Category: Uncategorized

Robert Novak notes Howard Dean’s TV schedule:

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Howard Dean routinely turns down requests from all television networks for traditional joint appearances with his Republican counterpart, Ken Mehlman.

Dean is a former governor of Vermont and was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, while Mehlman is a former staffer with little past TV experience. Dean may wish to avoid what happened during the last election cycle to then DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, who consistently came out second best against then RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie, who, like Mehlman, had previously been a staffer.

I find it interesting that despite the fact that Democrats still insist that they have the IQ advantage when their strongest support comes from those who didn’t finish high school, they have less money and their party leader is afraid to even appear in the same room as a Republican with whom he might have to argue.

I suppose it’s difficult to get substantial mileage out of the “ha ha, UR so LAM3, lol!” method of debate. “YEEEEAAAAAAH!”

Pretty Blonde Girl: “That’s called an Amaretto Sour, in case you ever want to order one when you’re out.”

Vox: “Why? Don’t you make it with that sweet lemon stuff?”

Pretty Blonde Girl: “No, it’s called Sour. That’s where the name comes from. Amaretto Sour.”

Vox: “Why would they call it that? It’s sweet. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Pretty Blonde Girl: “Maybe because it says Bitter Lemon on the bottle.”

Vox: “That is a convincing point.”

Halation is just a little bit skeptical:

given your attitudes towards the intelligence and competence of women in general, do you understand why some might be just a tad sceptical when you say that no, no, you pwomise we’ll have all those lovely natural rights, and not to worry our pretty little heads about it, to just go ahead and leave all that hard votin’ stuff to the menfolk, who’ll protect us, bein’ all big and strong and masculine?

It makes no difference what women might think of my opinion. As one television show has demonstrated, the vast majority of women think so little about the issue that they are perfectly willing to sign a petition to end women’s suffrage. And yet, I not only don’t blame Halation for her skepticism, indeed, I salute her for it. I only wish that all women were equally skeptical about pretty promises from people with grand ideas for improving society.

As for those women who do think about such things, the very few who actually value basic human rights and the protection of human liberty soon reach precisely the same conclusion I do when they think about it. I seem to recall Ann Coulter, for one, making reference to being willing to give up her vote if it means taking it away from the rest of her sex as well. Unfortunately, even among the women who do take the time to consider such matters, most don’t value human rights as such, instead they substitute needs for rights and place a priority upon the equality of result instead of the equality of opportunity.

Halation’s fear of losing the vote betrays a typically unsophisticated understanding of how the world works. Voters control nothing in any Western country, they simply provide safe cover for the multi-factional ruling party. Whereas the head beneath the crown lies ever uneasy, the members of the ruling oligarchy in a modern quasi-democracy know that whenever the peasantry becomes restless, a simple and showy passing of the torch from one member to another will suffice to convince them that genuine change is at hand. Rinse and repeat as needed.

Would Halation be as concerned about losing her vote were she a citizen of the former Soviet Union? It is important to remember that Civics 101 notwithstanding, voting is not synonymous with freedom. The ironic truth is that most who consider themselves champions of “democracy” are no genuine fans of it, as they support neither the severely limited democracy that fosters freedom nor the full-fledged direct democracy that would significantly reduce the opportunity for oligarchical manipulation at the cost of mob rule. Instead, they prefer to cling to their illusion of people power even as they mindlessly obey, in Pavlovian fashion, the bell-ringing of their masters.

Women will always be ruled by an elite because every human society has always been ruled by one. The only question is whether they prefer to be ruled by a overt freedom-loving elite that will protect them and value them, by a covert totalitarian elite that sees them as useful and unwitting instruments to obtain power, by a barbarian elite that hates them as a necessary evil or by a primitive elite that sees them as prizes and toys.

The first elite, in my opinion, is definitely the most preferable. But because of women’s demonstrably greater susceptibility to the second type, anyone who values human freedom and honestly considers recent history should be able to recognize that women’s suffrage has been a disaster for human liberty and understand why I oppose it.

I neither designed this world nor did I write its history. I am simply reflecting upon what I have observed, and I make no pretense to understand more than a fraction of it. I speak for no one but myself.

When someone whose opinion you respect, someone that you consider to be an excellent leader, informs you that your work is crap, do you:

A. Ask him why and do what you can to improve it?

B. Tell him he’s full of fecal matter himself and demonstrate why.

C. Run around shrieking and telling everyone you know that his assertion is “outrageous” and “painful”, like “a shotgun blast to the face”.

If you answered (C), you are probably an overpaid professional woman who relies on others to keep you afloat. Consider the words of Nancy Vonk, a presumably overpaid professional woman in the ad business.

It felt like I got a shotgun blast in the face. I’ve had the experience of him being an excellent leader and very inspiring person. My head is still spinning because it was so outrageous. The upshot of what he said is that you give [women] a shot and they run off and have babies. It wasn’t in good humor. It was extremely painful the way he spoke.”

Although Vonk described French as a longtime friend and mentor, she said she was shocked by the tone of his comments. “It was one of those experiences where you can hardly absorb what you are hearing,” Vonk continued. “Nothing prepared us. Even knowing him to be a boy’s boy. I never felt that he had such extreme views.”

Yes, he’s a boy’s boy. That’s probably why he thinks your work blows. The fact that he’s an expert and presumably knows good work from bad work couldn’t possibly be the truth, could it? And while the Sisterhood is celebrating the guy’s resignation, I can just imagine what the executives at WPP are thinking. “Great, he’s going to go off, start his own business and eat our lunch while we’re stuck competing against him with Little Miss Fainting Couch and the rest of the underperforming lightweights.”

Now, is it possible that the guy is an idiot and has no idea what he’s talking about? Sure. But Vonk’s response sure doesn’t make that look very likely, nor does the fact that his departure from the company was considered significant news in the industry.

There are plenty of women who excel at their jobs. I am fortunate enough to have several such women working for me. But no one, regardless of their age, sex, educational background, sports allegiance or religious creed, should use it as an excuse for failure. And if someone says your work is crap, then it’s up to you to show me how they’re wrong.

In which it is devoutly hoped that the ladies who voted Labour into power enjoy wearing their burqahs:

Britain’s population is projected to rise by more than seven million in the next 25 years – a far greater increase than official forecasts have previously predicted…. This year net migration is forecast to be even higher at 255,000, before reducing to an annual rate of about 145,000 from 2008. When Labour took office in 1997 net migration was about 50,000 a year….

The official figures indicate that 83 per cent of the expected population increase is due to immigration, both directly and as a result of children born to new arrivals. While four million of the population rise is directly due to net migrants, of the remaining 3.2 million more than half will be the children of immigrants.

And I wonder how they’ll vote? Tory, Labour, or Lib Dem? They will, of course, gravitate towards a new party demanding Sharia. The UK is already under tremendous pressure to accomodate its non-Westernized immigrants, who show very little sign of giving up their religious and cultural traditions. Instead, it is the British who have been willing to abandon their cultural tradition in opening their island to mass immigration. And such is the fear of the new demographics that even the new Tory leader-to-be, David Cameron, is talking down the immigration issue in a futile attempt to appeal to the Britastani bloc.

The Norman invasion had a tremendous effect on Anglo-Saxon Britain. The Islamic influx can be expected to do no less.

So, enjoy your equalitarian society while you can, oh you roses of England. I imagine you’ll probably be able to wear lipstick in public for another decade or two.

The International Herald Tribune notes that feminism is put to the test… and fails:

As one of the world’s most gender-equal countries – a land where 80 percent of the women have jobs, where about half of the members of Parliament are female – does Sweden need a feminist party?

Many people thought so this spring, when a number of high-profile Swedish women began Feministiskt Initiativ, or Feminist Initiative. Polls then showed that almost a quarter of the electorate would consider voting for the party in parliamentary elections next year.

Six months later, however, that backing has imploded as Sweden rethinks the politics of sex. Feminist Initiative is in disarray with the loss of several founding members who abruptly departed over the radical direction the party was taking. At its recent founding congress, for example, instead of tackling a mainstream platform as planned, the party presented proposals to abolish marriage and create “gender-neutral” names.

Support for feminism took another hit this summer with the airing of a Swedish television documentary called “The Gender War.” A wrenching debate was set off by the film, which showed militant feminism to be widespread, reaching into official circles: Ireen von Wachenfeldt, the chairman of Roks, Sweden’s largest women’s shelter organization, for one, was shown asserting that “men are animals.”

Suddenly the belief that politics, business, even private life should be reformed to allow a more equal society – a belief that has permeated Swedish politics for several decades – is being openly questioned.

As I have repeatedly written, calling a feminist a feminazi is an insult to the German National Socialist Worker’s Party. The serious ones are every bit as insane as the hard core communist true believers. Fortunately, the feminists’ ideal society is even less viable than that of the communists and begins to fall apart before it’s close to being fully implemented, so we won’t have to put up with them for much longer.

The one genuinely nice thing I can say about them is that for all their rhetoric, they don’t have a taste for openly aggressive violence; even the most lunatic wing of the Sisterhood is unlikely to pull a Pol Pot in desperately attempting to bring about their societally suicidal vision.

It will probably take another three or so generations for the evolutionary dead-ends to completely kill themselves off. By then, the West will either have recovered from the unsuccessful equalitarian experiment or they’ll all be in chador.

Richard Cohen of the Washington Post on Roe and abortion:

Conservatives — and some liberals — have long argued that the right to an abortion ought to be regulated by states. They have a point. My guess is that the more populous states would legalize it, the smaller ones would not, and most women would be protected. The prospect of some women traveling long distances to secure an abortion does not cheer me — I’m pro-choice, I repeat — but it would relieve us all from having to defend a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument.

For liberals, the trick is to untether abortion rights from Roe . The former can stand even if the latter falls. The difficulty of doing this is obvious. Roe has become so encrusted with precedent that not even the White House will say how Harriet Miers would vote on it, even though she is rigorously antiabortion and politically conservative. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument — but a bit of our soul as well.

I hope to one day see all abortion banned in every American state, but it is good to see that even pro-choice liberals are beginning to admit that Roe vs Wade is a Constitutional abomination. Richard Cohen is to be congratulated, not because he has suddenly transformed himself into a pro-life champion of unborn humanity – he has not – but because he has demonstrated unusual courage in taking on his party’s most sacred cow.

A Supreme Court that rules by fiat is in no one’s interest. The court that can create a fictitious right to privacy is one that can take away anyone’s right to free speech, property and liberty. Judicial activism in pursuit of what are political goals is a sword that cuts both ways, and Republicans would be as foolish to take it up as some Democrats are beginning to realize they have been.

Chris is slow to grasp that she doesn’t get to make the rules:

Did you miss the point where I indicated that one single argument is not, and should not be, the whole of a debate? I’m perfectly happy staying right here, where people can see every argument on the subject I’ve made to you and vice versa, rather than on the front page where all the stuff I’ve said in the past gets swept aside with each new post and we go around in circles forever. Stand and deliver here, VD.

First, my blog, my rules. So, regardless of how happy you are, no. Second, your assumptions are as errant when it comes to Internet software technology as they are with regards to my intellectual character. It is the Haloscan comments which will get washed away with time, which are not searchable and which do not get backed up. This is why, when someone makes an insightful, funny or otherwise interesting comment, I post it, in order to preserve it. It may not be your fault that you didn’t know this, but it is your fault that you didn’t bother to ask.

If you could parse an argument, you’d be able to see that the thrust of that sentence wasn’t that I know lots of smart women, yay me, but that the smart women I know are evidence that Spacebunny’s not exemplary of her gender. But you’re right, VD. The women I know aren’t private university types: they’re largely composed of engineering grad students at top rank state programs. Many of them have mastered discussing arcane technical concepts in a foreign language they learned as teenagers, but they’re clearly not too bright. Really.

Yes, I did grasp your insult to her. You’d be banned already, were it not for Spacebunny’s encouraging me to hold off. So, not only can I parse your argument, but I can also demonstrate that “the thrust of your argument” depends upon your claim to know “smart women”, which is not acceptable evidence to anyone here. According to you – and why should we take your statements at face value when you have repeatedly accused me of dishonesty instead of doing the same – your friends are taking classes in public universities. Meanwhile, my female friends – there are people here who know them and can vouch for them – graduated from elite private institutions, so based on the entrance requirements, the chances that your little engineers are smarter are slim. And if your friends are anything like the women engineers I know, they’d sell their soul to be more like Spacebunny. She is an extraordinary example of her sex.

The ability to function in a foreign language proves nothing. All it means is that you’re an immigrant. I know dim-witted people who do it every day, while the three smartest individuals I know don’t.

“I’ve answered every point you’ve put before me on this thread; you can’t say the same. Your current post on the front page demonstrates massive ignorance when you claim that “What prevented a literate upper-class Greek or Roman woman from writing a history or a philosophical treatise, or, like Galen, poking about corpses?” (Hint: in the Greek upper class, women simply weren’t educated beyond what we know today as “home economics”. Literacy was minimal or non-existent. The average age for an upper-class male was 30, the average [married] age for an upper-class female was 14, at which point they immediately started having kids. You’re simply an idiot if you think that, as a group, they had any chance in hell to do anything else with their lives.)

Your claim of answering every point I’ve put before you is demonstrably false, as you ignore both the cited evidence of female Roman literacy and pretensions to intellectual achievement during the Imperial era, the admittedly oblique reference to Japanese women’s literacy as well as the dichotomy of homosexual achievement in the face of even greater social repression. I note that as I’ve now finally addressed the historical issue, I am not aware of any point of yours have I missed. If I have, it is unintentional; please bring it to my attention and I will answer it. As to the Greeks, the mere existence of Sappho casts doubt on your assertion and I’d like to see your sources demonstrating this minimal literacy. In any case, since when do children render intellectual achievement impossible, especially in a slave-owning culture? Did upper-class Greek women even nurse their own children? I know that upper-class women in the Middle Ages certainly didn’t.

And you outright contradict yourself. Back the Electrolite thread you said “I suppose I might as well point out now that if anyone had actually bothered to read the column instead of limiting themselves to the one quote, I clearly subscribe to the DON’T school, not the CAN’T.” However, today you said “However, I’m not implying that women’s science ability and inclination is much lower than men, I’m outright stating it.”

Does the meaning of the word “and” escape you? If not, then please tell me if “inclination” falls under DON’T or CAN’T? Since the column to which you are referring stated that women were being intellectually cauterized by the current educational system, it’s either crazy or intentionally dishonest to conclude that I believed women “couldn’t” do better due to genetic limitations when the sole factor on which I was placing the blame is an environmental one. Is that true or not? And if not, please do walk us through the logic of how it isn’t.

As I wrote in 2003 and repeated in February: “Instead of taking advantage of their intellectual freedom and unprecedented access to education, the feminist vanguard has embraced an anti-intellectual dogmatism that imprisons the current generation of young women in the academic convent of Women’s Studies, robbing them of both foundational knowledge and the capacity for rational linear thought, thus ensuring that this generation, like its foremothers, will also fail to accomplish anything worthy of historical regard.

And from this you glean an attack on women’s genetic shortcomings? You underline my case!

But it’s other people that can’t put together a coherent logical argument. Right.

I haven’t seen you demonstrate the ability to do so yet. You’ve simply sniped away at various statements I’ve made, while making more than one ludicrously spurious and unsupported assertion in the process. Not even your fellow critics have indicated that they’re impressed with your arguments; I’m certainly not.

Bane rants, quietly:

I note that some of his commenters bring the manners prevalent in Vox’s sandbox to mine, and it scrapes my last nerve raw, some. For the most part, ya’ll settle down, and I appreciate that. This is not a debating arena, parliamentary and shouting.
I prefer a library setting, with small groups off discussing a mutual project in low tones.

I suspect Vox not only tolerates it, but encourages, believing somehow that he is whetting his sharp mind against their dull stone. But let me tell you, fine steel is ruined by a cheap whetstone.

I scroll down his various discussions lately, and sometimes dip my toe in, and I am faced with such a babbling crowd of frantic-eyed, semi-literate, unmedicated ADD children, that I have to go off somewhere quiet and rub my temples and calm my twitching trigger finger.

I’m actually very much in agreement with Bane’s opinion and I wouldn’t blame anyone who gets tired of the write-response-rinse-repeat cycle that invariably follows every controversial column. And while I was a little disappointed at first that so few liberals, and to a lesser extent, Republican supporters of the current administration, are so uninterested in reasonable, substantive and civil debate, I got over it.

Those are the sort of conversations I have with my liberal and socialist friends over a bottle or two of wine, not as often as I’d like, but often enough to me to realize that it’s primarily the medium that inspires these insult-focused critiques, although I suspect that the age of the critics also has something to do with it. I don’t think its an accident that the only similarly uncivil discourse takes place at the college level; most of these knee-jerk reactions appear to come from college students who combine cluelessness with the certainty that comes from a lack of real-world experience.

So, while I would prefer if people could hold off on the wild insult-hurling for at least the first round or two, that’s just not possible due to the reason many of the non-regulars come here in the first place. The people angrily blowing their stack this week are not the same people who were doing so three months ago, and neither group are the same as those doing it last year. It’s only the identical way they behave when they show up that makes one feel that sense of deja vu.

But different blogs serve different purposes. This blog started out primarily as a means of interacting with my readers, friendly and unfriendly, and allows me to respond once to twenty very similar emails. And while I’m under no illusion that sparring with people who are foolish enough to inform me what I was thinking when I wrote something – interesting logic there – is going to sharpen my mind, I do enjoy clashing with people like Res, the OC, Scintan, Franger and even Cedarford.

For example, Cedarford will likely never convince me that security is more important than liberty, or vice-versa, but the mere fact that I know he will be on any mistake or logical error related to his areas of interest prevents me from getting lazy when I write about the subject. The same holds true of many of the regulars here with regards to their areas of particular interest.

The one thing I would encourage regulars to do, however, is to hold your fire with regards to the one-liners and throwaway insults when the critics come by, even if you rightly suspect they’re drive-bys. Unless you’re a Bane-class flamethrower – and very few people are – all it does is sidetrack more interesting discussions and allows the critic to evade being pinned down and dissected.

Remember, a good intellectual vivisection is far more amusing and educational than a pedestrian name-calling.

Kiwi has her suspicions:

IMO, there are fewer women musicians, SF writers, programmers, and many other things for the same reason women aren’t as good at video games: Women tend to spend less time immersing themselves in a pastime, so they’re less likely to be experts. They’re also less likely to care.

During my brief, but glorious time in the music industry, a lot of the girls I knew were bitterly disappointed to discover that the musicians they thought were these incredibly cool demigods were, once you got past the stage glamour, basically geeks.

And this is true of almost all of them, even the wild ones. About the only exception is the bassists, who tend to be the good musicians’ cool friend that everyone wants in the band, so they figure they can teach him as it goes along.

The reason is pretty simple. The music business requires you to be good-looking and to have plenty of free time, so youth is a big advantage. In order to develop sufficient skill at an instrument or to master the programming of their electronic counterparts, an individual has to have spent a lot of time messing around in his basement during his teens.

So, in most cases, the wildly hedonistic behavior of the rock star is simply a geek making up for lost time.