Vox Popoli

77 Cranberry Bogs
58 East Mesa WhiteTrash

74 Mounds View Meerkats
50 W.C. Silver Spooners

59 Winston Reverends
29 Village Valkyries

52 Greenfield Grizzlies
48 Black Mouth Curs

52 Masonville Marauders
27 Burns ICU

Week 4 saw the mighty Meerkats finally get a win while Nate changed his team name to a much more appropriate moniker. Rumor has it that he cried at the press conference announcing it.

My favorite absurdist defense of Hollywood’s infatuation with violence is the idea that they are just portraying the gritty realism of violence in society:

With new clues, a Philadelphia homicide unit reopens the 1998 murder of Carrie Swett, who had joined the abstinence club, Hearts Wait, just before her death.

Carrie eventually learns the club members aren’t who they claim to be. Tina, the outspoken president, apparently is carrying on a sexual relationship with the youth pastor, Nathan, who oversees the club.

In a flashback scene, Carrie confronts Tina and encourages her to stop meeting alone with the youth pastor.

Tina replies, “You’re just some slut with a whore for a mother.”

Carrie also tells a young man who fears he’s homosexual and two teens who are sleeping together that there is nothing wrong with their feelings or actions.

The members of the club respond to Carrie by calling her “dirty,” “whore,” “slut” and “b****” before stoning her to death.

Last year, the FBI reported that six of the 16,692 murders in 2005 were hate crimes, which includes all crimes attributable to biases based on race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/ national origin, and disability. None of these six – or 16,292 – murders involved Christians stoning insufficiently abstinent girls, or anyone else, for that matter. Of course, it’s much safer to pretend that Christians stone women to death than make any reference to the particular group that does actually does stone women to death on a regular basis.

Freud has been discredited for decades. It is amazing that his unscientific theories are still being relied upon to attack those who don’t believe that unmititigated promiscuity is a benefit to society.

I refuse to watch any television show that is based on protagonists with any responsibility for investigating crime or involvement with the legal system. They’re uniformly shallow, boring, eminently predictable and inherently authoritarian.

Single career women theorize as to why men aren’t lining up to date them:

The only men who ever approach me for dates are in their fifties. Maybe it is because they have more confidence and security in themselves and so don’t feel threatened by a woman who has made a success of herself. Men my age never talk to me once they’ve found out what I do. Sometimes, they physically take a step back. I think they assume I am focused purely on my career….

I sometimes wonder if I would be happier if I had chosen a simpler path, but the only thing I have wanted to do is practise law. It can be quite tough, though. I am different in the office to how I am at home. At work, I am the only woman on my team, so I have to be hard-nosed and quite harsh. At weekends, I over-compensate by being really girly, because I don’t want any friends – or potential boyfriends – to think I’m an iron-knickered harridan.

In other words, you’re a bitch, but you pretend not to be when it suits you. Obviously, no man could possibly be intelligent enough to figure out that sooner or later, you’re going to be directing that hard-nosed harshness at him if he’s dumb enough to date you.

Professional women are so clueless when it comes to men that one wonders how they manage to remember to breathe long enough to finish those all-important Powerpoint shows. A few basic pointers:

1. No man has ever been impressed by a woman’s occupation, unless it is stripper, model or professional cheerleader for his favorite team. Honorable mention for aerobics/yoga instructor or nanny.

2. Few men are impressed by women’s salaries. They know perfectly well that most women will quit paid employment the moment they feel they can. A woman’s salary only matters to a man who doesn’t want to support a non-employed wife or have kids.

3. Men with their own careers generally don’t want wives with careers if they want a family. They’re looking for a wife and mother to their children, not a co-husband. Men who don’t have careers are much more open to the possibility, but then, no matter how much money a woman makes, she has no interest in men who makes less than she does. As Spacebunny points out, most women consider her own income to be “her money” while that earned by the man is “our money”. There are exceptions, of course, but this is the general rule.

4. The mere fact of having a career means you are too focused on it in the eyes of most professional men. They know perfectly well what it means since they work with women like you every day, furthermore, they also know that few professional women have any sense of proportion or perspective. You made a choice, now deal with it. Buy a cat… or five, and stock up on Duracell.

5. Men aren’t intimidated by you, your intelligence, your education or your pay packet. They are, however, intimidated by the divorce courts. They are extremely disinclined to dally with the sort of women who show any inclination towards depending upon them.

“If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.”
– Ann Coulter

Oh, it will happen. It is absolutely inevitable. Unfortunately, because we live in an irrational world where people cannot modify their behavior even when it is logically predictable that the consequences of that behavior will be disastrous for all and sundry, it won’t happen until after the collapse into imperialism, dictatorship and social chaos.

Democracy’s day is nearly done in the West. The American political parties aren’t even pretending to represent their bases anymore; once the anti-war crowd realizes in 2009 that they’ve been sold out as badly as the pro-life, small government and anti-interventionist blocs were sold out by the current leadership, both bases will understand that there is no representation for them.

In Europe, on the other hand, you can vote for whatever party you want, so long as it is Eurofascist.

I have no idea how long it will take, but it will happen.

I found this to be very interesting, especially in light of what I wrote in TIA about the Aztec practice of human sacrifice:

Before being chosen as sacrificial victims, the boy and girl had followed a typical peasant diet. This raises the possibility that they were chosen from among the Incas’ conquered subjects and killed not only to pacify the mountain gods, but also to instil terror and respect for an imperial power. “It looks to us as though the children were led up to the summit shrine in the culmination of a year-long rite, drugged and then left to succumb to exposure,” said Timothy Taylor of the University of Bradford, one of the lead researchers.

“Although some may wish to view these grim deaths within the context of indigenous belief systems, we should not forget that the Inca were imperialists too and the treatment of such peasant children may have served to instil fear and facilitate social control over remote mountain areas.”

Now, I certainly don’t deny the religious aspects of historical human sacrifice, it would be intellectually irresponsible to even try to do that, to say nothing of how it would contradict my own spiritual worldview. But I’ve noticed that although Mesoamerican human sacrifice took an overtly religious form, mass human sacrifice tends to correspond much more strongly with imperialism than it does with religion. I won’t be surprised if scholars eventually conclude that at least for the Aztecs and the Incas, human sacrifice was less a form of worship than it was a means of political terrorism designed to keep their more numerous subject peoples in line.

Bomb New York,
Light up the New York sky
Like the Fourth of July!

It’s typical Onion humor, but it wouldn’t be so funny if there weren’t more than a grain of truth to it. I don’t give a damn about New York City or its denizens and it’s not hard to make a powerful case that America as a nation would be better off without it and Washington DC.

“You can just reduce New York City to a pile of rubble, it ain’t going to affect us much.”

Whether you think that’s sad or not, it’s absolutely true. It also means that the Giuliani campaign, based as it is on his self-styled status as “the thavior of New York Thity”, isn’t going to get anywhere near the White House. You’ll notice that the Queen-in-waiting hasn’t been talking about being a big Yankees fan since her campaign started, she’s been playing up her carpetbagging Southern twang instead.

Nothing will change with mass immigration:

A southwest suburban school district has taken action, responding to the concerns of a parent who is Arabic….

There was some heated discussion between parents outside Columbus Manor Elementary School in Oak Lawn on Friday. The thought of no more traditional holiday celebrations has many parents really upset. For now, children in Ridgeland School District 122 will celebrate fall festival instead of Halloween and winter festival instead of Christmas….

The district has a 30 percent Arabic population. The superintendent says the reason for the change in tradition comes after one parent wanted Ramadan decorations put up inside Columbus Manor Elementary.

One wonders if the multicultis at the ACLU will finally begin to see a problem with third world immigration when the public schools are no longer content to ban Christmas, begin teaching “kill the Jew” and require mandatory clitorectomies in addition to vaccinations for all the girls.

History teaches that mass immigration – migration – is always a terrible thing for the host population, but it’s a particularly bad idea in any society that pretends to pass for democratic.

The Evangelical Outpost uses game theory to demonstrate that moderate Republicans who support Giuliani in the primary will be responsible for electing Hillary Clinton, not conservative Republicans who stay home in November:

Imagine that you have three groups of voters. Group A likes Hillary and opposes all Republican nominees; Group B prefers Giuliani, but would choose another nominee over Hillary; Group C prefers anyone other than Giuliani and Hillary….

Group A would be happy with A1, and unhappy with either A2 or A3. Similarly, Group B would be unhappiest with B1, happy with B2, and satisfied with B3. Group C would be unhappy with C1, dissatisfied with C2, and happy with C3.

Now let’s examine what rational choices each group of voters should make in a Republican primary.

Since the GOP is never going to nominate Hillary, the most rational choice for Group A would be to skip the Republican primary altogether and vote in the Democratic primaries. The most rational choice for Group C would be C3–anyone other than Giuliani. So what should Group B choose? Even though their first preference is B2, they have to consider how Group C will vote.

For Group B, choice B3 is what game theorists call the minimax condition, the choice which minimizes the maximum possible loss. They don’t get Giuliani but they don’t get Hillary either. (That same outcome, by the way, is the optimum choice for Group C.)

Even if they were unable to communicate with Group C, the most rational choice for Group B would be to choose the minimax. But they have even more incentive because social conservatives (Group C) have communicated to Giuliani supporters (Group B) that they will not accept option C2. All things being equal, it would therefore be irrational for primary voters to choose Giuliani….

Unless social conservatives vote for Hillary in either the primaries or the general election, we are in no way to blame for her moving back into the White House. That blame will go to our friends and neighbors. The same goes for the nomination of Rudy.

But what if the reason that Hillary wins is, as some want to claim, because social conservatives did not choose the lesser of two evils and vote for Rudy? Again, we social conservatives are not to blame at all. We are the ones who will have made the rational choice during the primaries while the Giuliani supporters made an irrational choice.

This is a solid explanation of the inherent futility of the moderate Republican candidate, one that I wish I had thought to develop. As I’ve been pointing out for months now, it is counterproductive to nominate a candidate who is so moderate that he has negative appeal to the base. The polls are irrelevant, Giuliani and Romney are demonstrably less electable than Paul, Huckabee or Thompson. Thompson and Huckabee can’t beat Clinton because they share her views on the major issues of the election cycle, but that’s another matter entirely.

By the way, Richard Dawkins should note that this is a proper use of game theory, not inventing Evolutionary Stable Strategies out of arbitrary assumptions and imaginary values.

Richard Dawkins proposes eliminating theology departments:

We who doubt that “theology” is a subject at all, or who compare it with the study of leprechauns, are eagerly hoping to be proved wrong. Of course, university departments of theology house many excellent scholars of history, linguistics, literature, ecclesiastical art and music, archaeology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, iconology, and other worthwhile and important subjects. These academics would be welcomed into appropriate departments elsewhere in the university. But as for theology itself, defined as “the organised body of knowledge dealing with the nature, attributes, and governance of God”, a positive case now needs to be made that it has any real content at all, and that it has any place in today’s universities.

Given that universities are no longer the important centers of Christian-centered intellectual development that they were founded to be, and given that they are demonstrably almost entirely useless in both professional and pure knowledge terms – tests have shown that the average student at an elite university actually knows less about history, law and economics after she graduates than when she enters – why not get rid of them altogether?

The best computer programmers don’t learn how to program at university. Econ majors can graduate from major state universities without ever learning who John Maynard Keynes was. Real published writers don’t learn how to write by studying English. Sociology, Womyn’s Studies and Art History majors are all self-evidently useless. It’s funny to see all the folks with useless degrees in pointless disciplines at Pharyngula who usually chime in with a hearty atheist amen to everything Dawkins and Myers preach suddenly stopping and saying, “hey, wait a minute, now….”

Coincidentally enough, I’ve developed a new technology design that, according to the gentleman at Oxford responsible for education technology, will likely go a long way towards doing precisely that.

The elite are never going to convince Americans that transforming themselves into North Mexicans is desirable. The more non-Americans that are forced on the citizenry, the more likely it is that extreme measures will eventually be adopted. History suggests that the choices are to either a) deport them now, or, b) do very bad things to them later.

Mayor Herbert Gears estimates that about 300 people in Irving are being turned over each month – more than in any other city in the nation. He said city officials are obligated to uphold the law and will continue to use the program, which is available to any city that wishes to participate.

“Of the 200 e-mails I’ve read so far, one is negative and all the rest are positive,” Mr. Gears said Thursday afternoon. “People are very overwhelmingly supporting what we are doing.”

The problem, of course, is that our fascist elites love violence , since conflict gives them the opportunity to create profit as well as the excuse to enact radical societal change. (It’s no accident that such changes in peacetime are typically categorizes as “the war on X”). So, from their point of view, immigration is a win-win, as it will either lead to a subjected third-world people or the chaos of widespread violence.

To avoid those probable outcomes, civilized and peaceful deportations are the only solution.