Marital sex is never rape

Some of my dimmer critics have attempted to make a meal out of my factual statement: a man cannot rape his wife. But that is not only a fact, it is the explicit law in the greater part of the world, just as it is part of the English Common Law.

A Delhi court has ruled that sex between a husband and wife, “even if forcible, is not rape.” The judge’s decision, which was made public Saturday, upheld section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which does not recognize “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age,” as rape.

The fact that some of the lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West presently call some forms of sex between a husband and wife “rape” does not transform marital sex into rape any more than a law that declared all vaginal intercourse to be rape would make it so. Reality is not defined by politics; we cannot settle the question of evolution by natural selection by simply passing a law that declares God created the world and everything in it last Tuesday.

Anyone with a basic grasp of logic who thinks about the subject of “marital rape” for more than ten seconds will quickly realize that marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis. This has to be the case, otherwise every time one partner wakes the other up in an intimate manner or has sex with an inebriated spouse, rape has been committed. And for those who wish to argue that consent can be withdrawn, there is a word for withdrawing consent in a marriage. That word is “divorce”.

The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.

Slouching towards barbarism

In his book A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade points out what he believes to be two of the most important steps in building an advanced Western civilization. The first is the more fundamental one:

How then was the profound transition made from the chimplike society of the joint ancestor to the hunter-gatherer societies in which all humans lived until 15,000 years ago and in which kinship was a central institution? The likely steps in this process have been persuasively worked out by the primatologist Bernard Chapais. The critical behavioral step, in his view, was formation of the pair bond, or at least a stable breeding relationship between male and female….

Having a dad around makes all the difference to social networks. In highly promiscuous societies like those of chimps, an individual knows only its mother and the siblings it grows up with. With pair bonding, people know not only their father as well as their mother, but all their father’s relatives too. The males in a community now recognized both their daughters and, when their daughters dispersed to a neighboring group, a daughter’s husband and his parents.

The development of the heterosexual pair bond, which eventually developed into monogamous marriage, appears to have been crucial in the development of tribalism. It therefore follows that the modern sexual free-for-all and the weakening of the vital pair bond involved is not only dyscivic, but downright dehumanizing.

The second significant step Wade identifies comes much later, and enables the escape from tribalism. This was accomplished most successfully, and fully, in England, but also took place in East Asia:

The entry to the modern industrial world has two principal requirements. The first is to develop institutions that enable a society to break away, at least to some substantial extent, from the default human institution of tribalism. Tribalism, being built around kinship ties, is incompatible with the institutions of a modern state.

The break from tribalism probably requires a population to evolve such behaviors as higher levels of trust toward those outside the family or tribe. A second required evolutionary change is the transformation of a population’s social traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies and documented by Clark for English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

But this break from tribalism required a eugenic and eucivic mechanism, one that Wade rather generously labels “natural selection”: the English rich consistently having a little more than twice as many children as the poor.

As it happens, 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….

“The surname evidence confirms a permanent selection in pre-industrial England for the genes of the economically successful, and against the genes of the poor and the criminal,” Clark concludes. “Their extra reproductive success had a permanent impact on the genetic composition of the later population.”

Clark’s data provide substantial evidence that the English population responded genetically to the harsh stresses of a Malthusian regime and that the shifts in its social behavior from 1200 to 1800 were shaped by natural selection. The burden of proof is surely shifted to those who might wish to assert that the English population was miraculously exempt from the very forces of natural selection whose existence it had suggested to Darwin.

If Wade and Clark are correct, this has terrible implications for the profoundly dyscivic mechanisms we are witnessing across the West today, where the dependent classes and the imported barbarians have considerably more children than the productive classes. While this part of the book is more logic based on statistical and historical observations than science, its scientific aspects are fairly firm. Blank slatists attempting to dismiss it unread, (the ever-inept PZ Myers being but one example), will soon find themselves forced to take scientifically indefensible positions.

Retroactive capital controls

The economic death knells are beginning to ring louder for the USA:

I read a troubling story in the Financial Times about Pfizer’s bid to take over British drug company AstraZeneca. One of the prime reasons that Pfizer is so interested is because the takeover would afford them the opportunity to redomicile the business in England.

Why do this? Because right now they’re paying US corporate tax… which is substantially higher than in the UK. So by moving the business abroad, the company would save shareholders billions. Uncle Sam has a big problem with this. And Congress is jumping all over Pfizer to block the deal… even going so far as to propose RETROACTIVE legislation.

In other words, they’re willing to go back in time to kill the deal before it even gets started.

The FT quotes Oregon Senator Ron Wyden as saying “I don’t approach retroactivity in legislation lightly, but corporations must understand that they won’t profit from abandoning the US…”

Ummm, actually that’s the whole point, Senator. The tax situation is so onerous that people do profit when they leave the US. That’s WHY people leave the US. Duh.

But like the drug companies themselves, Congress isn’t looking at the root cause. They’re treating the symptom. In this case, the symptom is American businesses heading overseas to escape the highest tax regime in the developed world.

The federal corporate tax rate alone can be as high as 38%, and that’s before including state corporate taxes, or personal taxes on the dividend distributions to shareholders.

It’s getting very, very obvious that the US government is desperate for tax revenue, to the point that they’ve entered a vicious circle of negative returns on their efforts. More inquiring minds might wonder what is driving this observable sense of desperation.

Banana Empire

One can’t honestly call the USA a banana republic. It’s more of a banana empire:

Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expand edits Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director. R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of innovations and industry leadership in the field of natural gas means that it can be a strong driver of a strong economy in Ukraine. As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

Daddy helps arrange for overthrowing the elected government, and the grateful oligarchs put junior on the board of directors. Anyone remember when the Russians were the bad guys?

I’m sure “the people of Ukraine” are a major concern here to everyone involved.

We can play that game

Remember, any time you see someone pop off about Christianity or say anything negative about anyone on the Right who isn’t a straight white male, one has a duty to register a complaint with the appropriate speech police. Those are the new rules of the game, after all, and there is NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for anyone who expresses a negative opinion about God, or Christians, or the UK Independence Party.

An education official was visited by police because he had upset Ukip on Twitter. Officers knocked at Michael Abberton’s door to question him about a mocked-up poster he had placed online that criticised the Eurosceptic party’s policies.

They asked him about his ‘intentions toward Ukip’ and suggested he should tell no one that the visit had taken place.

Mr Abberton, a Green party member, said police had overstepped the mark. The Cambridgeshire force said it had acted over a possible breach of electoral law. But their heavy-handed actions were condemned by civil rights campaigners and politicians from across the political spectrum.

That sort of thing works much better on the r/selected anyhow, which makes it some QUALITY black-knighting. Because, remember, there is NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for people who do not believe the things that we believe.

If you seriously want to knock a feminist back, drop that line on her. They literally have no idea how to respond to being targeted that way. Not when there is NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for her.

The prosecution rests

John C. Wright reflects on the SF/F community’s response to his article in Intercollegiate Review, which appears to mark the first time that the SF/F community at large has ever indicated it is aware of the existence of Intercollegiate Review:

I am surprised, but should not be, that an obscure opinion in an obscure journal by an obscure author such as myself would provoke so many loud and hostile reactions. (Maybe it is a slow news day and there is nothing else to fret about.)

Why so vehement a reaction when so other published opinions of mine, much more controversial, go uncontroverted? I suspect that the witchhunters hate being identified for what they are. Truth is their kriptonite.

I won’t bother linking to them. Overhearing strangers talk about me either in praise or blame bores me, since I am not a fascinating subject to myself, and none of these people know my character or my character flaws.

But I will make one comment, which I hope is telling: Please note that these various articles critiquing my article do not say, “the witch hunt never happened; we, the socially-aware segment of the science fiction community, are completely forgiving of all personal flaws and differences of opinion, political and personal, between ourselves and Malzberg, Moon, Correia, Card, etc, and we judge their works only on the merit of the writing!”

Instead they say, “But those people he defends really are witches and pariahs! Right-thinking people must have nothing to do with them!”

Which would seem to prove, rather than refute, my point.

And that would be checkmate.

It is rather remarkable how obtuse the hissy-fitters of the Left repeatedly show themselves to be. My personal favorite was SFWA President Steven Gould publicly asserting that his organization doesn’t do what got the whole ball rolling in the first place, then noting with an asterisk that it actually does exactly what he had been denying.

They don’t seem to grasp that the moment you proclaim “there is no place for X in our community”, X can be, and will be, defined as anything those with sufficient power deem it to be. If it is acceptable to say there is no place for racists, then it is also acceptable to say there is no place for blacks. If it is acceptable to say there is no place for libertarians, it is acceptable to say that there is no place for socialists. If it is acceptable to say there is no place for the science-literate, it is acceptable to say there is no place for the half-savage.

Once thought policing is imposed, the situation has devolved into a straightforward power game. But, as the slack-jawed reaction to the Hugo nominations has shown, they’re not actually ready for the open conflict they created. They don’t even realize that we haven’t even begun to flex our muscles. They thought they’d won the game while the other team was still in the locker room. Now the first three or four players players have stepped onto the field and they are absolutely shocked to discover that we showed up.

The amusing thing is that they think we’re crying about their harmless little attacks because that’s what they would feel like doing in our shoes. They still don’t realize that we are not like them. They still have no idea what is coming.

Thought Police: NFL style

It’s fascinating to see the sports media openly endorse corporate thought policing. I’m sure they will be similarly fine with being suspended and fined if they write positively of homogamy in public. Peter King writes on CNN/SI:

Good for the Dolphins for fining and suspending defensive back Don Jones for being an idiot on Twitter after Michael Sam got drafted.

I would love to see Fox News suspend and fine someone for expressing a critical attitude towards any religion. Just to prove the point, if nothing else. The fact that a self-professed journalist would openly endorse political speech-policing goes to show the dreadful state of journalism in America.

The inevitable

Hello My Dearest,

How are you today, with hope you are found in good condition of health?, Dear I have decided to contact you after much thought considering the fact that we have not meet before, but because of some circumstance oblige me, I decided to contact you due to the urgency of my present situation here in the refugee camp for your rescue. Meanwhile my Name is Miss Mercy Oscar Kamau Kingara, 16yrs old female and I from Kenya here in Africa. As you may have seen on Twitter hashtag #bringbackoutgirls I was brutally kidnapped from my school in Chibok by a criminal gang on the 14 April.

My dear, haven’t meet with you before I intend to disclose this to you with trust as a top secret which I believe you will never turn me down neither disclose it to anybody until everything is successfully done I will relocate over to your country. For only $10 per day, my kidnappers have promised that I can return from here, were I am forced to be a Wife to a man who will not love me or respect me or permission me to return to my studies which I so much love.

However my Dear, all am requesting from you is for your kind assistant in transferring this my ransom for investment assistance in your Country as my legal appointed trustee as the bank mentioned and it will be my intention to compensate you; note that immediately after the transfer i will relocate over to your country or position and further my education studies and spend the rest of my life while you will be acting as my brother and my sister. Please consider my request as my life is being hugely affected here in the camp of the kidnappers

Thanks a lot in your prompt positive response to help me out. I shall give you more details of the transfer in my next mail.

Yours Faithfully Mercy Oscar.

Assassinating the citizenry

Rand Paul opposes the appointment of a known defender of citizen assassinations to the federal judgeship, particularly since the Obama administration is hiding the man’s defenses of those assassinations from the Senate:

The Bill of Rights is clear. The Fifth Amendment provides that no one can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Sixth Amendment provides that “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury,” as well as the right to be informed of all charges and have access to legal counsel. These are fundamental rights that cannot be waived with a presidential pen.

In battle, combatants engaged in war against America get no due process and may lawfully be killed. But citizens not in a battlefield, however despicable, are guaranteed a trial by our Constitution. No one argues that Americans who commit treason shouldn’t be punished. The maximum penalty for treason is death. But the Constitution specifies the process necessary to convict.

Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen who was subject to a kill order from Mr. Obama, and was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a missile fired from a drone. I don’t doubt that Mr. Awlaki committed treason and deserved the most severe punishment. Under our Constitution, he should have been tried — in absentia, if necessary — and allowed a legal defense. If he had been convicted and sentenced to death, then the execution of that sentence, whether by drone or by injection, would not have been an issue.

But this new legal standard does not apply merely to a despicable human being who wanted to harm the United States. The Obama administration has established a legal justification that applies to every American citizen, whether in Yemen, Germany or Canada.

Defending the rights of all American citizens to a trial by jury is a core value of our Constitution. Those who would make exceptions for killing accused American citizens without trial should give thought to the times in our history when either prejudice or fear allowed us to forget due process.

One would think that Jews in America, more than anyone, would understand the intrinsic danger of permitting a government to legally kill its own citizens at will. I find it astonishing that most of them in the media appear to be more interested in defending the Obama administration than ensuring that the U.S. government is prevented from hunting down and killing Americans without trial.

That was fast

Nicholas Wade, the author of the excellent A Troublesome Inheritance and science editor of the New York Times, is now still the FORMER science editor of the New York Times:

Nicholas Wade, a British-born science reporter and editor for more than 30 years with The New York Times, is no longer with the newspaper — just days after the release of his latest book, in which he depicts blacks with roots in sub-Saharan Africa as genetically less adapted to modern life than whites and Asians.

Was The New York Times uncomfortable with Wade’s science or his conclusions? It’s unclear. Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment.

Wade’s last Times article appeared April 24. His Penguin Press book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” arrived in bookstores on Tuesday, May 6. In excerpts from his book posted by Time.com on Friday, he is identified as a “former science editor” of the Times. Until then, coverage of his book called him a current Times journalist.

Obviously he deserved it, as he undeniably implied black people are “differently evolved” when he wrote that only 45 of the 394 genes currently deemed to be under selection are the same genes in blacks and whites. In light of such an atrocity, he may as well have called someone a “half-savage”; clearly he must be lambasted and ritualistically assailed by every goodthinking individual. I wonder if it is still acceptable to the Left to describe the fine, upstanding gentlemen who belong to Boko Haram and are so eager to host teenage schoolgirls as “less than entirely civilized although otherwise totally equal to all individuals of both sexes of European descent in every way” or if that too is a purgeable offense?

The Left is more than uncomfortable with both science and the conclusions that logically follow from it. It is now openly and avowedly anti-science. What is fascinating is that most clueless Leftists still feverishly insist that they, and not the Right, are pro-science even as they reject it in favor of various nonexistent ideals. As I have repeatedly pointed out since last August, the time for tolerating the Left has passed. Your only choice now is to submit to them or to shatter them.

UPDATE: I’m not sure this proves that Wade was not “fired”, even if he had already stepped down as science editor. “Anyway, just heard from reliable source that Wade took a retirement
package a couple of years ago.  The deal was that he could continue to
make occasional contributions on a fee basis.”

If he continues to make occasional contributions, then we’ll know he wasn’t canned for his book. If his last contribution on a fee basis turns out to have been April 24th, well, that would not prove that he was fired, but it would tend to indicate that was the case.

UPDATE 2: Not so fast. Apparently the Daily Caller author let his imagination run away with him.

“I retired from the Times about two years ago. There’s a stupid story you may have seen in the blogosphere. It is completely untrue. The writer just made that up. The fact that he saw the words ‘former Science editor’ in the piece I did in Time. He assumed that I had been fired by the Times. There is nothing to the story at all. I myself wrote the word ‘former’ in because I saw that the Time editor in putting the tag line on had said that I was Science editor of the Times. Since that was some time in the past, and is no longer true, I inserted the word ‘former’ and the writer in the Daily Caller just made the story up out of thin air. He made absolutely no attempt to contact me and not a word of it is true.”