Vox Popoli

IA NH
Biden 2% 1%
Clark 2% 2%
Clinton 35% 39%
Dodd 1% 1%
Edwards 18% 13%
Gravel – –
Kucinich 2% 1%
Obama 14% 19%
Richardson 1% 2%
Vilsack 12% 1%
Undecided 13% 21%

Women give Hillary Clinton the edge in Iowa and New Hampshire. In Iowa, 39% of women (56% of likely caucus goers) say they would vote for Clinton and 30% of men say they would vote for Clinton. In New Hampshire, 43% of women (57% of likely primary voters) say they would vote for Clinton and 30% of men say they would vote for Clinton.

Thank your suffragette sisters for the Lizard Queen, women. I, for one, welcome our new lesbian feminist overlordesses.

Jefferson is still having trouble grasping the intrinsic difference between “freedom” and “the right to vote”:

What I’m looking for is any reason why these things on the whole would be good for either the country or humanity. There are none.

There are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of examples to the contrary, wherein individuals voluntarily choose to give up their right to vote in favor of obtaining more freedom.

If you have the right to vote in country X, but have no rights to property, speech or your body, but then move to country Y wherein you have those rights, you are giving up your right to vote… at least for the time it takes to become a voting citizen.

Now, to draw an absurd example that may help Jefferson clarify his thinking, suppose there were a large group of cannibals who were vehement eaters of human flesh, large enough to force through mandatory cannibalism based on their numbers. Would one argue that their right to vote should be respected and everyone should be forced to eat human flesh, or would one agree that everyone, (including the cannibals who are all suffering from kuru), would be better off were their right to vote denied?

Once this question is answered, it is merely a question of demonstrating that certain groups’ political influence are reliably destructive and therefore must be denied for the benefit of those very groups, to say nothing of everyone else.

But I am curious as to Jefferson’s opinion on this matter. Which is right? Do we all eat flesh, or do we prevent the cannibals from voting?

UPDATE – Jefferson rightly, according to his previously stated views, opts for the long pig. Very good, now why don’t we all vote on who goes to the death camps, gays, blacks, Jews, atheists, Christians, Muslims, Scientologists, smokers, fatties, or ugly people. As ye vote, so shall ye make right. Thus spake the suffrage fetishist.

And some still insist there’s no logical consequence to rational atheist morality….

We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused The Duke:

Your search – Fa’thagn Cthulhu – did not match any documents.
Please define. On your blog. Thanks.

Technically, the correct term is “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wagn’nagl fhtagn”, which is often shortened to “Iä! Cthulhu F’htagn!” The phrase basically means “In his house in R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.”

However, I was writing from memory and so got it wrong, but I decided not to correct it after I realized that what I had written could be translated as “Make Cthulhu King” if you applied the correct languages. It made me laugh, so I left it as it was.

My humor is sadly underappreciated.

From the New York Times:

A little-noticed rider to the January 2006 renewal of the ‘Violence Against Women Act’ allows government agencies to collect DNA samples from any individual arrested by federal authorities, and from every illegal immigrant held for any length of time by US agents. The goal is to make DNA collection as routine a part of detainment as fingerprinting and photography.

The law has strong support from crime victims’ organizations and some women’s groups, who say it will help law enforcement identify sexual predators and also detect dangerous criminals among illegal immigrants.

“Obviously, the bigger the DNA database, the better,” said Lynn Parrish, the spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, based in Washington.

It’s okay, they’re only going to use it to catch bad people. Honest. If you’re not a rapist, then you’ve got nothing to hide, right?

Jefferson fails to grasp the point of universal suffrage:

I can’t think of any argument that would not make me laugh that says who is over 18 and not a convicted criminal should not be allowed to vote.

How about this: universal suffrage exists primarily in order to disguise the existence of unaccountable and unlimited totalitarian rule.

This is why voting is mandatory in totalitarian countries; whereas less than fifty percent of the voting population votes in the United States, elections in Hussein’s Iraq and the former Soviet Union habitually saw 99 percent participation. Voting is nothing more than a symbolic act of submission to the ruling powers, the fact that the USA’s ruling party has two factions, Blue and Red, does not change the fact that its elections are as meaningless as those that confirmed the USSR’s ruling party and its solitary Red faction.

If the will of the people was genuinely permitted to rule by voting, there would be no drastic limitation on democracy by these “representative” members of the bi-factional ruling party. I daresay that I am, despite being an avowed anti-suffragist, more amenable to democracy than even a champion of universal suffragism like Jefferson because I would vastly prefer direct democracy to the disastrous status quo.

The question boils down to which is more important, freedom or voting? Would Jefferson permit a democratic vote on whether we should jail everyone named “Bill” or kill everyone whose last name ends in “-stein”? If not, then even he doesn’t take his own position seriously, he merely believes that universal suffrage in a representative democracy cannot be a genuine threat to freedom.

Given the fact that Mussolini, Hitler and Lenin all championed women’s suffrage as a means of gaining power, this is not an intellectually credible stance. And for anyone who happens to be dubious about that claim, I recommend beginning your education in these matters by reading the very first plank in the Fascist platform.

I’ve got some work to do and limited Internet access today, so I’ll post this early and turn my attention towards the Super Bowl. As a Black-and-Blue division man, I’ll be cheering for the Bears; if they can keep from getting blown out early, I think they’ll outlast Manning and company.

Nate has the career women of Nashville hitting the donuts hard this weekend:

Career Girls don’t actually help the economy at all.

A Career Girl goes out and gets a job. Very rarely however does she actually produce something beyond a pretty presentation or pie chart. For all their bluster women don’t go out there and start businesses. Career girls don’t anyway. Plenty of women go out and become self employed in various ways… and they are indeed participating in the economy and they are indeed producing something. Good for them. But the vast majority of Career Girls don’t do that. They get hired, and go about the business of destroying things with BS paperwork… needless regulation… increased bureacracy… gossip… and general problem causing.

This is one of the two points that regularly escapes those who attempt to consider the effects of women in the workplace. Merely being in the workplace does not make one a positive factor for production, and it’s demonstrably true that women are massively overrepresented in the unproductive and negatively productive occupations.

Secondly, women in and out of the workforce are consumers, so putting them into the workforce is only helpful if they are increasing productivity. If they are replacing more productive men, there may actually be a net loss, moreover, their obvious failure to perform their only societally necessary productive role, the reproductive one, shows that the grand experiment is already a failure.

No doubt future societies will marvel at our obvious shortsightedness.

First Amynda implodes, now Pharyngurl is, in his inimitable style, leaping about and flinging his stinking emissions at Scott Adams. Never one to worry about making sense, he’s now accusing the creator of Dilbert of having “a piss-poor sense of humor”.

One wonders what he’ll do for an encore, assert that Bill Gates isn’t rich? That Michael Medved isn’t gay? That Big Chilly is not a sex machine to all the chicks? What Amynda and Pharyngurl have in common, besides their tendency towards foam-flecked rhetoric, is their combination of demonstrable ignorance with ad hominum-oriented arrogance. Neither of them is anywhere nearly as bright as they appear to believe, and both of them are apparently foolish enough to believe their own hype.

I mean, Pharyngurl’s a professor, so he must be highly intelligent, right? But he’s a professor at Minnesota freaking Morris! I grew up in Minnesota and let’s just put it this way, Minnesota-Morris is not exactly a fall-back school for kids applying to the Ivy League, or the MIAC schools for that matter. It’s basically a community college with a hockey team.

What neither Amynda nor Pharyngurl have every understood is that holding “correct” opinions is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, especially when those opinions can be demonstrated to be at least questionable. A predilection for name-calling in the place of legitimate, logical argumentation is always the sign of a fourth-rate mind.

Amynda is barely on the job before she manages to get a fiasco named after her. While it is an accomplishment of sorts, I truly thought she’d be able to do more unintentional damage to the Edwards campaign before she was inevitably “asked” to resign:

The Edwards-Marcotte Fiasco

Before entering politics, Edwards was one of the state’s best-known civil attorneys*. He even worked in the law firm of Wade Smith, Collin Finnerty’s lead attorney in the lacrosse case. So if anyone should be sensitive to massive prosecutorial abuse, it’s Edwards.

His response? First silence—and then, as Liestoppers and Betsy Newmark have noted, appointing as his campaign’s lead blogger a figure who has branded the players guilty, in ugly rhetoric that almost makes Wendy Murphy look temperate.

Amanda Marcotte wrote on the Edwards blog that she came to her post after a stint at Pandagon, “which is one of the top liberal political blogs on the internet and known mostly for insightful and often humorous political blogging.” [emphasis added]

What kind of “insightful” blogging has Marcotte offered on the [Duke] lacrosse case? Liestoppers had the graphic detail:

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.

Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?

So unfair.

Yes, how dare a rape victim act confused and bewildered like she was raped or something.

Natalia, do you know the details of the case? If so, why do you think a women enthusiastically jumped into a sexual situation with men making slavery jokes at her? Furthermore, what is your theory on why she supposedly looooooved having sex with guys holding her facedown on the bathroom floor? There’s no “if” they behaved in a disrespectful manner. We have conclusive evidence that happened.

This is about race and class and gender in every way, and there’s basically no way this woman was going to see justice. In her part of the country, both women and black people are seen as subhuman objects to be used and abused by white men.

Yeah, I know, Alon. Which is why I’m frustrated that people are pretending ‘can’t identify which one raped her” somehow equals ‘wasn’t raped’. I had some initial confusion about exactly who was assaulting me when I was assaulted, but that doesn’t mean that his hands weren’t actually where they were.

Plus, the media is acting like these men are exonerated!

After James Taranto brought attention to the words above, Marcotte deleted them (so much for “transparency” in the Edwards campaign).

What, you mean it’s not a good idea to put a foul-mouthed feminist in charge of public relations for your political campaign… in the South? Boy, you sure learn something new every day!

If this had happened closer to the real campaign season or if Edwards was a bona fide candidate, I’d suspect that Amynda was a Clinton plant. But as anyone who has paid any attention to Pandagon knows, that’s just Our Amynda being Amynda.

The funny thing is that whereas I was falsely accused of removing controversial material from my column – I most certainly did not and every single word is still on voxday.net in all its original Medved-stroke-inspiring glory – Amynda has now openly admitted to doing so. I wonder if all of those who foolishly tried to jump down my throat are going to be criticizing her for this post-facto attempt to hide her words.

It seems electing B. Hussein Obama to the presidency might not be all bad:

Only two weeks after the elections in November of 2008, the United States of America, a nation of former greatness, lay in absolute desolate ruin. Within the previous 72 hours a series of eight successive, delayed nuclear devices had been detonated. Indescribably large portions of metro Washington, D.C., Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and two thirds of the island of Manhattan have been turned into steaming craters. Millions are dead. President George W. Bush is in intensive care; two-thirds of the Cabinet, including the vice president, are missing or dead.

President-elect Barack Obama faces the most enormous challenge of any incoming president in the history of the nation.

The question is if the benefit of getting rid of DC, Los Angeles and Manhattan are worth sacrificing Boston, Chicago and Dallas. My feeling is that it is not, because I simply can’t countenance the disturbance of Tom Landry’s grave at the Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park.

By the way, what is “an indescribably large portion” of a city? Is Kevin McCullough unfamiliar with the classic unit of measure “the square mile”? If I recall correctly from my time in Florida, Jacksonville is the largest American city in terms of area at 874 square miles, therefore the size of the steaming craters in each of the eight aforementioned cities can presumably be described.