Author: VD

A few things:

1. I KNEW I should have started Jones-Drew. I agonized over that one for about five minutes and finally went with Marion Barber III.

2. The Original Cyberpunk located my last formatting issue with the WRATH document, so that’s uploading to the printer now. They claim 7-10 working days, so if you want one of the very first run, contact K&B this week.

3. While there’s no foreign demand for my books, the same is not true of other authors in the house….

I have written previously about my skepticism regarding copyright laws, which is not entirely due to my being a lifelong computer pirate. As I have pointed out before, one cannot steal a loaf of bread that is still there after one has “stolen” it.

What shards of an argument remain to the IP apologists have now been trampled upon by that bastion of evil, the RIAA. I always knew their tears for the poor artist were crocodilian, now that is eminently clear to everyone:

In publicly defending its strong arm tactics and stated desire to scare consumers into absolute compliance, the RIAA has long cited the negative repercussions of piracy and lost revenue upon the recording artists that pour their talent into making the music that people like to hear. It’s a sympathetic defense, yet in the past week the RIAA has made it quite clear whose profits the group is truly out to defend, and it’s certainly not the artists who actually make the music.

On December 1 The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the RIAA is currently petitioning the panel of federal government Copyright Royalty Judges to lower the rates paid to publishers and songwriters for use of lyrics and melodies in applications like cell phone ring tones and other digital recordings. The last time the American government set the rate was in 1981, but since that time, the RIAA argues in its petition, a lot has changed.

Download an MP3 or rip a DVD in the RIAA’s honor today. What utter scum!

George Bush gleefully urinates on the corpse of the conservatism he stabbed in the back:

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was announced this week as leaving as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, is the leading prospect to replace John Bolton as envoy to the United Nations.

President Bush was reported by aides as looking for someone who approximates Bolton’s combination of toughness and diplomatic skill and has tentatively decided on Khalilzad. A native of Afghanistan, he has served in government posts dating back to 1985 and is the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration.

I think I’m really going to enjoy Bush the Younger’s lame duck period. It’s petty, of course, but watching conservatives writhe in agony at the actions of the man they voted into office under the “lesser of two evils” mantra is genuinely amusing.

Even the Three Monkeys at NRO can’t summon up the energy to think up excuses for him any more. Get ready for Hillary, folks. And I agree with Dick Morris on the name game, I fully expect her to go by Rodham Clinton during her campaign, then drop the Clinton altogether once she gets elected.

I, for one, welcome our new reptilesbian overlordess.

Here’s an old, but amusing example of a clown of reason cutting himself with the razor of logic:

If a woman consents to extramarital sex, she is committing a moral offense which is equal to that committed by the man who engages in consensual sex with her, or by the man who, in the absence of such consent, rapes her. Christianity knows no hierarchy of sins. Since only the woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man and is subsequently raped can truly be considered a wholly innocent victim under this ethic, it is no wonder that women who insist that internal consent is the sole determining factor of a woman’s victimization find traditional Western morality to be inherently distasteful.

Vox Day wrote the above. Like so many things which Vox Day writes, this vile little rant almost screams out as a sign of sociopathology, but I’d like to focus on an interesting aspect which might go overlooked. As disgustingly immoral as his position is, it’s also logically inconsistent and incoherent.

Allow us to assume, for the sake of argument, the premises that there is no hierarchy of sins and that a women who sins (as with having extramarital sex) is not an innocent victim when raped. Clearly it’s not the case that only sexual sins prevents a woman from being an innocent victim — after all, there is no hierarchy of sins, with sexual sins being worse than others. A woman who blasphemes, lies, shoplifts, or who commits any other transgression cannot be a “wholly innocent victim either.” Since it’s a basic Christian doctrine that we are all sinners, this means that no woman is a wholly innocent victim.

Austin makes the clumsy mistake here of applying the general to the particular due to a failure to grasp context. The context was a comparison of the immorality of rape with the immorality of extramarital sex. A woman who blasphemes, lies, etc. cannot be wholly innocent in general, to be sure, but she can certainly be a victim wholly innocent of sexual immorality despite the physical act of sexual congress in which she was forced to engage. The same is clearly not true of the woman who was engaging in immoral sexual behavior prior to withdrawing her previously given consent. Still a victim, just not a wholly innocent one and therefore it is correct to view her situation differently from a moral perspective.

After all, we regard those shot while committing bank robberies very differently than those who are shot while sitting peacefully at home. And before anyone is silly enough to say anything about the legality of extramarital sex versus bank robbery, please keep in mind that legality is neither morality nor under discussion here.

So that it all might be made more clear to Austin, I wonder if he would criticize the logic of the statement if it read as follows:

“only the woman who is not entertaining the possibility of sex with a man and is subsequently raped can truly be considered a [victim wholly innocent of sexual immorality] under this ethic.”

Unless he has an issue with the coherence or the logic of that, it should be quite clear that his only problem with the previous version is that he failed to comprehend the context, which is rather strange since the entire column was dealing with the question of morality, rape and sex.

The very idea of viewing the statement from a general point of view is a profoundly silly one, since one could easily and pointlessly add that since Austin and I have both told lies at some point in our lives, we are as immoral in the eyes of God as the rapist. And the rape victim. And Vladimir Putin. Which is all true, of course, but hardly germane to the matter being discussed in the column.

Finally, on what basis can he possibly claim my position on the moral equivalence of rape and extramarital sex is “immoral”? What ethic, what moral tradition can he, the godless disbeliever in all things supernatural, cite to demonstrate this, beyond “Austin’s personal dictate that Rape is Immoral and Sex is Moral”?

Honestly, the haphazard way in which these memetic parasites sling around the very words they simultaneously claim to be meaningless is downright embarrassing.

The Sports Gal may not be in the Sports Guy’s league, but she’s pretty funny in her own right. Universal Press Syndicate should just go ahead and sign their little girl to a column already:

You already know about the traffic in L.A., but now that it’s Xmas season, even parking has become impossible. Fortunately I happen to be married to a guy with the self-proclaimed “parking gene.” (Apparently this runs in the family because his dad thinks he has it, too.) Every so often, Bill stumbles upon the perfect spot — like last week, when I made him stop at Pinkberry (the greatest frozen yogurt shop ever) and he found a space right in front, then spent the next 30 seconds congratulating himself. He was so pleased. It’s too bad they can’t have the League of Dorks for finding parking spaces, I’m sure he’d be in three leagues and calling his buddy Hench every time he found a good space so they could calculate the standings….

If I’m ever found dead in a parking garage, skip the autopsy and just assume that I died of a carbon monoxide overdose or my bladder exploded while Bill was circling around looking for the perfect space.

Of course, they’re doomed.

UPDATE: Bill Simmons is very, very happy right now. I just read the following on Sports Illustrated.

Cincinnati Bengals cornerback Deltha O’Neal was charged with driving while intoxicated early Saturday morning after being stopped at a traffic checkpoint, the State Highway Patrol said…. O’Neal, a seven-year veteran, is the eighth Bengals player arrested this year on various charges.

That comes only hours after read this:Now that we have that settled — what about seven Bengals players getting arrested out of 53? That’s 13 percent of the team! Imagine if 13 percent of your office or classroom had been arrested in the past few months? Can they get to 10 before the end of the season? You figure with holiday parties coming, that’s good for one DUI. And the holidays bring visitors and family members, which usually brings trouble, so that’s good for some sort of incident at a party or a club. So we only need one more wild-card arrest — something harmless like speeding and attempting to evade an officer, or shoplifting a Christmas present of something — and then we’ll be at 10. Now that would be something. Ten Bengals arrested in one year? We’ll be telling our grandkids about that one. Keep your fingers crossed.

No doubt Jamie will prefer to read this version of the blog.

I think my favorite part was the way in which it translated two of the lesser teams in the VPFL:

5-8-0 Pizzy Horse Cowboys
4-9-0 Wizzay Texas Ho-slappin’

Truer words, my friends, truer words.

I’m not a big YouTube poster – Joe Namath’s Greatest Moment excepted – but this is pretty funny. Jonah Goldberg rightly cites it as one of the many fundamental dividing points between liberals and libertarians.

It doesn’t quite ring true, of course. The woman is nowhere nearly fat enough.

AEI senior fellow Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who joined the Institute in 1978, died yesterday. As a young political scientist at Georgetown University, Kirkpatrick wrote the first major study of the role of women in modern politics, Political Woman, which was published in 1974. Her work on the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which was formed in the aftermath of the Democratic Party’s tumultuous 1968 convention and changed the way party delegates were chosen, led to Dismantling the Parties: Reflections on Party Reform and Party Decomposition, which AEI published in 1978. Yet it was an essay written for Commentary magazine in 1979, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” (later expanded into a full-length book), that launched her into the political limelight. In the article, Kirkpatrick chronicled the failures of the Carter administration’s foreign policy and argued for a clearer understanding of the American national interest. Her essay matched Ronald Reagan’s instincts and convictions, and when he became president, he appointed her to represent the United States at the United Nations. Ambassador Kirkpatrick was a member of the president’s cabinet and the National Security Council. The United States has lost a great patriot and champion of freedom, and AEI mourns our beloved colleague.

As a young Reagan Republican, I very much admired Jeane Kirkpatrick. She was certainly a staunch anti-communist, although as my political understanding has grown more sophisticated over the years, I developed a few reservations about her stance on women in politics and political parties. Given what we know now, it is difficult to argue that the changes for which Kirkpatrick pressed have been positive in terms of the freedom that she valued so. And yet there can be no question that she was genuinely devoted to the cause of human liberty.

I only met her once, in Washington DC at a party. She was less formidable in person that she appeared in print, but she was very pleasant and her intelligence was obvious to even the most casual observer. I consider it an honor to have met her and those who value freedom would do well to raise a glass to her memory tonight.

Hollywood could be in for a taste of its own liberal medicine:

A new study by the UCLA School of Law and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center finds that Latino, black, Asian American and Native American actors have few acting opportunities available to them….

The study found that 69% of the roles were reserved for white actors and another 8.5% were open to white actors as well as non-white actors. Actors of color were limited to between .5% and about 8% of the roles, depending on racial background. “Casting directors take into account race and sex in a way that would be blatantly illegal in any other industry,” Robinson said. “Many actors accept this as normal, but depending on the facts of the case, lawsuits can be filed.” He believes that, in many instances, taking race and sex into account for acting roles violates Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination. According to Robinson, many casting breakdowns currently restrict, without any strong narrative justification, the sex and race of the actors who may audition.

Burn, Hollywood, burn. I do wonder, though, if blacks and Jews aren’t seriously overrepresented on television. I don’t watch a great deal of TV, but I have noticed rather more of both than one would expect, and far fewer Asians, Hispanics and Somalis.

In any case, this is a petard-hoisting that is long overdue.

UPDATE: Upon further review, it seems that white Americans can join that class action suit against Hollywood. “White American is the largest racial group counted in the 2000 Census, comprising 77.1 percent of the population.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that 77.1 percent is greater than 69 percent. And if one counts “roles that are open to white actors”, that’s 77.5 percent, which is nearly spot-on from a racist equity point of view. (Did I say racist? I meant RACIAL, of course….) But as I mentioned before, I suspect that there are too many blacks on television, mostly at Hispanic and Asian expense.