Category: Uncategorized

One thing Halation, being relatively new to these parts, has yet to learn is that I write nothing without being able to back it up to at least some small degree. She calls what she apparently considered to be a bluff:

perhaps you can tell me: what rights have i lost? there are precious few modern writers i can find who oppose women’s suffrage, save those who propound the same overwrought fearmongering the ‘scholars’ are offering here – ‘because then the communists win! and then the terrorists win! plus they want to kill your babies!’

Very well, let’s list your supposedly unalienable rights. There is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There are the Constitutionally enumerated Bill of Rights, including the rights to free speech, to a free press, to bear arms, to be secure in your person, houses, papers, and effects, the right to a speedy and public trial, the right of trial by jury, the right to not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, the right to not have private property be taken for public use without just compensation.

How have those rights fared since women received the “right” to vote.

1. The right to life is under siege, for unborn children, disabled children and the elderly.
2. The right to liberty is all but destroyed already.
3. You still have the right to pursue happiness.
4. The right to free speech has been eliminated by sexual harassment laws, hate crime laws, the FEC and campaign reform laws.
5. The right to a free press has been limited by campaign reform laws and the establishment of the FCC.
6. The right to bear arms has been significantly reduced by gun control laws.
7. The right to be secure in your person, houses, papers and effects has been eliminated by the drug laws, the airport laws, the IRS, etc.
8. The right to a public and speedy trial has been eliminated by the Patriot Act. Once declared an “enemy combatant” by a government official you can be held indefinitely.
9. The right to trial by jury has been eliminated by the family “courts”, the tax “courts” and the immigration “courts”, none of which even belong to the judicial branch but are simply executive-branch bureaucrats dressed up as judges.
10. The right to due process of law has been eliminated. See 9.
11. The right to not have your property taken except for justly compensated public use has been eliminated under Kelo.

Now, I believe it’s your turn to provide that list of the rights you’ve gained under the suffrage-enabled regime of the last 85 years? Still think it’s been a worthwhile trade?

the only thing i’ve been able to find bearing a passing resemblance to a sensical argument is the argument that, as voting is not a right, denying it someone is not taking away their rights, as such. this appears to be what you are arguing, and as i’ve said, you can make that argument, but make it honestly. stop making the issue about women in particular, for when you do, your arguments are based on the same logic of emotion you accuse those ghastly gashes the feminists of using.

What emotion? I’m not appealing to emotion at all. Voting is manifestly not a right, it was never intended to be a right, and and history reliably demonstrates that if basic human liberties are to be preserved in any quasi-democratic society, women cannot be granted the privilege of voting.

you’re calling for controlled rule by an elite. vox has said as much, but he says it rarely; usually he speaks more about the grave threat that is Woman. likely he does this because it’s more fun, because it gets him more listeners, and because doing so allows him to manipulate the emotions of those who despise women and who’d far prefer to see them with limited rights or no rights at all – civil or natural. the loss of rights is, to many, implied in the anti-suffrage logic, and that’s why they like it. thinking is hard. smugness is easy.

I am not calling for a rule by an elite, I am simply pointing out that an elite has always and will always rule. In the USA, we have been governed for the last 20 years by the members of two families, all three of whom attended the same small university. The opposing candidate in the last election also attended that same university, while the leading contender for the next eight years also belongs to one of those two families. And you still can’t see an elite? The question at hand is what sort of elite do you prefer, an honest one that rules openly or a covert one that rules by manipulation?

i’ve asked before, and i’ll ask yet again, and ask until i get an answer: how many of your readers here will have the vote, vox? readers, how many of you care? are you, like spacebunny, happy to give up your vote to take away mine?

First, liberty is not voting, halation. Millions of people around the world have freely given up their “right” to vote in order to move somewhere else where they can live in more freedom. As immigrants and non-citizens, they cannot vote, and yet they demonstrably go very far out of their way to trade that vote in pursuit of liberty.

The historic estimate for those permitted to vote by the Founding Fathers was around 20 percent. I suspect the ideal percentage is closer to 10 percent, which approximates that of the historical Athenian democracy, but removing the most centrophilic fifty-two percent or thereabouts from the voting rolls would certainly be satisfactory.

I find it tremendously amusing that people who profess to be horrified by my opposition to universal suffrage are unaware that the democratic ideals they claim to revere are rooted in systems more strictly limited than anything I’m advocating. That is only one of the many reasons I am untroubled by the opprobrium of the Oprah-watching masses.

Halation isn’t exactly up on her legal precedents:

what i truly have standing between me and an honour-killing or rape and murder is a legal system, part of a government which considers me an individual in my own right and not the property of my father or husband. forgive me if i decide not to toss that away and put my faith in y’all. it also should be said i’m pretty handy in a fight, when i need to be. but thanks all the same.

Oh, Sweet Cthulhu, I am filled with mirth indeed! Halation, my poor, naive innocent, in truth you have NOTHING WHATSOEVER standing between you and the bad guys.

This is not merely my opinion, it is a matter of settled case law. Neither your state and local police nor the various and sundry security agencies and armed forces of the U.S. federal government have any responsibility to protect you from rape, murder or anything else that any individual of ill intent wishes to do to you. They are merely there to pick up the pieces afterward and see if the bad guy was dumb enough to leave any obvious clues for them.

The question of your tossing that away or not is irrelevant, because all you are holding an empty hand full of nothing but hot air and uninformed illusions. But please, don’t take my word for it. You can look it up on Westlaw.

From NRO’s Corner:

Reuters reports Bush will tap White House economic adviser Ben Bernanke as the new Fed chief. I know nothing about Bernanke, but the Dow is up a bit today, so perhaps this is a good choice.

Actually, it’s a disastrous and entirely predictable one. I called this one back in June, as did virtually every other contrarian who saw how Bernanke was being given more face-time in the media. Now does that prediction of a Rodham administration today look a little less implausible?

Bernanke is the one who believes that all financial problems can be solved by increasing the money supply ala the magic printing press. However, this doesn’t mean that he’ll actually be successful in inflating the US economy out of recession, as he’ll likely run into the “pushing on a string” problem that so worried Greenspan.

It’s still uncertain whether the deflationists are correct, but a healthy mix of cash and gold should keep one in decent shape, even if it won’t render you wildly wealthy. Remember, self-preservation is the main point in a bear market, so don’t get carried away in thinking that because you’re ahead of the crowds, you’re ahead of the game.

Haloscan has been down this morning, so at KH’s request, I thought I’d give the Blogspot comments a whirl. I’m not entirely sure that I like them, however, so let me know what you think about the one versus the other.

UPDATE: Okay, that’s enough data. For all their numerous flaws, Haloscan comments work better than Blogspot comments. We shall resume commenting service when Haloscan decides to cooperate.

Let’s think about this. After one drink you “are not a hundred percent.” Heather [an Abilene-based MADD victims advocate] believes that we must keep people from driving who are “not one hundred percent.” OK. I’ll buy it. Let’s get impaired people off the road.

Going to the web site of The Women’s Health Channel, I find the following listed as symptoms of PMS:

“• Mood-related (“affective”) symptoms: depression, sadness, anxiety, anger, irritability, frequent and severe mood swings.
• Mental process (“cognitive”) symptoms: decreased concentration, indecision.”

Does that sound like one hundred percent to you? I figure it’s a pretty good description of an unstable borderline psychotic. Oh good. I want to drive on the roads with someone who doesn’t pay attention, couldn’t decide what to do it she did, and wants to kill something. Me, probably.

We need to recognize the seriousness of PMS. People joke about it, as they do about drunkenness, but these women are public hazards. “Anger, irritability, frequent and severe mood swings”? (Now that’s a revelation.) “Decreased concentration”? Sounds like a bad drunk in a pool hall, a recipe for inattentive homicidal road-rage. I think the police should send squads into supermarket parking lots to check for these impaired women. Other cops should wait outside churches. To better protect the public we should have checkpoints on highways…. Ponder this from Planet Estrogen: “Additionally, several studies demonstrate reduced reaction time, neuromuscular coordination and manual dexterity during the pre-menstruation and menstrual phases.”

As Fred astutely points out, MADD transformed itself into the prohibitionist movement, version 2.0. I am a little concerned, however, that in calling for banning PMS-impaired driving, he has stolen my rightful spot as NOW’s favorite columnist. In noticing “the weird totalitarianism of the female”, Fred reminds me of a question I forgot to ask my critics a few weeks ago: If women are not instinctive totalitarians, can anyone please point to ten individual rights that women’s organizations want to expand, other than the right to murder? (Unborn children, excess children, supposedly abusive husbands, elderly parents, etc.)

Because there is not exactly a shortage of things that women’s organizations are actively working towards banning. Susan Faludi was worried about a backlash against feminism a few years ago. I don’t think she’s even begun to see anything yet.

Last week: 12-2. Overall: 56-32, .636. Fantasy: 4-2.

W-Colts over Texans
W-Falcons over Jets
W-Redskins over 49ers
L-Bengals over Steelers
W-Bears over Ravens
L-Chargers over Eagles
W-Chiefs over Dolphins
W-Raiders over Bills
L-Browns over Lions
W-Giants over Broncos
L-Titans over Cardinals
L-Cowboys over Seahawks
W-Vikings over Packers
W-Rams over Saints

The Dichotomous Subversive: Douglas Adams and the Rule of Unreason
by Vox Day
copyright (c) 2004

From THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, Ben Bella Books

Adams exposes the fundamental flaw at the heart of all centralism in the defeat of the murderous xenophobes of Krikkit, whose legions of deadly white robots operate under the direct control of the Krikkit War Computer. In much the same way that the Mongols, on the verge of conquering Europe in 1242, were brought to a complete halt by the death of Ogedai Khan, the Krikkit war machine is shut down by the exposure of the War Computer’s central intelligence core to the suicidally depressed robot. It is worth noting that Adams again ties together the concepts of centralism and mass death, as the Clerk of the Court at the War Crimes Trial concludes that two grillion guys were “zilched out” by the forces of Krikkit.

In addition to his unexpectedly fruitful harvest in the comedic orchards of death, war crimes and monetary policy, Adams manages to find hilarity in the always amusing topic of taxes. He jabs effectively at static revenue models, (which assert that individual behavior will remain the same despite changing tax rates), by introducing Arthur Dent to the corpse of Disaster Area lead singer Hotblack Desiato, who is “spending the year dead for tax reasons,”, and in doing so, highlights how government policies force otherwise rational humans to behave in an irrational manner.

Other government-fostered irrationalities are exposed in the brief discussion of bad poetry following Arthur and Ford’s escape from Earth. While the execrable and oft deadly Vogon poetry is a natural artifact of Vogon culture, public funding results in an even more dangerous form of composition :

The second worst is that of the Azagoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode To A Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.

Then there is the terrible punishment of the Belcebron people, whose quietly enlightened accomplishments incur the perverse wrath of the Galactic Tribunal. This sort of petty vindictiveness is all too typical of government bureaucracies, which always seeks to control that which is not beholden to them and to destroy what they cannot control. The unprovoked attack on the people of Belcebron is more than a little remniscent of the ongoing campaign being waged against the Boy Scouts by local governments around the country, which seek to deny the organization funds and access to public property on the basis of a 95-year old policy which was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA V. DALE (99-699) 530 U.S. 640.

The savage irony of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, what is surely Douglas Adams’ greatest and most subtle joke, is that this overtly anti-government collection of subversion was not only funded by the British government, but distributed by it to the masses in a variety of formats through the BBC. Through Hitchhiker’s, Douglas Adams does not so much bite the hand that was feeding him as rip it off entirely, leaving nothing but a bloody stump behind. The dichotomy is almost precisely the reverse of Lenin’s famous construction; in this case, the socialist state gave the very rope to the writer with which he throttled it.

Adams’ theme cannot honestly be characterized as a Thatcherite one— his interests ran more towards pointing out problems and contradictions than proposing policies to address them— but even so, it appears to be more than a coincidence that the first airing of the Hitchhiker’s radio program should have been March 8, 1978, five weeks after a massive nationwide strike by the four major public service unions and a scant eight weeks before the British people threw the Labour Party out of office following seventeen ruinous years of post-war dominance. It seems logical to conclude that the conservative wave which swept Britain and brought Margaret Thatcher to power also helped in establishing Douglas Adams as a worldwide literary star.

Certainly, Britain’s new Prime Minister must have approved of his take on trade unions. The concept of a philosopher’s union is humorous enough in itself, but Adams’ adept description of how unions use the government’s legal muscle to reinforce their position to stifle technological advancement teaches more in a paragraph than most elite economics courses can manage in a semester in describing how corrupt power politics are used to inhibit entrepeneurship and economic growth.

It is unfortunate that Douglas Adams is now seen primarily as an amusing writer of science fiction. He was much more than that. The five books of the Hitchhiker’s trilogy are, in their own unique manner, every bit as serious and as provokingly philosophical as Voltaire’s “Candide” or Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”. Douglas Adams may not have been a Libertarian, but his works deserve to be categorized among the most powerfully libertarian literature to have ever seen print.

But the anti-government theme of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy can best be summarized in Adams’ own words, which leave little doubt as to the author’s deep skepticism with regards to the rational nature and reasonable intentions of those who seek to rule over their fellow man.

The major problem— one of the major problems, for there are several— one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

The Dichotomous Subversive Part I of II

From NRO’s Corner:

My official position on Miers has been to criticize the selection, but give her the benefit of the doubt until the hearings. In other words, bad pick but she’s the nominee so let’s give her a shot.

No more.

After reading this story I’m officially against Miers. I’m with the Editors , Will, Frum, and Krauthammer.

It’s not just that Miers was in favor of racial quotas — we’d pretty much known that for a while. It’s the fundamental confirmation that she’s a go-along-with-the-crowd establishmentarian. The White House says that her enthusiastic support for goals, timetables and quotas at the Bar Association says nothing about her views on government race policies. Yeah, right. She simultaneously thought what she was doing was great and important while also believing it would be unconstitutional if the government did the same thing.

About time, matey. Now, if we can just get the National Review to come around on Bush himself.

By the way, I’m not saying that I’d vote for him – although I’d consider it – but the Republicans could and probably will do a lot worse than nominating Tom Coburn for President.

The Dichotomous Subversive: Douglas Adams and the Rule of Unreason
by Vox Day
copyright (c) 2004

From THE ANTHOLOGY AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, Ben Bella Books

It is not written in thirty-foot high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, but there is a distinct message that can be found woven throughout Douglas Adams’ (regrettably no longer) increasingly innacurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy. His is a seditious message, a wildly subversive one, in fact, considering the ironic circumstances of its germination and subsequent propagation.

The dark master of the black art of humor, Adams is a fearless thrower of flames; an equal-opportunity mocker, his targets are freely distributed across the spectrum. He ridicules rock bands, religious fundamentalists, quantum mechanists, environmentalists and the Oxford English dictionary. He mocks Hollywood screenwriters and philosophers with equal enthusiasm, ; he lampoons politicians and poets with effortlessly cruel flair. If an author can be discerned through the veil of his characters, he would appear to be more Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged than the long-suffering Arthur Dent, though Adams does not trouble to order his insults alphabetically.

To fully appreciate the overarching contempt that fuels Adams’ humor, it is necessary to understand that the government that inspired it was not the post-Thatcher New Labour of Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia, but the grim, ponderous Old Labour regime of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. Economically illiterate and dominated by socialist trade-unions, its policies had led to a severe devalution of the pound combined with harsh currency controls that limited the amount of cash British vacationers could take out of the country, forcing a nation with colonies in Bermuda and the Virgin Islands to spend its vacations at the cold Atlantic beaches of Blackpool.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy begins with the indelible image of a showdown between a bulldozer and a man futilely attempting to defend his property against the proclaimed interest of the governing authorities. The remorseless and inexorable logic of the Council — you’ve got to build bypasses – was recently echoed in the U.S.A. by the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled that the city of New London was operating within its rights when it used its power of eminent domain to condemn the middle-class Fort Trumbull neighborhood in order to permit developers to knock down ninety homes and replace them with upscale condominiums and an office park.

One hopes that unlike the case of Arthur Dent’s house, these demolitions will not soon be followed by the total destruction of the Earth.

This classic critique of eminent domain is far from the only one that Adams makes in his clandestine litany of the mindless abuses of government. His feelings on the bureaucrats who run the show could hardly be made more clear when he writes that it is the ugly, unevolved Vogons who have migrated in mass to the political hub of the galaxy and now make up “the immensely powerful backbone of the Galactic Civil Service.” Anyone who has had the misfortune of encountering the corpulent troglodytes who dwell in department of transportation offices will readily recognize where Adams likely found his inspiration for both the Vogon’s appearance and their unhelpful philosophy.

“They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy— – not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters.”

This profoundly negative attitude towards government is not limited to observations of its low-level functionaries, but is instead a broad-based, highly conceptual worldview. The citizen of a world-spanning empire declining into global irrelevance, Douglas Adams paints a picture of a galaxy in similar decline, where the “wild, rich and largely tax-free” days of glory and greatness are lost in the mists of time and those who cater to the wealthy Galactic elite are forced to hibernate in time stasis to wait until the economic cycle of boom and bust plays itself out.

Remarkably, Adams manages to mine this unlikely field, economics, for some of his most scathing barbs. The dismal science does not often figure into fictional plot lines and still less is it played for laughs, but nevertheless, it has an integral role in both the overall story and Adams’ underlying theme. Indeed, Adams betrays a remarkably sophisticated understanding of economics when he pokes fun at the Marxian concept of capitalist crisis in the Shoe Event Horizon that ruins the world of Frogstar World B.

Furthermore, his grasp of the dangers of inflation is not only markedly superior to the world’s current central bankers, but he also lays the blame squarely where it lies, namely, with the government authorities responsible for adopting an inherently worthless paper currency subject to inevitable inflation.

“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”

Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.

“But we have also,” continued the Management Consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.”

Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The Management Consultant waved them down.

“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revaluate the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and . . . er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”

It would seem that the British government’s currency disaster of his youth left an indelible impression on Adams, for he mentions the collapse of the Altairan dollar on more than one occasion and expresses deep skepticism about the concept of compound interest outpacing inflation in describing how one pays for a meal at Milliways, the restaurant at the end of the universe, with a single penny. Indeed, Adams’ environmentalist take on paper currency sounds very much like that of Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard, whose seminal history of money and banking chronicles how American monetary authorities have repeatedly caused social and economic calamity through an addiction to expansive monetary policy:

The issue of this fiat “Continental’ paper rapidly escalated over the next few years…. The result was, as could be expected, a rapid price inflation in terms of the paper notes, and a corollary accelerating depreciation of the paper in terms of specie [gold or silver coin]. Thus, at the end of 1776, the Continentals were worth $1 to $1.25 in specie; by the fall of the following year, its value had fallen to 3-to-1; by December 1778 the value was 6.8-to-1; and by December 1779, to the negligible 42-to-1. By the spring of 1781, the Continentals were virtually worthless, exchanging on the market at 168 dollars to one dollar in specie. This collapse of the Continental currency gave rise to the phrase “not worth a Continental.”
– Murray Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States, p. 59

Money mismanagement is far from the only form of gross government incompetence target
ed by Adams. When Marvin is stuck in the swamp on Squornshellous Zeta, the robot tells a mattress named Zem about a speech he once gave at the opening of a thousand-mile bridge constructed in the swamp. “It was going to revitalize the economy of the Squornshellous System,” he informs the flolloping Zem. “They spent the entire economy of the Squornshellous System building it.”

Friedrich Hayek’s “Two Pages of Fiction: The Impossibility of Socialist Calculation,” is famous for demonstrating how the central planner’s task is bound to be a hopeless one, but Adams takes the concept one step further by pointing out the inevitable absurdities as well. Squornshellous Zeta’s economic revival project fails in a spectacular manner at what should have been its moment of glory by sinking into the swamp and killing everyone. In addition to being a critique of central planning, this vignette could also be seen as a sly reference to the lethal nature of socialist governments in the twentieth century, which so often began by promising Heaven on Earth and instead delivered Hell.

– END PART I –