The rebel cow of the Romagna

And you wonder why I so love Italia and the Italiani:

I was wading through the daily mire of newspaper headlines the other day about the deepening euro crisis and the latest rich or famous Italian to be arrested when I saw this: “Mucca inferocita in fuga semina paura” (Ferocious cow on the run spreads panic). A cow, nicknamed “Libera” (free) by article’s author, had been on the loose now “for months” in the Apennine Mountains near the small city of Forlì where I live, and “quella enorme massa di 800 chili” (that enormous mass of 800 kilos) was charging anyone who approached it.

It was not that the cow had decided one day to become a bull, or a butch lesbian, or anything so boringly human. The cow’s feelings about its sexuality had nothing to do with it: The cow simply had enough of its life of slavery as a farm animal.

Capable of covering many miles a day, it had now bewitched two other cows from a different farm because, as the newspaper—La Voce di Romagna—explained, it “contagia” (infects) any other cow it comes across with the urge to be free. How many other cows in my neck of the woods, or indeed in Italy as a whole, would now heed the siren call to rebellion of this charismatic rebel cow and return to their primeval state? And where does the cow stand on the single currency? Is it for or against the euro?

According to La Voce, not even the farmer who owns the cow could get it to see reason. So the powers that be in the nearest town, Predappio, had at long last decided to swing into action….

Perhaps they convinced themselves that the cow was a fascist fifth columnist masquerading as a communist because according to the paper, one morning last week off they all went, up into those hills where there are no roads, just perilous mud tracks, woods, and the occasional field, in their four-wheel drives bristling with weapons. Amazingly, they soon found the cow and her two sidekicks in a scene described by La Voce thusly: “A sort of big game hunt. The forestale (forest rangers), veterinari (vets), and even the carabinieri (police) and the sindaco (mayor). All of them around Libera, at a safe distance, in order to immobilize her.”

But it was all in vain. They could not get near enough to the cow to capture it, and the only alternative was either to shoot it dead or shoot it with a tranquilizer bullet. But the sindaco, being a leftie and a staunch believer in animals’ rights over those of fascist humans, would not sign the order to kill the beast and nobody had any tranquilizer bullets. “The rebel cow has won her battle for freedom,” La Voce concluded, “for now Libera remains where she is, happy to roam the hills, and no doubt in the company of the other two cows.”

La dolce vita, baby. La dolce vita. I can’t wait for the inevitable political party, Mucca Ribella, to form around Libera. She certainly can’t be any worse as prime minister than Monti, and she’s already every bit as democratically legitimate.

Russia crashes out!

Holy Kremlin, but I did not see that coming. Greece upset Russia, 1-0, and combined with the Czech defeat of Poland, that bounces Russia out of the tournament! I’m shocked, as I thought the Russians looked like the third best team in the tournament, after Spain and Germany. The crazy thing is that Greece fully merited the win and could easily have won 2-0 had they been given an obvious penalty in the second half.

Oh, relax and enjoy it, Kate

One of the things I find remarkable is the readiness of outspoken feminist women to crucify themselves with their own words. It’s as if they have absolutely no conception of the logical consequences of their ideas, and despite their confrontational tone, they appear to have no expectation that their position can or will be criticized.

Consider the following excerpts from the linked cartoon, which features a retarded form of Socratic dialogue between a cartoon figure and an even more cartoonish version of anti-feminist arguments.

It’s not fair that I have to be terrified when I go jogging after 6 PM or when I’m on the bus or going to get milk.

Then don’t go out alone at night. That’s common sense.

That’s rape culture! When you tell me it’s my responsibility not to get hurt, you take away the responsibility of a human being not to rape!

Why are we even talking about this? I’m not a rapist.

Because it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in equality!

First of all, Kate being terrified of rape when she goes to get milk is her problem. Some women are terrified of bats, others are afraid of heights, and those fears are no more your problem or my problem than Kate’s terror of rape on the milk run. It is very, very easy for Kate to significantly reduce her chances of being raped, as getting a concealed carry permit and avoiding the company of black and Hispanic men will virtually eliminate the possibility that she will be forcibly raped. Even without taking any such defensive measures, the national rate of forcible rape is only 24.7 per 100,000 population, one-third lower than it was in 1990. This means that in a population of 308 million, Kate’s chances of being raped in any given year are less than one in 12,000 and declining. This cannot be reasonably described as a “rape culture”.

If Kate genuinely lives in constant terror of a one in 12,000 risk, she is delusional and may be clinically paranoid. And this doesn’t even begin to take into account that unless a woman is raped at home by someone breaking into her residence, it is very difficult for a woman to get raped without her not only contributing to the situation, but contributing significantly to it. And yes, in such situations, that does make the victim at least partially culpable from a legal perspective. If you don’t understand that, try looking at it this way. If insurance companies sold rape insurance, are there any behaviors that would conceivably increase or decrease the premium?

Furthermore, Kate is quite obviously crazy. If she had said “it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in rainbow-tailed unicorns”, everyone would quite correctly conclude that she is a lunatic. But there is no more evidence for equality than there is for rainbow-tailed unicorns. Human equality simply doesn’t exist and it has never existed. As I have pointed out before, both logic and genetic science demonstrate that human beings are not even all equally human. Her lunacy is further evidenced by her bizarre attempt to justify her broaching the topic with the non-rapist by an appeal to her own exhaustion. That does not follow. Moreover, it is apparent that Kate, by her own admission, doesn’t actually believe in equality anyway. Consider her final rant:

So fuck ANYONE who thinks they have the right to tell me not to care! FUCK THEM! I do care. I will always care.

Here Kate is expressly denying that others have the right to free speech, which is not only encoded into various legal systems but also happens to observably exist in a material manner, while simultaneously asserting the legitimacy of her attempt to believe in a future that is not only nonexistent, but improbable to the point of near impossibility. From which we are forced to conclude that she’s not only crazy, she’s outrageously stupid to boot.

The fundamentally nonsensical thing about her position is that she wants others to do what she will not. If she can’t be bothered to put any effort into defending herself against rape, why should anyone else? If it’s not her responsibility to act on something about which she professes to care so deeply, how could it possibly be mine, or anyone else’s, when we do not care in the slightest about her feelings or her fate.

Kate declares her opinion that angry posturing on behalf of nonexistent female rights is “hot as hell”. Which is fine, I suppose, so long as she is hoping to attract angry, rancid feminist women. But it certainly isn’t going to be attractive to men who have access to better options, such as Internet porn or voluntary chastity.

For further amusement, I highly recommend the emotional posturing in which various Pharyngulans are engaging as they attempt to demonstrate which one of them is the anti-rapiest of all. Apparently the winner will be awarded a tiara carved from the horn of a pink unicorn by PZ Myers himself. This was one of the finer examples of the intellectual fireworks on display:

I can’t think of one, even one, precaution that a woman (or man) can take that actually has a good chance of preventing rape that would also be considered “reasonable” by any rational or honest individual…. And if you want to talk about “reasonable” precautions, I think, the first burden on you is to describe your proposed precaution and demonstrate that it actually works to prevent rape.

This total inability of humanity to prevent any rape no doubt explains why rape rates never change over time and do not vary from one nation to another. It is a very strange belief system indeed where human action can modify the global climate, but rape is random, inevitable, and completely immune to human action. Of course, it would be deplorably raciss to notice that a 31 percent increase in the number of incarcerated black men, mostly for harmless drug charges, has corresponded with the 33 percent decline in forcible rapes per 100,000, from 41.2 in 1990 to 27.5 in 2010.

Vanished kingdoms, shifting cultures

“One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements. The capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. In reality, just as individuals can go abroad and merge into a foreign community, so a stationary population, if subjected to a changed linguistic and cultural environment, can quite easily be persuaded to follow suit. Dominant cultures are closely connected to dominant power groups. As the balance of power shifts, the balance of cultures shifts as well.”
– Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies

This is exactly why I consider it to be so significant that the racial, ethnic, and cultural mix of the USA has been transformed so dramatically since the two major immigration “reforms” in 1965 and 1986. In the course of half a single lifetime, the USA has gone from a white, Christian nation-state to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-national state. While many people celebrate this, they do so foolishly because they wrongly believe that such transformations are possible without changing all of the aspects of the dominant culture. It’s not that the American people will vanish altogether, but they will become something that can no longer be reasonably considered American, just as the Brythonic Celts of the kingdom of Alt Clud first became “Scottish”, then “British” despite having been ethnically and linguistically distinct.

This is why the USA is now wracked by the same sort of corruption, crime, and legal inequality that occurs in most non-WASP cultures. And this is why we can safely assume that as long as the population mix continues to move towards the polyglot, basic aspects of WASP culture that are assumed to be intrinsic to the geographical location will continue to disappear. In Europe, the nationalism is stronger and the minority populations are smaller, which is why ethnic cleansing of the sort advocated by Greece’s Golden Dawn is the likely outcome, but in the USA, where there is already three, and arguably four, distinct nations, a breakup of the political entity is more probable.

Some are expecting war as a consequence of the failure of the Euro and the coming dissolution of the European Union, but I think it is much more likely to take place in the United States when the people of Aztlan demand their right to self-determination and all the Wilsonian neocons are hoist upon their own petard.

On a related note, the Obama administration is taking the law into its own hands by bypassing Congress and granting amnesty and legal residence to around one million young illegal infiltrators, to use the Israeli term:

The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies. The policy change, described to The Associated Press by two senior administration officials, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation…. It tracks closely to a proposal offered by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as an alternative to the DREAM Act.

Euro 2012 Days 6 and 7

Portugal 3 Denmark 2

Portugal was the better team, and they proved it by going up 2-nil, but the Danes were mentally tough and battled back to tie it up at 2-all with Bendter’s second header after Christiano Ronaldo sent wide a perfect through ball that would have sealed the game. I think he actually had too much time; that’s often a problem for otherwise efficient scorers. I thought the Danes merited a draw, but a bit of untimely defensive carelessness combined with a powerful shot from Varela in the 87th minute cost them the point. Contra my assumptions prior to the tournament, it looks as if Portugal will finish second in the group instead of Holland.

Germany 2 Holland 1

Aside from Van Persie’s goal from outside the box after the game was largely sealed, the Dutch looked more like a second-tier team than a legitimate powerhouse. Before his goal, Van Persie was dreadful for a second straight game, falling over his own legs, the defender’s legs, and even the ball. Willem, the Dutch left back, was as inept as I’ve ever seen a defender at this level; at one point, when one commentator mentioned that he had been caught out of position, the other commentator replied that he hadn’t been in position all night. Mario Gomez, on the other hand, was brilliant, showing an amazingly deft touch for such a big man on the little spin-and-shoot on his first goal, then running right past the hapless Willem onto a perfect Bastian Schweinsteiger pass to score the eventual winner. Germany looked much better than they did against Portugal and at this point, it’s readily apparent that the two best teams are Germany and Spain, with Italy a distant third.

Italy 1 Croatia 1

A wasted game for the Azzurri. It began on a bad note, with Balotelli up front despite his uselessness in the first game and that was the case again here, as Italy got its only goal from a very precise Pirlo free kick. Italy dominated the game in the first half, but seemed content to sit back and defend in the second, which was a mistake because the defense was caught sitting very deep in the box and failed to jump on a cross to Mandzukic that he had time to trap and shoot from about five yards out. Croatia didn’t earn the draw so much as Italy didn’t merit the win. Italy is in trouble with only two points to Croatia’s four, but should still qualify, as I can’t see them failing to take the three points against Ireland or Spain failing to beat Croatia.

Spain 4 Ireland 0

This game was a classic example of the way that certain strikers are very dangerous against mediocre defenses while being ineffective against good ones. Fernando Torres scored twice and looked like he was playing against boys as he powered through the Irish defense, while watching the Irish midfield try to deal with the Spanish midfield was like watching headless chickens try to solve a Rubik’s Cube. Spain looked like the reigning European and world champions, and only the Germans look as if they’re capable of denying them a successful defense of their title.

Egyptian spring!

Fortunately, Facebook and other social media are far more powerful than mere militaries. Right?

Egypt’s highest court declared the parliament invalid Thursday, and the country’s interim military rulers promptly declared full legislative authority, triggering a new level of chaos and confusion in the country’s leadership. The Supreme Constitutional Court found that all articles making up the law that regulated parliamentary elections are invalid, said Showee Elsayed, a constitutional lawyer.

It’s not as if the USA is in a position to throw any stones here. The new Egyptian military government is no less illegitimate than Mr. Soetoro. Regardless of whether they decided it rightly or wrongly, at least Egypt’s Supreme Court is willing to consider the question of whether the elected officials are valid or not.

The Dread Ilk expand

Congratulations to JartStar, who has a new little girl. However, there were some complications in her birthing and she and her mother could use some prayers on their behalf.

Mailvox: the permissive will of a red-handed god

KH asks about the so-called “permissive will” that is part of the Calvinist concept of the divine:

I have followed your discussion of Calvinism with great interest. Some of these questions come up routinely in an on going group Bible study. Recently, one Calvinist used the term “permissive will” in reference to God allowing a natural disaster to kill people. (The term was new to me). He argued that God does not cause these tragedies but permits them or allows Satan to cause them. The problem I perceived with this argument is that one is still blaming God for the earthquake or tornado fatalities, whether it was His “permissive/passive” or active will. The term “permissive will” seemed like a euphemism to get around the belief of God controlling every storm and fault line without actually accusing Him of murder. I still feel like there was a missed opportunity for the use of logic to take out that argument. How would you have responded to the use of that term?

This is one of the concepts I lampoon in my occasional reference to the nine billion wills of God – actually, I think I previously referred to 17, but nine billion more appropriately reflects my view of the matter – and it refers to the distinctions that some Calvinists make between the “perfect”, the “permissive”, the “decreed”, the “directive”, the “perceptive”, and the “directed” wills of God. This isn’t quite as insane as it sounds, as there is a necessary and legitimate reason to distinguish between what God demands, what God decrees, what God anticipates, and what God wishes but does not expect, all of which can be reasonably described as what He wills.

However, KH is correct in smelling a rat. Those inclined to omniderigence will draw no such distinction; John Piper, for example, is straightforward about his belief in a literally murderous Jesus Christ who purposefully kills people with tornadoes. But this is a theologically incorrect use of “permissive will”, as that is what is used to explain Man’s ability to sin, not Man’s suffering natural disasters, which is generally considered to be a consequence of God’s “perfect will”.

This use of “permissive will” actually sounds rather more like my very non-Calvinist perspective, although I would never use such a term to describe what I observe to be Satan’s partial sovereignty over the world. It is always intriguing to compare the Calvinist claims of God’s sovereignty with the contradictory claims of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul concerning the being they describe as “the prince of this world” and “the god of this age”.

Inequality before the law

As with homogamy, one of the real purposes behind eliminating the statute of limitations for child abuse has nothing to do with the purported ones, as it is intended to specifically target and damage the Church.

While the first criminal trial of a Roman Catholic church official accused of covering up child sexual abuse has drawn national attention to Philadelphia, the church has been quietly engaged in equally consequential battles over abuse, not in courtrooms but in state legislatures around the country.

The fights concern proposals to loosen statutes of limitations, which impose deadlines on when victims can bring civil suits or prosecutors can press charges. These time limits, set state by state, have held down the number of criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits against all kinds of people accused of child abuse — not just clergy members, but also teachers, youth counselors and family members accused of incest.

Victims and their advocates in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York are pushing legislators to lengthen the limits or abolish them altogether, and to open temporary “windows” during which victims can file lawsuits no matter how long after the alleged abuse occurred….

In New York, the Catholic bishops said they would support a modest increase in the age of victims in criminal or civil cases, to 28. But their lobbying, along with that of ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders, has so far halted proposals that would allow a one-year window for civil suits for abuses from the past. The bishops say the provision unfairly targets the church because public schools, the site of much abuse, and municipalities have fought successfully to be exempted.

Now, I don’t have any problem with making it easier for genuine victims of child abuse to confront those who victimized them and receive reparations, but it is reprehensible to do so on the basis of the employer of the criminally culpable individual. This is a gross violation of the increasingly nonexistent concept of equality before the law; why should teachers and government employees be provided a free pass on molesting children?

It would appear this is because the state governments don’t want to be held financially responsible for the actions of their employees, and while they can often get away with excusing criminal behavior under the guise of it being committed in the exercise of the state employee’s duties, it’s not presently credible to claim that anyone’s occupational duties require the commission of sexual abuse. So, the Church is expected to pay for the misdeeds of its priests, but the state intends to exempt itself from paying for the misdeeds of its teachers and other employees.

The potential problem in this is that if the state governments are permitted to get away with this two-tiered law concerning past crimes, there is no reason they cannot extend it to cover present ones as well. After all, the logic is identical, as exempting teachers and state employees from responsibility for the sexual abuse of children would also reduce the financial liability of the state and local governments.

Euro 2012 Day 5

Czech Republic 2 Greece 1

No interest, didn’t watch it. Apparently the Czechs scored twice in the first six minutes, then hung on for the next 84 minutes.

Russia 1 Poland 1

The Russians were clearly the much better team, but the Poles were playing as hard as I’ve ever seen a team play. They took a pretty good punch in the mouth when the Russians scored on a free kick against the run of play and were back on their heels for the remainder of the half, but they somehow made it to halftime without conceding another goal. After the half, they came out fired up again, and after they got their equalizer on an excellent goal from their captain, they kept the Russians mostly under control. It may have been a tie, but it felt like a major victory for Poland and the Polish crowd celebrated it like one.