Vox Popoli

From the New York Times:

More intriguing still were the divergent sexual responses between men who ranked high on the inhibition scale and those who scored low. Whereas both groups reacted to the nonthreatening sex scenes with an equivalently hearty degree of tumescence, only the low scorers — those whose answers to the questionnaire indicated they had scant sexual inhibition — maintained an enthusiastic physiological response when confronted with film clips of sexual brutality.

The results suggest that having a good set of sexual brakes not only dampens the willingness to commit rape or sexual abuse, but the desire as well, giving the lie to notions that “all men are the same” and would be likely to rape their way through the local maiden population if they thought they could get away with it.

Obviously, given that the only thing preventing men from doing so are, well, other men. No wonder the women are all simmering with anger these days; in training men to be weak and sexually submissive, they managed to reduce men’s desire for them as well as performance should these nice guys ever somehow manage to stumble into bed with them.

I think the reason why modern marriage destroys sex lives is because of the way the sexual dynamic shifts. Before marriage, a man can easily tell a woman to put out or get out so that he can replace her with a woman who will. And because he can, he usually doesn’t have to. After marriage, she’s the one who holds the cards, which means that sex becomes a vote of one, namely, hers.

And since most women dislike decisions, responsibility and being the sexual initiator, this is a recipe for porn, adultery and general marital disaster. The problem is that the old school alternative, leaving the sexual decisions up to her husband, is even more unpalatable to the modern woman.

Of course, the end of marriage and the return of sex slavery will put an end to the dilemma soon enough, so even if there’s a wee spot of bother involved in the total collapse of the Western cultural tradition, at least there’s the return of the ancient sexual dynamic to anticipate.

Someone seems to be missing the point here:

The author of Meon Nara, a certain Rhie Won-bok, believes “the Jews are the invisible force that controls the U.S.” In his comic, he argues that 9/11 was caused by Jewish domination of America; that the U.S. media “is the voice of the Jews;” that both Hollywood and Wall Street are Jewish- occupied territory; and that ambitious Korean-Americans are continually thwarted by “the fortress of the Jews.”

Thanks to agitation by outraged American — most notably Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, who travelled to Seoul last month — Meon Nara’s publisher is taking the book off store shelves. Unfortunately, the company is powerless to recall the existing copies that are providing legions of Koreans with a Borat-like view of the Jewish race.

Can I suggest here that making use of rabbi-inspired American pressure to force a Korean publisher to stop selling a multi-million selling comic book, however lunatic, is perhaps not the best way to convince Koreans that the Jews are not, in fact, continually thwarting ambitious Korean-Americans?

As for the US media, while it may not be “the voice of the Jews”, it is certainly “the voice of a lot of Jews”. This isn’t an inherently good thing or an inherently bad thing, it’s merely an obvious and observable thing. And if you don’t want people to notice this and comment negatively on it, perhaps you should consider not hiring cousin Ira’s nephew’s brother-in-law the next time a spot opens up on the Metro page and not publishing huge articles about Hannukah on December 25th.

Scott Adams digs an all-too-common atheist hole:

If you think about it, wars are generally fought because of a false sense of certainty. Usually some leader thinks he is a God, or talks to God, or descended from the Gods, or thinks God gave his people some particular piece of real estate. The leader’s opinion is the most certain in the land. People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. The next thing you know, stuff is blowing up.

This wildly ignorant assertion is completely incorrect, as Mr. Adams would know if he knew any military history or had even bothered to spend 5 minutes consulting the Encyclopedia of Wars, (Phillips & Axelrod, 2005). Only about 7 percent of the 1700+ historical wars recorded there have even a remote connection to anything religious, indeed, the only certainty that exists in the typical war-making leader’s mind is that waging war will serve his immediate purposes, whether that be his personal desire to rule over a larger kingdom, to seek revenge upon an enemy or to give the masses sufficient distraction from turning their violent attentions upon him.

I quite enjoy Mr. Adams’exercises in philosotainment, but his belief in rational ontology as a substitute for historical reading does occasionally lead to some rather amusing howlers. Such as the all-too typical one cited above.

For those who claim to be more intelligent and educated than the norm, atheists ironically demonstrate an reliable tendency to say tremendously stupid things betraying the lack of a decent education.

I noticed that my Technorati rank was rising recently, in part because some fake porn sites have apparently decided that their strange business model required linking to VP. I’m neither upset nor offended by this, only confused… I know these sites make money from enough accidental visits, but I don’t really understand how.

Anyhow, among the fake cites was a link from a self-described black feminist single mother named Jamila; I naturally assumed that I’d offended her in one way or another. So, I was more than a little surprised to read this:

Hypocrites

Exhibit #1: Amanda Marcotte, a liberal, calls Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist, a Class A Uncle Tom.

Exhibit #2: Echidne, another liberal, titles a post about Parker “Aunt Thomasina”–an obvious play on the racist label “Uncle Tom.” Also, see this post where Echidne calls Kathleen an Uncle Tom but runs a line through it.

Kathleen Parker is a white woman.

I wonder if being condemned for being a racist hypocrite by a black feminist single-mother will cause Amynda to slow down and actually consider the fundamental intellectual weakness of her ideology for the first time in her life? I assume not, but as Jamila demonstrates, people can be less predictable than one tends to assume.

Jamila is actually has a pretty interesting mind, as evidenced by this unusually self-aware statement: “Obviously, my sexuality was based on false braggadocio. I perceived myself to be confident and aware when in reality I was anything but.”

It’s amazing how most male predators know about this tendency and prey upon it, while many young women not only don’t realize that it exists, but actually tend to mistake that false braggadacio for genuine self-confidence and seek to emulate it.

I don’t often do this, but I will offer Jamila one piece of unsolicited advice, mostly because it’s the same advice I gave a corporate attorney who found himself out of a job a few years ago due to his commendable unwillingness to generate fraudulent billable hours. Initially, he didn’t want to take a job that was beneath him and his status as an officer of the court, so he spent more than a year unemployed.

I told him to take a job, any job, that would keep him in employment shape. (He was getting a bit too obviously accustomed to his unemployed status.) He finally agreed and began working in sales at CompUSA for less than one-thirtieth of what he made in his previous job, and over the course of the next year, he turned himself from a computer neophyte into a near-expert while continuing his fruitless round of interviews.

When he finally got a job as the corporate attorney for a technology company, it his computer expertise that separated him from the hundreds of other lawyers applying. That company was acquired, then the acquirer was acquired, and within two years of being hired, my friend was made a director of a multi-billion dollar technology multinational.

I’ve worked “dead-end” jobs, including construction and pizza delivery, and I’m from a fairly comfortable family. I would say that the expectation of employment and performance has arguably been more helpful to the success I’ve had than the familial wealth. Perhaps more importantly, nearly every self-made man I know, from the artists to the business billionaires, has held similar jobs, often for extended periods of time.

The key is this: it is always easier to get a job if you have a job, no matter what that job is. Most employers care far more impressed with a demonstrated willingness to do whatever it takes than they are with a degree from Prestigious Paper Mill University.

Take the job, any job. Then excel in it, even as you look for a better one. Speaking as someone who just signed off on an expensive new engineer last week, there’s nothing a prospective employer checking references likes hearing better than “dammit, I really wish we could keep her, but I understand she can’t afford to turn down the opportunity.”

It seems Mary Shelley may not have written “Frankenstein” after all:

Finally, I read a fabulous book last week — John Lauritsen’s “The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein,” which will be published in May by the gay-themed Pagan Press, based in Dorchester, Mass. Lauritsen, who is known for his work in gay history and for his heterodox views of the AIDS epidemic, sent me an advance copy, which arrived as I was on my way to midterm exams. Its thesis is that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and not his wife, the feminist idol, Mary Shelley, wrote “Frankenstein” and that the hidden theme of that book is male love….

Lauritsen assembles an overwhelming case that Mary Shelley, as a badly educated teenager, could not possibly have written the soaring prose of “Frankenstein” (which has her husband’s intensity of tone and headlong cadences all over it) and that the so-called manuscript in her hand is simply one example of the clerical work she did for many writers as a copyist. I was stunned to learn about the destruction of records undertaken by Mary for years after Percy’s death in 1822 in a boating accident in Italy. Crucial pages covering the weeks when “Frankenstein” was composed were ripped out of a journal. And Percy Shelley’s identity as the author seems to have been known in British literary circles, as illustrated by a Knights Quarterly review published in 1824 that Lauritsen reprints in the appendix.

I don’t recall enough of the book to speak about its underlying theme, but I’ve always been skeptical about the apocryphal tale of book being written due to a ghost story-telling session among the artistic Bohemians. Then, too, there’s the conceptual link between Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and the subtitle of Frankenstein, “the Modern Prometheus”. Now, imagine the firestorm of hysteria if it was discovered that there was any possibility that a male “author” had taken credit for his wife’s famous work this way.

I can’t say that I’ve ever anticipated a gay-themed work of literary non-fiction before, but I really think I’ll have to check out this one.

Lest you wonder why I love her so:

I do not own guns and have no interest in them. (Swords, those Homeric and chivalric emblems, have always attracted me more.) But as a libertarian, I read the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights as granting to private citizens the right to bear arms against the potential abuses of a government turned tyrannous. Furthermore, should police authority evaporate after a cataclysm of storm, flood, earthquake or terrorism, citizens have a right to defend their families and property against criminals and looters. If food and water are in short supply over a protracted period, expect predators and violence.

The horrendous problem of illegal guns now rampant among the urban underclass cannot be solved by depriving all American citizens of their Second Amendment rights. Major cities must address their internal problems, which include improving public education and vocational training, creating job-rich public works projects, and instituting on-the-street neighborhood policing. The major media, concentrated in their metropolises, should stop extrapolating their local issues to the nation as a whole.

Camille Paglia is more than a little schizophrenic with regards to political realities, in my opinion, and her grasp of economics is not so much sketchy as nonexistent, but her intelligence, insight into human nature and historical awareness is so great that those weaknesses in no way lessen my very high regard for her.

I am in complete agreement with her assessment of global warming, or if you prefer, anthropogenic global climate change:

Who is impious enough to believe that Earth’s contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began “Sexual Personae” (parodying the New Testament): “In the beginning was nature.” And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.

I voted for Ralph Nader for president in the 2000 election because I feel that the United States needs a strong Green Party. However, when I tried to watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on cable TV recently, I wasn’t able to get past the first 10 minutes. I was snorting with disgust at its manipulations and distortions and laughing at Gore’s lugubrious sentimentality, which was painfully revelatory of his indecisive, self-thwarting character. When Gore told a congressional hearing last month that there is a universal consensus among scientists about global warming — which is blatantly untrue — he forfeited his own credibility.

Read the whole thing… I haven’t even posted the best parts. La Paglia doesn’t let minor things like death interfere with her beautifully venomous contempt.

The Regression to the Mean gets his pre-presidential kneepads on behalf of the Lisper:

I haven’t even yet mentioned your magnificent leadership on and after 9/11, which also combined both the visionary and the practical in a truly stirring way. That combination of vision and competence is what even your enemies have come to show a grudging respect for….

You can beat back such foes any time with the power of your intellect and your peerless ability to master and synthesize ideas – if you’re willing to get cracking.

Cliff’s Notes version: Rudy is so sexy and dreamy and smart… how I wish he would pierce me with those fierce Italian eyes and handcuff me in front of the whole wide world!

Speaking of metaphors, I haven’t read anything that flamingly gay since Fight Club. Even the editors at The Advocate are reading it and thinking, “well, we are looking for a political columnist, but that’s really a bit much.”

The New York Times would have us shed a tear for those poor unfortunates who aren’t allowed to migrate because they don’t have any relations in the United States:

When the DNA results landed on Isaac Owusu’s dinner table here last year, they showed that only one of the four boys — the oldest — was his biological child….

The State Department let his oldest son, now 23, come to the United States last fall, but said the others — a 19-year-old and 17-year-old twins — could not come because they are not biologically related to him.

Isaac Owusu, who asked that only his first and middle names be published because he would like to keep his family’s pain private, is still hoping the government will allow the teenagers to join him, arguing that he has been a devoted stepfather, if not a biological parent.

What is the world coming to, when a man cannot leave his country behind and bring along his adulterous wife’s bastard offspring? Oh, the inhumanity!

I hope everyone finds as much amusement in Third World America as much as I do. I’m certain the millions of incoming individuals from dictatorships and savage tribal cultures will rush to embrace the USA’s perverted form of strictly limited democracy in no time. Of course, what they will vote for probably won’t be quite what white liberal Democrats and Republican corporatists have in mind, but by the time those morons realize the inevitable result of their promised multicultural paradise-on-earth, the barbarians will be barbecuing the milk cows and zoo animals as they do in the home countries.

“Sometimes these are complicated families,” said Tony Edson, a deputy assistant secretary of state. “People are learning things that they never knew about themselves.”

It’s interesting how “complicated” things can get once the traditional Western family is obliterated, isn’t it. And it’s such a surprise that things are already hopelessly complicated in the many places that have never known any such structure.

When you permit cannibals to immigrate, you shouldn’t be surprised when they start eating people.

UPDATE – For those of you who doubted Washington’s involvement with 9/11, I note that apparently we suffer from such a shortage of terrorists that we are planning to import more:

The head of a U.N. agency charged with caring for Palestinian refugees said the United States has offered to receive 7,000 Palestinians who fled Iraq.

Maybe the feds should cut right to the chase and give them all jobs driving public school buses.

This spectacularly silly girl doesn’t quite get that whole “free speech” thing:

Silencing Through Trolling

Another powerful tool that mainstream sites, if not employ then at the very least are party to, is having their members troll sites that are negatively highlighted. I first encountered this with the website Something Awful, which would have the Awful Link of the Day. At first I thought it was funny, until I noticed that highlighted sites would be bombarded with e-mails and other hateful comments. The line was finally crossed for me when one woman shut down her website because of the harassment she received due to the SA goons’ trolling. Her only crime? Being highlighted as an ALOTD because she was transsexual.

But I’ve seen that pattern over and over again elsewhere. The only time I ever got it here, that I am aware of, was when I said something nasty about Vox Day because of a post he made about rape. And with my discussion policy that I have now, if something like that happened again, it wouldn’t affect my readers. But that’s not the case for many sites who don’t have moderation, and even for those who do, I know from personal experience that getting hateful comments calling you names and saying you’re worthless does take an emotional toll.

What about me? What about my emotional toll? Sometimes I just sit here in front of my keyboard, trying to type through the tears…. You see, it’s just fine for her to say nasty things about other people. (I have no idea what she’s referring to, but I’ll take her word for it.) But, you see, you must not respond in kind, because then she might feel bad. And if she feels really bad, then she won’t want to say anything else in the future.

(And what a loss to humanity that would be.)

Now, not saying anything is silence, so therefore being made to feel so bad that you decide to be silent is the same as being silenced, just like Hitler’s SA used to beat people up and kill them in order to silence them. Because, you see, words are the same as physical actions, therefore a verbal attack is the same as a physical attack, except of course when a woman is simply exercising her right to free speech in attacking someone else.

Does that make sense to you? If so, I highly recommend that you ask someone to drive you to the hospital and offer your organs for donation as you are quite clearly brain-dead.

I can’t help but think that this handicapable individual could use a material, non-metaphorical kick in the head, perhaps that might help her understand the difference between silencing yourself and actually being silenced. Sweet Darwin but I despise those who cannot distinguish between metaphor with reality.

Is $32,100 per year:

They found that a 5-foot-8 man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6-footer if he made more money — precisely $146,000 a year more. For a 5-foot-2 man, the number was $277,000.

So, apparently I was wrong. Women care more about height than money, although there are diminishing returns with height that obviously don’t exist in the case of the cash.

Tierney’s comments about the overly selective nature of people in large cities, specifically New York, ring very true to me. None of my female friends who lived in New York ever got married while they were there or to anyone they met while they were there.

Another interesting factor is that women with a high degree of what the study’s authors call “sociosexuality”, which based on the determining questions appears to be a predilection for unfaithfulness, preferred non-religious individuals as strongly as women attracted to height preferred tall men.

This may help explain the three marriages of Richard Dawkins, all arguments for atheist morality notwithstanding.