Vox Popoli

I have to admit that I’m impressed at how people are hanging a tougher this time despite the apparent increased level of difficulty when compared with the scores of the first Voxiversity. 250 people took the second quiz, a dropoff of only thirty percent from the original 357 opposed to the 50 percent decline last time. However, we’re starting to get into the particulars now so I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes somewhat more difficult for those who have been skimming over the material or are coasting on their previous knowledge of Austrian theory.

UPDATE – Chapter III “Some Alternative Explanations for Depression: A Critique” for next Saturday.

I figured you could help a “former” pussy liberal who finally woke up… So I’d like to buy my first gun before the Peter (SHTF) hits the fan. I have no interest in blowing someone’s head off with a .40 magnum. I’m thinking a 9mm since that is standard issue around the world and the bullets would be cheap for practice.

Anything you’d recommend? I’m leaning towards a sub-compact because I like the element of surprise. I’m looking at this…

I will be frowned upon by people around me if I at least don’t make sure it has a safety. Otherwise I would just go with a sub-compact Glock.

I figured this might be of some small interest to the regulars here, plus that bit about the big caliber was just too good not to share. But give him credit for being willing to take responsibility for himself and be sure to explain the reasoning behind your recommendation.

If you want to win, don’t listen to the guys who told you how to lose:

For years, New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing mash notes to John McCain. In November 2007, he quoted an allegedly “smart-alecky” political consultant who exclaimed, in private, “You know, there’s really only one great man running for president this year, and that’s McCain.”

“My friend’s remark,” Brooks somberly intoned, “had the added weight of truth.”

Brooks gushed, “I can tell you there is nobody in politics remotely like him,” and even threw down the gauntlet, saying: “You will never persuade me that he is not among the finest of men.”

That took guts at the Times, where McCain is constantly praised by the op-ed columnists and was endorsed by the paper in the Republican primary. Even Frank Rich has hailed McCain as the “most experienced and principled” of the Republicans and said no one in either party “has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator” — the biggest rave issued by Rich since “Rent” opened on Broadway.

They adored McCain at the Times! Does anyone here not see a cluster of bright red flags?

In January this year, Brooks boasted of McCain’s ability to attract “independents.”

And then Election Day arrived, and all the liberals who had spent years praising McCain all voted for Obama. Independents voted for Palin or voted against Obama. No one outside of McCain’s immediate family was specifically voting for McCain.

But now Brooks presumes to lecture Republicans about what to do next time. How about: “Don’t take David Brooks’ advice”?

I will never, ever, understand those who think that listening to the other side’s advice makes any sense at all. I mean, it’s not as if Bill Belichick would take it seriously if Mangini told him that the Patriots would stand a better chance of wining next time if instead of throwing the ball to Randy Moss, they have Matt Cassell run the ball up the middle.

Every student of history recognizes that there is always an ebb-and-flux pattern to events. While the Muslim conquest of Spain took less than ten years; the Reconquista required nearly 800, during which time the Christian advance sped up and slowed down, mostly depending upon the characters and abilities of the leaders on the opposing sides.

Unfortunately, modern political observers tend to take an extremely short-term view of things. They are uninterested in what happened last week, let alone last month, and so are incapable of even the most basic observations such as the direct connection between the events in Kosovo and subsequent events in Georgia. But it’s not only the observers who forget, many times the actors fail to take into consideration the probable medium- and long-term consequences of their own actions.

If you keep one thing in mind when considering political events, remember this: the King always dies.

Good kings are succeeded by bad kings. Foreign policy presidents are followed by domestic presidents, and vice-versa. A Marcus Aurelius gives way to a Commodus just as a Caligula is succeeded by a Claudius. We don’t know Obama’s character yet, but there’s no question that the aggressive Bush/Clinton/Bush foreign policies have created a degree of reactionary antipathy among countries that were never well-disposed towards the United States in the first place. So, it should come as no surprise that there are increasing rumbles heard from Russia and China lately:

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev gave his long-awaited first State of the State address (the equivalent of the U.S. president’s State of the Union address) on Nov. 5. The speech was much more than a nationalist appeal liberally sprinkled with Soviet-era rhetoric; it was a declaration of Russia’s return to the ranks of the world’s great powers. In effect, Medvedev not only tossed the gauntlet for Russia’s rivals in the West, but he also is not waiting around to see how they respond….

It was Surkov who recommended that Medvedev’s speech, originally scheduled for Oct. 23, be postponed. Ostensibly, the delay was meant to allow Russia more time to deal with its deepening financial crisis, but in reality, Surkov wanted to know which presidential candidate the Americans were going to elect. The speech was already written. In fact, according to Stratfor sources, two speeches had been written — one for each possible outcome of the U.S. election. In waiting for a clear picture on whom Moscow would be dealing with in Washington, Russia underscored the central role the United States plays in the international system, and that Moscow views Washington as its main counterweight.

Unlike many previous State of the State addresses, Medvedev’s Nov. 5 speech contained few veiled threats or simple proclamations. Instead, it announced hard actions….

And so the ghost of the previous Democratic presidency returns to haunt the president-elect, exacerbated by eight years of short-sighted Bush imperialism. Fortunately, the powerful and healthy US economy, the beneficiary of eight years of wise Republican economic stewardship and the post-Cold War Peace Dividend, will give President Obama an epic advantage in dealing with all foreign foes.

As most of us with functioning brains assumed, the story about Palin not knowing that Africa is a continent wasappears to be false. Actually, it appears to have been part of a larger media hoax:

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist.

How totally unsurprising. And note that the hoaxers correctly assumed that the news media wouldn’t think to question such a revelation about a Republican.

You know, perhaps the Republican Party should have paid closer attention to John Hawkins’s Right Wing News poll last year. One can’t help but notice that John McCain been in the top 3 of the least popular national figures on the Right with the right-wing blogosphere since the poll first began in 2005:

10) Arnold Schwarzenegger (12)
7) Mike Huckabee, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul (13)
6) Chuck Hagel (14)
5) Arlen Specter (15)
4) Colin Powell (17)
3) Peggy Noonan (18)
2) Ted Stevens (19)
1) John McCain (25)

I couldn’t help but notice one rather significant name missing from the 25 on the list. Not only that, but Peggy Noonan makes a surprise appearance as the third most-unpopular; she wasn’t even on last year’s list. Don’t you suspect that perhaps this just might have something to do with the extreme popularity of the individual that Noonan rather publicly dissed on several occasions? I think the poll is a very strong indication that despite the best efforts of the McCain staffers and the Republican squish“reform” faction, Gov. Palin will remain far more popular and influential with the conservative base than will her detractors in the media.

UPDATE – John Hawkins his own bad self emails with additional information: Not only did Palin not make the list, she didn’t receive a single vote.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner of the John Jay College reviews The Irrational Atheist for New Oxford Review:

What makes Day’s book entertaining is his exuberant language — the rhetorical fireworks with which he takes on the new atheists. High spirits and clever phrasing provoke continual chuckles, as for example when he remarks that not since the craze for Marx and Freud “has there been so much enthusiasm about the non-existence of God,” and that this new evangelism is directed at “atheists whose lack of faith is weak.” He employs mock praise, too, as in, “Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God, both at the age of nine.” Yet the humor doesn’t get in the way of subtle analysis, for he lays bare Dawkins’s “incessant shell games,” Harris’s “exercises in self-parody,” and Hitchens’s “epic feat of intellectual self-evisceration.”…

Although Day is an evangelical, he is remarkably sympathetic to Catholics, who are usually the chief targets of atheists. Day scoffs at the way Dawkins, in the space of a couple of pages, dismisses the 3,000-page Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas: He says that Dawkins waved “a dead chicken over the keyboard” and tried to make readers believe he had “seriously considered” the Sum­ma and found it “wanting.”

I have to confess that the latter bit was, in my considered opinion, probably the most intellectually disgusting thing about The God Delusion, as well as the most revealing of Richard Dawkins’s fundamentally anti-intellectual character. It certainly demonstrated what a tawdry little charlatan Dawkins is. As Summa Elvetica should suffice to indicate, I have a much stronger understanding of Aquinan logic than does Dawkins so I am by no means unaware of its intrinsic structural flaw or a number of the more questionable leaps of logic made by the saint. Summa Elvetica may be a parody of the Summa Theologica on several levels, but it is a very respectful, even affectionate, parody because Thomas Aquinas’s masterpiece is a remarkable intellectual achievement that demands the regard of any thinking man; Dawkins should be deeply embarrassed about his shameless attempt to dismiss one of Man’s great philosophical works without the courage to offer any substantive criticism of his own.

There are errors in every great philosophical classic. I have myself pointed out several of them in the dialogues of Socrates; imagine what TIA readers would have thought if I had similarly dismissed Euthyphro as “wanting” without bothering to point out any of the specific flaws in the argument. Richard Dawkins’s criticism of Thomas Aquinas is no more serious or legitimate than The Princess Bride’s take on Plato, Aristotle and Socrates.

I had to laugh when I reached the end of the review, as it appears the Divine String-puller has arranged things in such a manner as to warm the Responsible Puppet’s heart:

One caveat: At the end, Day touches briefly on theology and tries to solve the mystery of suffering by limiting God’s omnipotence and omniscience. This amounts to reducing a great mystery to a problem.

I tend to think that limiting omniscience to voliscience is not only Biblically correct but also resolves a number of logical objections, so I’m quite curious to know what sort of new problem it might introduce. But I have no objection whatsoever to this sort of criticism, and am quite pleased to learn that Dr. Gardiner found the book to be worth her while.

Wrath of the Lich King is live. This is good. Lord British has announced his departure from NCSoft in terms that suggest he is essentially retiring from game development. This is devastating. I’ve been acquainted with him for years and when we spoke last summer, I was impressed to see how he was one of the few designers in the MMO space who was really trying to break out of the hardware cycle and expand the nature of the fundamental gameplay instead. Tabula Rasa was a failure for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here, but I suspect will prove to be a more influential game in terms of design concepts than much more successful MMOs like Warhammer.

Instead of beginning the long march to level 80 tonight, I think I shall go old school instead and fire up Akalabeth on the Apple II emulator.

The demographic countdown:

There is no question that Obama owes a debt to the Kennedys – but it may be far greater than he or they realize. Yes, Senator Edward M. Kennedy offered a crucial early endorsement, comparing the Obama of 2008 to the Jack Kennedy of 1960. And certainly Caroline and others in the Kennedy family worked hard on the campaign trail. But the greatest Kennedy legacy to Obama isn’t Ted or Caroline or Bobby Jr., but rather the Immigration Act of 1965, which created the diverse country that is already being called Obama’s America.

That act is rarely mentioned when recounting the high points of 1960s liberalism, but its impact arguably rivals the Voting Rights Act, the creation of Medicare, or other legislative landmarks of the era. It transformed a nation 85 percent white in 1965 into one that’s one-third minority today, and on track for a nonwhite majority by 2042.

Before the act, immigration visas were apportioned based on the demographic breakdown that existed at the time of the 1920 Census – meaning that there were few if any limits on immigrants from Western and Northern Europe, but strict quotas on those from elsewhere.

I understand that many, if not most, Americans believe that people are simply people, all scientific knowledge and even evolutionary biology notwithstanding. But, it’s amazing that so many of them are perfectly willing to gamble not only their country, but their children’s future, on this assumption without even a shred of scientific support except for an obvious intra-species ability to breed.

So, here’s the obvious question. What if this assumption is, in fact, wrong? What if it is determined that there are, in fact, qualitative differences between different human populations? And wouldn’t it have been a good idea to see a non-European culture demonstrate a proven capacity for Western civilization and Western societal norms before permitting the unlimited migration of its members? It’s true that Japan has demonstrated a genuine capacity for Western civilization, but then, Japan is not Somalia, Mexico, or Pakistan and the migration into America is not primarily made up of Japanese.

And if Somalis, Mexicans, and Pakistanis can’t manage Western civilization in their own countries, what is the basis for the belief that they can do so in Western countries? This is a particularly important question given the known consequences of historical migrations in addition to the empirical evidence of modern Londonistan, the Parisian banlieus, and Washington DC.

Democrats are not yet a permanent majority, but they appear to be only two generations away from becoming one prior to splitting into a new bifactional ruling party. In this sense, the Republican squish faction is correct to push for a Republican makeover in the Democrat Lite mode; if current trends prevail, there will be two major parties in the USA, the Democratic Socialists and the Social Democrats. One thing that immigration observers often miss is that two of the three major Mexican parties – the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Party of the Democratic Revolution – are to the left of the Democratic party, being members of the Socialist International.

If they had any economic sense at all, the American and European central banks would have been raising rates sooner rather than later:

Russia lifts rates to 12pc to save rouble as crisis deepens

Russia’s central bank has raised interest rates a full percentage point to 12pc to prevent a collapse of the rouble following a day of mayhem on the Moscow markets, prompting concerns that the financial crisis may be spiralling out of control. The surprise move last night came after the authorities had spent $7bn of foreign reserves in a matter of hours trying to defend the currency, at a lower level. The central bank has now spent $84bn of its reserves over the last month…. Expecting trouble, the Kremlin has mobilised the police to crush dissent.

It seems there are two models for the American future, the Russian one and the Japanese one. Neither looks particularly appealing, but they’re both to be preferred to the Weimar Republic’s hyperinflation.