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Jennifer writes: After a whole article about how women need to respect men (which I agree with) and how women should help boost a man’s confidence, not tear it down — doesn’t it make sense that a man should respect a women’s insecurites and build her up, too? If it is a confidence killer to her for him to be looking at the pictures can’t he just for her sake put it down?

Absolutely. But that’s NEVER going to happen if she’s not showing any interest in meeting his needs or even in his feelings. Why would a woman expect him to show any concern about her desires or insecurities if she shows none about his. I think it is impotant for women to understand that sexual rejection is probably the biggest cause of male insecurity there is, not just for eight-grade boys but adult men as well. There’s a reason that all the super-studs are irritatingly confident, it stems primarily from their knowledge that they can get what they want in the arena that matters most to men.

From the Independent: Shell was embroiled yesterday in Britain’s biggest corporate scandal for almost 20 years after it admitted a three-year plan to deceive its shareholders. The City reacted with astonishment after the crisis-stricken multinational released details from an internal report that exposed how the company had deliberately overstated its oil and gas reserves for several years. Judy Boynton, the finance chief, became the third boardroom casualty of the furore that followed the shock 20 per cent downgrade in reserves three months ago. The Shell affair, the most damaging scandal in the UK since the Guinness debacle 18 years ago, has already led to the departure of the chairman, Sir Philip Watts, and the head of exploration and production, Walter van de Vijver.

Take that, White Buffalo. A fig for your improved corporate behavior and governance. And yes, it counts.

A different JT writes to the WND editor this time: Getting straight to the point. I am appalled at Vox Day’s recommendation in the commentary “What Men Want,” that anyone should view Sports Illustrated”swimsuit” models to choose the prettiest. The rest of the article was well thought out and offered sound edification for any adult. The offer of advice to look at soft porn as a way to win favor with the “boys” is a stumbling block of the first order in a Christian’s life. God has given Vox Day the talent to write and a clear mind to think straight. He should use them with responsibility.

While I’m most appreciative of JT’s kind words as well as the fact that she is cognizant of the fact that there was more to the column than the one-half of one sentence which seems to have caught the attention of all the Christian women – other women seem to be so busy being appalled at the notion that I dared to suggest that female behavior in a relationship could possibly be sub-optimal that my shocking advocacy of pornography, adultery, necrophilia and tantric sex ritual in church appears to have escaped them.

What’s interesting to me is how flimsy my critics’ arguments are. I break it down as follows:

1. Having an opinion on which SI model is prettier requires one to have read the SI swimsuit edition. (false)

2. Sports Illustrated is porn (dubious, but I’ll grant it), and all porn is equal (false – every argument makes the immediate bait-and-switch from SI to ponygirls. If SI is your only “porn”, then you’re not much of an addict if you only see it once per year.)

3. Porn viewing is/leads to lusting after other women. (true)

4. Porn viewing leads to adultery (false – baseless assertion) or increased likelihood of adultery. (false – porn is a sex substitute). I enjoy how people making this argument skip right over the verse about husbands and wives not denying themselves to each other. Ever said, “not tonight?” Poof, there goes your high ground.

5. Porn leads to broken marriages (false – anecdotal proof only and very little of that)

5. Porn is displeasing to God (true)

There’s not much of an argument if all you can come up with, really, is that God doesn’t like it so you shouldn’t do it. Well, sure, definitely, but that doesn’t really explain the crusading mentality. Lust is a deadly sin, along with Sloth, Greed and Gluttony and the other three sins. There’s also a verse or two warning about what you look at. Meanwhile, there’s practically an entire book in the New Testament, not to mention tons of Proverbs, devoted to warning about how loose and wicked tongues lead to Hell. I would bet that not one one-hundredth the marriages that have failed have done so due to porn compared to how many have broken down thanks to wicked and untamed tongues. For every Penthouse subscriber there are 100 fat greedy little women gossiping in the sanctuary about each other, each convinced of their righteousness vis-a-vis the fourteen year-old boy with acne and a Playboy collection. It’s like a bad joke. Perhaps I’m the only one who sees irony in the image of an obese lesbian pastor shrieking against the evils of pornography from the pulpit of her dying church.

But of course, sins like gossip, greed and gluttony have far more appeal to women than image-based lusting, so therefore the latter must be warred against as a cancer on the church and society, while all the former are quietly ignored. I say that the bulk of these arguments and the crusading outrage have nothing to do with God at all, as substantially similar arguments are made by non-believing women with much the same frothing-at-the-mouth passion. It’s about female insecurity, not hatred of sin.

Now, the title of this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I am not advocating pornography nor am I a fan of it. I don’t even subscribe to Sports Illustrated, for that matter. But I think the overweening obsession with it on the part of modern Christians is both indicative of the feminization of the church as well as yet another example of mistaking a symptom of societal decline for a causal factor. The magical elimination of all porn from society would not have even a small part of the positive impact on society of requiring churches to be led by men who actually believe in the Bible as God’s Word and are devoted to helping their congregations apply it to their lives.

Nate asks: Vox, who’s your favorite Hugo winner from the last 20 years?

First, I have to point out that Zelazny won in 1968, so Nate’s own answer should be disqualified. Stuck in the ’80’s, are we, Nate? I’m basing this on ouvre to date, not solely on the book for which they won, since Zelazny’s LORD OF LIGHT is one of my all-time favorites, but he also wrote a lot of lesser fiction. Anyhow, I’ll go back to 1968 since Zelazny is in the game and I can leave both Heinlein and Herbert out of the mix.

1. Neal Stephenson

2. William Gibson

3. Dan Simmons

4. Roger Zelazny

5. Tie: Lois McMaster Bujold and Joan D. Vinge. Bujold should get the nod based on cumulative, but THE SNOW QUEEN is too fantastic to leave out entirely.

From the LA Times: I decided to listen to one entire day’s original programming, all 17 hours. So at 6 a.m. on Good Friday — the first anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, the day after Condoleezza Rice testified before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks — I tuned in to 1580, turned on my computer to take notes and sat with both until 11 p.m. It may have been the most boring day of my life. My fellow liberals have long argued that they haven’t been able to match the conservative success on talk radio because the medium is ideally suited to conservatives. According to this self-serving argument, conservatives are more willing than liberals to engage in nasty name-calling and to see everything in black and white, while liberals — concerned with nuance and complexity — are inevitably reasonable, willing to consider both sides of an issue. But President W’s policies — especially in Iraq — have now so enraged liberals that they are willing to play dirty too. Hence, Air America. Not….

Limbaugh does his name-calling so creatively and hilariously that it usually winds up being entertaining. As repellent as I find his politics, Limbaugh is an entertainer as well as a polemicist, and after liberal talk-show experiments with such policy wonks as former Govs. Jerry Brown of California and Mario Cuomo of New York all failed, the folks behind Air America promised that they’d learned their lesson. They too would find ideologues who are funny. Nice try.

Adieu, sweet, sweet Alice. Go thou gently, (and quietly for the love of all that’s good and holy), into that dark and radio-silent night.

Bill comments: I hang around because the conversation is interesting, not because I agree with it. Vox and I seem to share enough of a world-view to talk, but we’re still pretty far apart on many issues of substance. I often get the sense that our discussions range from talking past each other to violently agreeing.

I couldn’t bear to do this if everyone agreed with me all the time. I have zero interest in preaching to the choir, I’m far more interested in having my premises challenged and tested – by sane people capable of rational thought, that is. Not that the occasional hate mail isn’t a blast, or a sober attempt at a substantive critique as we’ve seen from folks like Strange, Able and others. I’d hardly be recommending the fiction of an EU-loving pagan socialist if I didn’t believe that exposing oneself to intellectual diversity is not only healthy, but vital for sharpening one’s own mind.

The only thing that’s been disappointing about this blog is seeing how the volume of hate mail I used to receive from the column so rapidly dwindled to a tiny trickle, as people became less and less sanguine about entering the ring. I hope the syndicate will add some papers in the next six months or so and then we’ll get a new supple of fresh meat, er, that is to say, amusingly disrespectful missives of disagreement.

It seems my appearance on the Northern Alliance Radio Show went pretty well, as Saint Paul and the gang have asked me to become a quasi-regular of sorts. I’ll be appearing for a segment or two on a monthly basis, in much the same way that Hugh Hewitt has his regulars. No formal schedule or anything, but I’ll post here a few days before I’m going to be on. He mentioned that several people were interested hearing more on the Bush v Kerry question that we barely began to get into at the end.

Anyhow, it was fun and in the event I ever to decide to do anything beyond the writing, the experience will come in handy. I’ve already gotten most of the “ums” out, now it’s time to work on “you know”. I’m still working on getting my hands on an MP3, and when I do I’ll arrange to post it somewhere for your listening pleasure.

Michael Graham writes on NRO’s Corner: Jeff Greenfield of CNN says the most disturbing revelation on “60 Minutes” last night was Bob Woodward’s claim that the Saudis plan to flood the international market with oil to bring down gas prices in time for the American election. To which I say “Great!” Why shouldn’t the Saudis help out the president who’s bravely led a coalition against an enemy on their own border, an enemy who has repeatedly threatened to invade Saudi Arabia? If the Democrats want to argue that having President Bush in office means oil-rich nations will try to help out the American economy, go right ahead. If these nations were driving gas prices up in order to punish Bush, you can bet Teresa Heinz Kerry’s dead husband’s last dollar that the Democrats would be holding Bush responsible. Instead, they’re helping a brother out. What’s the prob?

I’m not even sure where to begin teeing off on this one. If George Bush is “a brother” of the House of Saud, well, we’ve got some serious problems considering that it is the Wahhabist Saudis who have revived the long slumbering war on the Dar-al-Harb in the interest of establishing global sharia. But it would certainly go a long way in explaining why, after a Saudi-financed attack by Saudis at the behest of a Saudi expat cheered on by Saudi government clerics, the President decided to wage an undeclared war on Iraq. Michael Moore is a borderline insane, dishonest lump of lunacy, but I don’t know if even he’s gone so far in saying that the President is not only in bed with House of Saud, but is downright akin to them.

JT, a self-proclaimed widow, writes: I always thought a misogynist little boy lurked under your skin, and I now I know you are a misogynist little boy masquerading as a man. You aren’t even married; you are like a priest trying to tell a married couple how they should respond to each other…. I have no idea on what you are basing your ideas, but it seems to me that you need to have your ego stroked all the time. For instance sports–you need to have your sports time and would like to have a woman sitting by your side whether or not she is bored to death (sort of like a dog) so that you can reach over and touch her just to make sure you are not alone. You sound like a guy who just can’t be alone and who is not happy with the kind of person he is. I am 54 years old, so it may be that the years separate our opinions, but you really need to find yourself-really find yourself. Do people your age actually walk around thinking about their relationships all the time?

As usual, write something a woman doesn’t like, and immediately she resorts to accusations of mysogyny. It’s really sad when even the hate mail is tedious. So, where did I go wrong? What, exactly, is she asserting, that women should be disrespectful and uncivil to their husbands? That a woman should behave like a unhappy harpy and still expect a man to stick around? That a man is responsible for her feelings and that her time is well spent in trying to bring him down? That she should try to prevent him from hanging out with friends, and if they do happen to be around, she should insert herself into the gathering and play topic police? JT, do you even have a point?

I always find it amusing when people make staggeringly inaccurate assertions about me. As anyone whose ever spent 30 minutes with me can probably tell, I’m not all that keen on spending the bulk of my time around other people. The five books I’ve written would tend to be a bit of a clue that I enjoy my solitude. But it’s true, I do spend 24-7 thinking about relationships, watching Oprah and reading women’s magazines.

I expect CNBC to hire him as an expert investment commentator any day now. He’d fit right in with Larry Kudlow. Buy! Buy! Buy!

Meanwhile, Fleck writes: The refi game and government stimulus have been the only glue holding the economy together. If last Wednesday’s move in the bond market has shut the door on (mortgage) refi activity once and for all, as I believe it has, then the Fed is basically trapped. It is my view that we have reached the inflection point — where it’s game over for stocks, real estate and the economy. That doesn’t mean everything will stop on a dime, but we may look back at this period in time and say that it was an inflection point.