Vox Popoli

Ecuador defaults on foreign debt:

Ecuador’s president announced in early December that his country would not be paying the interest on its foreign debt in 2009, repudiating it as “illegal.” The value of the bonds defaulted on amounts to 19% of GDP.

Given the magnitude of the problems being experienced by massive debtors, the threat of not being able to borrow more money in the future has never looked more toothless. Contractions are survivable, but not when you’re leveraged, which is why those whose revenue depends upon loan-making fight tooth and nail against permitting the business cycle to take its course.

CD asks about the recent military operations in Gaza:

Can you share with us your thoughts on the Israel attacks on Gaza? I’d be interested to hear your perspective. I already know Justin Raimondo’s

While I like and respect Justin Raimondo, appreciate his consistent criticism of America’s War Party, and understand his take on the current violence, I think it’s more important to look at the situation from a strategic and historical perspective than from a political perspective, particularly an American political perspective.

Raimondo is absolutely right to question the reasons behind Washington’s tacit support of the Israeli attacks; there is very good reason to be suspicious of many of the individuals who insist on attempting to subordinate American foreign policy to the Israeli national interest. But none of those political realities have anything to do with the fundamental problem underlying the Gaza operations because the core issue is a straightforward one that revolves around a very basic historical reality: The Palestinians refuse to recognize the very right of conquest by which they themselves previously held claim to the land.

In considering this, I note that it is irrelevant to debate the question of whether the descendants of Ashkenazi European Zionists hold the same historical claim to the land of Israel as Sephardic Jews, given that the way in which that historical claim is based on an identical right of conquest. From the historical perspective, the primary issue is the realization that the situation will remain violent until one of three things happens:

1) The Palestinians accept their conquest and are peacefully digested into a trans-tribal Israeli identity.
2) The Israelis are forced to withdraw to the United States and Europe.
3) The Palestinians are forced to withdraw to the neighboring Arab countries.

Given the decades-long failure of various parties to force option (1) through a wide variety of measures, to say nothing of the obvious futility of attempting to construct a modern representative democracy with an electorate that would include a large and understandably bitter tribal near-majority, it’s not a reasonable strategy. Option (2) is even less tenable given the military balance of power, leaving option (3) is the only possible solution regardless of one’s sympathies or distaste for forced population movements.

Understand that I’m not advocating this option, I’m merely pointing out the strategic realities of the situation. My actual position is total indifference to the Gaza invasion, which those who read this blog have probably gleaned already based on my failure to so much as mention it prior to this post. If the Palestinians don’t want to have their territory, which is held only by the permission of the Israeli authorities, strafed by IDF rockets and overrun by IDF tanks, then they should refrain from annoying their conquerers by firing mortars at them.

Anyhow, Israelis have the same right to Gaza as various Palestinians have to London, Stockholm, Brussels, Toulouse, and Copenhagen. Because the Western authorities so foolishly ignored the sage warnings of men such as Samuel Huntington, the forced exodus of peoples everywhere from America to Europe and the Middle East is all but inevitable now.

UPDATE – My thinking may be original, but it is by no means new. Consider John Derbyshire’s 2002 article on the issue:

What, actually, are the possible futures for the Palestinians? I think the following list is exhaustive.

1. An independent state, under Arafat or someone just as thuggish.
2. Military occupation by Israel.
3. Re-incorporation into a Jordanian-Palestinian nation.
4. Some sort of U.N. trusteeship.
5. Expulsion from the West Bank and Gaza, those territories then incorporated into Israel.

Number 1 is what we are all supposed to want. As I have already indicated, I don’t want it, and I can’t see why anyone else would, either. Except Palestinians, I suppose: If they yearn to be ruled by amoral hoodlums (as, according to polls, they apparently do), I suppose they have some theoretical right to see their wishes fulfilled — but why should the rest of us allow it to happen, given the dangers to us? Number 2 might work for a time, but the Israelis would eventually get fed up with it, and then we’d move on to one of the other options. Number 3 would get us back to the pseudo-stability of pre-1967, but is deeply unpopular with Jordanians — and look what happened in 1967! Number 4 undoubtedly has the UNRWA bureaucrats drooling, but as with number 1, it’s hard to see what’s in it for the rest of us. Aren’t we handing over enough of our money in welfare payments to our own people?

Which leaves us with number 5: expulsion. I am starting to think that this might be the best option

There would appear to be a high probability that in another seven years, there will be writers be making similarly keen observations of the obvious.

Number Three, the Deutsch:

German billionaire Adolf Merckle has committed suicide after his business empire, which included interests ranging from pharmaceuticals to cement, ran into trouble in the global financial crisis, his family said Tuesday.

The global economy is obviously not into a full force contraction yet, otherwise these suicide reports would be occuring on a daily basis rather than a biweekly one. Although it’s also possible that perceptions haven’t quite caught up with the grim reality.

Okay, not so much:

NHS records show that 3,645 people died as a result of “patient safety incidents” – including botched operations and the outbreak of infections – between April 2007 and March 2008. The figure was 1,370 higher than two years earlier. Patient groups have warned that the true toll is likely to be higher because some hospitals do not record all incidents.

It would also be interesting to see how the restricted supply inherent to socialized medicine affects patient mortality rates, assuming that those who are denied treatment are even factored into the figures. Remember, in the USA, HMOs were once considered to be the solution to the problem, now they are practically considered to be synonymous with it. It’s interesting to note how many self-proclaimed devotees of empiricism nevertheless support the empirical lunacy of socialized medicine.

This would tend to explain American voting patterns:

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

While city life has always held certain attractions for me, I’ve never had any serious desire to live in an urban center. I might have been an inveterate night club prowler in my late teens and early twenties, but I lived on an isolated private lake surrounded by a forest. Big Chilly and I briefly considered moving downtown when we started the Digital Ghetto, but instead we elected to set up shop in a quiet, wooded suburb. Which, of course, led to Micron’s famous quote: “Dude, we are the criminal element.” One thing I like about where we are now is that one can go for a nice quiet walk past the cows, the sheep, and the ubiquitous donkeys in the afternoon, then catch an opera or an intimate reading by a world-famous author in the evening.

(Not that we ever do, of course, since I’m far too busy slaughtering masses of Horde in Azeroth to have any time for culture. But we COULD, you see, that’s the important thing. It’s all about the perception.)

On a tangential note, I’ve noticed is that cities are seldom the ideal place to build stable, long-term relationships, especially not destination cities like New York City, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. It happens, of course, but people usually go there to have their big adventure, they don’t go there to settle down. So, if your long-term goal is to get married and have a family, about the very last thing you should do is apply for that exciting job in the great big city.

UPDATE – LP emails a comment:

Doing the big city life ruined my social life or my hope of becoming a married mom by 30. What was i thinking! Dumb ass 20 year old.

In time we learn what we knew not;
In youth one is an idiot.
Sagacity comes far too late
To be of use in youthful state.
And bitter indeed is the joke,
Time’s cruel, ironic, master stroke,
For when his ravage runs its course
We find we can afford the Porsche.

This is very good news. USA Today reports that homeschooling is not only growing, it is actually growing at an increasing rate:

The ranks of America’s home-schooled children have continued a steady climb over the past five years, and new research suggests broader reasons for the appeal.

The number of home-schooled kids hit 1.5 million in 2007, up 74% from when the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics started keeping track in 1999, and up 36% since 2003. The percentage of the school-age population that was home-schooled increased from 2.2% in 2003 to 2.9% in 2007. “There’s no reason to believe it would not keep going up,” says Gail Mulligan, a statistician at the center.

1999-2003: 9 percent/year
2003-2007: 9.5 percent/year

At the current rate of growth, there are now 1.64 million homeschoolers representing 3.2 percent of American schoolchildren. That’s nearly a third of the children who attend all of the private schools in the country combined. Since these families will represent the educated elite of the nation’s future, it’s also where libertarians should be focusing their political recruitment efforts.

The count finally comes out the way they wanted:

A state election board on Monday will announce Democrat Al Franken has defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race, state officials told CNN Sunday.
A board will say Al Franken won the U.S. Senate race by 225 votes, Minnesota’s secretary of state says. The canvassing board on Monday will say a recount determined Franken won by 225 votes, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie told CNN.

Norm Coleman’s defeat is no loss for Minnesotans or for conservatives, as the replacement with one liberal Jew born in New York with a more liberal Jew also born in New York is hardly going to make much of a difference; at least Franken grew up there and has some genuinely Minnesotan sensibilities. And, let’s face it, there’s even more prospective hilarity to be expected with Senator Franken than there was with Senator Wellstone and Governor Ventura combined.

Of course, his election should suffice to create some doubts among those who still seriously buy into the idea that voting is a sacred responsibility.

UPDATE – Every vote counts. And some votes count twice:

Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as “duplicate” and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote.

In which questions are asked about one of my critics’ favorite columns:

I’m a 24 year old young woman and a Christian. I happened to have stumbled across your article “The Morality of Rape” and from there I found your blog. Needless to say, you have some very interesting thoughts about rape, feminism, and other issues. I admit, they got me thinking.

I understand your opinion that “date-rape” doesn’t exist (rape is rape no matter what circumstance). The thing is, I think it’s just another example of our need to categorize things, case in point “acquaintance rape”. Also, I do believe that there are precautions that women and girls need to take to protect themselves, especially when going out to parties and clubs. But when you say the women can be partially blamed for their rape, in what situations are you talking about in general. Know the whole “getting drunk” or “walking alone at night in a secluded area when you didn’t have to” one, but what about a girl who was just hanging out with someone who she thought of as a friend? I know personally I hung out in a friend’s room who was male. We weren’t dating, no fooling around, and I trusted him. The only thing we did was lay on his bed for a bit and watched TV (fully clothed).

Furthermore, what about a girl on a date who made it clear that she doesn’t want sex whether during the date or before? The guy just simply over-powered her. I also remember a scenario from one of your posts in which a woman changed her mind during or when she was about to have sex. Do you think that a woman has no room to change her mind and that she should just go along with it?

First of all, I think it’s important for everyone, particularly women, to step back, take a deep breath, and turn on their brains before contemplating such an emotionally charged issue. Shrieking about the immorality and criminality of rape being universally axiomatic and declaring that every man accused by any woman of anything should be immediately hung, drawn, and fifthed is not only pointless, it combines near-complete irrationality with an embarrassing degree of historical ignorance.

Let me answer your questions, which as near as I can tell boil down to two, very briefly, then explain my thinking in more detail. 1. Caveat Emptor. Any woman who voluntarily places herself in a position where rape is possible bears precisely the same responsibility for any subsequent rape that the defrauded victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scam bear for the loss of their investment funds. Are they to blame for the fact that Madoff was a fraud? Absolutely not. Are they to blame for the fact that they trusted him? Of course, for who else made the decision to place their trust in him? Responsibility is not a zero-sum game. While one cannot blame a victim for being victimized, one can, indeed, one must, hold a victim responsible for any decisions that rendered that victimization possible. 2. In most circumstances, once given, consent is not easily revoked. This is a nebulous area, especially since explicit consent is seldom given in intimate matters. However, I would say that from a Judeo-Christian moral perspective the question of withdrawn consent is irrelevant, because if obtaining consent is an issue, in most cases the act is already determined to be immoral. (One could also raise the scriptural direction to let your yes be yes and your no be no.) From a legal perspective, the question should also be irrelevant given the probable absence of witnesses. And from the non-Christian moral perspective, well, that completely depends upon the particular morality and the individual conscience. Or lack thereof.

The first serious question, then, is whether we are talking about morality or legality. These are two completely different questions. As to the question of morality, there is no question that every form of rape, including the various forms of non-rape sometimes errantly described as “date rape” or “acquaintance rape”, are immoral under the Judeo-Christian ethic, with the possible exception of “marital rape”. (Forget the latter for now, however, since it can be dealt with as part of the legality question for reasons that will eventually become clear.)

Now, it’s important to understand that rape was not considered to be immoral under most historical non-Christian ethical systems. To the extent it was frowned upon, it was more akin to a property-related crime with compensation due to the offended property owner. Consider, for example, the pagan sacrament of burial among the Rus, as told by Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rašīd ibn Hammād, secretary to the ambassador from the Caliph of Baghdad to the Bulgars in 922:

“The tenth day, they brought the deceased out of the ground and put him inside the pavilion and put around him different kinds of flowers and fragrant plants. Many men and women gathered and played musical instruments, and each of his kinsman built a pavilion around his pavilion at some distance. The slave girl arrayed herself and went to the pavilions of the kinsmen of the dead man, and the master of each had sexual intercourse once with her, saying in a loud voice, ‘Tell your master that I have exercised the right of love and friendship.’ And so, as she went to all the pavilions to the last one, all the men had intercourse with her. When this was over, they cut a dog in two halves and put in into the boat, then, having cut the head off a rooster, they threw it, head and body, to the right and left of the ship…. Then the old woman sized her head and made her enter the pavilion and entered with her. Thereupon the men began to strike with sticks on the shields so that her cries would not be heard and the other slave girls would not be frightened and seek to escape death with their masters. Then six men went into the pavilion and each had intercourse with the girl. Then they laid her at the side of her master; two held her feet and two her hands; the old woman known as the Angel of Death re-entered and looped a cord around her neck and gave the crossed ends to the two men for them to pull. Then she approached her with a broad-bladed dagger, which she plunged between her ribs repeatedly, and the men strangled her with the cord until she was dead.”

It was only after the violent religious festivities had ended that the famous ship-burning took place. They usually seem to leave out the preceding parts in the movies and medieval fantasies, don’t they…. In defense of the Rus, it must be noted that the girl is a nominal volunteer. On the other hand, she is a slave who is guarded closely after her “volunteering”, she’s forcibly intoxicated, and steps are taken to prevent her screams from being heard prior to her murder. But whether she volunteers for her death or not, the casual way in which she is passed from one man to another makes it readily apparent that the Rus had no ethical problem with a failure to obtain consent prior to intimate relations. It’s a bit much to imagine one hard-bitten pagan warrior after another politely offering variants on this theme: “Oh, ah, I know you’re drunk off your skull and a mad old woman is going to strangle you in a moment, but I say, you don’t object if I have a go first, do you, my dear?”

The Rus were hardly alone in this either, as from a purely materialist perspective there is no logical reason to raise any moral objection to rape, because the specific location of various collections of atoms at any one point in time are simply not a moral matter. In order to construct any objection, it’s first necessary to elevate the discussion beyond the purely material or the scientific.

– more later –

The nice thing about yesterday’s wins by the Cardinals and the Chargers is that it should shut up TMQ and all the other lunatics who were crying about the fact that two 8-8 division champions made it to the playoffs. Arizona and San Diego are now 9-8 and have conclusively proved that they merited their place. The NFL isn’t broken, so people who claim to be fans should stop trying to fix it.

I’d rather go the other direction and get rid of the wild card teams altogether. If you want to win a championship, then you can start by winning your division.