Category: Uncategorized

Wild Hunt goes off on a strange hunt indeed:

The strange thing about his thesis (besides the sheer ignorant asinine horror of it all) is that he displays absolutely no understanding of how myth and stories work in culture, and how that differs from texts of law or religious doctrine. Since a Roman founding story features rape, and since Greek gods raped in myth it must mean that people from that time found no moral quandary with actual rape. This immense lack in understanding allows the author to make sweeping judgments about thousands of years of history and culture….

No ancient culture has their hands clean in this matter, and to single out Christianity for special moral praise is to blur and confuse the actual history of Christianity and rape in ancient societies. Morality didn’t spring whole-cloth from the Bible and anyone versed in history would know that. Rape is a horror and all right-thinking modern religions and cultures condemn it, to try and twist history and facts to suit your religious moralistic viewpoint and to in turn damn all other religious cultures is petty and small-minded.

I’m curious to know how Wildhunt thinks I’ve tried to “twist history and facts”. First, a column is not an academic treatise; as it stood, I more than doubled the usual column length in order to present more than naked assertions. The fact that the column is not an encyclopedia does not mean that there is not a plethora of evidence supporting my case, however.

Another blogger mentioned another Roman founding myth, the Rape of Lucretia by Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last King, as evidence that rape was morally condemned by Romans, the celebrated Rape of the Sabine Women notwithstanding. Of course, the response was violent, not jurisprudent, the myth centers around a political power struggle, and Lucretia, despite her rape, killed herself as a future example to unchaste women. And the mythomoralists complain that I’m prone blaming the victim?

(I should perhaps note that I was not unfamiliar with Livy prior to writing this week’s column, indeed, Big Chilly’s bird I accidentally killed at the Digital Ghetto was named Lucretia, although we tended to view it more as an homage to the Borgia.)

As for Wildhunt’s suggestion with regards to legal, as mythical resources, rape is primarily conspicuous by its absence from the Roman legal system. Despite a vast panoply of laws which govern everything from divorce to women’s adornment, the only law specifically dedicated to rape I’ve seen is from the Codex Justinian, which is three hundred years post-Republic and says:

Foedissimam earum nequitiam, quae pudorem suum alienis libidinibus prosternunt, non etiam earum, quae per vim stupro comprehensae sunt, inreprehensam voluntatem leges ulciscuntur, quando etiam inviolatae existimationis esse nec nuptiis earum aliis interdici merito placuit. – CJ.9.9.20: Imperatores Diocletianus, Maximianus

Translated: “The laws punish the detestable wickedness of women who prostitute their chastity to the lusts of others, but do not hold those liable who are violated by force and against their will. And, moreover, it has very properly been decided that their reputations are not lost, and that their marriage with others should not be prohibited on this account.”

In other words, Imperial Roman law did not state that rape was a crime, only that being raped was not a crime. As for another famous legal system, the Code of Hammurabi, it echoes the Republican lex Plautia de vi and the Caesarian lex Julia de vi publica in focusing on the damage to the father/husband’s property.

If a man violate the wife (betrothed or child-wife) of another man, who has never known a man, and still lives in her father’s house, and sleep with her and be surprised, this man shall be put to death, but the wife is blameless. – Hammurabi 130.

If a man betroth a girl to his son, but his son has not known her, and if then he defile her, he shall pay her half a gold mina, and compensate her for all that she brought out of her father’s house. She may marry the man of her heart. – Hammurabi 156.

Stealing a woman’s virginity was therefore illegal, but Hammurabi’s law says nothing about forcing an unwilling, unchaste woman. As for the Celtic example cited, one has to question the application of a single legal code to define the morality of a people as broadly scattered as the Celts, particularly a people with sacred myths described by Wildhunt’s source in this way: goddesses in [Celtic] literature were often raped, died in childbirth and their status was destroyed by the symbolism of the rape. The goddesses, however, gave birth to great men who would in turn become great warriors.

That does not strike me as an anti-rape culture, particularly when Wildhunt’s source adds: ” Evidence also points to the cruel treatment of women during this particularly violent time. They were often raped by course warriors, starved, and basically used as bait.”

To argue, as Wildhunt does, that rape was a serious violation of ancient moral codes appears to be manifestly absurd based on much of the very evidence he claims was missing from Monday’s column. And I have not even begun to elucidate the pagan systems of temple prostitution, to which every woman was forced to submit in some ancient cities, or some of the more notorious religious rites of Cybella and other pagan gods.

Finally, I note that today’s New York Times offers a glimpse into a modern pagan view of the need for sexual consent: Devadasis – poor, lower-caste women consecrated to gods as young girls and then consigned to prostitution – live in the south.

Some lovely sleight-of-hand courtesy of KillJuliet at The Not-So-Invisible Man:

Haha. Yes, I’m compensating for your lack of intelligence. The only reason I even highlighted your spelling errors was to demonstrate how you are attacking acpatriot for sounding like a 5-year-old, yet you don’t spell any better than a person of that age.

I know this may sound too logical for you, but by saying that a person is “partially responsible” for being raped, you are partially removing some guilt from the perpetrator. Anyone who believes this may say to him/herself, “Well, she didn’t take the proper precautions to prevent the rape, so it’s kind of her fault that she was raped.” This example brings me to my next point: by claiming a person is “partially responsible” for being raped, you are suggesting that he/she is partially at fault for the rape — which implies that he/she partially deserved to be raped. Using this logic, Vox implied that women deserved to be raped because they could have decreased their chances of being assaulted in the first place.

No, that’s not even close to being “too logical”. First, we have the common failure to grasp the absence of a zero-sum situation. As I have now had to state at least three times, responsibility attaching to one party does not remove guilt from the other party.

Responsibility and guilt are two different concepts. They can overlap, but they are not synonymous. If I run over a man who crosses against a red light, I am obviously RESPONSIBLE for his death – he wouldn’t be dead if I didn’t run over him – but I am not GUILTY as I clearly had no intention of killing him. KillJuliet relies on the weasel word “implied” in a vain attempt to hide the fact that she is drawing a false conclusion that I have already explicitly rejected.

I note that no one has yet seriously attempted to build a non-Judeo-Christian case against rape. Ironically, KillJuliet even attempts to draw upon it as a particularly ill-conceived base from which to launch an attack.

That your public-schooled kid won’t be abused by an adult:

A US Department of Education study released last year found that 7 per cent of pupils were victims of physical or sexual abuse by teachers or other school employees. Of those, 22 per cent were abused by a woman.

The odds are quite good that your kid won’t be abused by an adult at school. But if you factor in abuse by fellow students – which would be perhaps three times as likely, just to make a rough guess – then you’re looking at nearly a quarter of kids being forced to deal with this sort of thing. Suddenly, those odds don’t look so great.

You can certainly defend rolling the dice with the “that which does not kill me makes me stronger” theory, but then, I suppose homeschooling parents could always hire someone to swing by once a month and punch their kids too. I wonder what Child Protective Services would make of that?

Another splash for the absinthe-deprived:

Apparently, women can be “partially responsible” for being raped. Since Vox says date rape doesn’t exist, I guess that dating is in and of itself a damning activity that might give rise to this partial responsibility. This is the problem with the notion that women can be blamed for, even “partially,” for rape, is that there is absolutely no limit to the demands that rape apologists will put on women if women want to absolve their responsibility. If a woman can be responsible for rape, that means women can’t drink. They can’t walk anywhere at night. They can’t ever enter the apartment of another male. They can’t ever allow a male to enter their apartment. They can never wear skirts above the knee. They can never wear any tight-fitting clothing. They can never have consensual sex with someone they are not married, to, since apparently having consensual sex with one or two men means you want to have sex with them all. They can never kiss a man (“why did you kiss him if you didn’t want to have sex with him?”), flirt with a man, make obvious eye contact with a man, talk to a man they don’t know, allow a man to walk her home, be alone with a man. They can’t take public transportation in any city where crime is common. They must always be under the watchful eye of a brother, father or husband. Oh, but wait, let’s not forget that women are raped by their brothers, fathers, and husbands every day.

As Camille Paglia points out, you’ve got your freedom now, baby! At least, you do with regards to this subject. And what that means that you’ve got all the risk that is inherent with sexual liberty. If you want to cliff-dive, you can do it, but do so in the recognition that you just might break your neck. Sure, the chances that going to that nice fraternity boy’s room means that you’ll end up with your skin decorating a lampshade are slim, but you just bumped them up a notch. Here’s a question for OOA: is it possible for someone to be partially responsible for their purse getting stolen? If so, then how is it impossible for someone to be partially responsible for getting raped?

Assigning women responsibility for rape is a game that always, always end in a further perpetuation of the rape culture.

As I pointed out in my column today, there is quite a bit of evidence that suggests refusing to assign women responsibility for their actions not only perpetuates rape, but increases the number of rapes committed per 100,000 population.

So, what are women to do, then? Hope and pray that neither Vox nor any of his legion of worshipppers ever get ahold of any political power.

Yes, because libertarians are just ITCHING to get at the reins of central government power in order to rape, pillage and plunder the masses. Need another example of the female tendency towards fascism? It appears that OOA can’t even contemplate the notion of having political power and not using it to force your views on others.

Sometimes I feel like a wild animal standing outside a cage, looking at the tame animals within. There’s enough of them there to force the cage door open, but they just stand there, looking at me as if I’m insane.

“Open the damn door!” I tell them. “You can leave.”

“But, but, but what would we do then? No one would tell us what to do! No one would make the bad ones behave!”

“No one makes them behave now. Anyhow, so what, you’d be free. You should be free!”

“But what if something bad happened. What if someone raped us?”

“You’re getting raped now! At least if you were free, you could run away. You could defend yourself!”

“No… I can’t… you’re crazy!”

Perhaps. Aber die Gedanken, sie sind immer frei.

10x 44kg
08x 48kg
06x 52kg
04x 56kg
10x 40kg

What was that you said, mate? I can’t hear BECAUSE MY ARMS ARE BLOCKING MY EARS!

Don Banks writes on SI:

Boomer Esiasion on CBS’s pre-game show Sunday actually said if the Vikings make the playoffs, head coach Mike Tice should have his salary quadrupled and “don’t be surprised if he’s coach of the year.”

Coach of the Year? Tice couldn’t even win Coach of the Year in his division. Ever hear of Lovie Smith, Boom? And yes we know you and Tice hail from the same neck of the woods on Long Island, and both went to Maryland, but how about a little objectivity?

I am going to go upstairs, remove the purple Vikings sweatshirt I am currently sporting, and take a shower. A long, hot one. I shall do my level best to forget that I ever read anything to this effect. Should I fail, I shall then go about seeking psychiatric help before I snap and am found frozen to death in the process of making naked snow angels to spell out FIRE MIKE TICE in giant letters outside Winter Park.

ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FREAKISHLY BLOND GOURD, BOOMER? ARE YOU EVIL OR ARE YOU MAD? DO YOU PARTICULARLY HATE THE VIKINGS OR JUST MINNESOTANS IN GENERAL? AAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!

UPDATE – okay, I am feeling calm now. I am at peace, I am at one with the world in all its vicissitudes, with the NFL and with the Vikings. Now that I am capable of thinking soberly about this, I have concluded that Boomer Esiason is in the pay of Matt Millen, who realizes that his only hope of winning the NFC Central – yes, I know, shut up, I still haven’t accepted the 16-game season – is to encourage even greater incompetence than he can muster. He’s already done the Packers in with Sherman, the Vikings with Tice, and Lovie Smith was a devious plot that went horribly wrong due to Millen’s racist miscalculations.

By the way, there are few individuals I hate in the world, but Matt Millen may top the list. I still remember every single Packers-Vikings game wherein he would spend the entire game slagging the Vikes under the nominal guise of a color commentator.

How does he still have a job anyhow? Hey, maybe Millen can hire Tice!!! Now THAT would be perfect!

Derbyshire dislikes Irving Kristol’s elitism:

“A year ago, I asked Kristol after a lecture whether he believed in God or not. He got a twinkle in his eye and responded, ‘I don’t believe in God, I have faith in God.’ Well, faith, as it says in Hebrews 11:1, ‘is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ But at the recent AEI lecture, journalist Ben Wattenberg asked him the same thing. Kristol responded that ‘that is a stupid question,’ and crisply restated his belief that religion is essential for maintaining social discipline. A much younger (and perhaps less circumspect) Kristol asserted in a 1949 essay that in order to prevent the social disarray that would occur if ordinary people lost their religious faith, ‘it would indeed become the duty of the wise publicly to defend and support religion.'”

Here we have a guy who plainly doesn’t believe in God, but who thinks that well-padded intellectual elitists like himself ought to evade the issue in public for fear of demoralizing the proles and perhaps jeopardizing some padding thereby. I can’t think of anything nice to say about that; and in fact, the only things I CAN think of to say would not be suitable for a family website.

I’m no neoconservative. But I do note that Kristol’s position is of a long and distinguished lineage, dating back to Socrates and including Voltaire, Joyce, and more recently, Eco among its adherents. And, as was implied in today’s column, there is something to be said for doing one’s best to remain on the side of that which has proven to build civilization instead of tearing it down, regardless of one’s private doubts.

Derb adds:

To your question: “And Derb, why is it wrong for atheists and agnostics to believe that religion can be a force for good?” If you can point me to anything I have ever said or written that suggested such a thing, I’d be obliged.

If you were to start a list of people who, while themselves atheist or agnostic, believed widespread religious belief to be a social and/or personal good, you would have to block out a weekend to get the job done. Confucius, Plato, the emperor Augustus, Ben Franklin…. This has been such a commonplace intellectual position that if you DID think it wrong you’d have to cross half the great thinkers & doers of history off your Christmas card list.

I always find this interesting, given how so many modern atheists and agnostics sneer at religion and will often even go so far as to insist that as a cause of war and general evil, should be stamped out. And yet, the brightest lights IN THEIR OWN CAMP would vehemently disagree.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Arnold Schwarzenegger stunned California last week by selecting the former deputy chief of staff to Gray Davis, the Democratic governor ousted by the recall that brought Mr. Schwarzenegger to power, to be his own chief of staff.

Conservatives are furious that Susan Kennedy, a 45-year-old former acolyte of radical activists Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, will be Gov. Schwarzenegger’s top administrator, with power to hire and fire staff. Some liberals are angry at her joining a GOP governor; others are bemused. This Wednesday, 450 Gray Davis alumni will fill the state capitol for the unveiling of Mr. Davis’s portrait. Ms. Kennedy will be reunited with David Zingale, another former top Davis aide, who is now chief of staff to First Lady Maria Shriver. Jason Kinney, a Davis speechwriter, quips that Mr. Schwarzenegger has decided to “finish the second term of Gray Davis.” Mr. Davis, for his part, notes that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

I tried to warn starry-eyed Republicans of this in a column during the post-recall election, but the Hewittian-led pragmatists won over the ironically more realistic idealists.

You can’t always get what you want. You won’t always get what you need. But you usually get what you deserve.

Todd is puzzled:

Do you have any idea where many of today’s women are getting fed their daily feminist bread? As a single man I keep running into women that keep describing themselves as “independent” in conversations. Men never need to qualify themselves this way because we are naturally more independent.

These women make it a point to stress their “independence” which gets me wondering whether they are reading it in Cosmopolitan or some other rag that this is what men want out of women.

The concept is pushed most heavily in college, although it has trickled down to the high schools, especially the private schools, to some extent. It is also pushed via entertainment; one can look at nearly any movie or television show and see that a woman dependent on a man is nearly always portrayed as frustrated, embittered and dowdy, whereas a woman who supports herself is portrayed as being happy, confident and more attractive to men.

The movie True Lies was an example of this, as Jamie Lee Curtis does not bloom until she becomes a secret agent in partnership with her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (If you haven’t seen it, do, it’s much better than you’d think and single-handedly reversed my previous opinion of Tom Arnold as being entirely unfunny.) The movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith is perhaps a good example of the SIW’s (strong independent woman)ideal, where the woman’s independence and equality is asserted to be an intrinsicly sexy thing. One can trace this theme back to Hepburn and Tracy, but while it is true that snappy repartee can be briefly entertaining, it is a horrible basis for a relationship.

It’s important to understand that women tend to think in images. This is why they are so susceptible to visual propaganda; while many men’s magazines are nothing but text and even Playboy usually features lengthy and in-depth articles, you can go through a stack of women’s magazines without finding more than a few pages that contain more than two paragraphs worth of text. Even many intelligent women who are perfectly capable of it don’t really like to think, they find it more interesting to express and explain themselves. You, on the other hand, may find the topic somewhat less fascinating.

Following the overt (college) and the covert (Hollywood) propaganda, this independence theme is powerfully reinforced by other women. As most of you have probably noted from visits to feminist-oriented blogs, external and critical input is seldom welcomed by female-dominated circles. Whereas competitive men welcome and feed off negative energy – think of Michael Jordan manufacturing perceived slights to motivate himself, Reggie Miller’s habit of walking around New York in a Pacers jersey on game day or the “we get no respect” theme echoed by every NFL team, including the home field advantage holder in the playoffs, (I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to hearing how a potentially 16-0 Colts team that is nearly every sportswriters’ pre-season Super Bowl pick is going to complain about how they get no respect), – most women shrink from it. This is why many women develop a habit of verbal aggressiveness, on the reasonable grounds that the best defense is a constant offense.

But the toughness is an illusion. They’re like tank destroyers, all gun and no armor. At college, I found that the most verbally aggressive women were the most easily reduced to tears, even if one didn’t bother to get personal. So, since the Strong Independent Woman theme is almost always a front designed to mask an inherent insecurity, so you need not take it too seriously. The key is to determine how tightly the mask is bonded to her self-perception; if she responds warmly to masculine assertiveness and takes it off within a week or two, there’s no problem. If she clings to the illusion and continues to hide behind it, write her off and move on even if you are able to see through it.

Never waste any time with anyone who makes a habit of lying to themself. They will all too easily rationalize justifications for lying to you.