for Jonah Goldberg.

And you wonder why I don’t bother to vote.

Q3 has a question:

Does this seem incredibly vacuous to you?

Which gets me to the main thing I personally take from feminism: For me, it’s a form of social calculus. It simplifies things in the way that learning integral calculus simplifies problems that would otherwise be murder to solve if attacked only with algebra and geometry. I don’t mean it makes everything simple–it certainly doesn’t do that, if this thread is any indication–and I don’t mean it makes my approach to life simplistic. I mean that, to quote from Barbara Findlen’s introduction to Listen Up:

“Feminism is what helps us make sense of the unfairness by affirming that it’s about political injustice, not personal failure. The feminist movement offers us the combined strength and wisdom of people from all walks of life who are fighting for meaningful equality.”

In other words, “it’s acceptable for me to act and think like a child, because NOTHING CAN BE MY FAULT. See, all the other girls are doing it!”

The appeal of feminism is no surprise, but it’s still an intellectual ghetto even more bankrupt than socialism, and with less prospect for survival. It will be interesting to note if the die-hards manage to figure this out before they wind up in burqahs or as sex slaves owned by the United Nations.

I’m a little disappointed that the Baseball Savant hasn’t posted his NFL playoff picks yet, since I won’t be able to mock them in the process of making my own. Ah well, no doubt he will soon give us the opportunity to abuse him by calling for his beloved Peyton Manning to knock off Detroit in the Super Bowl or something like that.

Hey, it’s why they call him the BASEBALL Savant.

In short, I expect Baltimore to win the Super Bowl. In the absence of a dominant team, go with the defense with the competent quarterback and the proven playoff coach. The Chargers are certainly impressive, but I don’t see them as being particularly dominant, nor do I see Marty Schottenheimer guiding a first-time playoff quarterback to a championship.

I’m less enthusiastic about even picking an NFC champion, but I simply can’t go with the Bears given how bad Grossman has played. The Saints strike me as being too happy to be there and while Brees is even better than the quarterback I wanted the Vikings to pursue in free agency last year, he hasn’t been a big playoff performer. Since I have to pick someone, I’ll go with the Eagles. I’ve always liked Jeff Garcia, Andy Reid is a proven playoff coach and their defensive weakness is against the pass, which Grossman is unlikely to exploit.

Also, it’s the veteran white quarterbacks who tend to overperform in the playoffs. I still can’t get over Rich Gannon’s swan song with the Raiders… who was that guy and why didn’t he play that way in his prime for the Vikings?

As for this week, here’s my thoughts:

Colts over Chiefs – Dungy is a good man and a bad game-day coach. Herm Edwards is a shifty man and an even worse game-day coach. Sure, the Colts can’t stop Johnson, but the Chiefs won’t stop Manning in a Dome either.

Cowboys over Seahawks – A rookie quarterback can get you past the first round. Seattle has not impressed me in any way, shape or form this year. Maybe I’m underestimating them, but I don’t think so.

Patriots over Jets – I’m with the Sports Guy on this one. I think Brady and Belicek have been laying low for the last month. Mangini has done an excellent job this season, but he just doesn’t have enough horses.

Eagles over Giants – Maybe the chaos will magically come together again, as it did last week, but I seriously doubt it.

Wouldn’t it be ironic, though, if this is the year that Dungy and company are finally able to get it done, when nearly everyone has jumped off the bandwagon. (Note: I was NEVER on it, having been a Tony Dungy fan since his Gopher days. That Chuckie thing wasn’t a coincidence.)

UPDATE: Despite ripping off all of my first-round picks, the BASEBALL Savant does not disappoint:

SUPER BOWL PREDICTION: Indianapolis Colts over Philadelphia Eagles

At the end of the day, PEYTON MANNING WILL BE CROWNED SIMULTANEOUSLY SUPER BOWL CHAMPION AND GREATEST QB TO EVER PLAY THE GAME! Of course, we already know he’s the greatest QB to ever play the game. Now all the haters will have to admit it!

SUPER BOWL CHAMPION BABY!

Well, at least he realized that the Lions didn’t make the playoffs. Nevertheless, psychiatric therapy is clearly indicated.

Pretty Lady managed to offend the liberals by contrasting her experience here in this den of right-wing extremism with the behavior of her left-wing acquaintances:

I am a female person who is not occupying a traditional role in society and I have received nothing but respect from these men, who do me the honor of taking me seriously as a fully responsible adult, while also providing much kindness and practical support. Whereas a great number of my more ‘liberal’ male acquaintances have behaved like passive, blood-sucking users, toward a fully responsible adult female like myself….

And there is a greater likelihood of being sexually railroaded, manipulated, and ultimately betrayed and abandoned by a pseudo-liberal, ‘sex-positive’ person, who disconnects sex from its obvious consequences, than by a man who believes that sex carries responsibilities and consequences for BOTH people participating in the act, and that thus it should be undertaken with consideration and reverence.

MikeWC, as appears to be his wont, took exception to this, replying:

Are you claiming it is empirically true that “liberal” men rape more often than “conservative” men (whatever those silly modifiers mean)? I’d like to see some numbers on that.

I jumped in by suggesting that while Pretty Lady was not necessarily saying any such thing, I would be happy to do so, and moreover, would prove that liberals are inordinately rape-inclined with empirical evidence. In fact, I shall prove it using a variety of statistical measures. They are admittedly rather crude, in my opinion, but are nevertheless significantly more accurate than the measures deemed acceptable by eminent scientists such as Richard Dawkins and various American university professors.

It is a known fact that non-white men are more inclined to be liberal, (in the current American sense of the term), as evidenced by their 2004 electoral support for the two left-wing presidential candidates, John Kerry and Ralph Nader. This non-white group made up 21.7 percent of the male electorate and supported Kerry by a factor of 2.27, with 68 percent voting for Kerry or Nader, and only 30 percent voting for Bush. (All electoral data is courtesy of CNN.)

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, African-American, American Indian or Alaskan Native and Asian or Pacific Islander men were arrested for 34.9 percent of the Forcible Rapes in 2005.(1) This is 60.8 percent more rapes than their percentage of the voting population would indicate and 102 percent more than would be expected given their percentage of the total population. (17.3 percent).

Furthermore, the white male population, which was 78.3 percent of the male electorate and supported Bush over Kerry and Nader by 62 percent to 37 percent, only committed 65.1 percent of the Forcible Rapes. This is 20.3 percent fewer rapes than would be statistically predicted, furthermore, the number of rape arrests attributable to Bush-voting is actually overcounted due to the fact that while the FBI’s URC methodology includes Hispanic rapists in the white totals, they are not included in the white male voting populace, as Latinos (of both sexes) were 8 percent of the electorate in 2004.

Assuming that voting Latino men rape at the same rate as white male voters, (the anecdotal evidence is that Hispanics are more likely to commit rape but I have no statistical data), the percentage of rapes attributable to white men drops to 61.8 percent, while that of non-white men rises to 38.2.(2)

Therefore, whereas the liberal-leaning group commits 76 percent more rapes than their percentage of the electorate would predict, the conservative-leaning group commits 26.7 percent less rape. Therefore, we can estimate that a liberal man is roughly twice as likely to commit rape than a conservative man.

But this is only one way to demonstrate the liberal male proclivity towards rape. In a comparative study of America’s most liberal and most conservative large cities, the most liberal city, Detroit, had a rape rate of 65.4 per 100,000 population, whereas the most conservative city, Provo, had a rape rate that was 22.4 percent lower, at 53.4 per 100,000.

This comparison holds true at every level, state, county and city. The most liberal “state” in the country, Washington DC, also boasts the highest rate of rape as well. The reader may recall the famous map of the 2004 election demonstrating graphically that most of Kerry’s support was in the urban communites, while Bush dominated the suburban and rural communities. The rape rates in 2005 were 35.4 for urban communities, 24.9 for the suburban communities and 26.2 for rural communities, indicating a 38.55 percent greater inclination for rape in the liberal-leaning urban populations across the country.

However, it is in the county comparisons that the most striking detail can be seen. Minnesota’s most liberal county is St. Louis county, which supported Kerry by a margin of 66 to 35. The St. Louis rape rate was five points higher than the national average, at 18.45 per 100k, and was more than THREE TIMES higher the most conservative county, Roseau, which went for Bush 68 to 32 and had a 2005 rape rate of only 6.1 per 100k.(3)

The Minnesota example is supported by similar analyses I have done comparing violent crime statistics in all of the counties in Maryland and Florida, in fact, the conclusion that liberal men are inordinately disposed to commit rape will likely be supported by the county-by-county evidence from every state in America. Therefore, we can reasonably conclude that liberals are between two and three times more likely to commit rape than conservatives.

Cogito, ergo mandato.

(1) Given the fact that the identity of the rapist can only be determined via arrests, for the purposes of this analysis, rape arrests = rapes. However, since the percentage of non-white men convicted for rape is even higher than the percentage of non-white men arrested, this methodology actually tends to minimize the liberal proclivity for rape.
(2) Fibonacci! Now you KNOW it’s true.
(3) Liberals can’t even hide behind the race card. The racial makeup of liberal St. Louis county is 94.86% white, compared to 95.92% in conservative Roseau county.

I heard from a gentleman who does read ancient Chinese. He requested that I not post his excellent and detailed explication of Sun Tzu and the question of Moral Law/morale, but the summary is: you’re wrong on this one and you have no idea what you’re talking about.

If I grasped what he was saying correctly, the underlying problem is that the concept of individual morale as we know it in the West simply isn’t applicable to a society that didn’t view people as individuals per se, but more as appendages of the greater social body. Therefore, the “harmony” translation clearly makes more sense and Giles was right to resist the temptation to use “morale”.

I hope I won’t offend the gentleman by sharing one thing from his email, because it’s quite funny and illustrates how perilous it can be to blindly trust translations. (More on this later, as I’m reading Eco’s new book on the subject right now.) The Chinese scholar compared what is considered to be the best translation of a passage from the I Ching with his own translation from the original:

“Great good fortune: it furthers one to see the Great Man; it furthers one to cross the great Water….etc.”

“Big Man standing in a Pool of Blood: Move the Troops”.

Anyhow, mea culpa. I henceforth renounce my short-lived, inauspicious career in Ancient Chinese translation. Speaking of texts, I could use a OpenOffice or Word document containing the full text of the blog archives here. This would be useful in searching for past posts since the Blogger search function is rather unreliable. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, but just haven’t gotten around to it.

So, if you’re in the mood for something tedious, please let me know by commenting here in order prevent redundancy.

Girls and logic don’t mix so well. In fact, based on my personal experience, you’re more likely to see a crash when you mix the latter:

She explicitly illustrates a problem I’ve noticed with women who resent the way the world works: they confuse consequence with punishment.

Reminder here, the “consequence” in question is being raped. It’s a “consequence” of being a woman and getting drunk in a bar. And that’s just the way the world works, so lie back and try to enjoy it, sweetie. Rejecting that in any way is just a foot-stomping girl-tantrum because you just don’t comprehend reality.

Does Spinner actually deny that getting raped is a possible consequence of being a woman and getting drunk in a bar? That wouldn’t leave her the chance to get outraged and pose, so presumably not. But if so, she need merely let us know and we can consider that argument… it won’t be a long one.

If she admits that it is a possible consequence, that a woman is more likely to get raped under those circumstances than a woman who gets drunk at home or stays sober in a bar, then there’s really not much to discuss. Spinner can’t reasonably complain about the increased probability any more than the girl who gets drunk and drives her car can complain about the increased probability of denting her fender.

The fact is that some men do rape. It is an incontravertible fact. There will always be individuals who will rape, lie, cheat, steal and kill. This is the planet Earth, not Happy-happy Unicorn Land, and it’s a far more vicious place than these maleducated intellectual virgins, whose childish little minds have never been soiled with a rational thought, will ever realize until they actually leave their little suburban world for ten minutes and experience what the rest of the world is like.

Oh, they’ve had their perilous near-rape experiences with a boy wearing Abercrombie & Fitch who drank too many Coors Lights and came this close to touching them, you know, there, but they’ve never spoken with a Laotian refugee who lost half his family to utopian idealists building a better world. They don’t know any Russian strippers who whored themselves in order to escape the post-mortem paroxysms of the Soviet Union’s demise, because it paid so much better than their nursing degrees. They don’t even drive down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, for that matter.

Ask those strippers how much an education matters when the utopian idealists finally get their chance to run things.

The choice is not between rejecting reality and lying back and relaxing, it’s about taking responsibility for your own life, for your own actions and your own decisions or refusing to accept it. No one is saying you can’t play with fire, do what you want, it’s up to you. But don’t expect a whole lot of sympathy when you get burned either.

Life is all about probability. All you can do is improve your odds or worsen them. Which option you choose is up to you.

I wonder if this revelation will cause all the feminists who are angrily campaigning against sex slavery to rethink their use of the United Nations as an effective organiation with which to ally? I rather doubt it:

Members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Sudan are facing allegations of raping and abusing children as young as 12, The Daily Telegraph reported today….

This paper has learnt of more than 20 victims’ accounts claiming that some peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex. It is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.

And where is that UN Inter-Agency Project to Combat Trafficking in Women and Children when you need it? Okay, in fairness, they’re not actually buying them or even employing them as prostitutes, they’re simply using them.

Fortunately Amynda has the answer for these unfortunate children: “Use them right back and show them payback’s a bitch!”

Although I addressed Shadowin’s point back in November, now that I’m looking at this material with more attention to detail, I believe I can provide him with a more satisfactory answer to the question of Sun Tzu and the presence of religion as a factor in war-making.

Shadowin was rightly suspicious of my claim that Sun Tzu didn’t mention anything about religion, given that the Five Constant Factors of the art of war that must to be taken into account when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field are: Moral Law, Heaven, Earth, The Commander, and Method and Discipline.

This would, upon first glance, appear to conclusively demonstrate that I am wrong. However, since I am multi-lingual and happened to study an amount of Chinese history along the way, I am perhaps a little less likely to be thrown off by cultural miscommunications than the average American.

Heaven is easily dealt with, as Sun Tzu himself defines it as signifying: “night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.” In other words, “Heaven” merely means the environmental setting in which the battle takes place, it has no religious significance to the military strategist whatsoever, regardless of whether he happens to believe those settings are defined by a deity or not.

Sun Tzu clearly did not see the modification of Heaven as the general’s concern, or else he would have certainly recommended whatever actions were best indicated to achieve an ideal one, just as he did in some detail with regards to the ways in which a general might achieve a favorable Earth.

As for Moral Law, I contend that it is best translated as morale, as this is such a vital tactical concern that nearly every tactical wargame incorporates it in some measure. In Advanced Squad Leader, for example, it is one of the three primary elements, along with firepower and movement.

Translator Lionel Giles considers this possibility, “One might be tempted to render it by ‘morale’, were it not considered as an attribute of the ruler in ss. 13”, but prefers “is in harmony with his subjects”.

I understand his reasoning given the wording of I. 13 (1): “Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral law?”, but I think the concept of morale encompasses the concept of being in harmony with the subjects. Leadership and morale are generally considered to be closely related matters, (in the case of ASL, the primary role of the former is to act as a modifier on the latter), so I think Giles’ distinction here is an artificial and unneccesary one.

Of course, I’m handicapped by being unable to read the original Chinese, so if anyone has any comments on this score, I’d be interested in hearing them.

Gene asks a reasonable question:

I’ve asked this before but never got an answer; Why do you pay attention to Amynda? Aren’t there many like her blogging? Aren’t many college age people similar to her in their thinking? Does she have a large readership or something?

First, Amynda is as close to the the archetype of the idiot feminist I encountered in college as I’ve ever seen on the Internet. Her blog is an intellectual open sewer of the sort one can usually only find in a Woman’s Studies program, and unlike the similar Bitch PhD, she’s still young enough and insulated enough to cling to her feelings about reality rather than accepting it for what is is and adjusting her behavior accordingly.

Furthermore, she is held up as an exemplary feminist blogger by several mainstream sources. If I were to use a less-lauded example, I would be rightly accused of addressing a marginal figure to whom no one actually pays attention. As it stands, it’s quite clear that I’m not making anything up, that these people do exist and that there are a lot of young women who actually do subscribe to this particularly noxious form of feminist ideology.

In short, if Amynda didn’t exist, I’d almost have to invent her. Ironically, she is the Strawfeminist; it would seem that like vampires, feminists are incapable of looking in the mirror.

I firmly believe in shining a cold analytical light on evil and exposing it rather than ignoring it and hoping it will go away. As Andy pointed out, widespread exposure of Amynda’s ideas will do far more damage to radical feminism than I could ever do on my own. The utter revulsion they inspire in women like Gene is actually testimony to that notion.

And you’ll note, for example, that no one even tries to quote Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris here the way they do on other blogs, now that everyone here has seen them exposed as grossly ignorant intellectual charlatans.

Amynda confirms my opinion that feminism is a form of environmental retardation:

What “we’ve always done” is rape, for those who understandably don’t want to click over and read the whole post.

Once can only assume that she doesn’t want her readers to click over and read the whole post, because if they did, those few capable of passing a fourth-grade reading comprehension test would immediately recognize that what “we’ve always done” is to carry guns, legally or otherwise. The nice thing about Amynda is that one doesn’t have to wonder if she’s evil or stupid, as she regularly demonstrates her unique ability to combine the two into a single beautiful Platonian ideal of feminism.

Those who can’t understand why I enjoy reading her probably don’t grasp the deeper appeal of Maupassant when the syphilis kicked in either.

it’s clear he wants my attention very badly….

Well, naturally. Who wouldn’t? She is as beautiful as she is brilliant.

The Coven did its part by contributing some amusing expositions on their haphazard relationship to reality and the English language:

Oh, my God. I’d looked all over the internets for one of his books, even his own website didn’t sell them at the time. I think like maybe one of his fantasy books is in a library somewhere in central Ohio, but that’s as close as I’d ever been to one. People who claim to know say his stuff is laughably awful, and I’d love to take a peek at one myself.

Apparently she didn’t looked very hard, or grasp that complicated “click on the cover” interface. Or perhaps that complicated eReader install was simply too much:

“Um, Colin? Is this computer a Windows or a Symbian?”
“It’s a Mac, Kyso. A Macintosh. Click on that one.”
Don’t you tell me what to do, Mr. Patriarchy! Your Masculinist Techno-Oppression of Women won’t last forever, you know!”
“I’m sorry. I am a worm. I am evil. Please throw rocks at me.”
You don’t deserve to have rocks thrown at you, you pathetic potential rapist!” (clicks once) “Um, I don’t think it worked, there’s this grey box now.”
“Okay, so click on Save to Disk… I mean, you can if you want….”
It’s my body and I’ll click if I want to!”

As for the quality of my fantasy novels, I’ll freely admit that the first one was rather weak, but I’ll happily match the second or the third against any of the novels nominated for the Nebula last year, except for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrill and Going Postal. Better yet, compare them with any novel written by Nebula winner Catharine Asaro…. Regardless, the worst review from any professional secular reviewer was 3 out of 5, which hardly strikes me as “laughably awful”.

And after basing most of its criticism on my theology – which seemed a little odd given that it’s a fantasy novel, but whatever – Publisher’s Weekly wrote this about The World in Shadow: “an excellent job of capturing the rarefied world of high school, and both Christian and fallen teenagers are painted with some sympathy. His chapters are headed by epigraphs ranging from the Bible to rock music to blockbuster movies, which lend the book a hip edge. The novel’s driving tension is an evil plan to stage a Columbine-like massacre at the senior prom. Some of the best (and most disturbing) writing occurs in the sections that try to imagine the inner worlds of the killers….”

Unfortunately, there are very few reviews of my novels since most SFWA reviewers are openly prejudiced against anything with a religious flavor. I have exchanged email with several well-known fantasy and science fiction reviewers in the past and was informed that they simply won’t read anything that they consider to have Christian content. That’s their right, of course, but it’s simply false to assert that the reviews are negative.

So, he writes shitty sci-fi and thinks that women are inherently unable to write sci-fi. This could explain much.

No, he writes mediocre FANTASY, thank you very much indeed, and thinks the reason that women ALMOST NEVER write HARD science fiction, (which is really not up for debate as this dearth is an occasional topic of discussion in the SFWA), is because they are extremely disinclined to specialize in the hard sciences. Even when they major and obtain advanced degrees in them, they seldom maintain their interest in the field for long.

For example, when John Scalzi and I were arguing about this topic on the Tor editors’ blog, Electrolite, he cited one female professor’s Astrophysics major as evidence of her interest in the hard sciences… but that professor is now teaching Queer theory in Indian film. (Seriously, I’m not joking.) That Astrophysics major no more makes her a hard scientist than my East Asian Studies major makes me Japanese. In short, my opinion is that the potential pool of women capable of writing hard science fiction is too small to produce the critical mass required, and as Catharine Asaro demonstrates, even those who can do it would rather write romance novels. Or, as is more likely these days, vampire and were-seal porn.

Zuzu from Feministe demonstrates her acumen with the language.

So how’s Vox’s daddy doing in prison?

Dad’s not in prison, which was sort of the point of those newspaper headlines last summer. Of course, one really can’t expect a feminist to be able to distinguish between “fugitive” and “felon”. Nouns are hard!

Marcy, on the other hand, has trouble with adjectives:

He’s a Christian Libertarian? How do you work that? I thought Ayn Rand was an atheist.

In the English language, the adjective preceding the noun is there to MODIFY it. In this case, “Christian” modifies the noun “Libertarian” in much the same way that “Social” and “Christian” are both used to modify “Democrat” and therefore distinguish the SDP from the CDU. Furthermore, Ayn Rand defined Objectivism, not libertarianism.

In practice, this means that I am a firm libertarian on most matters, but anti-abortion. I am also anti-open immigration, but that is solely on utilitarian grounds.