Vox Popoli

How long will it be before the first call for a UN Navy begin?

Somali pirates struck again yesterday, seizing an Iranian cargo ship holding 30,000 tonnes of grain, as the world’s governments and navies pronounced themselves powerless against this new threat to global trade. Admiral Michael Mullen, the US military chief, pronounced himself stunned by the pirates’ reach after their capture of the supertanker Sirius Star and its $100 million (£70 million) cargo. Commanders from the US Fifth Fleet and from Nato warships in the area said that they would not intervene to retake the vessel. The Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, the owner of the ship, condemned the hijacking as an “outrageous act” that required international action.

Note that this is almost surely a false crisis. Numerous national navies have the capacity to deal quickly and easily with a single captured supertanker, however, under so-called “international law”, I don’t think they have the right to attack a vessel flying a foreign flag. The Saudis have only to offer payment to the French, the British, the Americans, or the Chinese, and the matter could be quickly resolved. One wonders, then, why they are not doing so, and are instead calling for the ever-nebulous “international action”.

In which Kay Hymowitz decides that Camille Paglia was correct all along:

Jillian Straus, author of Unhooked Generation, discovered that a lot of women had “personal scripts”—explicit ideas about how a guy should act, such as walking his date home or helping her on with her coat. Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hapless social worker supposed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female colleague for reaching for the office door the previous week.

It should surprise no one that the combination of mixed messages and self-destructive incentive structures created by women is having a pernicious effect on the mating rituals of Western culture. I don’t think it has occurred to many young women that the not uncommon act of saying one thing and doing another not only has the potential to turn would-be Nice Guys into Sexual Predators as is described in the linked article, it not infrequently has the effect of teaching young men to ignore absolutely everything that comes out of a woman’s mouth.

What, after all, is the average guy to conclude when, after listening to a female acquaintance’s oft-heard lamentation that “all she wants is someone who is nice and will treat her well”, she promptly lifts her skirt for the first drunk, unemployed bad boy she runs across within hours of their first meeting. Not only is her behavior creating a negative disincentive for courtly pursuit and a positive incentive for ruthless predation, it’s also teaching him that there is no reason to place any value on her words.

This sort of thing isn’t likely to make an significant effect the first or second time, unless it’s the behavior of a girl to whom the guy is especially attracted, but after seeing the same scenario play out a few dozen times, why would any woman expect men to pay attention to her words? Even worse, once a man concludes that female words addressed to him are meaningless, he loses any justification to tell her the truth in return.

I have to admit, even as a hard-core gamer, I’m somewhat dismayed by the stunning lack of interest many young male gamers show in the opposite sex. Historical statistics indicate that most of them will eventually come around and successfully propagate the species, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that in the next ten years, more and more intelligent young men will turn away from conventional dating patterns in favor of prostitute services, pornography, and female-substitute devices. I suspect that two of the great technology investment opportunities of the future will be pseudo-relationship software services for women and robo-girl technologies for men.

In fact, the incipient economic catastrophe may well be the one thing that saves Western culture; a society focused on survival is one too busy for the modern cycle of sexual bitterness. The great power of woman has always been her ability to influence the behavior of man, and while the descent of the modern young man may not have been caused by the decisions of the modern young women, it is certainly exacerbated and encouraged by them.

UPDATE – Roissy aptly sums up the crucial issue:

A simple question many men ask themselves: If I play by the rules and make room for human cultivation, and the asshole down the street is getting laid like gangbusters, then what’s in it for me?

If Hymowitz answers “An ennobling of your spirit and dignity as a man”, she will lose the argument. As well she should.

Rachel Lucas explains it in her “Scenes from Chem Lab”:

[I]t was a thick solution. It drip-drip-dripped very slowly through the funnel. So guess what my genius lab partner and a few other brain surgeons in the class decided would be a good way to speed it up?

Why, move the funnel apparatus as high up on the clamp stand as possible, as far away from the beaker as possible! Because somehow, in some alternate universe with vastly different laws of physics than we know here on Earth, that would make the solution move through the funnel more quickly.

I am not making this up.

When Lab Partner started doing this, all spastically as is his way, I told him that all he was accomplishing was making the drips splash harder into the beaker and even out of the beaker entirely. Pretty much, he was just making a mess. He was steadfast, and kept telling me to just watch. “It goes faster!”

I asked him if the solution in the funnel knew where the beaker was and he stared at me like I was being obtuse. I asked again, how could the distance between the two possibly have any effect whatsoever on how fast the solution came out of the funnel because after all, it doesn’t know how far it has to fall, and it doesn’t care. He shushed me and told me to watch.

Pressing on, I asked him if there is some sort of magical force field between the funnel and the beaker, and if he was positing that the beaker was sending a message to the liquid in the funnel, hey I’m far away, you better get through that funnel quickly! I wondered out loud if he knew some special law of physics I’d never heard of. He shook his head and kept repeating, “just watch, just watch.”

It was painful. And the thing is, it wasn’t even only him. Several other groups at our counter were doing the same thing. I was struck speechless and had no choice but to stand there and search for an argument in my brain that did not involve calling anyone “retarded.”

It only went on for about a minute because as soon as TA saw what all these Mensa members were doing, with their funnels high in the air, making the drips splash all over the place, he came over to us and asked why, and some of them actually attempted to present their finely-honed Einsteinian theories about how much more quickly the process would go this way. TA and I and the rest of the class that weren’t acting like crackheads all stared blankly at them for a full 10 seconds. One girl across the room loudly said something like, “I hope none of y’all are science majors.”

Sadly, most of them are.

It’s not just special biology physics. They also believe very, very hard in evolution as well. And if you don’t, well, then you’re clearly just not intelligent and educated like them.

Thankfully, that is entirely true.

Can you even imagine how foreign leaders are going to enjoy the Lizard Queen?

Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

On a tangential note, it is utterly unsurprising to learn that McCain is willing to team up with Obama in order to “help to guide through Congress legislation that they both strongly favour.”

“Free Speech for me, but not for thee” is the mantra of the modern “liberal”. How, one wonders, can anyone seriously attempt to claim to simultaneously champion free speech and yet clamor for the abolition of “hate speech”?

My sister Ellen started a Facebook group called Impeach Barack Obama, which has gotten a lot of media attention. Someone else started a Facebook group called “We Should Do Something to Ellen Finnigan,” which now has 175 members. It says “we should still have a 0 tolerance for people who talk bad or talk down on our president.” The founder has changed the description to be more mellow, but the implication is clear. This is liberal fascism at its worst. I think it deserves maximum attention, as it shows the ugly side of Obama crazies. “We want change, and if you don’t go along with it, better watch out!”

If you think the Obamanations are crazy now, just wait until he begins the ritual back-stabbing as soon as he’s in office! He’s already signaled this quite clearly with his initial appointments. I won’t be surprised if more than a few of those who are now heaping odium on Ellen find themselves joining her Facebook group by the end of his first term.

Personally, I’m quite looking forward to the cognitive dissonance; Obama promises to be even more entertaining than Bush the Younger. But then, I am a Cruelty Artist.

Thanks largely to Beezle, today’s column takes a look at Paul Krugman’s advice to president-elect Obama. In light of his analysis, it’s interesting to note that the states appear to be on the verge of widescale spending reductions combined with tax increases:

Rising unemployment and sharp drops in tax revenue are forcing states to face service cuts, hiring freezes, tax increases, or all of these.

Second verse, same as the first. Yes, the article notes that the states are “trying” to avoid raising taxes, but I wouldn’t be too optimistic about them being successful in doing so.

While there’s been a fair amount of chatter about the possibility of the current contraction turning into a full-blown depression comparable to the Great Depression for some time now, I haven’t seen too many explications of what that would mean in statistical terms. And while I’m extremely skeptical of the statistical approach to economics given the incredible number of assumptions and estimates involved, it’s an interesting exercise.

From the high point of the economy in 1929, it took four years for the economy to contract 45.6 percent. That was an average of roughly 11 percent per year, although it was the second and third year that bore the brunt of the contraction. The economy began growing again at a 17 percent rate (!) in 1934, but it still took 12 years to get back to the 1929 peak.

If 2008 marks the beginning of a comparable depression – and if there’s going to be a depression, the size of the boom would appear to indicate that it’s going to be a comparable one at a minimum – that would mean that the US economy is due to contract from 13.7 trillion in 2007 to 7.5 trillion in 2012. GDP per capita would decline from $45,850 to around $24,064 if population growth continues at the present rate.

This would reduce the average US living standard to one that is similar to current Israel, Greece, and Portugal. That’s obviously not a good thing, but it’s hardly the Dust Bowl of yore. The problem, of course, is if the wealth calculations are no more accurate than derivative risk management, it could be worse.

At present, real GDP is forecast to contract only 0.3 percent in Q3 2008. So, obviously the contraction appears to be off to a slow start. The panic demonstrated by world leaders, however, tends to cause one to suspect that either the statistics are unreliable or they’ll start looking much worse in the near future. In any event, it’s probably not a bad idea to plan out what you would need to do in order to live on one-half your present income.

If you haven’t tried OpenOffice 3.0 yet, I really encourage you to join the millions using it:

Confirming recent comments by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer, an independent study released Friday found OpenOffice.org’s free office suite to be five times more popular among adult U.S. internet users than Google Docs.

Microsoft Office remains dominant, with 51% of American internet users over age 18 using it, according to a 6-month study conducted by market researcher ClickStream Technologies. OpenOffice.org was used by 5% of people, versus Google Docs’ 1%, according to the survey of 2,400 users on their home PCs conducted between May and November of this year.

I’ve written my last three books on OpenOffice. It’s gotten so good and so reliable that I haven’t even bothered to install a backup copy of Word on my last two computers. I have but one regret: no one has written a macro for Impress that allows random slide shows as did the one I used in Powerpoint.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that some people get upset when I point out that incoming migration necessarily causes a fundamental change in society, but no one gets their panties in a bunch when those on the left notice precisely the same thing:

Look closely at the Florida exit polls for 2008 vs 2004. you see why the gop is in deep trouble. you won white people by exactly the same margins as you beat kerry, but got killed by latinos…. It’s like you’re playing with a deck with only white cards in it—harder and harder to find an Ace of Ivory when the the other side keeps adding black, brown, and yellow cards to its hand.

Note that this is cited as a reason that the Republican Party must move leftmodernize or face continued electoral decline. So, how is this substantively different from my observations? It also seems to escape these keen observers that there is an obvious alternative to simply accepting left-wing multicultural rule for the foreseeable future.

And given that socionomics predicts increased ethnic conflict during economic contractions, it’s probably too soon to assume that there will be no migrational ebb tide.