Category: Uncategorized

Rich Brookhiser writes on NRO: We are in a war, GWB understands it, and very little else matters. Of the preceding points, perhaps only the last matters. We want the United States and the civilization it is defending to prevail, and at this moment that means we want George W. Bush to win re-election. We also know that even victory will involve great and destabilizing losses. Nobody promised us a perfect life. That’s why we’re conservatives.

Ask yourself if this logic would work for you if you substituted FDR, LBJ or Woodrow Wilson for George Delano. Supporting a President who is waging a war and wanting the United States to win doesn’t make you conservative. Neither does understanding that no one promised perfection. The sad thing is, there are probably plenty of people who not only think that this means something, but is convincing.

Jill writes, somewhat as predicted: Vox you are ranting this time and making no sense. First you don’t even eludicate exactly on WHAT women are supposedly “not taking responsibility.” And two, don’t make me LAUGH. Just because men think women don’t take responsibility is nothing more than projection. It has never changed, even down to men STILL blaming women for THEIR lack of responsibility.I suggest men grow up and take the responsibility they have avoided for centuries before they take it upon themselves to preach to the sex that has been shouldering that lack of responsibility.

How can “their words, their actions and their decisions” possibly be considered a failure to elucidate for what women are failing to take responsibility? The specifics vary from individual to individual. I’ll consider believing that women are collectively ready to take general responsibility for themselves the next time I see a woman insult someone, get punched in the mouth, then get up and say, “yeah, I deserved that.” Which has happened, in my experience, ah, let me see… never.

A female friend of mine once got badly hurt after mouthing off to a stranger who rather forcefully demonstrated his belief in the inherent equality of men and women. Her date, a similarly propagandized young man, didn’t defend her, presumably on grounds of self-responsibility. Why should he bear the consequences for her words? A rather damning indictment of where 30 years of feminism have gotten us, true, but she did learn what every man knows; take responsibility for your words, as they can have unpleasant and unforeseen consequences.

I love the capital letters. Jill’s email doesn’t quite count as (1) asserting that women don’t respect men and have every reason for doing so, but the implication is certainly there based on the context of the response. I’ll call it one-half down, three and one-half to go. In any event, there’s a lot more to taking responsibility than being willing to raise a child after you’ve had sex.

John Derbyshire writes: Yes, I got a lot of e-mail about my postings too, some of it angry. Who the heck do I think I am, criticizing Bush’s performance? Etc., etc. Well, I’m a citizen, and this is not North Korea. I want GWB to win the general election in November. I wish him well. I think a Kerry presidency would be a horrible disaster…. As for the lese majeste accusation: Shove it. This is a republic.

Word em up, D. The reasons are several, most of them Federal. I totally agree, except for the bit about wanting George Delano to win. Unless, of course, “want” and “believe will be marginally less disastrous” are rather more synonymous than I was led to believe.

Joe Farah puts it even better:

Now there are those who would blame me because John Kerry will become the next president. Don’t blame me. Blame Bush. I am not supporting Kerry. Kerry is a creep. But I cannot and will not support the lesser of two evils. My faith teaches me that light and dark don’t mix. My faith teaches me I’m not to have anything to do with evil. I’m not supposed to compromise with it.

And that, my friends, is THE WORD.

They’re at it again. Strange, how these Democratic People’s Republics just keep happening to turn their countries into one charnal house after another. Such a long series of an unaccountable coincidences! We surely don’t want that to happen here. But to stop it elsewhere, we the people cede more power to the central government.

And they say irony is dead.

CM writes: You went the long speculative way around in order to get to your speculative, sort-of conclusion. It was a conclusion that left me frustrated, and so I decided to do something responsible about it, instead of: just whine, complain to a gurlll-frain or write you an unconstructive, insulting letter. ANYBODY on the planet, male or female, who doesn’t take responsibility for their behaviors, is basically a liar about reality and therefore sins relentlessly against most everybody around them – male or female. That this avoidance of truth-seeking, truth-seeing, and truth-telling is primarily (as you imply) a female sin, is an interesting speculation. I tend to doubt it, and am now going to study the matter. My first step will be to take it up with 6 family counselors I know, 4 who are women and 2 who are men. I promise to write you about what I find out. Give me a couple of months, please.

Thank you for your self-restraint and decision to approach the matter constructively. I’ll be quite interested to hear the results of your little investigation. However, I am sure that plenty of men also seek to avoid responsibility. Just look at all the fatherless children, for one thing, and stoners living in their parent’s basement. But logically, there are three possibilities:

1. Men try harder to avoid responsibility

2. Women try harder to avoid responsibility

3. Both men and women try equally hard to avoid responsibility

Those are the three options. I don’t find (3) to be remotely credible. My personal experience, which is admittedly only anecdotal, strongly tends to lean towards (2). To give one example, when I graduated from college, every single man in my class with whom I was acquainted already had a job. Less than half of the women, all graduating from the same elite university, did.

I happen to believe that many women are worthy of respect that they do not receive. I do not have a definitive answer for why they do not, I am merely attempting to suggest one possible solution that may help these women begin to receive the respect they deserve. The key, of course, is to begin by understanding that not everyone is worthy of respect. To suggest that everyone is so worthy does nothing but diminish the meaning of the word. All we have the right to expect is polite civility and the chance to prove ourselves worthy of respect.

From the Anchorage Daily News:He [Tom Maloney] was fascinated by rockets and airplanes, mastered rock climbing, and obtained his pilot’s license at age 14. Fifteen months after he enrolled at Central, on a Saturday morning in November 1998, the eighth-grader strung up a rope and hung himself at his parents’ home. When paramedics arrived, he had no pulse. After 15 minutes of CPR, they were able to get his heart going. But the boy had already suffered extensive and irreversible brain damage. His family sued the School District in 2000. Among their claims: School staffers refused to work with the boy’s psychologist and destroyed records pertinent to the boy’s situation, including documentation showing when and how he was harassed by other students. The suit claimed district employees erred by “punishing Thomas equally or worse than his attackers whenever an assault on Thomas was reported.”

…Tom looked defeated and told his mother that he wasn’t going to be blamed anymore for things he didn’t do…. The next morning, after speaking with her son, Tom’s mother left the house for 20 minutes or so to drop his younger sister off at a sewing class, she testified. When she returned, she found him hanging from a rope strung from the ceiling.

This sort of thing makes me feel soulsick. It is the other side of Columbine. Notice how we’ve never heard of this story, because Tom Maloney chose to direct his desperation at himself. Color me ruthless if you will, but I have far more sympathy for the Columbine killers than I do for the kids who drove them to it.* Klebold and Harris may have become lethal monsters, but they did not do so without significant help from others. In any case, it’s a pity that none of these bullied, suicidal children were homeschooled, as that would have almost surely prevented both tragedies. Read the Anchorage piece and notice how the so-called educators don’t appear to care much about anything except that their indifferent, incompetent posteriors are not held responsible.

The Rocky Mountain News wrote: No matter how exhaustive, the official report will never tell the entire story or measure the deep scars this tragedy left on the victims and the community…. Why? “I think I know why they did it,” the FBI’s Fuselier says. “It was because they were so filled with hate. But the real question is why they had so much hate inside them.”

The kids know why.

* Yes, of course the two killers are the only ones who were responsible for their actions; their suicides argue that they were quite willing to pay the price.

Is there anything more annoying than someone playing story police? I don’t care if I’m telling one or listening to one, the chances that anyone seriously cares that Aunt Martha’s 1976 Thunderbird is actually red, not blue, are infitesimally small. Now, it’s one thing if the correction actually has something to do with the basic point or the punchline, but otherwise, please, people, shut up!

The worst is when the storyteller and the story police get in an argument and everyone has to sit around and pretend that it’s not happening. Look, if someone is telling a story, it’s their story. Stay out of it. No one cares about the details and it’s impossible not to look like an ass when you jump in and start correcting somebody. Men do this, women do this, it’s equally unpalatable in either case. Unless the person telling the story is wired up to a lie detector or under oath, do leave it alone.

I don’t know if story policing in Emily Post or not, but it boggles my mind that people who would never dream of saying “pull my finger” and letting it rip at a cocktail party will do this sort of thing at the first opportunity. It’s much ruder than that.

I just launched a little test that is an exercise in literary cynicism. I have come to the conclusion that the quality of the writing is somewhere around the seventh or eighth most important factor in a publisher’s decision-making process, so I submitted a proposal to a publisher purporting to be a female writer. It’s not a romance novel, but it’s in a subgenre that predominantly features women writers. We’ve come a long ways since the days of George Eliot, baby! I even included a fake bio and an “author’s photo” of Space Bunny, based on what might be called the Candace Bushnell theory of literary submission – a babe gets every benefit of the doubt – and ran the text through the Gender Genie to make sure that it read “female”.

I’m quite curious to see what will happen. My writing plate is quite full now, but it was a story that I’ve had floating around the back of my head for about a year now so it was nice to write up a bit of it and do something with it. I’ll be pretty amused if it makes it through the slush pile; Space Bunny’s sufficiently well-read and knows enough writers to fake the tortured artist thing if she ever needs to speak to an editor on the phone. The most amusing thing would be if the book was reasonably successful and they wanted to do a book tour. I can’t imagine I’d be able to talk Space Bunny into doing that, although it would make for a pretty good expose of the extraordinary silliness of the publishing industry after the fact.

I was quite put out when I found out that F.W. Dixon did not, in fact, write all of the Hardy Boys books. And I always wondered how on Earth Don Pendleton managed to write about five million Executioner novels. Although I suppose it helped that the plot was always exactly the same. I think the strangest book of this sort I ever read – part of anyhow – was a porn novel set in the middle ages. I’d picked it up at a garage sale thinking it was a historical novel, and it wasn’t until I hit about page 30 and the gorgeous hot-bodied Saracen spy was climaxing while being gang-raped that I stopped and went “okay, wait a minute, that’s a bit rich.”

Lesson: Don’t judge a book by its cover or its author’s photo.

Or something. Does anyone have any idea why the sidebar is showing up in Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird and Opera, but not Internet Explorer. Yes, I know that Micro$oft blows, but I’d like those poor benighted souls who are still trapped in Windows to be able to view things properly too without having to make the Great Migration.

Any ideas?

UPDATE – TZ, I tried to paste the code in here to see how it should be modified, but Blogger won’t cooperate and it doesn’t show up – looks like it’s either the script for the comments or the Alliance, since those are the only two. Can you email me to show they should be changed in order to work properly for everyone?

The Alan Guttmacher Institute explains why women have abortions:



Woman is concerned about how having a baby could change her life: 76 percent

Woman can’t afford baby now: 68 percent

Woman has health problems: 7 percent

Woman was victim of rape or incest: 1 percent

Strange, all we ever seem to hear about are rape, incest and health of the killer. A lot of things change with marriage; if you’re concerned about how your mother-in-law could change your life, is it cool to stick a fork in her head too?