Germany v Argentina

It may not be the Brazil v Spain clash of the titans most were anticipating at the start of the tournament, but it’s a very interesting matchup nonetheless. Germany has clearly demonstrated it has the best team in the World Cup, while Argentina has, not quite so clearly, demonstrated that it has, if not the best, one of the best individual players in the tournament.

The case for Germany: Argentina is exhausted. Messi is exhausted. Two of their best players, di Maria and Mascheranno, are less than 100 percent. Several teams, including Holland, have demonstrated that Messi can be kept in check by an aggressive midfield. Germany is well-rested, confident, and injury-free. Lowe has shown that he can select the right rosters and make the right tactical substitutions during the game.

The case for Argentina. Messi. It’s a quasi-home game. And as far as the narrative goes, it would make the final an all-time epic if Messi was somehow able to lead Argentina over the heavily favored Germans; Argentina is 2.5-to-1 underdog.

Conclusion: There is no way Germany doesn’t win. It won’t go to penalties. It won’t go to extra time. I expect Germany to come out strong and to attempt to crush the Argentine spirit early. Holland tried to play conservative and outlast the Albiceleste, and it didn’t work out well for them. Die Mannschaft won’t make the same mistake. Germany 3-0.

GERMANY 0 ARGENTINA 0 Argentina has done very well to take the game to extra time. They have Germany right where they want them, in fact, if Higuina could simply put his shots on goal, they would have already won. Messi, too, has missed one very good opportunity. Argentina’s lack of finishing has been dreadful; it seems that more than half their shots have gone wide. But in Kadir’s absence, Germany has been playing too conservatively, Ozil has been a nonentity again, and I have no idea what Lowe was thinking by playing the 36-year old Klose for 85 minutes instead of taking him out 10 minutes after halftime.

John C. Wright is hard to edit

Mr. Wright has, if you will excuse the pun, let the black cat out of the bag with regards to the next work of his that Castalia House will be publishing. Regrettably, he has been manfully resisting the best efforts of our editors to keep his fanciful flights of highfalutin prose in check.

A previous version of One Bright Star to Guide Them appeared in F&SF in their 2009 April-May, but at the editor’s suggestion, I made some changes. The daring idea of the the text being entirely rewritten to eliminate all male and female pronouns, and a scene where the heroine wishes her husband were a dinosaur and fantasizes about him in graphic sexual detail, as well making each character have a nonbinary sexual  orientation, like Leehallfae, but without any imagination or point, were all contemplated as possibilities, but in the end the editor forced me to write a story that had a beginning, middle and end, so I will not be able to win any prestigious awards, or get a government grant to not write a novel.

(However, in retaliation against my editor, I wrote a story without a beginning, middle and end — at least not in that order, and not with only one ending — and sold it to him as CITY BEYOND TIME. Hoo hah!! On sale now!)

You see what we are forced to deal with here on a daily basis. Thank you to the volunteers, we now have a sufficient number. However, if you haven’t read CITY BEYOND TIME yet, which is indeed on sale now, you need not take my word for why you should, but need only peruse the reviews for more convincing explanations.

“Best of Wright I have read. “This is the third book of John C. Wright I have read this year. I was introduced to Wright’s writing with his book “Awake in the Nightland,” published by Castalia House. The second was “Count to a Trillion,” published by Tor. This third book, “City Beyond Time,” is published by Castalia House…. The writing is tremendous.”

“Buy this before your future self comes back to make you. There are a lot of time travel books out there, the best and enduring being ones that examine questions of why or how or who. John C Wright has done what I’ve never seen before and examined time travel by “ought”; only with questions far deeper than just “ought you kill baby Hitler?” If you’re a scifi/fantasy fan you owe it to yourself to check out this collection.”

CITY BEYOND TIME is, without question, one of the best SF books published this year. It is clever, original, and fantastic in every sense of the word. And yet, in my opinion, it isn’t even one of the two best John C. Wright books we will publish this year.

A classic left-wing “refutation”

How do you know that Nicholas Wade’s A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE is worth reading? Because the New York Times has published a second hit-piecereview. And it is a classic of its type, utilizing techniques that you see repeatedly here and elsewhere when left-wingers are attempting to cast doubt on something they cannot reasonably rebut.

First, David Dobbs resorts to the popular “Disproof by Citation” tactic. One often sees this used in reference to scientific studies (in particular John Lott’s landmark study on gun crime), in which the left-wing critic will claim, almost always falsely, that some hitherto unknown figure has “demolished” or “destroyed” or “refuted” or “totally disproven” the “debunked” piece being cited.

In his 2007 book “A Farewell to Alms,” the economic historian Gregory Clark argued that the English came to rule the world largely because their rich outbred their poor, and thus embedded their superior genes and values throughout the nation. In her comprehensive takedown, the historian Deirdre N. McCloskey noted that Clark’s idea was a “bold hypothesis, and was bold when first articulated by social Darwinists such as Charles Davenport and Francis Galton in the century before last.” Indeed, over the past 150 years, various white Western scientists and writers have repeatedly offered biological explanations for Caucasian superiority. They have repeatedly failed because, as Mc­Closkey noted, none ever mounted a credible quantitative argument.

Note the phrase “comprehensive takedown”. That is the first red flag. And yet, even without reading McCloskey, without even reading Clark, we can safely assume that both she, and Dobbs, are not being honest because we know that a) Clark’s argument is not the same as those made by the social Darwinists, b) Clark’s argument only refers to the English and not other white nations, c) the only part of the “comprehensive takedown” actually cited simply called Clark’s idea a “bold hypothesis” before going off onto a tangent attacking other, unrelated parties. Furthermore, Clark does present a credible quantitative argument, one involving “the real day wages of English farm laborers from 1200 to 1800”, “homicide rates”, and other obviously quantitative factors. As Wade describes it:

“Clark has documented four behaviors that steadily changed in the English population between 1200 and 1800, as well as a plausible mechanism of change. The four behaviors are those of interpersonal violence, literacy, the propensity to save and the propensity to work.”

Now, how can you reconcile McCloskey’s claim that Clark did not mount a credible quantitative argument with the observable fact that this is exactly what Clark has done, complete with graphs and explanations of exactly how he is quantifying the four behaviors? By reading more carefully and realizing that McCloskey isn’t actually addressing Clark, but rather Davenport, Galton, and others from the pre-quantification era of social science. Dobbs knows that most people don’t read carefully, they only skim to see what they want to see. He’s not actually lying about anything except for the assertion – which is a subjective matter – of the “comprehensive takedown”, but he deceives the common reader into thinking that his assertion is supported. 

Second, Dobbs erects a strawman and burns it. Third, he resorts to outright lying.

And despite his protests to the contrary, Wade often sounds as if he sees the rise of the West as a sort of stable endpoint of human history and evolution — as if, having considered 5,000 years in which history has successively blessed the Middle East, the Far East and the Ottoman Empire, he observes the West’s current run of glory and thinks the pendulum has stilled.

If Wade could point to genes that give races distinctive social behaviors, we might overlook such shortcomings. But he cannot.

So, Wade specifically and repeatedly states he is not doing what Dobbs thinks he is doing, which Dobbs then uses as justification to reach a conclusion that manifestly and absurdly contradicts everything Wade is saying. Wade never claims that “the pendulum has stilled”, quite to the contrary, his ENTIRE ARGUMENT depends upon the idea that the pendulum never stops swinging. And Wade does point to genes, specific genes, including the MAO-A gene, the SLC24A5 gene, the ABCC11 gene, and the EDAR gene that give races distinctive features as well as, in the case of the MAO-A gene, observably affecting their social behaviors.

Fourth and finally, Dobbs resorts to Vox’s Second Law of Critical Dynamics. If I can imagine it, it must be assumed true. If you can’t conclusively prove it, it must be assumed false.

Learn to recognize these deplorable rhetorical tactics. And never, ever, take a left-winger’s word for anything. You’ll be surprised how often they blatantly lie in the hopes that you won’t bother doing the research necessary to call them out on it.

On libertarianism

Increasingly of late, people have been attempting to claim I am not a libertarian on the basis of my failure to adhere to one or another common libertarian shibboleths. Consider my purported heresies:

  1. I oppose open borders.
  2. I oppose free trade.
  3. I oppose female suffrage.
  4. I oppose “equal rights”.
  5. I oppose desegregation.
  6. I oppose the incoherently named “gay marriage”.
  7. I have observed, and stated, that sexual anarchy is incompatible with traditional Western civilization.
  8. I have observed, and stated, that female education is both dyscivic and dysgenic.
  9. I support the right of free association.

These positions are obviously anti-libertine, but are they truly anti-libertarian? I don’t see that the case can be made if one considers the actual definition of libertarianism rather than various dogmatic policies that have somehow come to pass for the philosophy itself. From Wikipedia:

Libertarianism (Latin: liber, free) is a classification of political philosophies that uphold liberty as their principal objective. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and freedom of choice, emphasizing political freedom, voluntary association and the primacy of individual judgment. While libertarians share a skepticism of authority, they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing political and economic systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling to restrict or even to wholly dissolve pervasive social institutions. Rather than embodying a singular, rigid systematic theory or ideology, libertarianism has been applied as an umbrella term to a wide range of sometimes discordant political ideas through modern history.

All of my supposedly anti-libertarian positions are based on the idea of maximizing liberty in a society based on Western civilization. So, far from being anti-libertarian, I would argue that my National Libertarianism is more in keeping with the true concept of libertarianism than all the various dogmas that are libertarian in theory, but in practice have material consequences that are observably anti-human liberty.

The end may not justify the means, but the end is the only correct means of judging any social policy. Intentions and hypotheses and flights of fancy are all equally irrelevant. In the end, one can only look at the policy and decide: does this advance or detract from human liberty in this particular polity.

Foreign policy as Humane Society

William S. Lind observes that the Obama administration’s foreign policy is not so much ill-advised as precisely backward:

After meeting with Ukraine’s newly elected president, Petro O.
Poroshenko, President Obama added, “The United States is absolutely
committed to standing behind the Ukrainian people and their aspirations,
not just in the coming days and weeks but in the coming years.”
Unaccountably, Ruritania and Graustark were forgotten.

This is an animal shelter foreign policy. Based entirely on
sentiment, we are taking in any and every little country that somehow
feels threatened by a state that actually counts. We equally “stand
with” Vietnam and the Philippines against China, in an area long known
as the South China Sea. Just what “standing with” means is left vague.
Does it mean that if they get knocked down, we’re in a fight with
whomever threw the punch? If so, the Obama administration is making one
of the worst foreign policy errors a country can make, casually and
thoughtlessly offering commitments that can lead to war.

Even apart from that risk, we are making a fundamental mistake. These
little countries can do nothing for us. A commitment to them benefits
them, but does absolutely nothing for us. It is to such a “giveaway”
foreign policy that sentiment invariably leads.

This tripwires have historically proven to be one of the primary causes of war for centuries; the fact that various administrations have so eagerly committed US military forces on behalf of small countries of no possible national interest to the American people tends to indicate that war is the ultimate purpose of making these commitments.

As Lind notes: “History shows over and over again that foreign policies based on
sentiment lead to disaster….
Whether or not we “like” the current governments of Russia and China,
our relations with them involve very important interests. We have no
important interests at stake in Ukraine, or Poland, or the Baltics, or
Vietnam, or the Philippines.”

It’s understandable why the governments of these little countries would instinctively seek out the “protection” of military commitments from larger countries, but they before electing to do so they would do well to keep in mind the usual fate of a dog sent to a shelter. It is dangerous to be the USA’s enemy. But as governments from Vietnam to Iraq have learned, it can be fatal to be the USA’s ally.

Great Depression 2.0

Only instead of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, we have the geniuses who permitted the NSA to spy on allied countries:

Germany Instructs Its Companies To Limit Cooperation, Procurement Orders With The US

Update: it just got worse. Moments ago Bloomberg followed up with the second, and expected, part of this story, namely that just like China cut off major US corporations from big procurement contracts leading to a collapse in CSCO and IBM Asian revenues, it is now Germany’s turn. Per Bloomberg, the German Interior Ministry reviewing rules for awarding govt contracts for computer, communications equipment and services as political rift w/ U.S. widens, people familiar with matter told Bloomberg News’ Cornelius Rahn, Amy Thomson.

  • Ministry will probably issue new purchasing guidelines in coming weeks to replace “no-spy-order” dated April 30
  • Details being worked out, may require suppliers of components of bidder’s goods or services to guarantee they don’t hand over confidential data
  • IBM, CSCO, MSFT may be affected by any tightening of procurement procedures: Forrester Research analyst Andrew Rose

It could be for show, but I tend to doubt it. German companies have to be slavering at the notion of having an excellent excuse – nay, reason – to bar their American competitors from government contracts.

LeBron is going home

I don’t care about basketball, much less the NBA. But in a world of superpaid sports stars chasing championships and money and lower state income taxes, it’s almost mindblowing for a bona fide superstar in his prime to defy all the experts and announce that he’s going to return to Cleveland because it’s the place he calls home:

Before anyone ever cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio. It’s where I walked. It’s where I ran. It’s where I cried. It’s where I bled. It holds a special place in my heart. People there have seen me grow up. I sometimes feel like I’m their son. Their passion can be overwhelming. But it drives me. I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now.

Remember when I was sitting up there at the Boys & Girls Club in 2010? I was thinking, This is really tough. I could feel it. I was leaving something I had spent a long time creating. If I had to do it all over again, I’d obviously do things differently, but I’d still have left. Miami, for me, has been almost like college for other kids. These past four years helped raise me into who I am. I became a better player and a better man. I learned from a franchise that had been where I wanted to go. I will always think of Miami as my second home. Without the experiences I had there, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing today.

I went to Miami because of D-Wade and CB. We made sacrifices to keep UD. I loved becoming a big bro to Rio. I believed we could do something magical if we came together. And that’s exactly what we did! The hardest thing to leave is what I built with those guys. I’ve talked to some of them and will talk to others. Nothing will ever change what we accomplished. We are brothers for life.  I also want to thank Micky Arison and Pat Riley for giving me an amazing four years.

I’m doing this essay because I want an opportunity to explain myself uninterrupted. I don’t want anyone thinking: He and Erik Spoelstra didn’t get along. … He and Riles didn’t get along. … The Heat couldn’t put the right team together. That’s absolutely not true.

I’m not having a press conference or a party. After this, it’s time to get to work.

When I left Cleveland, I was on a mission. I was seeking championships, and we won two. But Miami already knew that feeling. Our city hasn’t had that feeling in a long, long, long time. My goal is still to win as many titles as possible, no question. But what’s most important for me is bringing one trophy back to Northeast Ohio.

I always believed that I’d return to Cleveland and finish my career there. I just didn’t know when. After the season, free agency wasn’t even a thought. But I have two boys and my wife, Savannah, is pregnant with a girl. I started thinking about what it would be like to raise my family in my hometown. I looked at other teams, but I wasn’t going to leave Miami for anywhere except Cleveland. The more time passed, the more it felt right. This is what makes me happy.

To make the move I needed the support of my wife and my mom, who can be very tough. The letter from Dan Gilbert, the booing of the Cleveland fans, the jerseys being burned — seeing all that was hard for them. My emotions were more mixed. It was easy to say, “OK, I don’t want to deal with these people ever again.” But then you think about the other side. What if I were a kid who looked up to an athlete, and that athlete made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left? How would I react? I’ve met with Dan, face-to-face, man-to-man. We’ve talked it out. Everybody makes mistakes. I’ve made mistakes as well. Who am I to hold a grudge?

I’m not promising a championship. I know how hard that is to deliver. We’re not ready right now. No way. Of course, I want to win next year, but I’m realistic. It will be a long process, much longer than it was in 2010. My patience will get tested. I know that. I’m going into a situation with a young team and a new coach. I will be the old head. But I get a thrill out of bringing a group together and helping them reach a place they didn’t know they could go. I see myself as a mentor now and I’m excited to lead some of these talented young guys. I think I can help Kyrie Irving become one of the best point guards in our league. I think I can help elevate Tristan Thompson and Dion Waiters. And I can’t wait to reunite with Anderson Varejao, one of my favorite teammates.

But this is not about the roster or the organization. I feel my calling here goes above basketball. I have a responsibility to lead, in more ways than one, and I take that very seriously. My presence can make a difference in Miami, but I think it can mean more where I’m from. I want kids in Northeast Ohio, like the hundreds of Akron third-graders I sponsor through my foundation, to realize that there’s no better place to grow up. Maybe some of them will come home after college and start a family or open a business. That would make me smile. Our community, which has struggled so much, needs all the talent it can get.

In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have.

I’m ready to accept the challenge. I’m coming home.

It’s remarkable to see how James declines to hold a grudge against Dan Gilbert after the Cavaliers owner published a bitter, nasty open letter to him after he left Cleveland for Miami. This is the statement, and action, of a man who embraces responsibility and leadership. I won’t be surprised if there are more than a few people outside Northeast Ohio hoping that one day, LeBron James is able to present that one trophy to the place, and the people, he obviously loves.

Mailvox: DISCO SUCKS and the Evil League of Evil

I was less interested in the analogy drawn here than the important conclusion drawn by the emailer:

I mentioned that we were now in the “riot grrl” phase of SFF. Today, after reading the following link, I came to more conclusions:  1) The Evil League of Evil is the “Disco Sucks” of SFF, and 2) NEVER let your opponent have the opportunity to speak on your own behalf and not answer in kind:

“So how did racism and homophobia get attached to Disco Demolition?

In 1996, VH1 was attempting to expand from the music video template of MTV by creating documentaries and original programming. One of their first was “The Seventies,” a look at the decade in popular culture. A producer asked me to contribute a commentary about Disco Demolition. I saw the event as a romp, not of major cultural significance. I had no interest in claiming responsibility for killing disco. My target was Disco DAI, which was smothered in spring of 1980. The interview coincided with my quitting WMVP (a story for another day). I missed it.

Blowing off that interview was a mistake. The producers reframed the event through the lens of 1996 sensibilities. For the first time, the event was labeled racist and homophobic. It was a cheap shot, made without exploration, and it served as a pivot point for their documentary. It has lived on, thanks to Google….We were a bunch of disenfranchised 20-something rockers having some laughs at the expense of older brothers who had the capital and the clothing to hang with the trendy social elite. We were letting off a little steam. Any statement to the contrary is just plain wrong.”

I remember the VH1 documentary he’s writing about, and I remember the saddened, wistful, “knowing” looks of the disco artists bemoaning the “Disco Demolition” and the “Disco sucks” movement in general, and yes, I specifically remember the charges of racism and homosexual backlash they labeled it with, completely unchallenged.  I even remember a cutscene of Tom Petty smashing the shit out of a drum machine around 1979 or so.  Funny how no one ever accuses HIM of being racist or homophobic.

My parents both grew up in Philadelphia in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.  That means American Band Stand when it was still broadcast in Philly, there were such things as “regional sounds” regional hits and scenes, records you might NEVER hear again if you ventured 2 or 3 hours away.  In the ’70s, they were into disco (they married in ’75, I came along in ’77).  Everybody was into disco, for the simple reason, it was fun and it was a party scene, especially for guidos growing up in Northeastern cities.

My parent’s reaction to the “Disco Sucks” thing?  Well, they thought it was a little mean spirited, at worst, and maybe, maybe, there was an element of anti-black or anti-gay bias in it, but they were the first to admit that by 1979 it was pretty much over.  They didn’t attach too much cultural significance to disco itself, It was a fad, and like all fads, it was time to move on to the next one.  Incidentally 1979 is about the time they both jumped off the pop culture wagon – they didn’t care for punk or New Wave, and I think, other than oldies collections, the last NEW record my Dad bought was Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall.”  As time went on, they went further back into soul, R&B, doo wop, and classic rock. 

They were more Philly Soul and Motown fans than anything else, so they also readily admitting to realizing just how limiting a musical form disco was.  Sure there are some tremendous records, but if you wanted something that was actually PLAYED by musicians, you were looking for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Chic, NOT the very first names that come to mind when someone says “Disco.”  I mean, Kiss went disco, Blondie went disco, Star Wars went disco.  It was simply,  played,  out.  It did NOT speak to rock fans.  There was only so much you could do with “four on the floor” and “burn baby burn.”

Funny though, the VH1 “rockumentary” made ZERO mention about the 9 million pound asteroid in the room:  did disco, in fact, SUCK?  No one of course would actually go near the idea that maybe, just maybe the music wasn’t really all that good – now it’s looked at as kitsch, nostalgia fodder.

The interviewees they had, that I remember, included Donna Summer and Nile Rodgers of Chic – that’s bringing in the ringers – that is a convenient way of saying “you can’t say it sucked!!!”  They sure as hell didn’t interview the Bee Gees, or Abba, or Tavares.  No one actually did much criticizing of the obvious, the central point, the music, other than to say a little “yeah maybe it was a bit manufactured and faddish, I mean, c’mon, Kiss” but YOU’RE ALL REYCISSS!!!!!  It’s like how you simply CANNOT criticize Pink SFf for its actuall literary merits or lack thereof – the SKILL of the writer – all that’s important is the feels and  the politics, it doesn’t matter if it’s actually good or not.  It’s art as participation trophy for the oppressed, and this documentary, I think, KICKSTARTED that idea into the stratosphere.

But, here’s the point, the original instigator, Steve Dahl, passed on a chance to have his say in court.  Would it have made a difference? I don’t know.  And I also don’t know why he waited until now to make his point, but the fact is this, this rock-hard meme that’s it going to be damn near impossible to ever refute is stuck in the popular consciousness, just about the time when PC bullshit and the war on language really took off, the 1990s.

So, why say that ELoE is the “disco sucks” movement of SFF?  Because you’re the only ones calling out Pink SFF on its overuse of drum machines, recycled beats, empty lyrics, and celebration of shallow excess – Pink SFF happens to be the current ever-declining sales posting radio friendly unit shifters of the moment, but you’re basically saying that what came along with “New Wave” sci-fi in the ’60s and ’70s, which was pretty damn disco sci-fi if you ask me (Jerry Cornelius anyone?), also begat cynical punk rock (cyberpunk), industrial (gray goo), and other fads that have had their time, and are fading. You could call some of Pink SFF “hip hop” but unlike real-life hip hop, it also doesn’t sell, and I think that’s more apparent in comics and graphic novels and movies than books. 

He’s correct. The pinkshirts are DESPERATE to avoid the discussion that the Evil League of Evil has collectively initiated about science fiction and fantasy, and they are constantly trying to summarize and explain and interpret and spin what we are saying rather than simply quoting us. In many cases, they don’t even refer directly to us by name, but instead provide in-group indicators so that their fellow pinkshirts will know to whom they are referring and bark on request while moderates and neutrals more capable of being swayed will be left in the dark.

They are attempting to control the narrative rather than engage in discourse, for the obvious reason that they know as well as we do that we are absolutely correct. They claim we are bad writers while readily admitting to never having read our books. We claim they are inept storytellers pushing left-wing propaganda on the basis of being intimately familiar with the very best they have to offer. Hence we can identify them, quote them at length, and directly engage because we have nothing to hide and nothing to fear. They, on the contrary, are correctly fearful of being exposed, at having their whole Potemkin Village of publishers and editors and writers and reviews and “bestseller” lists and awards blown away in the harsh, judgmental winds of reality.

So, they will attempt to continue controlling the narrative by speaking on our behalf and erecting the sort of strawmen they are capable of defeating. But, thanks to the Internet and our own determination to speak for ourselves, they will not succeed.

The slippery slope is not a logical fallacy

To the contrary, the slippery slope is observably a predictive model with occasional success, particularly with regards to sexual matters:

Judge Garry Neilson, from the district court in the state of New South Wales, likened incest to homosexuality, which was once regarded as criminal and “unnatural” but is now widely accepted.

He said incest was now only a crime because it may lead to abnormalities in offspring but this rationale was increasingly irrelevant because of the availability of contraception and abortion.

“A jury might find nothing untoward in the advance of a brother towards his sister once she had sexually matured, had sexual relationships with other men and was now ‘available’, not having [a] sexual partner,” the judge said.

“If this was the 1950s and you had a jury of 12 men there, which is what you’d invariably have, they would say it’s unnatural for a man to be interested in another man or a man being interested in a boy. Those things have gone….

“The complainant has been sexually awoken, shall we say, by having two relationships with men and she had become ‘free’ when the second relationship broke down. The only thing that might change that is the fact that they were a brother and sister but we’ve come a long way from the 1950s – when the position of the English Common Law was that sex outside marriage was not lawful.”

This should make it clear to everyone who is not a sexual deviant that the position of the English Common Law was correct, and that all of the various deviancies that have been legalized and normalized and declared no longer indicative of psychological sickness since the 1950s should promptly be returned to their former status.

There is no middle ground. What devotees of one particular immorality or another believe is a reasonable stopping point – here, and no further –  is nothing more than a waystation on the road to total depravity of the worst imaginable sort.

We libertarians were wrong. Societal liberty simply cannot be maximized through sexual anarchy any more than it can be maximized though unrestricted immigration, unrestricted government, or unrestricted voting. In retrospect, this should always have been obvious: if everything goes, then literally everything will go. This is no longer a hypothetical objection on the part of traditional conservatives, it is an undeniable reality. It is human nature to push at the boundaries; there will always be those who cross the line. Therefore, the line needs to be set firmly along boundaries that are undeniably eucivic and proven by centuries of tradition to be sustainable in the long term.

There will be those who disingenuously insist that the clock cannot be turned back, that humanity is doomed to an endless future of sodomy, incest, rape, necrophilia, and bestiality. This is provably false; the current period of sexual anarchy in the West is hardly the first in human history and it is very short by historical standards. And this particular clock most certainly will be turned back, one way or another, because everything from birth rates to the transmission rates of sexually transmitted diseases indicate that the current state of near-sexual anarchy has already reached the point of unsustainability.

Technology can never trump Creator-imposed morality any more than science can surmount the physical laws of Nature. It may appear to do so, for a short time, but that is nothing more than an illusion based on incomplete understanding.

Chiraq: America’s war zone

Whatever could be the problem in Chicago? It’s probably poverty. Or hunger. Or income inequality. Or privilege. Or maybe global climate change.

For 10 minutes, it seemed like the shooting was everywhere in the South Chicago neighborhood. It started when someone shot and wounded a couple, then two people fired at the shooter, then there was a chase and shots exchanged and a man sitting on a porch was hit. Responding officers kept cutting each other off on their radios as they reported other gunfire in the area late Sunday night and early Monday morning.

Then the heavy equipment rolled in: A helicopter and SUVs packed with lockers of rifles. SWAT teams in green coveralls patrolled the streets with uniformed officers.

It was just one of dozens of shooting scenes across Chicago over the long Fourth of July weekend. In all, at least 82 people were shot, 14 of them fatally, since Thursday afternoon when two woman were shot as they sat outside a two-flat within a block of Garfield Park.

Five of the people were shot by police over 36 hours on Friday and Saturday, including two boys 14 and 16 who were killed when they allegedly refused to drop their guns.

Many of the long weekend’s shootings were on the South Side, clustered in the Englewood, Roseland, Gresham and West Pullman neighborhoods that rank among the most violent in the city.

The victims ranged from the 14-year-boy shot by police in the Old Irving Park neighborhood to a 66-year-old woman grazed in the head as she walked up the steps of her porch on the Far South Side.  Most victims were in their late teens and 20s.

Fortunately, there is an answer, and that is the MILITARY OCCUPATION of Chicago.

National Guard needed in city to stem shootings

It is time to call out the National Guard to patrol the streets of certain crime-infested neighborhoods in Chicago where the murder rate is high. It is apparent that the presence of the city’s police force alone is inadequate to deal with this violence.

I suggest that the National Guard be mobilized during every weekend for the rest of the summer.  I also suggest imposing a curfew of midnight on weekend nights during the summer on all teenagers in the city except for those with jobs that require them to be out after the curfew.

It is, of course, deplorably racist to express any wish to avoid living among people who cannot be described as being even a little bit savage and merely require a modest military occupation in order to reduce the amount of murderous violence in which they happen to engage for no particular reason at all. All right-thinking people would cheerfully welcome the chance to have their neighborhood occupied by the US military, as that is a very small price to pay for the myriad benefits of diversity.