Run away, Rush, run away

I find Rush Limbaugh’s retreat on Slutgate to be more than a little amusing:

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh apologized Saturday to a Georgetown University law student he had branded a “slut” and “prostitute” after fellow Republicans as well as Democrats criticized him and several advertisers left his program.

The student, Sandra Fluke, had testified to congressional Democrats in support of their national health care policy that would compel her college to offer health plans that cover her birth control.

“My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir,” Limbaugh said on his website. “I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choice.

Now, I don’t know if Ms. Fluke is a slut or not. I do know her position on government funded birth control is idiotic and that she’s not intelligent enough to understand basic supply and demand or she wouldn’t be pursuing a law degree at the age of 30. So, she may well be a slut, but she is not necessarily one. I tend to think it’s a little strange to apologize to someone for something that is possibly, though not necessarily, true without first attempting to determine if one is actually incorrect or not.

But Limbaugh’s apology demonstrates the fundamental cowardice of the conservative media. They are spooked as easily as neurotic thoroughbred horses. He’s the one with the massive audience, so why should he pay any attention to what his advertisers want? By allowing them to dictate his limits, he’s making himself their bitch. That’s fine, if that’s his desire, but then he would do well to abandon all of the heroic posturing of which he is so fond.

As with the Republicans, Limbaugh operates by one core principle: Always Retreat. And that is why conservatism has failed and one reason why American democracy is a thing of the past.

WND column

The Limits of Democracy

Two of the most informative political tracts one can ever expect to read share very similar names. I mention this simply because in these degreed, but uneducated days, if one happens to refer to Cicero’s “Republic,” one can reliably count on being “corrected” by someone insisting that it was not Cicero, but Plato who wrote it. But for all their similar appellations, there are distinct differences between “De re publica” and “Res publica” that are less the result of the distinction between practical Roman thought and philosophical Greek philosophy and more the difference between the experience of an accomplished politician and the utopianism of an academic without responsibility.

Mailvox: convinced by the consequences

No doubt many readers will be amused by the eventual outcome of YM’s experience in attempting to discuss a basic political principle with his mother:

My father arrived home from a business trip last night. Upon hearing what happened, he ungrounded me, and suggested to my mother that punishing a child for thought crime would only drive him further into misogyny. Then he took me aside and said “While you may be right about Santa Claus being not being real, you have to accept that a 6-year old will throw a tantrum at you when you tell him that.”

The funny thing is, I never actually told her women shouldn’t vote, only that it was an interesting idea, yet she still reacted like a child. Given my mother’s irrational response, I am now firmly on your side. I had seen this sort of behavior before, but mostly from younger, feminist women. I never thought in a million years that my evangelical, allegedly traditionalist mother would act the same way. You are right about learning a valuable lesson on women.

Ironic, and yet hardly surprising. YM is not only fortunate in having a strong male father in his life, but he is aware of it. Notice too that he didn’t react with outrage to his unfair and absurd grounding, but simply waited calmly for his father to rectify the situation. This is the way things are supposed to be.

As I have pointed out many times before, those who are capable of intellectually defending their position will do so calmly. Those who can’t always try to shut down the conversation one way or another. While the pro-suffrage side did have some effective hypothetical arguments in the early part of the 20th century, the subsequent 90 years of negative consequences have sufficed to destroy them utterly.

It’s interesting to note how female solipsism can trump a mother’s instinct to defend her son, which nevertheless is capable of detaching a woman from Team Woman at times.

Mailvox: try again, George

Unsurprisingly, yet another atheist demonstrates that he doesn’t know what “evidence” is.

“You have repeatedly asserted that voting is equivalent to liberty, now please either offer your evidence in support of the assertion or retract the claim.”

If there is no connection between liberty and voting, then how could women voting have negatively effected the amount of liberty in the country.

Furthermore it has been demonstrated throughout history that only way to undermine authoritarianism, to assure that the people and not the very few, define liberties is to assure that government is the result of the consent of the governed. The only way to assure all are able to consent is through democracy of one form or another.

You fail to understand the dynamics of basic political science. I believe your misogyny gets in the way in this case.

My purported misogyny and/or failure to understand the dynamics of basic political science are wholly irrelevant here. And even if we ignore its obvious flaws, it is imposible to deny that the logic presented by George here is not evidence.

So, I repeat the demand: You have repeatedly asserted that voting is equivalent to liberty, now please either offer your evidence in support of the assertion or retract the claim.”

Mailvox: seriously, don’t do this

Ken makes what I regard to be an inexcusable blunder:

I haven’t looked as closely at the numbers as you have but if you subtract the female vote entirely, is it possible that the Nazis simply would have come to power earlier because prior to ’32 the women were voting for parties other than the NASDAP?

Nothing against Ken, but I really dislike this sort of thing. Trying to come up with alternative explanations when you haven’t even bothered to look at the data is the hallmark of the idealogue, the anti-intellectual. It is neither discourse nor analysis, it is almost always mere excuse-making.

In this case, the answer is simple. No, because a) they weren’t even close and b) the dominant SPD was heavily supported by men. In 1928, the NSDAP was only the ninth-largest party in the Reichstag with 2.6% of the vote. Although they improved significantly in 1930, coming in second with 18.3% of the vote, they were still too far behind the dominant SPD with 24.5%, moreover, if Ken had paid more attention to what was already mentioned he would have realized that the SPD would have benefited even more than the NSDAP from the absence of the female vote, which tended to go to the Catholic parties prior to 1932.

In 1931, the NSDAP launched its campaign to win over female voters. A year later, in the first 1932 election, it won 37.3% of the vote to the second-place SPD’s 21.6%.

There is certainly nothing wrong with coming up with an unusual or alternative hypotheses, but one should always check them against the readily available data before offering suggestions, especially when one is proposing them in contradiction to another’s informed conclusions.

Al Qaeda and Afghanistan

This is what happens when you don’t go home when the game is over:

ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Carney when was “the last time US troops in Afghanistan killed anybody associated with Al Qaeda.” Carney didn’t have an answer, and referred Tapper to the Defense Department and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force.

I queried those agencies Tuesday and got an answer today. According to a Defense Department spokesman, the most recent operation that killed an Al Qaeda fighter was in April 2011—ten months ago. However, there was an “Al Qaeda foreign fighter” captured near Kabul in May 2011, and an “Al Qaeda facilitator” captured in the Paktiya province on January 30 of this year.

By comparison, there have been 466 coalition fatalities since April 2011.

This can be spun one of two ways. But regardless, either the Coalition of the Willing – love those bizarre Bush administration names – has won the war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and should bring its troops home or it is losing by a 466-1 ratio and should promptly retreat before it ends up getting wiped out.

Dutch Einsatzgruppen

Humanity continues to progress towards Seculatopia:

A controversial system of mobile euthanasia units that will travel around the country to respond to the wishes of sick people who wish to end their lives has been launched in the Netherlands. The scheme, which started on Thursday , will send teams of specially trained doctors and nurses to the homes of people whose own doctors have refused to carry out patients’ requests to end their lives. The launch of the so-called Levenseinde, or “Life End”, house-call units – whose services are being offered to Dutch citizens free of charge – coincides with the opening of a clinic of the same name in The Hague, which will take patients with incurable illnesses as well as others who do not want to die at home.”

“In 30 years Holland has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia of people who are terminally ill to euthanasia of those who are chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for mental illness, from euthanasia for mental illness to euthanasia for psychological distress or mental suffering, and from voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia or as the Dutch prefer to call it “termination of the patient without explicit request”.”

In related news, German officials recently announced that they are considering the establishment of a federal Bundeslebensende which would provide involuntary euthanasia services to individuals of Jewish descent regardless of age. The amusing thing is that the Dutch actually profess to be upset by the fact that Rick Santorum is drawing American attention to their murderous practices. Santorum appears to have exaggerated, but is otherwise correct; the figures I have read show that involuntary euthanasia accounts does not account for one-half of all euthanasia cases, but only one-quarter.

A lesson in alternative logic

Let’s play He or She.

What’s that?

Say it’s a he or a she.

What’s a he or she?

An animal.

Um, okay. He.

Is it white?

No.

Is it blue?

No.

Is it red?

No.

Is it golden?

Yes.

Is it money?

No. Doesn’t it have to be an animal?

Oh yeah…. Is it a clown?

No! It’s an animal, remember? A he.

Is it a hippo? Is it pink?

No, it’s not a hippo. He’s golden, golden brown.

Is it a princess?

Tracking the trackers

This Firefox add-on is a good idea, particularly if you don’t make use of NoScript or keep your cookies turned off.

Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has unveiled a new add-on for the popular web browser that gives web users an instant view of which companies are ‘watching’ them as they browse.

The move comes the same week that Google pushed ahead with its controversial new privacy policy, built to provide even more data for Google’s $28 billion advertising business – despite concerns that the massive harvesting of private data might be illegal in many countries.

The Collusion add-on will allow users to ‘pull back the curtain’ on web advertising firms and other third parties that track people’s online movements, says Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs.

Google’s new anti-privacy policy is disappointing, as it really reduces the usefulness of Android. I don’t even turn on the data connection on my smartphone or use most of its features simply because I don’t want to share my entire life with Google.

It increasingly appears that the only way to deal with the data monsters is to flood them with crap. I’m thinking it might be useful to have an app or an add/on that will surf all the nastiest websites and all the most random shopping sites possible in the background and constantly stream that information to the data collectors. Sure, your real data will be there, but they’ll have to work a lot harder to make any useful sense of it.