Category: Uncategorized

A PhD apparently means never having to confess economic illiteracy:

On the one hand, seniority pay seems reasonable to me. On the other, the simple fact is that men do not take, and are not eligible to take, maternity leave. If a company (or a country) provides maternity leave, but not paternity leave, then paying less to women who take it is, I think, clearly discriminatory. On the other hand, if they offer both maternity *and* paternity leave, and if the paternity leave is as long as the maternity leave, then I’d say fine, legally. Although I imagine that in the real world, the dad’s company may not offer such leave, and the fact that it’s legal to discriminate in pay if someone takes it is probably *more*, not less likely to encourage men not to do so.

Fuck it, man. We need to just make paid parental leave for both parents mandatory.

Or we could simply have the government mandate a mininum annual wage of ONE BILLION dollars for everyone. And it will be paid via helicopter regardless of whether you work or not. Then we’d all be rich and have as much free time as we wanted!

Apparently this woman hasn’t ever been to France or Sweden and seen the results of similar mandates. The truth is that if the goal is to raise wages and make childcare affordable without destroying the national economy, the single most effective thing the government could do would be to ban working mothers* while holding down immigration.

On the pro-side, however, mandatory parental leave would be a VERY effective means of ending discrimination against elderly workers.

Scratch a feminist, find a fascist. Every. Single. Time.

*I’m the libertarian, remember. I’m not endorsing this, merely playing Keynesian’s advocate. No sort of leave, maternity, sick or vacation, is an appropriate matter for government involvement.

I knew him before he was banned in Germany, Horatio:

I’d also like to know how the Holocaust death total of 6 million was determined. Is it the sort of number that is so well documented with actual names and perhaps a Nazi paper trail that no historian could doubt its accuracy, give or take ten thousand? Or is it like every other LRN (large round number) that someone pulled out of his ass and it became true by repetition? Does the figure include resistance fighters and civilians who died in the normal course of war, or just the Jews rounded up and killed systematically? No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened, but wouldn’t you like to know how the exact number was calculated, just for context? Without that context, I don’t know if I should lump the people who think the Holocaust might have been exaggerated for political purposes with the Holocaust deniers. If they are equally nuts, I’d like to know that. I want context.

One of the more interesting things about the professional victims groups is the strange way in which they demand one must a) never forget, and, b) never look too close. The fact that an incredible number of Jews were murdered by National Socialist Germans is horrific, but those poor individuals are no more dead than the victims of Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Yet one is never considered a Ukraine Famine denier or a Great Leap Forward denier when trying to figure out if Mao starved 35 million or 50 million Chinese to death.

(This despite the fact that there were, and are, Ukraine Famine deniers out there. Just ask the New York Times about old Walter Duranty.)

The example of the Spanish Inquisition shows that it is entirely possible for what many assume to have been the murder of millions to have in fact been nothing of the sort. Unlike the Spanish Inquisition, in which around 6,000 people were executed by the State, (not the Church, as is commonly supposed), there is no reason to doubt that a tremendous number of Jews were murdered by the Nazis. The exact number, however, appears to be unknown and never will be known if scholars are forced to choose between accepting a big round number or facing jail time.

I am pro-Jew and pro-Israel. I think RJ Rummel’s number of 5.3 million Jewish fatalities is probably the most accurate estimated bodycount for the Holocaust. But like Scott Adams, I have never seen any historical documents that support the six million number and the fact that professional victims groups are so eager to resort to the use of government force to even avoid discussing the matter makes me wonder what it is they are attempting to hide.

The Sports Guy teams up with a reader to demonstrate proper bitch-slapping technique:

“During their most recent loss to the Rams, Lions’ radio color commentator Jim Brandstatter said that fantasy football was for ‘people with no lives.’ My buddies and I were trying to put this statement into context, and compared it to a NASCAR announcer talking about how stupid watching cars go around in a circle is, or a Catholic priest telling his parishioners that the Bible probably shouldn’t be taken literally….”

The radio color commentator for the worst football franchise of this decade just told me that I don’t have a life. I’m a little shaken, frankly. It’s like being called short by Mike Fratello. How do you regroup?

Yes, because real football is so much more significant to everyday life than fantasy football… seriously, what is wrong with some people. The Sports Gal loathes fantasy sports too, her rant this week is a tribute to the immortal spirit of woman.

“I can’t believe I married someone who needed a second phone line to talk about a fake baseball team…. I hate the League of Dorks.”

(This just goes to show that Spacebunny is far superior to the Sports Gal. The Sports Gal bitches about Simmons fantasy leagues, Spacebunny had jerseys made for both my team and my old team. I’m starting to suspect she arranged to have them hexed beforehand, though, since her Wallabies (Young Daniel manages it for her) won the title that year and the White Buffalo last year. And I’m off to an 0-4 start this year….

I can’t really blame her, though. When I finally do win the Loki Cup, I’m going to have a ring made with enough cubic zirconium to make a real Super Bowl ring look tasteful.

Russia begins expelling its immigrants:

Some 150 immigrants were rounded up and deported by Russian police yesterday. Officers demanded that schools draw up lists of children with Georgian surnames, prompting fears that the expulsions could be widened. Several hundred thousand Georgians are believed to live in Russia.

Despite the release of the four officers on Monday, Russia has introduced sanctions against Georgia on an almost daily basis, causing the worst tension between them in years amid international concern of a crisis in the south Caucasus.

Mr Saakashvili said the latest retaliation went beyond the limits of acceptability. “It looks like they’re hunting for people in the streets,” he said in his first interview with a western newspaper since the crisis began.

This may be significant, not because Georgians are Muslims – they’re not – but Russia is one of the most demographically challenged nations in Europe. If they have decided that immigrants are more trouble than they’re worth, one can expect France – where the Muslim youth are openly fighting the police – and Britain – where a Muslim gang just trashed a house four British veterans had rented – to follow suit in fairly short order. The fact that this is the lead headline at the Telegraph is also suggestive of Britain soon electing to put its own house in order.

The multicutural myth has been proven to be a dangerous charade. Mass integration is neither possible nor desirable. What does most of the Third World have to offer Western civilization anyhow, except in rare instances such as the Anglican Church where the Third World has better kept the traditions of Western Civilization than the West itself.

Socionomists will see this as another indication of a negative Wave Three. If they’re correct, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Spacebunny always enjoys these conversations:

“Hey, how’d it go? Did you guys win?”

“Well, the good news is, we won 3-2.”

“That’s great! Wait a minute….”

“Yeah, the bad news is that I’m at the hospital getting my knee stitched up.”

So, apparently I’ll be sitting around doing nothing but playing Total War and watching football this weekend. That’s not all that bad, actually, when you think about it. We had our second game in three nights yesterday evening, and while knocking off both teams put us into third place (!) with a game in hand, at a certain point late in the second half, I looked down and saw that my knee was rather bloody.

No big deal, I assumed I’d scraped it in a high-speed collision with the other team’s goalie. I got to the ball first and flipped it over him, but he got just enough finger on it to deflect it and keep it out long enough for a defender to clear. According to my teammates who saw what happened, he’d come in cleats-up, tried to take out my knee and partially succeeded. I didn’t notice it myself, being focused on the ball, and didn’t feel anything afterwards either.

Anyhow, the rules prohibit open bleeding on the field, so I took myself out and figured I’d rinse it off after the game. However, one of my teammates noticed that what I thought was just some blood welling up was actually a fairly deep gash. We wear black socks so it didn’t look that bad until, at his persistent insistence, I went to the locker room to take an early shower and get cleaned up so he could look at it.

The shower proved to be a no-go, however, as it turned out that the sock was already soaked with blood and the locker room was starting to look like an abattoir before I even managed to get my shorts off. Fortunately, I had a red shirt in my bag, so I stuck it on my knee, collected my belongings and told my teammate that perhaps he was right and a trip to the hospital was in order after all.

My teammate is obviously a true humanitarian, because he was perfectly willing to let me bleed all over his Maserati (I put my warm-ups over the seat, of course) and we got there in record time. The final score was: seven stitches, one bruised knee, one tetanus shot and I’m on the sidelines for the next two games.

It’s all good, though. I’m one of the weakest links on the team anyhow, the bruise hurts more than the gash itself and Spacebunny is wonderfully solicitous of this sort of thing. It was lovely to limp downstairs this morning and find a pretty blonde greeting me with a giant mocha and an amused smile.

Suckit runs a strange little train of thought right off the tracks:

Bane curses some chick out and tells her he’s going to send his “big dogs” to destroy her computer. It is obvious that only radical feminists are godless creatures who seek to limit the rights of others!

Let’s play the “how many errors can you fit into two sentences game”.

1. I am not Bane. What does this have to do with me?
2. Bane is not a libertarian. He does not recognize the same sort of sacrosanct individual rights that I do.
3. It is virtually impossible to destroy a specific computer via the Internet. The threat is meaningless.
4. Bane seldom, if ever, writes about feminists, radical or otherwise. The purported irony is nonexistent.
5. Bane is not a government. His actions are not laws limiting individual rights.
6. Bane has a right to control comments on his blog. Taking advantage of dynamic IPs to avoid a blog ban is, at the very least, bad manners that merit a public denouncing.

This doesn’t even qualify as bad logic, it’s just an incompetent and misdirected attempt at sarcasm.

I note with equal parts mirth and contempt the efforts of some die-hard Republican commentators to argue that the Foley scandal was little more than a Democratic sting, or that it is somehow unfair for Democrats to take maximum advantage of self-inflicted Republican foot-shooting.

All is fair in love, war and politics. If you are dumb enough to sacrifice principle for pragmatism and foolish enough to choose a barely closeted gay man as a representative of a party dependent upon the votes of Catholics and evangelical Christians, you shouldn’t be surprised when all your over-thought strategery begins to unravel.

The Republican leadership handed Democrats this stick and they shouldn’t be surprised or upset when Democrats gleefully beat them with it. Pointing to Clinton, Frank or other sexually incontinent individuals won’t make any difference, the party of the San Francisco Democrats is supposed to be perverse. The party of married America with children isn’t.

KB protests a bit too vehemently, in my book:

Love your site and articles, but to me this entry really falls. It’s a cheap and inaccurate argument to say that when someone expresses dislike or criticism for something it’s because he or she is jealous. If true, that would reveal some very ridiculous things about just what YOU admire and whom you envy.

I’m a thin, fit, small chested chick and I think women who get implants are pathetic. It seems that studies also testify to the psychological weakness and instability of the types of women who choose this cosmetic disfigurement. My husband is a fabulous piece of man, intellectually and physically superior to 99% of his gender – and at age 30 he’s basically bald. We laugh together at those television commercials of all the insecure losers whose self identity is too fragile to accept the natural results of aging and their own genetics.

It’s not (necessarily) jealousy for a woman to dislike another woman’s implants. I love gorgeous women; I hate what is fake. I love people as they are; I hate when they try to or think they have to make themselves into something they’re not, whether this is the attempt to adopt an inauthentic personality, intellect, or physicality.

While I agree that it is not NECESSARILY jealousy for a woman to dislike another woman’s breast implants – let’s face it, those are the only implants that set women off – I continue to assert that this is usually the case. Of course this isn’t always true of every criticism or dislike, I’ve stated several times how tiresome I find being accused of being jealous of a Malkin or a Shapiro due to my criticism of them; of course, if that were the case then why wouldn’t I be similarly jealous of the far more successful Coulters, Goldbergs and Buchanans of the world?

(Do you want to know who I envy? John Romero for one. J. Gregory Keyes for another, at least today just after finishing his excellent Age of Unreason series. Andrei Shevchenko for a third. Whoever designed the Total War franchise for a fourth. To even think to suggest that I would envy third- and fourth-rate commentators with mild gifts for self-promotion is downright insulting.)

As Spacebunny pointed out in the comments yesterday, the line of attack on women with breast implants could just as easily be applied to the many other individuals who elect to subject themselves to the 10.5 million other cosmetic procedures performed annually, and yet they never are. Lipo or rhinoplasty is as fake as breast augmentation, in fact, there’s probably more dishonesty surrounding rhinoplasty than any other procedure considering how many “deviated septums” are mysteriously fixed via external modifications.

KB also raises the larger question of inauthenticity. But what is authentic? I remember weighing 140 pounds and looking like an anorexic elf at the same height I am now. After more than a decade of painful and unnatural activity, I’ve stacked on 40 additional pounds, most of which would disappear in less than a year if I quit lifting. Is that authentic? How about when I’m on creatine and add another five pounds of muscle… most of that is gone within a month of going off the powder.

I conclude there is nothing inherently moral or immoral about intentional body modification, regardless of the method. Indeed, one can make a better Biblical case against a woman cutting her hair or a man eating too much than against most cosmetic surgery.

Given the hatred so many women harbor for more attractive women, I suspect that the real source of Irrational Implant-Induced Irritability is that it forces a woman to admit that she has a choice in a matter wherein she would prefer to believe she has none. I think this is similar to the dislike many of the unfit harbor for the fit, it’s much nicer to think that the status quo is not your fault and there’s simply nothing you can do. Whereas the flat woman can look at the natural D-cup with only mild envy, the augmented D-cup presents her with a direct challenge: you too can look like this if you so choose.

One does not need to be psychologically damaged in order to wish to look more attractive in a society where attractiveness is a significant material benefit. I do question, however, the psychological well-being of someone who actively dislikes another person merely for the way in which the mere fact of the dislikee’s existence forces the disliker to acknowledge the fact that she has, in fact, made a choice.

I frequently criticize the maleficent effect of women’s involvement in politics, but, as this Dilbert cartoon illustrates rather nicely, it’s not with women where the ultimate blame for the current state of civilization rests.

And I quite liked the next day’s cartoon, wherein Mr. Adams describes one of the hot woman’s natural enemies. While many men harbor an amount of dislike for pretty boys, you will see – and hear – almost as much visceral hatred taking a swimsuit model wearing a tight dress out in public than you would escorting an Orthodox Jew to synagogue in Riyadh.

I always wonder why small-breasted women who loudly snap “I bet those aren’t real” don’t simply shut up and get some decent implants themselves. Do they not hear the envy and the spite in their own voices? If they didn’t care it wouldn’t bother them, so obviously they do. But if that’s the case, then why not do something about it? If men could acquire hair or larger penises so easily, we’d be a nation of Fabio Jeremies.

Now, I don’t know if women would consider that to be a good thing or not, especially given how men tend to overdo it. Given what some guys do with free weights alone, the mind threatens to boggle.

Mr. Podhoretz, put down the logic and step away from it slowly before you hurt yourself:

Rod [Dreher] writes: “Could you do that? Could you stand over the body of a dead child and tell the young not to hate her killer? I could not. Please God, make me into the sort of man who could.”

I am a modestly observant Jew, not a Christian, but I can certainly see the beauty and the moral seriousness that would follow from attempting to hew as closely as possible to Christ’s example of unconditional love and forgiveness. All the same, this story disturbs me deeply — because there can be no question that anger can be as righteous as forgiveness. I’m not sure I would want to be someone who succeeded in rising above hatred of those who murder children. Does this mean that those who harbor hatred of child killers have somehow achieved a higher level of Godliness than those who succeed in banishing such hatred from their hearts? That seems to be a necessary corollary of the idea that it is heroic to “instruct the young not to hate,” and that seems very wrong to me.

Podhoretz the Younger has an intelligent father, but he appears to be determined to illustrate the principle of regression to the mean.

The fact that anger can be, at times, as righteous as forgiveness does not mean that it always is. In fact, Jesus Christ said that it was necessary to forgive a brother 70 times 7 times, he provided no similar imperative for anger. Furthermore, it is clear that Christian hate is to be directed at the sin, not the sinner who commits it.

Building on this false equality, Podhoretz then uses a weasel word, “seems”, on which to construct his ridiculous question. “Does this mean that those who harbor hatred of child killers have somehow achieved a higher level of Godliness than those who succeed in banishing such hatred from their hearts?”

No, you dunderingly incompetent would-be sophist, it doesn’t.

I used to be a big fan of National Review, but it’s become increasingly painful to watch some of these writers flail about as they attempt to live up to their billing as political philosophers and public intellectuals.

That being said, Podhoretz does make one valid point. It is a hard, hard thing to even conceive of forgiving such a monstrous crime against one’s loved ones. One would do well to pray that one never has the opportunity to do so.

As for me, I must confess that while I understand the need to avoid giving in to hatred of the sinner, (since it is corrosive to the hater), I don’t agree with the notion of forgiving those who have not repented of their wrongdoings. God does not forgive those who do not repent of their sins, and I see no imperative to go Him one better by providing proactive forgiveness. Those 490 acts of forgiveness logically imply 490 previous acts of repentance, as forgiving the unrepentant smacks of cheap and promiscuous grace.