Vox Popoli

I was at Dr. Helen’s blog today, and for the first time noticed that the picture of her leaning back and smiling in the chair is meant to be her in her red pajamas. Which it probably actually is, I belatedly note. Cos, you know, Pajamas Media. It’s semiotics, is what that is.

Now, I’m not a big fan of the basic concept and I wasn’t invited in the first place, but it occurred to me that even if I was inclined to join, I simply couldn’t. It wouldn’t be right. I don’t even own a proper pair of pajamas and I haven’t for nearly as long as I can remember.

I did have a pair of red flannel Calvin Klein bottoms that I very much liked, but those wore out years ago despite an attempt to salvage them as pajama shorts. I have some replacements, but they’re just not the same, and besides, there really isn’t any need for pajamas in a Mediterranean locale. I may be a remarkably handsome individual, but even so, I don’t think the world needs an image of me kicking back in my not-pajamas anytime soon. Or ever, really.

If Chapter 13 gets a little out of focus, blame it on the Disaronno, I just knocked out half of it in one sitting. (The chapter, not the bottle.) I’ve also decided that I want to debate Christopher Hitchens, but with a rule that you have to do a shot before taking your turn to talk. (Make that two for Hitch, he’s supposedly got the tolerance of a mule that’s trod a wine-press for the last decade.) And a one-shot penalty of the opponent’s choice for accidentally saying “Crushades”.

If we could get Book TV to televise it, it could be their funniest broadcast ever. Everything is less boring with a degree of difficulty.

It’s often remarked that women will fight savagely to protect their children. What is less often mentioned, but is just as true, is that women are significantly less inclined to lift a finger in defense of a child who isn’t their own:

I was 14, and went with a school group on a weeklong summer trip to the beach. Teenagers are cliquish and cruel, and though I had always been a popular kid throughout grade school, for some reason the ringleaders in the in-crowd in the grade above mine decided I was going to be one of their marks on this trip. I walked into a hotel room where a lot of them were hanging out, just to see what was going on. Suddenly, egged on by the older girls, a group of the older boys grabbed me and pinned me to the floor. They told me they were going to take my pants off and embarrass me in front of the girls. I don’t know that I’ve ever been so scared in my life. I was pinned and couldn’t move my arms to fight, and anyway, they were all bigger than I was. The group was having great fun watching me beg, in my terror.

Here’s the thing: there were two adult women in that hotel room, mothers of my classmates. They watched all this go on. I screamed at them, begging them to help me, to make the boys let me up. These two women literally stepped over me as I was pinned to the floor, and left the room rather than tell the bully children of the in-crowd to let me go.

There’s a good reason for this apparent callousness, of course. An adult woman isn’t capable of taking on a 15 year-old male, let alone a group of them. Rather than risk their own safety, they are inclined to protect themselves by leaving the weaker to their fate, just like adolescent males.

Physically capable adult males don’t respect either women or adolescent males, which is why you occasionally read of men getting themselves in over their head by confronting a pack of armed young thugs or being shot in the back while they sleep. I’d be interested to know if the women here consider the behavior of the chaperones to be reasonable; I know most of the men are reading the story a second time thinking, wait a minute, this all took place in front of the adults in charge?

But keep in mind that it’s pretty easy to be judgmental when you aren’t worried about your own skin. I wouldn’t hesitate to knock a few 15-year old bullies around, but you won’t find me telling off armed mafiosi either.

Reading Rod’s account reminds me of the benefit of learning very early on that no one was going to help and that you had to shut your mouth as soon as anything started to happen. Apparently it’s not as much fun for playground bullies when their victim is simply lying there staring silently at them. So, I waited patiently until one summer, I grew big enough to fight back, and that autumn I broke the ribs of the first kid that shouldered me into a locker.

I got sent to the principal’s office, where I was asked about my “overreaction”. But he didn’t have much to say after I explained that I’d been waiting a long time for the chance to defend myself, and that everyone could avoid getting hurt by the simple expedient of not attacking me. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that not only wasn’t I punished, but all the bullies except two left me completely alone after that.

It took me another year to take care of that situation, but it was resolved in the end. There are few sights sweeter than the dawning realization in a bully’s eyes that an erstwhile victim is ready to claim a little of his long-awaited revenge.

To this day, I cannot abide bullies. I had to make another trip to the dean’s office my senior year after there were complaints from the elementary school about my having picked up a fifth-grader by the throat and slamming him against a brick wall. The dean was pretty torqued until I pointed out that no fifth-grader caught beating up a first-grader has any grounds for complaining about his rough treatment at the hands of the first-grader’s older brothers.

Dr. PZ had a link to a test of personality defects. I guess the only real surprise is that I scored rather lower on Brutal than I might have expected and much higher on Rational than some of my critics would have thought.

The Braggart
85% Rational, 71% Extroverted, 28% Brutal, and 71% Arrogant.

Interesting that apparently I’m even more Arrogant than the Haughty Intellectual.

Of course, my philosophy has always been that it’s not bragging if you back up your words, and especially when you call your shot ahead of time. But your mileage may vary.

Jonah Goldberg has a “who voted for Nixon” moment:

I find this very hard to believe. I can certainly see Paul having disproportionately high military support. But this sounds way out of whack. I need to see the numbers broken down. Maybe it’s a very small pool? Weird accounting? Or, maybe, it’s true:

So we now know that, measured in terms of financial support, Ron Paul, the one GOP candidate who actually backs individual liberty against government power, is now ahead of Huckabee, Brownback, Thompson (Tommy) and Tancredo. He’s the alternative to the Big Three. But guess who are among his strongest supporters? The U.S. military. Paul has a staggering 52.53 percent of all military contributions.

Yes, Jonah, the American people oppose the war, including a lot of veterans, including a lot of soldiers who are over there right now. Doesn’t anyone at National Review know any actual soldiers or at least have watched a few movies like “Band of Brothers”? Soldiers want to do their job and then come home. America’s soldiers have done their job; they took out Hussein and they know that they should have come home then. No one knows better than they do that democracy in the Middle East is a hopeless and self-destructive project. It doesn’t matter when we leave, tomorrow or in ten years, Iraq is going to fall apart because the only thing that ever kept it together was central military power.

It’s amusing how completely unconnected to the popular mood the conservative media has become. They’re almost as prone to spinning entirely around their little New York-Washington axis as the liberal media – look at how Podhoretz still thinks that Giuliani is a winner because he “saved” New York. Even if it were true, that would be the reason that two-thirds of flyover country would vote AGAINST him.

I was born on the East Coast. I went to university on the East Coast. Now, I can’t stand the East Coast or its parochial, myopic would-be elites.

And the self-sabotage begins:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Planned Parenthood Tuesday that sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is “age-appropriate,” is “the right thing to do.”

It sounds like someone from Team Clinton gave Obama a call and reminded him that he’s supposed to make it look like a race, not actually try and win the nomination. It must have been the Oprah money that inspired this little reminder.

If Obama starts passing Hillary in the polls, we’ll see him start denying global warming, then the Holocaust, and if he gets really desperate, promising to select Ron Mexico as his running mate.

MD presents a succinct argument:

WHAT AN ASSWHIPE YOU ARE

Hard to argue with that, although I confess I’m not sure whether he intends to state that I’m a sadist with a predilection for posteriors or remarkable for my absorbent qualities.

I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot more of these eloquent missives once TIA comes out. Because atheists are so much smarter and everything, you know? I should be wrapping up the first draft this weekend, actually, one more full chapter and a bit of touch-up on two others is all that’s left.

I’ve never heard a single Kenny G song, but I’ll happily join Pat Metheny’s boycott simply because it’s such a heartfelt and enjoyable rant:

Not long ago, Kenny G put out a recording where he overdubbed himself on top of a 30+ year old Louis Armstrong record, the track “What a Wonderful World”. With this single move, Kenny G became one of the few people on earth I can say that I really can’t use at all – as a man, for his incredible arrogance to even consider such a thing, and as a musician, for presuming to share the stage with the single most important figure in our music….

But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture – something that we all should be totally embarrassed about – and afraid of.

I can understand how frustrating it must be for very talented musicians to see far less talented individuals seeing much greater success. I was the least accomplished musician of the four guys in my house after college; I was also the only one with a record contract.

But if jealousy is the more talented, less successful individual’s problem, the popular hack does have the responsibility to not be a complete jerk about it and should be respectful to those he knows are his artistic superiors. The problem is that we too often confuse popular success with artistic merit, and the two things are simply not at all the same.

From Pro Football Talk

Jason Cole of Yahoo! Sports reports that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is expected to suspend Falcons quarterback Mike Vick.

“Where [Vick] is in the most trouble is that he lied to the commissioner,” a league source told Cole. “He told [Goodell] in April that he didn’t know anything about this. The commissioner gave [Vick] every chance to come clean, be straight about what was going on. Instead, he just kept denying it.”

Dumb, very dumb. Generally speaking, if you’re a public figure, you should avoid any activities that involve the words “strangulation” or “electrocution”.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think dog-fighting should be illegal, or cock-fighting or beetle-fighting or whatever other sort of animal combat is enjoyed by the lower classes. The more sensitive and aesthetically inclined may not enjoy it, but then, I don’t like television and it’s a lot easier to make a case for the harmful effects of television than for all the animal combats in the world combined.

But whether it’s legal or not, there’s just some things you cannot due and expect to be regarded as a civilized member of society in good standing. One of them is slaughtering your animals for no reason.

I’ve decided I kind of like pit bulls after all, now that Mr. Pit Bull down the street and I have made friends. He’s very sweet, when I walk past his house, he wags his tail, cocks his head and presses against the gate to get his ears scratched. This doesn’t make him any more predictable or dangerous to little people, but it does make Mr. Mexico’s actions that much more reprehensible in my book.

As I recommended last year, before this dog-fighting scandal, the Falcons should have traded Vick, not Schaub. He’s an exciting player, but he’s already reached his potential as a quarterback. And now he’s very damaged goods, even if he is still allowed to play.

The more we see that in some regards, nothing has changed in nearly two thousand years:

Christians in Iraq, including converts from Islam and people involved in mixed-faith marriages, are being crucified by Muslim terrorists, according to a Dutch member of Parliament studying the war-torn country. Several Iraqi Christians “are nailed to a cross and their arms are tied up with ropes. The ropes are put on fire,” Joel Voordewind told BosNewsLife, an online news agency focusing on Christians and Jews in difficult circumstances.

According to the site, Voordewind described how a person, who “survived” a crucifixion, “even showed holes in his hands,” apparently from nails.

Voordewind said victims of the crucifixions are “in most cases Christian converts who abandoned Islam or people who, religiously speaking, are involved in mixed marriages.”

Isn’t it wonderful that America is bringing democracy to this place? I note that Hitler not only won three parliamentary pluralities, but went on to win his four plebiscites with an average approval rating of more than 95 percent, and with voter turnout that was more than twice as high than that of the current United States. There has never been a leader with a greater or more genuine democratic mandate than the late German Reichskanzler.

The good news: Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost considers VP to be one of the top 100 Christian blogs.

The bad news: That would be #97… and Joe doesn’t know how to spell it.

Actually, the lowly rating is somewhat of a relief, because as I’ve tried to make clear to everyone, no one should ever makes the mistake of judging the verity or falsity of Christianity on the basis of my example. I’m a Christian, I’m just not a very good one. That’s not modesty – you know I don’t do modesty – it’s just the facts.

There are those who walk the Way in giant strides. Then there are the rest of us, who merely hope that we can manage two steps forward for every one step back. Either way, it’s worth remembering that we have a guide who never hurries.