Category: Uncategorized

After cackling about how his hit rate went up due to my linking to his blog, Orca is whining that I didn’t link to him the next time. Whatever. At any rate, Minnesota’s favorite Nancy Hopkins wannabe came up with this amidst more obfuscatory posturing:

As for Vox’s comment, clearly he seems to be backing off a bit on the issue–as well he should.

I’m not backing away from anything. Just ask Bartholomew, he seems to think I post on nothing else. And still, not a single critic has even come close to addressing my first question, (now clarified thanks to IF):

Did women’s suffrage enhance, degrade or make no difference to American liberties as laid out in the Bill of Rights?

There is no discussion to be had when my critics are afraid to even take a stand on the very simple question of whether suffrage has been a positive, a negative or an irrelevance. It must be one of the three, for there are no other possibilities. (Although “I don’t know” is a reasonable response.) Of course, hiding behind a meaningless fog of words in an attempt to avoid taking a position is the first defense of the intellectual coward.

Now, it is true that Orca’s arguments of a post hoc, propter hoc fallacy would seem to admit that American liberties have been degraded since women began voting, but this still falls short of answering the question.

So, which is it sport? Your ball. Positive, negative or irrelevant?

From New Scientist magazine:

In simulations with groups ranging from 4 to 256 invididuals, the team found that altruism could evolve. The benefits that cooperation conferred on a group outweighed its costs to individuals – but only in groups of less than about 10…. so how could cooperative behavior have evolved and spread in these groups?

The answer lies in the fact that strong reciprocity is not simply a matter of cooperation; it also requires punishment of those who fail to toe the line. When the team added punishment to their models, they found it made a huge difference…. This time, competition between groups led to the emergence of cooperation in groups of up to 50 individuals.

It’s interesting to note here how science is supporting the idea that altruistic cooperation is only naturally possible in family-sized units. These experiments also explain why the government is so comfortable using coercion to force the social “altruism” it desires. The article went on to explain how cooperation between even larger groups was possible if not only the “anti-social” were punished, but those who fail to punish the “anti-social” were punished as well.

This helps explain the vehemence with which the tax cheerleaders, secular supremacists, feminist groups and other collectivist, pro-government forces attack not only those who overtly oppose them, but also those who fail to adequately submit to their hive mentality.

From Sports Illustrated:

One odd fact has emerged from the controversy in Italy over a recent wave of soccer-related violence. Premier Silvio Berlusconi said on Wednesday that “drastic measures” may be necessary to curtail the unrest. That’s not the strange part; what is unusual is that Berlusconi is also the owner of soccer giant AC Milan.

That is news, considering that Berlusconi bought Milan in 1986, a mere NINETEEN YEARS AGO! And he was first elected Prime Minister in 1994.

I know sportswriters aren’t the brightest bulbs in the generally pallid giardino of journalism, but this combination of parochialism and ignorance is truly impressive. It’s one thing to not be up on the minutiae of curling coaches or the all-stars of Scottish telephone pole tossing, but Milan only happens to be one of the five biggest teams in the biggest sport in the world.

czja comments:

It is the ludicrous and ungodly conclusion Vox and you and others have come to in dealing with this reality that I take issue with…. Read your bible from cover to cover a couple of times and then we’ll talk.

Ungodly? Unbiblical?

“It is good for a man not to marry.”

“To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband.”

“But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances;”

“Are you married? Do not seek a divorce. Are you unmarried? Do not look for a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.”

Obviously, the notion that men must marry is demonstrably unbiblical. And there is clearly nothing wrong with a man taking defensive legal measures once the wife has pursued the unbiblical principle of refusing herself to her husband or violated the Biblical command not to separate from her husband.

A defense of the overtly unbiblical (the separating wife seeking a divorce) over that which the Bible says nothing (legal financial maneuvers put into play once a divorce-seeking woman’s intentions become clear) indicates use of the Bible to defend an emotional position rather than a Biblical position in its own right.

I note that the unusual measures proposed by Minnesota should not be confused with mine. There are many good reasons to invest offshore, not least the fact that foreign exchanges have significantly outperformed US markets since 2003, performance compounded by the weakening dollar. Indeed, a marriage in Italy, where the divorce laws are far stronger, might be a wise step worth considering for both men and women who value their marital commitment and contract.

As I stated in the original column, God’s concept of marriage is good. But would cZja and others argue that men must accept the harsh realities of civil marriage if it required men to amputate their left hand? Why, then, should they expect men to blithely submit to having their property rights violated at will? For the Biblically minded, it is perhaps worth recalling that those property rights are unalienably endowed by their Creator.

From the New York Times:

After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk….

Until recently, the condition was all but unheard of because endurance events like marathons and triathlons were populated almost entirely by fast athletes who did not have time to drink too much.

“Elite athletes are not drinking much, and they never have,” Dr. Noakes said.

I always ignored my coaches in college who encouraged me to “stay hydrated”. It never made much sense to me in the first place, being a sprinter, and drinking more than a few swallows of water made me feel like an overloaded boat wallowing through the waves. At an all-day meet when the sun was quite hot, they made us hydrate and I wound up throwing up in between the 200 and the 4×100.

The fact that avoiding the nonexistent dangers of dehydration is actually killing people is just too ironic for words. And to think that we often let science define truth for us!

KS explains why he won’t remarry:

I found the timing of her divorce declaration to be interesting, to say the least. Six weeks before her graduation, and six weeks before she was supposed to get a job according to our long-standing agreement, she announced she wanted a divorce….

I cried myself to sleep every night for the next several months. I cried until I had no more tears left to cry, until there was simply no more sorrow and emotion left in me. My whole world, my children, the little people who I loved more than anything in the world and for whom I would lay down my own life, were gone. Vanished. They were gone not because I was dishonest or had an affair or intentionally abandoned them. They were gone simply because my ex-wife decided they should be.

Since my divorce I have had seven offers of marriage from six different women (one of them asked me twice), despite the fact that I have told each of these women up front that I would never be interested in marriage again. I have refused marriage not because I thought these women weren’t nice people, but because I simply don’t trust the courts to be fair or honest in the event of another divorce….

As I have had the chance to relate my story to friends and work associates over the years, I have frequently been asked the rhetorical question, usually by someone who has not experienced the horrors that I have experienced, “So, you’re against marriage because you had one bad experience?” My response is usually to ask how many experiences I am required to have in order to know that the institution is hostile to my interests and doesn’t meet my needs.

So I’m opposed to marriage not because of “one bad experience” or “one bad person”, as though my position is somehow childish or ill-considered. Quite to the contrary. I’m opposed to marriage because of extensive, ongoing experience with one bad system that I do not think will change in the foreseeable future…. Since the family courts did not honor either the written law during my divorce nor the oral contracts that were made during my marriage, I have no reason to believe that they would now honor written prenuptial agreements or private contracts, either. I simply don’t trust the family court system, and will not place myself under its jurisdiction again.

KS cuts to the heart of the matter. The reason men need to be far more careful about deciding to get married doesn’t have anything to do with their feelings for a specific woman or even women in general. It has to do with the wisdom of voluntarily sticking your head into a quasi-legal system that is designed to destroy men and their families.

There are a number of ways to protect yourself, of course. Overseas investments are not only wise from a financial point of view, but will almost surely reduce the risk of losing everything in a divorce. If the woman has no idea where the money is and knows that the minute she files, you’re off to the Cayman Islands, she’s probably going to think twice before cutting her financial throat. Even if you’re not rich, you can use an offshore account as a bargaining chip; after all, she doesn’t need to know that there’s only $500.00 in your Bahamian account until after she trades you custody of the kids for it.

This isn’t to say that you should behave in a Machiavellian manner from the first day of the honeymoon – although if you are diving in the Caymans, why not open an account there while you’re at it – but a divorce seldom comes out of nowhere. The time to begin defensive operations is when the signs start appearing, not when the papers get served.

And what are those signs? From the descriptions of divorces I’ve been receiving in the mail, they include:

1. total loss of interest in sex (this means 3x per year, not 3x per week)
2. weight gain
3. loss of interest in the children, their activities and appearances
4. scheduling frequent activities alone in the evening
5. laziness, especially a refusal to work part-time when it’s needed
6. disinclination to do simple household chores
7. noticeable increase in bitterness
8. spending majority of time with a toxic, man-hating friend

Gentlemen, given that you have nothing to lose but your house, bank accounts, children and credit rating, it just might behoove you to pay a little attention to this sort of thing should it crop up in your marriage.

CS writes in support of government executions:

You seem to play the relativist in that you are so disdainful of ALL government that you even descend to equating Communist regimes with the United States government. You also seem to lump in the the many “killings” by such regimes neglecting that they were not in any sense the execution of Biblically defined justice

You play to the lowest common demoninator when you use broad strokes to paint capital punishment by any and all types of government as “equal”. You also fail to neglect that Jesus Himself was a victim of capital punishment. In fact, He has been the only one who was truly innocent in that has ever been unjustly executed. Your wisdom my assured belief that liberals and libertarians kiss as the far Left meets the far Right.

Not only does CS embrace the assuredly asinine concept popular among left-wing academics that the ideological spectrum is circular – which makes the left-right lexicon irrelevant as well as allows these campus socialists of an international bent to wash their hands of responsibility for their nationalist kin – but he manages to trip over his own rhetoric in insisting that justice was served in every government execution.

This conflation of Original Sin with temporal justice is bizarre, but at least it is uncommon. What is rather more common, if equally wrong, is the idea that the states or the federal government are the least bit interested in justice. Does CS, or anyone, seriously believe that the same people who break their oaths to defend and uphold the Constitution – and the borders – can be relied on to provide justice?

I don’t think so.

Furthermore, I have never equated the US government with lethal socialist regimes; I have rather warned of a dangerous direction the USA increasingly appears to be headed.

Umberto Eco writes of the great science-fiction author on the centenary of his death:

VOYAGE TO THE CENTER OF JULES VERNE
L’Espresso
April 11, 2005

When we were boys, we were divided into two groups: those that held to Salgari [Italian author Emilio Salgari] and those that held to Verne. I quickly confess that at that time I held for Salgari, and now History compels me to revisit my opinions of that time. Salgari, retold, cited from memory, loved for all the colors it gave one’s infancy, no longer seduces new generations or – to tell the truth – the elders either. When they reread him in search of a little ironic nostalgia, the reading simply makes them tired, and too many of those mangroves and wild pigs come to be an annoyance.

Instead, in 2005 we are celebrating the centenary of the death of Jules Verne, and not only in France are there daily and weekly conventions dedicated to him, searching to demonstrate the many ways that his fantasies anticipated reality. A look at the editorial catalogs in our country suggest to me that Verne was republished far more often than Salgari, to say nothing of France, where there exists an absolute industry of Vernian antiquities. The old hardbound Hetzel editions are certainly very beautiful. (In Paris, on the Left Bank alone, there are at least two stores possessing these splended volumes laid out in red and gold, offered at a prohibitive price.)

For all the merits that our Salgari must be remembered, the father of Sandokan did not have a great sense of humor, (not unlike the rest of his characters, with the exception of Yanez), while the romances of Verne were full of humor. It is enough to remember those splendid pages of “Michele Strogoff” where, after the battle of Kolyvan, the reporter from the Daily Telegraph, Harry Blount, goes to the telegraph office and spends thousands of rubles transmitting verses of the Bible* to his corrispondent in Paris in order to impede his rival, Alcide Jolivet. But Jolivet succeeds in robbing Blount of his position at the telegraph and blocks him in turn by transmitting the little songs of [François] Béranger.

“Hallo!” said Harry Blount.
“Just so,” answered Jolivet.”

And tell me if this is not style!

Another reason for this fascination is that many futuristic stories, read at a temporal distance when that future is already known, leaves the reader a little disappointed, because the things that truly happened, the inventions that were actually realized, are more marvelous than those imagined by the books of the previous era. With Verne this is not so, no atomic submarine will be more technologically wonderful than the Nautilus and no dirigible or jumbo jet will ever be as fascinating as the majestic helix ship of Robur the Conquistador….

And if we do not have the money to buy the old Hetzel editions from antique bookstores and we are not satisfied with the contemporary re-editions? You can go on the Internet, to the address http://jv.gilead.org.il/. There a gentleman by the name of Zvi Har’El, a collector of all the news of Verne, has a list of the worldwide celebrations, a complete bibliography, an anthology of sayings, 304 incredible stamps dedicated to Verne from various countries, translations in Hebrew, and most of all, a virtual library where you can find integral texts of Verne in various languages and see the original French editions as well all of the engravings to save and afterwards enlarge as you like because, sometimes, we are even more captivated the second time.

One of the most decent things about writers, a famously indecent lot, is that they are one of the few disciplines who trouble to remember those who went before.

*Eco makes an uncharacteristic mistake here, as “the verses learned in his childhood” do not refer to the Bible, but rather “the well-known verses of Cowper”, which is to say, William Cowper, the English poet.

OR shares some misplaced sympathy:

I’ve quickly perused your website after hearing part of your interview on NARN this weekend. You get a pass from me because it sounds like you had a nasty divorce and are (rightly) bitter. Hopefully you don’t let the bitterness take over. There is light at the end of the tunnel–I know. I was married to a lawyer(!) who screwed our nanny and then screwed me and my kids at every turn in the divorce proceedings.

It is not always the woman who is the bad one, although there are more bad women out there than I’d like to admit. I hope you’ll learn to not care as much about protecting your “stuff” and worry more about building real relationships with a good
woman. Keep saying to yourself “This too shall pass.”

When did everything become personal in America? Are there no ideas which are not deeply rooted in one’s psyche anymore? You know it’s bad when even the sympathetic readers are so hopelessly off-base.

I’m not bitter. I don’t hate women and I have no reason to do so. I’ve been very happily married to a very nice, very pretty woman for a long time. Since I do not limit myself to considering only those topics which are approved for public discussion, you can expect to occasionally encounter concepts that you find a priori outrageous. If you can manage to control your knee-jerk reaction, you will usually find that even if I turn out to have gone off the proverbial deep end, there is a logical case to be found down there somewhere.

America did not get from point A to point B by random walk, and it is massively unreasonable to assert that suffragism has had no effect whatsoever on American history. Now, as I am famously skeptical about the future of this country, it should come as no surprise that I believe the female franchise has been one of the various negative factors in the significant reduction of American liberties in the last century. If you think America is headed in the right direction and is getting better every day, no doubt you will disagree.

The reality is that the pallid, strictly limited form of democracy practiced in America is a placebo. The ease with which the electorate can be manipulated is so great that I am sure we would be better off with the pure democracy that technology now makes possible. And yet, how many of these frothing-at-the-mouth voting rights absolutists are willing to support such an expansion of democracy here in America? Very, very few, I suspect.

Instafaggot brings up a valid point:

Firstly, you’ve got this backwards. The “market” drove women into the workplace (increased demand for employees coupled with increased need for families to make more money. Real income has deteriorated during the past few decades) rather than feminism.

VD: [That’s not the market, that’s the government. That “increased need” of which you speak is called taxes. Which leads us back to government spending, which, in turn, was brought about by the people who put the spenders into power.]

Secondly, this is a classic (or rather anti-classic) loaded question which presumes several things that are not proven to be so.

“positive step” is not defined nor is a mean of measure offered. Before you roll you eyes at me, explain how you measure a positive economy. Are we talking about the US only? The West only? The world in general or what? What is the criteria? GNP? Interest rates? Home ownership rates? Are these things really a good measure of “positive”? If so, how?

Define “individual liberties”…For liberals, liberty means freedom from discrimination, economic misery, repression, blah, blah, blah. For conservative, especially Christian libertarians, this means the right to disrciminate and repress, to use bad words, make threats, imprison sodomites, etc. So we’re not clear.

This is a fair question and a reasonable response. I’ll have more on this later, but Liverpool-Juventus is starting. In the meantime, I think Switzerland and the USA offer the best comparisons, given that neither were torn apart by WWII and the fact that Swiss women did not get the vote until 1971 provides a control mechanism of sorts. The context was the USA, but I suspect that the results will be similar in any Western county.

I mentioned a few thoughts in the comments of a previous post, but if anyone has their own ideas for a fair and reasonable metric, this would be a good place to suggest them.

UPDATE – Talk about leaping to errant conclusions! Some bloggers are concluding that I was making an editorial comment about Instapundit here, not responding to a gay blogger who left some comments here. Given his links to Margaret Cho and Michelangelo Signorile, I’m guessing he’s not a VPQF member.