Vox Popoli

John Scalzi considers the Big Idea behind The Irrational Atheist. And while Mr. Scalzi is a Confirmed Troublemaker, I highly advise behaving yourself in his house.

Rod Dreher sums it up:

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is the Dems will tax us to blow our money, and the Republicans will just put the shopping spree on a credit card.

And that’s pretty much it. They both love pointless wars with no plausible American interest, they both love the idea of electing a new people via migration and neither of them have any intention of reducing the size or scope of the federal government.

Brazilians have long held a reputation for being the giants of football, now they can also lay claim to being the first country with a team made up entirely of dwarves…. The average size of the team is about 4ft, while the smallest player is just 3ft 3in.

This is awesome, the guy with the ball looks rather like Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink wearing a Ronaldinho wig. And their name is great too, Gigantes do Norte, Giants of the North. How can you not admire their spirit?

Equalitarians don’t seem to understand that the primary role of the military is to do very bad things to people, many of whom don’t deserve it:

The stories are shocking in their simplicity and brutality: A female military recruit is pinned down at knifepoint and raped repeatedly in her own barracks. Her attackers hid their faces but she identified them by their uniforms; they were her fellow soldiers. During a routine gynecological exam, a female soldier is attacked and raped by her military physician. Yet another young soldier, still adapting to life in a war zone, is raped by her commanding officer. Afraid for her standing in her unit, she feels she has nowhere to turn. These are true stories, and, sadly, not isolated incidents. Women serving in the U.S. military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq.

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service.

This isn’t shocking, this is entirely predictable. It was predicted, as it was one of the many reasons that sane individuals have opposed women serving in the military from the very start. The idea that you can overcome Man’s moral resistence to murdering people so that he will kill on command without having any impact whatsoever on his other moral restraints is a classic example of the Education Fallacy.

Soldiers have always raped women; a kinder, gentler, more civilized military that is incapable of rape is also a military that is going to crumble in disarray before the onslaught of military forces less concerned with social niceties and more focused on winning wars. As every brilliant commander who ever loosed his troops on a defeated city knew, military discipline has its limits and attempting to stretch those limits risks sacrificing discipline entirely. And if you don’t want the hard men on the front lines subject to military discipline with their attentions focused on an external enemy, then where do you want them? Wandering around suburban malls? Working as policemen and security guards? With sufficient training, one can turn a human wolf into an extremely effective sheepdog, but one can never hope to turn him into a toy poodle.

It’s worth noting how one soldier explains why soldiers have so much contempt for the female “soldiers” in their midst: “As an infantryman in the Army, my view is that the simple fact of the matter is that the large majority of women in the military are not soldiers. They may wear a uniform…even passed basic training..but they are not soldiers. They are chicks who like to dress like soldiers. They expect special treatment for being female (and often get it), have lower standards, have almost no respect for military courtesy and discipline, pay lipservice to equality and then cry foul when they get treated the same as their male co-workers, and all to often, their advance in paygrade is tied not to their job performance, but who they are sleeping with. Men don’t take them seriously because they don’t take the job, the standards of military culture, their fellow servicepeople, or themselves seriously. I have no doubts that there are legitimate cases of rape and assault within the military, but since the military became coed, fraternization has gone rampant and it is very hard…very hard….to be able to distinguish the legitimate cases from the ones where a female is screaming sour grapes because she tried to trade sex for rank and lost out on the deal…particularly if the “victim” already has a reputation of sleeping around to get things she wants. That is why so many cases get dropped because of lack of evidence.”

The Olympic torch goes out:

Security officials snuffed out the torch and rushed it onto a bus at least five times because of the raucous protests against China’s human rights record.

I hate everything about the Olympics. Its smarmy one-worldism, its long tradition of glorifying dictatorships, its pseudo-religious aura, its fake amateurism, and the ever-present corruption which begins with the host city bids and ends with the athletes. I hope the Beijing Olympics are the debacle that spells the beginning of the end for this long-running, obnoxious charade.

And while we’re at it: Free Tibet!

BE sounds a familiar theme:

Great article on the 31st. This is the second time I’ve written you. The first time was about three years ago and I ripped you on an article. I don’t read you much because I think you have a shallow view of politics but it seems you’ve rankled some hairs with this one so I thought I’d take a look…

I agree with what you said but if you can take a little constructive critisism, I’d just like to make a point. You seem to have evolved into a very intellectual man but when I read this, I kept saying to myself “I’m the only one I know that would read this article all the way through”. The reason being that you write above most people’s vocabulary. I could cut and paste examples where you could have stated things more simply and succinctly but if you look for yourself, you will see many times where you could have used different language(more friendly to the great uneducated) than you did. You’re a very smart guy and you have a lot to say, so if you want it to be heard(read) I’m just thinking that you need to dumb it down a little so not just people like me will stay with it. I’m sure you won’t take offense at this and I wish you all the best.

I take no offense, as I never mind constructive criticism. In fact, I tend to find a good deal of amusement in this recurring theme of mass illiteracy. The fact of the matter is that I neither expect everyone to agree with me nor care if everyone agrees with me, so going out of my way to make my writing perfectly accessible to the lowest-common denominator simply isn’t going to happen. I tried it once at the request of my then-syndicate when newspaper editors informed them that the sentence structure of my columns was too complex for their readerships, and I found it took 3x more time than simply writing the way I happen to write. So, it’s not going to happen, and therefore my columns and podcasts shall remain media products for niche markets.

If BE thinks the columns are overly esoteric, I wonder what he must make of the Voxonomics podcasts? But I do appreciate his concern and am ever so relieved that he found the more recent column more to his liking.

A classic tale of calcio and catastrophe from the Mad Aussie:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of Italian World Cup supremacy, it was the age of Neo-Cons, it was the epoch of Treos, it was the epoch of online female sports writers, it was the season of indoor soccer, it was the season of Serie A match postponements, it was the spring of goal scoring, it was the winter of eye patches. Vox Day had the game before him, Vox Day had the game behind him, he was going direct to hospital, he was going direct from the game…

As the sun set on another woggy day, blogger at large Vox Day pondered. He pondered his team, he pondered his abilities, he pondered the task before him, he pondered victory… For tonight, his indoor soccer team, the Italian Handbags, were playing the much feared German Reinforcements. The crowd was eager. The Italian team finalised their warm ups – one by one they hugged their mothers in the pre-match ritual, while the boxheads stared at their opposition and simply rolled their eyes. They were not to do it for all though…..they didn’t do that in Vox Day’s direction. Oh no. Vox Day was to be feared, Vox Day was being massaged by a one Spacebunny, while he finished up ebook number five for the day on the Treo….

The referee had walked onto the field of play and the players were assuming their positions. Vox Day cooly strode out. He cooly strode back. He had forgot to do something. Looking at Spacebunny, he raised her hand with a smile…then kissed his Treo. “Wish me luck,” he asked of the small little device.

There’s simply no rip more effective than a genuinely creative rip from someone who knows you. It’s especially remarkable for its total lack of pity about someone BEING BLINDED! And yet, some still wonder how I’m able to endure attacks and insults from my critics with such Zen-like equanimity….

It’s a pity John Hawkins didn’t reference “Libertarian Girl” in his investigation of the travails of the female blogger. The argument for young, attractive women achieving their success based solely on merit is ludicrous, one has only to turn on Fox News or survey the non-fiction bestseller lists to realize that merit barely even enters into the equation, which is why, like Hollywood actresses and porn stars, women in the media tend to find less and less work as they garner more experience in their field.

One thing I learned from this blog is how easy attractive woman have it. When I had a blog as my real self, no one linked to me, no one left any comments, it was as if the blog existed in a vacuum. But things were different for Libertarian Girl. Every day I’d check Technorati and discover new unsolicited links. It was like I had warped into an alternate universe where all the rules had changed. At the rate things were happening, this would have been an A-list blog in a few more months. It’s funny how there have been some posts in the blogosphere saying that the political blogosphere was a boys club that discriminated against women, as evidenced by how few politics bloggers were women. Boy were they completely off the mark. It’s ten times easier for a woman’s blog to become popular.

This effect no doubt carries over into the real world. Whenever I see an attractive woman with a successful career, I’ll remember the experience of this blog and assume that she didn’t really get there on merit, just her looks.

The old editor at WND and I used to joke about how if I ever wanted another national syndication deal and a Fox gig, I’d simply continue writing my columns, but with a picture of Spacebunny at the top. If Spacebunny ever starts her own blog, I have no doubt whatsoever that she’ll quickly develop a readership 10x the size of this one. Based solely on her many merits, of course.

The thing is, while success is always nice, success that comes through something other than your own achievement is always less than entirely satisfactory. So, it’s a bit of a two-edged sword and one that one really shouldn’t begrudge.

Apparently the Law of Supply and Demand still comes as a bit of a shock to some. What, you mean you can’t subsidize the cost of health care without increasing the demand for it?

Now in Massachusetts, in an unintended consequence of universal coverage, the imbalance is being exacerbated by the state’s new law requiring residents to have health insurance.

Naturally, the economically clueless idiots behind this demand-side problem are seeking to compound it by subsidizing the supply-side. All that needs to be done is eliminate Medicare and the AMA and let the market and the individual sort it out for themselves. Yes, some stupid and unfortunate people will suffer from a lack of health care as a result, but far fewer than are now suffering from it. There is no problem with the free market that government solutions cannot exacerbate.

And you can always count on the liberal fascists to want to throw force into the equation: “Since the government is taking over the health care, doctors should not be “encouraged” to join primary-care. They should be required. If doctors refuse, they should be arrested and locked up.

The Bush administration is simply not pro-soldier. I don’t think they give a damn about the troops at all, except as another tool to be used and cast aside:

Among the 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, more than 197,000 have deployed more than once, and more than 53,000 have deployed three or more times, according to a separate set of statistics provided this week by Army personnel officers. The percentage of troops sent back to Iraq for repeat deployments would have to increase in the months ahead.

More than ten percent have deployed three or more times already! That’s completely crazy, especially when we’re not at war, and when there is no prospect of an end in sight. Even if you are foolish enough to think that trying to build a stable Iraqi democracy is the most urgent priority for U.S. national security, you have to understand that bringing a soldier home and sending him back to a war zone again and again is going to significantly harm his morale. Some men and their families can handle it, but an awful lot simply won’t be able to do so.

Fewer, longer tours would probably take far less of a toll while increasing effectiveness in the field.