Vox Popoli

A woman asks: “I was drunk, but was it my fault?

As I sat on the doorstep, sobbing, no one mentioned calling the police. Or they did, but only to say there was no point calling them as I was drunk. But by then I was stone-cold sober, and acutely aware that the consensus was that I had brought any misfortune on myself and was at least partly to blame. I must have led him on, flirted, asked for it. Even if I was comatose, as I claimed, by being drunk I had made myself de facto available – come on, I’d been lying on a bed, hadn’t I?

To focus on “fault” when it comes to attempted rape is to miss the point. There is no inherent contradiction in holding the rapist 100 percent guilty of a crime while still blaming the victim for knowingly placing herself in circumstances that rendered her victimization more likely. To do otherwise is to assume that women are children who possess no control over their own actions or circumstances.

Those who think that women cannot possibly be complicit in any way for their own victimization need to consider their opinion on other, less contentious matters. Would they agree, for example, that a homeowner is not to blame in any way for having his home burgled when he was on vacation should he leave the doors unlocked and windows open? If not, then at what point should the line of culpability be drawn?

If, on the other hand, you think it’s reasonable to require that people take some level of responsibility for themselves in recognition of the fact that some individuals refuse to respect the sanctity of life, liberty, and property rights, then it’s correct to distinguish between the victim who freely elected to place herself in harms way and the victim who did not.

In this case, the correct answer is “yes”, as getting drunk to the point of passing out in the house of a complete stranger is obviously an incredibly bad idea. For those who would argue otherwise, I suggest we turn to science for the answer: Enter a randomly selected house tonight, get drunk and pass out, then let us know the results. With luck, you won’t run into the friendly neighborhood cannibal….

I’m just curious how cold it’s going to have to get before the global warming crowd finally begins to admit that not only are their Steamed Planet scenarios far from inevitable, but confess how they were completely wrong on the entire issue from the start. That should take place right about the time that glaciers cover Minnesota and start threatening New York City, I assume:

[S]ummer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade. There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.

Perhaps it’s time we take a page from their stupid playbook and begin referring to them as global warming Insisters. Because, as they will be more than happy to tell you, the planet IS getting warmer, except, of course, when it isn’t.

JM asks about guns and immigration in the UK:

Nice blog… And thats coming from a New Atheist. Well maybe not what you refer to as a militant atheist, but an atheist nonetheless. Just wanted you to know that I enjoy reading your blog, you have a funny and thought provoking persona, and although I may disagree with quite a few of your arguments, I respect your intellectual position. I also figured you probably don’t get all that many emails like this from types like me, so yeah.

Having said that, I feel compelled to question your whole stance on guns and gun ownership, especially some of your comments regarding the UK’s policy. The root issues of gun crime here in the UK are the products of a flawed society, caused by the totalitarian descent we are currently steeped in but I feel that the introduction of public gun ownership would only serve to escalate matters. The amount of intolerant idiots in this country is exceptionally high, and I reckon that giving tools to these tools, to coin a phrase, will only result in a proliferation of gun-based deaths, on a fairly epic scale.

Also, your general stance on the cultural shift underway here comes across as fairly intolerant, given your supposed liberal attitude. A country is nothing more than a place, with a history, and ours is one of change and migration, as is yours. The world is constantly in a state of flux, and this is just a manifestation of this. Maybe its due to my lack of faith but I believe that this flux should be accepted and dealt with, not opposed.

I appreciate the sentiments, as it has never been my goal to run an echo chamber. I don’t expect most people to agree with me, it doesn’t bother me when they don’t, and while I’m equally comfortable engaging in civil and friendly discourse or hostile and insulting argument, believe it or not, I usually prefer the former.

JM’s two subsequent points are interesting, given as they tend to be related to his presumed atheist materialism, albeit in contrary ways. Taking the last point first, the idea that a country is nothing more than a place is deeply distinct from the Judeo-Christian concept of spiritual nations based on kinship rather than geography; the historical evidence of human behavior is a powerful, although by no means conclusive, argument in support of the latter. Would England be England if it were inhabited entirely by Asians from Pakistan? I would say no, absolutely not.

From a materialist’s genetic perspective, a homo sapiens is a homo sapiens, although presumably some of them are mutated and more highly evolved beyond the species standard. From a Judeo-Christian point of view, all homo sapiens are not alike and any society based on their fundamental sameness is bound to fail. My position on the Third World migrations into the West not a question of liberalism or intolerance, it’s – ironically enough – merely recognizing the inexorable material realities, as observed over thousands of years of recorded history. The idea that blood, identity, and culture are irrelevant, malleable and capable of being superceded by the state via its dictates is a relatively new one and that is observably inaccurate.

I’ll address the guns momentarily….

JB feels as if his innocence has been violated:

At first I admit to great dismay when your wedgie on Fight Club exposed its frilly lace. The book you’ve made sound so horribly gay that I’d sooner read Whitman. But you have tilted at the wrong windmill in your attempt to impute homosexual undertones to the movie’s phallic symbolism, and quite missed your overstretched mark. And let me head you off from any outing of my prose with the impenetrable defense that even my metaphors are heterogeneous.

Marla. In the movie, she was banged, a lot, very hotly. Even the weak avatar hit on her, “let me get your phone number.” Nobody gets the homosexuality of Fight Club because the theme isn’t there. Fighting = manhood = get hot girl. Doesn’t get more heterosexual than that. The cock scene in the theater. Cut to little girl crying. Now that’s good heterosexual humor… she’ll like it plenty later.

The psychology of fighting vs. reality. The book’s famed 50 fuck-fights, one man at a time, doesn’t happen. The fights aren’t realistic because real fights aren’t psychologically realistic. That’s why wisdom is necessary, to understand the idiocy of natural emotion. The movie, whatever its faggy authorial inspiration, is a story about the immanentization of Valhalla. End the office. End Apollonian order. Revive the territorial, the brotherhood and discipline and respect of the religious tribe, the violence and joy of the single combat gloriously extending and cycling anew each weekend, the resultant damage cartoonish and dismissable. It is the ultimate possible expression of the psychology of the fighter, to live on Earth and yet in Valhalla, to walk among sheep as a god.

Sure the psychological weakness of the beta Edward Norton hints at gayness in his dependent relationship on Tyler, but that ends when Edward becomes a man himself, and every beta is kind of faggy, so in that sense the whole world is flaming. And since Edward WAS Tyler, he was beating the shit out of himself in the parking lot and was the badass all along… and even the Catholics most disapproving of “self-abuse” admit it’s not a Levitically executable offence.

Unlike many books that lose their souls on the silver screen, Fight Club was merely deboned. Q.E.D.

Deboned is a good description. Degayed would be a more acccurate one, were it not for the essential point of the appeal provided by a bare-chested Brad Pitt. It’s quite clear that JB has not read the book Fight Club, but merely seen the movie. I’m not imputing anything to the movie; while I do mention it, I’m primarily writing about the book, which is more shriekingly homosexual than the average pride parade. I’ll readily grant JB that the movie is rather less gay than the book, but then, how does the relative non-gayness of the movie make the book flame any less? I futher note that opposition to Apollonian order is a veritable gay theme in and of itself, as per Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae.

But the primary error that JB makes is that the homosexual theme of Fight Club makes the book not worth reading. To the contrary, it is precisely that theme and the subsequent alienation of the characters that make the book stand out. Unless you read only to have your feelings, opinions, and prejudices confirmed, Fight Club is as deeply interesting for the glimpse it provides into an alien perspective as is The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

Howard Kurtz can’t get his story any straighter than John Edwards could:

The whispered allegations about John Edwards were an open secret that was debated in every newsroom and reported by almost none….Bill O’Reilly, while skeptical of the story, told his Fox News viewers last Monday: “I do know that if it were Mitt Romney instead of John Edwards, this would be on the front page of the New York Times.”

I don’t think the party favoritism charge holds up. Yes, the media went hard after two Republican senators, Larry Craig (who pleaded guilty in that bathroom incident) and David Vitter (who admitted calling an escort service). But they also pounced on New York’s Democratic then-governor, Eliot Spitzer (whose taste in prostitutes was revealed by the New York Times), and, famously, Bill Clinton (whose Monica Lewinsky mess was disclosed by The Post and hotly pursued by Newsweek).

No wonder the newspapers and mainstream media are dying off… and deservedly so. They’re not interested in doing the very thing for which they’re trying to get people to pay them. The Lewinsky story only came out thanks to Drudge, while Craig, Vitter and Spitzer were all matters of public record and didn’t require any reporting or editorial thumbs-up. “Hey, it turns out the governor of New York is being investigated by the IRS and the FBI, and he’s going to have to resign. Do you think maybe we should find some space for that?”

The more relevant comparison is the big story about McCain’s non-affair with Vicki Iseman that was published by the New York Times in February. How can that possibly be news when John Edwards’s actual affair isn’t?

Watching the mainstream media fade away is like watching a cancer patient die without going through the five stages of grief; they’re stuck firmly in denial. Now, it’s true that Fox News is the house organ of the Republican Party, but in like manner, the ABCNNBCBS cabal, the AP, and the major newspapers are the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. In times of increasing technological pressure, purposely cutting off your appeal to half your potential market isn’t stupid, its simply suicidal.

And misses the entire point of the South Ossetian situation:

For those that are still fixated on the idea that Georgia started this and Russia simply responded, answer me how what appears to be multiple combined-arms groups just happened to be able to respond so quickly, including the sortie of parts of the Black Sea fleet? It takes a lot of time, planning, and even movement and stockpiling of logistics to make that happen. The troubling question raised is how was it missed by — apparently — so many? It’s not like it’s easy to hide and that was part of what I will call the Fulda Tripwire: the movement and stockpiling takes time, for a combined arms force on the Soviet model chews through supplies in a way that makes a high school football team at an all-you-can-eat buffet seem like pikers. One example is in the shelling done and still ongoing — think about the rate of supply and resupply and then think about being surprised…

This battle for Georgia – not South Ossetia – is a long time in coming. Bill Clinton laid the groundwork for it by altering the rules of the game in Serbia, in which it was made clear that a major power had the right to intervene on behalf of a breakaway republic if it cried “help, help, I’m being repressed” by the sovereign territory owner. The Russians rightly feel that they’re playing by our rules and they have every reason to believe they’re going to get away with it since there is zero sympathy for the anti-Russian US position in Europe. The European position, quite reasonably, is to shrug and assume that it’s just like Kosovo, except that they also don’t want to upset their Russian fuel supplies.

At this point, the Georgian attack on South Ossetia appears to have been a terrible miscalculation by the Georgians and their US and Israeli advisors, who have been trying to solidify control over the oil pipeline in recent months. As some observers have noted, there’s even some reason to believe that the foreign advisors may have been in the forefront of the attack, based on the appearance of the troops and their gear in pictures of the earliest action. (I don’t have an opinion on this; I didn’t see the pictures myself.) In overreacting to the obvious provocations from the Russian-backed South Ossetians, the Georgians handed Russia the excuse it was quite obviously waiting for. I doubt Russia wants to annex Georgia, they are seeking a regime change, preferably to one that is pro-Russian.

Georgia did start this. That the Russians anticipated such a blunder and are taking full advantage of it doesn’t change the central fact of the situation. The truly worrisome possibility is not Russian expansion in the Soviet model, but rather, the idea that the attack on South Ossetia was not a blunder, but rather an intentional provocation by the USA designed to trigger a wider war in the area that will allow for a strike on Iran before the end of the Bush administration. Time will tell.

Michael Ledeen, weighs in with some neoconnery in the place of his usual thoughtful consideration:

When you’re doing reading it, ask yourself what’s the difference between this and the annexation of the Sudetenland?

Oh, not much. Other than the fact that the Czechs didn’t attack the Sudentenland and that the Russians are demanding recognition for South Ossetian independence, not its annexation. The Georgian situation has far more in common with Serbia and Kosovo, but you’d never know that to listen to the neocons. I wonder how long will it be until the first “Putin is the new Hitler” column is written?

Ledeen’s fellow Cornerite, Andrew Sullivan, notes the correct analogy with a prophetic quote from Lech Walesa:

“Recognizing Kosovo will bring nothing but trouble. No one can be denied the right to self-determination, but only within the bounds of common sense…with its irresponsible behaviour, [Kosovo is] causing new divisions in Europe and globally and undermining international relations.”

To say nothing of handing NATORussia an excuse for nobly defending the right to self-determination of the oppressed KosovarsSouth Ossetians, who are suffering at the genocidal hands of SerbiaGeorgia.

Surprise – influential neocons seldom fail to push for military action against somebody, somewhere:

Georgia, a nation of about 4.6 million, has had the third-largest military presence — about 2,000 troops — fighting along with U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq. For this reason alone, we owe Georgia a serious effort to defend its sovereignty. Surely we cannot simply stand by as an autocratic aggressor gobbles up part of — and perhaps destabilizes all of — a friendly democratic nation that we were sponsoring for NATO membership a few months ago.

Well, I’m just shocked that Kristol the Younger favors military action. Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that he fails to see the pattern I noted in my column today, entitled “Georgia and the Democracy Debacle, despite the obvious historical antecedent.

It’s striking that dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes — whatever their differences — seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies. So Russia helps Iran. Iran and North Korea help Syria. Russia and China block Security Council sanctions against Zimbabwe. China props up the regimes in Burma and North Korea.

It’s not striking at all, it’s completely obvious and in complete accordance with the historical behavior shown by Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. Perhaps as importantly, the Peloponnesians were the side favored by neutrals… and based on the size of that Georgian contingency, today’s nominally democratic “allies” are far less useful to America than they were to Athens in its unsuccessful attempt to maintain its maritime domination of Greece 2,500 years ago.

This is Debka’s conclusion, by the way, and I don’t disagree with their analysis:

This is Moscow’s payback for the US-NATO success in detaching Kosovo from Serbia and approving its independence. It is also a warning to Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia against joining up with the United States and the NATO bloc in areas which Moscow deems part of its strategic sphere of influence

After seizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, four follow-up Russian steps may be postulated:

1. The two separatist provinces will proclaim their independence, just like Kosovo.

2. Russia will continue to exercise its overwhelming military and air might to force the pro-American Saakashvili’s capitulation.

3. The Georgian president will not survive in office long after losing two regions of his country and national humiliation. Moscow aims to make Washington swallow a pro-Russian successor.

4. Moscow’s trampling of Georgia will serve as an object lesson for Russia’s own secessionist provinces such as Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushettia not to risk defying Russian armed might.

Another important lesson: Vladimir Putin has a long memory and is very patient. Never underestimate a man who can wait silently for years and then strike like lightning when the oppportunity presents itself.

The Onion has some suggestions. Personally, I prefer the head-on approach of telling the insistent voter that I wouldn’t vote for anyone on the ballot in 2008 if voting was mandatory and punished by a jail sentence. To vote for the lesser of two evils is to serve evil; there is no such thing as a vote “against” in American presidential politics.

The great man identified the soullessness of Western secularism long before it became so readily apparent:

Solzhenitsyn was nothing like anyone had thought, and he went from being the heroic intellectual to a tiresome crank in no time. Solzhenitsyn attacked the idea that the alternative to communism had to be secular, individualist humanism. He had a much different alternative in mind.

Solzhenitsyn saw the basic problem that humanity faced as being rooted in the French Enlightenment and modern science. Both identify the world with nature, and nature with matter. If humans are part of nature, they themselves are material. If humans are material, then what is the realm of God and of spirit? And if there is no room for God and spirituality, then what keeps humans from sinking into bestiality? For Solzhenitsyn, Stalin was impossible without Lenin’s praise of materialism, and Lenin was impossible without the Enlightenment.

Secularists and atheists will deny this, of course, just as their secular liberal predecessors denied the reality of the Soviet horrors. But their denials are transparent and there’s little reason to doubt that when they’re eventually shown to have been completely wrong, they’ll be disavowed as unscientific and No True Atheists by their successors just as they disavow their predecessors.

The inability of the secularist, the liberal, the atheist, and the science fetishist to learn from history is one of the true marvels of humanity. It should come as no surprise that they have so little regard for both tradition and historical evidence alike, as they tend to neither know nor care about history. The neocons, being former Trotskyites, are alarmingly similar in this regard.