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Plagiarism is one of the worst accusations to be made of a writer. Morgan of the Lake has now seen fit to twice accuse me of doing so, so I think it’s worthwhile to compare my 2004 column “How to Argue Like a Liberal” with an Internet post that preceded it by eight years, “How to Argue Like a Creationist“. I note that I had never seen this piece prior to today, and while the construction of the title is not particularly original, everything else was written solely based on my experience of arguing with a very liberal friend.

The first point is from my column, the older one is in italics.

1. Make an untrue statement, preferably on the subject of something about which you know nothing.
1. Make outrageous claims, but don’t dare to support them. Make other people prove them wrong.

2. Express astonishment that your source could possibly be inaccurate.
2. Keep repeating your claims. People will believe them eventually.

3. Demand what motivation your source would have to lie.
3. If someone asks you specific questions about one of your claims, make up answers.

4. Assert that the other party’s inability to articulate this motivation is tantamount to proof that your source is not lying.
4. When presented with evidence that contradicts your claims, trivialize it. Say, “ha ha! you only presented X pieces of evidence!” Hope they won’t notice that you presented none.

5. Question the motivation of the contrary source.
5. When caught in an error, redefine the English language to accommodate the error.

6. Argue that all sources are equal and that therefore the contrary source is irrelevant.
6. Refuse to provide references for any claim unless at least 10 people ask for them.

7. Change the subject.
7. When producing your reference, assuming you have one, provide a vague citation with no page numbers or publisher information.

I think it should be fairly clear that despite the obvious similarities inherent to the subject, my column contains two step-by-step 7-point processes describing an argument between two people whereas the other piece is simply a list of 25 randomly listed points for use in a group setting.

Is it plagiarism or does MOTL simply not understand the English language? You be the judge. I further note that Tom Tomorrow appears to be guilty of similar “plagiarism” in his “How to Argue Like a Conservative” cartoon of February 22, 2005.

Morgan of the Lake doesn’t get it:

I particularly enjoyed SB’s diatribe – which I guess was her only other significant intellectual contribution other than offering to be covered in oil. Then I realized that her italicized comments aren’t even hers! I’ve read the exact same words a number of times on other forums.

Yes, so have I. No doubt the plagiarizing little minx stole it from here.

Morgan adds:

To the people here who want to see women stripped of the vote, it’s never going to happen, no matter how bad you want it to. The women like SB and Jeanne who feel too stupid to make such decisions always have the option of not voting and I’m sure they will.

This actually made me laugh out loud. You see, Morgan, it absolutely will happen, in fact, we are on the track to this now, although not in the manner I have recommended. Once women are successful in realizing their goal of establishing a government where collective security is finally given firm precedence over individual liberty, one of three things will happen.

1. All voting will permanently end. This is the Chinese/German/Kampuchean model.
2. Voting will not only be permitted but required, but voting is meaningless as it is nothing more than a legitimizing stamp on the ruling party. This is the Soviet/Zimbabwean/Egyptian model.
3. Voting for a wide variety of parties will be permitted, but voting will be meaningless since all significant legislation will be passed by a superlegislature of unelected bureaucrats. This is the new European Union model.

I would say that we have quietly evolved into a crude variant of (2) while all indications are that we are headed quickly towards (3).

BR informs me of a few Bush-related prophecies:

Anyhow, what God said through Kenneth Copeland is that 2004 was the Year of Fullness and the year 2005 is the Year of Overflow. Us Christians are going to get our rewards and the sinners also reached the Year of Fullness for their sins and then they are going to be punished for their sins. God was going to punish those who did not vote for George Bush, so it is very possible God spoke to the preacher and he kicked out the people who did not vote for President Bush. God said His Children would listen to Him and vote for the person He picked and He picked George Bush. If you didn’t hear that, then you aren’t listening to God. There is something missing in your walk with Jesus and I tried to tell you about that, before.

It’s true, I didn’t vote for George Bush. How can I argue with that? I’m not surprised that something is missing, I guess I’m just kind of surprised it turns out to be that. I’m afraid haven’t been reading my Bible very much either, but what is that compared to turning my back on God’s chosen leader?

“The Spirit of the Lord says Now that you have put the man that I have chosen into the White House… and you did… I will send you an unusual fire. I will send you an unusual rain. I will send you an unusual measure of My Spirit says the Lord…
…For you have raised up a gatekeeper over this Nation, George W. Bush. Though many do not agree with the way he is, I raised him up to pray. I raised him up to open up the gates of righteousness. I raised him up that he may open the floodgates, that heaven may bring forth a blessing upon this Nation.
Fallujah, there is a battle that will come to a swift end. For God will honor His President and give a swift victory in Fallujah. For as Arafat slips into eternity, I’m raising up a new generation that shall bring a short period of peace. And that short period of peace will give me access into the land that they call holy. Watch me, for the great victory that shall come before January in Fallujah and the regions surrounding Iraq, you will see it and they will not believe it. They will say it’s impossible, it’s impossible, but God says how can it be impossible when you have elected a gatekeeper that shall watch over this Nation with prayer and with praise? That’s why you shall be honored – Fallujah!”

I don’t really recall that Fallujah was ever in doubt. I mean, on the one hand, we had the most feared fighting force since the Waffen-SS with armor support and air supremacy, on the other, a few barely trained guerilla fighters armed with AK-47s and old Russian rocket launchers. But perhaps I simply failed to note its significance and the Creasy estate will soon be releasing 16 DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD, with Fallujah taking its rightful place beside Marathon, Arbela, Hastings and Waterloo.

(Dated 2/11/2005) The Spirit of God told me to tell you “He will root out and pluck out the corruption that exists in high places in the politics of this Nation. And every accusation that comes against the President, an accusation that is not warranted, that is not of the Spirit, that arises, I will expose two that are corrupt within the political system, pluck them out, expose them, take their clothes off so that they are naked before the people. For this shall not continue in this Nation. For I have raised this Nation up as a righteous Nation. I am raising up Daniels in Washington, D.C. Daniels that will explain to the King how he should act and how he should live. I want you to know that Daniels are being raised up in the schools and in the Universities. Watch, in the next three months for the corruptions that are going to be exposed and every accusation that rises against those that are placed in high places, there will be two that I will undress. There will be two that I’ll expose and I will clean the house so that righteousness will prevail in this Nation, says the Lord.”

Tom DeLay? Although if someone is getting undressed, you have to assume that either a Clinton or a Kennedy is involved. In any case, I suppose shouldn’t express my doubts about the veracity of this last prophecy. There’s still one more day before the three months are up.

The thing that always makes me wonder about this sort of thing is this. If God picked George Bush, then didn’t he pick Bill Clinton too? I don’t seem to recall a lot of conservative Christians beating on that drum six years ago.

John Derbyshire writes on NRO:

If your national economy consists of a large private sector and a large public sector, and if neither big political party is nakedly hostile to either, or looks like doing serious harm to either, then politics comes down to a dull, wonkish tussle between those who think that the private sector is over-regulated and those who think the public sector is under-funded. Right now in Britain the economy is humming along nicely; the welfare state is in reasonable working order; and the public-private mix in life services like health, education, and pensions seems to offer about as much choice as people want.** Center-left or center-right? A state that occupies 40 percent of the national economy, or one that occupies 38 percent? Why change?

There isn’t much room in there for a strong, principled conservatism. Nor do the British seem to want such a thing. Look at those voting figures. Since the Lib-Dems are to the left of Labor, and most of the little nationalist parties are even further left than that, the vote breaks down as one third for conservatism — the much diluted conservatism of the post-Thatcher Tories — and two thirds for everything further left. Apparently our cousins across the pond are pretty happy in their Old-Europe-trending welfarist consensus. Real conservatism is dead in Britain.

Is it any better off here in the USA? Hardly. Executive, legislature, judiciary — where can we look for strong promotion of, and adherence to, conservative principles? We think of our president as a conservative, but in what respects can he be said to have advanced conservatism? John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, in The Right Nation , tick off the six fundamentals of classical, Burkean, Anglo-Saxon conservatism:

a deep suspicion of the power of the state.

a preference for liberty over equality.

patriotism.

a belief in established institutions and hierarchies.

skepticism about the idea of progress.

elitism.

“The exceptionalism of modern American conservatism” (the authors go on to say) “lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke’s principles and contradiction of the last three.” All right, let’s ignore the last three of those principles and mark George W. Bush on the first three.

Definitely a worthwhile read. Some readers might remember my comments a few weeks ago about how triumphalism is the last sign before the reversal. And if the USA is going the way of the UK, it’s not terribly hard to figure out what is going to take the place of the EU in that analogy.

Ace of Spades examines the Grey Lady’s attempt to cover her nakedness:

In part because the Times’s editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic.

WHAT!?! THE NEW YORK FREAKING TIMES just admitted that it is LIBERAL?!? But they told us they were journalistically trained to be objective and that any perception of liberal bias on the part of their elite commentators was merely because they were smarter, better educated, more caring people than those grunting sky-worshipping clods with dirty fingernails in flyover country!

I’m frightened! Hold me, Ralph!

The LA Weekly on the latest debacle of California’s clown princess:

Judging from today’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington’s bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it’s clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences….

Still, the celebs aren’t to blame here, because they made the bad mistake of allowing Arianna to sweet-talk them into believing that they had something to say in the first place.

If one examines the writings that have survived from Rome and Athens, one seldom discovers anything worthwhile written by the charioteers, gladiators, thespians and Olympians who were the celebrities of their day. The hubristic optimism of our own celebrities in thinking that things would be any different now is more than a little amusing. I haven’t read the Huffer Puffer nor will I do so in the future, just as I’ve never listened to Air America. They’ll both be gone soon enough.

Craigp asserts that men and women are fundamentally the same:

I hold that these voting patterns backup my idea that women and men vote PRETTY MUCH equally, and that the idea that women are going to usher in massive socialism is overstateed I think one can fairly say that women are a LITTLE BIT more likley to vote socialistic but not all that much at all.

Of course, that seven-to-eleven percent gender gap between support for the openly socialist faction and the secretly neo-socialist faction in the USA is nearly triple the entire Jewish vote and comparable to the entire Black vote, the latter of which, thanks to the laws against prisoners and ex-felons voting, is heavily female. It’s worth noting, too, that the concept that women vote very differently than men for reasons solely relating to their sex is hardly new as it has been the position of feminists since the nineteenth century.

“In continental Europe, some socialists saw the demand for the women’s vote as being unnecessarily divisive in the working class movement, while others successfully fought for it to be accepted as a necessary part of a socialist program.”
– A History of International Women’s Day

It’s hard to be much more clear than that.

“Women’s support gave Blair the edge. It was women voters who last Thursday delivered a comfortable majority for Tony Blair. That is the clear message from a detailed analysis of nearly 18,000 MORI interviewees weighted to the final result. Thirty-eight per cent of those women who voted gave their support to Labour, 32 per cent to the Conservatives and 22 per cent to the Liberal Democrats. By comparison, men voted 34 per cent each for Labour and Conservatives and 23 per cent for the Lib Dems.”
– The Guardian (UK)

This doesn’t include the three percent of the vote that went to the anti-EU UK Independence Party and British National Party, both of which the British press presumes to be heavily male. There’s the magic 7 percent again, which appears to be the minimum gender gap.

“The Nazis projected themselves as a youthful, dynamic party, and Nazi members were younger than those of other parties. Yet the Nazis were also successful in picking up the votes of pensioners and the elderly, especially those whose pensions and savings had been eroded in value. This group, especially elderly women, were a reservoir of previous non-voters to whom the Nazis made a real appeal…. People were more likely to vote Nazi if they were Protestants from rural areas and small provincial towns, especially if they were from the middle classes and if they were female and young.”
– History Today

Playing off the fears of the elderly while being fundamentally dependent on young unmarried women… that does sound rather remniscent of a certain American political party, does it not?

“On the one hand, the women who voted for Hitler at the time were in the majority. Without them, he may not have come to power. They had surrendered to him like a bridegroom, just like religious women in the Middle Ages who worshiped Jesus as their bridegroom. Hitler’s success was to a large extent based on this love—the dedication and enthusiasm of German women.”
– Margrethe von Trotta, German filmmaker

A common mistake made by those who attempt to study women and left-wing totalitarians is that they concentrate solely on how the Fascists and National Socialists turned against women once in power in defining the relationship between the two as inherently negative. This is true, but ignores the critical fact that the men in the totalitarian parties are dependent upon their demagogic appeal to women to obtain the position of power required to alter the system to their advantage in the first place. For example, contrary to what most Americans would assume, the largest Islamist party in Turkey, (Refah Partisi, which means Welfare Party), has a majority of female members and is the party most popular with Turkish women.

Female representation in national legislatures:
Sweden 41%, Finland 39%, Norway 36%, Switzerland 17%, Ireland 12%, United States 11%

Pop Quiz: Of the six countries listed above, which three are more heavily socialist? And which three are relatively less socialist?

I am, of course, opposed to every part of the socialist program, most particularly the necessary ones. If you wish to fetishize some non-existent “right” to vote, that’s up to you, but doing so at the cost of destroying your country’s wealth, sovereignty, birth rate, environment and liberties while risking the murderous governance in which socialists so often engage strikes me as borderline insane.

I do, however, agree that the Revolutionary principle of no taxation without representation is an important one. Therefore, my suggestion is that if women should ever be denied the vote, they also be exempted from all income, property and capital gains taxes.

None of this is to say that women are to blame for socialism. Socialism was created by men, socialist parties past and present are led by men and men have engineered every one of socialism’s greatest atrocities. But if evil men are the socialist internal combustion engine, it is their support from women that appears to be the gasoline required for it to run in peaceful societies.

In case anyone still doesn’t understand that recruiting is now the toughest job in the Army, the service missed its April goal by 42 percent. It was the third month in a row that the active-duty recruiting mission was not accomplished.

It looks as if they’ll either start bringing troops home soon or start drafting new ones. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Wave III.

Jay Nordlinger writes on NRO:

I have said it before, friends, and will remind you again: There will never be another like him. Enjoy it while you can.

In light of my column today, I found myself wondering if that is a threat or a promise?

TJ doesn’t want to get chipped:

Do you see any way around this? My first idea is to get out of this country while the getting is good.

It’s important to keep in mind that Christians have been expecting the end times for 2,000 years, and so far, they’ve been wrong every time. The historical odds are that the equation of implantable chips with the Biblical mark is incorrect. That being said, most Americans aren’t aware of how far in advance of the rest of the world we are in terms of going cashless.

Only the UK comes anywhere close to our bias towards electronic payments and you can pay cash for a new car everywhere from Italy to Norway without anyone blinking an eye, much less filing a government report on you. Until quite recently, one could buy a cell phone without providing ID as well, although that’s changed under pressure from US authorities.

But if the mark is not some sort of metaphor but truly is a mandatory cashless currency implant, at this point one would have to assume that it’s going to begin in the United States. This is because Asians an Europeans don’t like credit cards; debit cards are about as far as they’ll go, and despite the EU’s average tax on savings at 53.5 percent, Europeans still sock away much more money than Americans do. German households, for example, save 11 percent of their after-tax income compared to less than 1 percent by their American counterparts. This is tangential, to be sure, but is indicative of a mentality not likely to be easily swayed by the current marketing appeals of Verichip and other advocates of cashless currency.

Anyhow, it’s a point to ponder, since most Christians have long assumed that the USA was the last and best defense against one-world government, not where the ball would start rolling.