Vox Popoli

A self-described feminist at the Daily Telegraph begins to have second thoughts:

I was half asleep in the front seat the other day, coming back from some exhausting tour of an educational establishment, and in the back seat were two twentysomething female graduates. They were talking about men, so I tried to focus, while keeping my eyes cunningly half closed.One of them made the eternal feminine complaint. “All men are useless these days,” she said. “Yeah,” said the other. “The trouble is that they haven’t risen to the challenge of feminism. They don’t understand that we need them to be more masculine, and instead they have just copped out.”I am afraid that, at this point, I copped out myself, and slid into unconsciousness. But before I went under I thought, hmmm, this is interesting; and I think back to that conversation as I read that women continue their astonishing dominance of university admissions.
Look at those girls go! Women now make up 57 per cent of university entrants, and they outnumber men in every subject — including maths and engineering….

Speaking as an ardent feminist, I expect that this will have many wonderful results: a culture that is more feng shui and emotionally literate and altogether nicer, and an economy that benefits from unleashing the phenomenal energy and talents of British women who are — if GCSEs, A-levels and university entrance results mean anything — currently giving the male sex a good old intellectual thrashing.Obviously a neanderthal corner of my heart worries about some aspects of the coming feminisation. Will we all become even more namby-pamby, elf-n-safety-conscious, regulation-prone and generally incapable of beating the Australians at anything than we already are? Hmm? And even if the feminist revolution is good and unstoppable (and it is both), we should perhaps consider some of the downsides — and the most interesting is that greater equality between the sexes is actually leading to greater division between the classes. Here’s how.Since the emergence of our species, it has been a brutally sexist feature of romance that women on the whole — and I stress on the whole — will want to mate/procreate with men who are either on a par with themselves, or their superior, in socio-economic and intellectual attainment. A recent study shows that if a man’s IQ rises by 16 points, his chances of marrying increase by 35 per cent; if a woman’s IQ rises by 16 points, her chances of getting hitched decline by the same amount.Now look at those university entrance figures again, feed in that basic human prejudice, and some recent social phenomena become intelligible. If you have a sudden surge in the number of highly educated women — more women than men — then it is not surprising that you have a fair few Bridget Jones-type characters who are having a tough job finding Mr Darcy. It is a gloomy truth that 40 per cent of female graduates born in 1970 are likely to enter their forties childless.

Needless to say, the future cat ladies of Britain are too short-sighted to see any problem with this:

As a very well educated, highly career-oriented, straight, single-ish woman in my early 20s – why ever should I want to get married and have kids? Far too many other things to be doing, thanks.
Posted by Jenny on February 1, 2007

Oh, I don’t know, perhaps because living under the regime of the more demographically friendly societal structure that replaces the unsustainable status quo is likely to prove rather less pleasant than the traditional Christian society that was abandoned in favor of equality and feminism.But it is encouraging to see that even those who have led the cheers for feminism in the past are beginning to recognize that it is a societal dead-end. Post-feminist society has not yet been fully articulated, but the significant trends are developing well in advance of the chattering classes. These are some of the probable developments:

1. The decline of the traditional university degree. Degrees are already scorned in a leading technology industry, the games industry, this trend will spread as more individuals, mostly men, realize that wasting 4-6 years and tens of thousands of dollars on a ticket to a dead-end job is a stupid investment.

2. Educated women will find it increasingly difficult to find a man who will even date them, let alone marry them. This is not yet a conscious trend, it will become one soon. I was one of the first guys I knew who wouldn’t even go out on a first date with a career girl, this is becoming an increasingly common dealbreaker among the younger crowd.

3. Society will increasingly provide psychological rewards to women who bear children and penalties to those who don’t. This is already the case in dying European countries, where people will literally stop families in the street and congratulate them on having more than one child.

It took seventy years for the fundamental flaws of communism to cause communist society to collapse. Full-fledged feminism has only been in the ascendance for 34 years; while it is even less sustainable than communism, it still has another 25 years or so to go before it collapses entirely. I think an 8 to 12-year experience of female leaders is necessary to demonstrate the scope of feminism’s virulence in a final gasp before women finally accept that it is a poisonous ideology and abandon it en masse.

Insty doesn’t cover the half of it:

A big vulnerability is going to be on the gun issue, I think: It is for him [Giuliani] what Campaign Finance Reform is for McCain, something that chases away GOP base voters who lean libertarian.

Giuliani cannot win the nomination, nor would he win the election. He’s far more hopelessly unelectable than any of the genuine conservatives that the faux conservative media are trying to chase off as unelectable, he’s less electable than Bob Dole, for that matter.

Meanwhile, National Review editor Katherine Lopez demonstrates how the conservative commentariat is increasingly out of touch with the conservative Americans who still, mysteriously, to read them.

Glenn Reynolds thinks ” A big vulnerability is going to be on the gun issue.” I dunno I don’t think most Americans want New Yorkers running around with guns. I’m no libertarian but I bet he gets a pass.

Of course, this is the woman who is dumb enough to think that Americans are pining for a third Bush in the White House. Sure, Jeb talks a good game, but the problem is that after the lies his father and his brother told to get elected, no one with more than half a brain, conservative or liberal, believes anything that comes out of the mouth of anyone named Bush.

Most of the Americans who belong to the NRA or more serious gun-rights organizations aren’t libertarians. They are conservatives, a group that National Review and the Republican party once represented. Clearly they are no longer interested in doing so, their protests notwithstanding.

I realize there’s a bit of a tempest in a teapot about all this, but I don’t think Senator Biden’s words are anything but mildly amusing and generally accurate:

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Let’s face it, Al Sharpton isn’t the most handsome man, he looks like an overbaked walrus and he’s most famous for his attachment to a girl rolled in fecal matter. Jesse Jackson is a plumped-out, rapping pimp. And while there are articulate and presentable public figures like JC Watts in Washington, they are Republicans and therefore out of the mainstream as Democrats like Senator Biden and the New York Times define it.

As Biden is essentially pointing out, B. Hussein Obama makes for a lovely token Negro who can be relied upon to avoid breaking into rap, impregnating the staff or stealing the silverware, and who will stay safely home on the left-liberal plantation despite the occasional genteel nod to the opposition. His primary appeal is that he makes liberal whites feel good about themselves for supporting him, which will make him the perfect fall accessory for the Lizard Queen. She needs a way to keep the liberal whites enthused enough to show up on election day since she’ll begin tacking hard to the center as soon as she feels the nomination is in hand; dangling a storybook Negro in appeal to the self-proclaimed moral superiority of the left-liberal voter is one sure way to do that.

The point is, as Biden surely recognizes, Obama isn’t running for president, he’s running for vice-president. I don’t pretend to know what’s in it for him, as he’s as likely to get chewed up and spit out by the Clinton Machine as he is to become the Lizard Queen’s heir apparent in 2016, but then, the ineffable mechanics of an ambitious politician’s mind are thankfully alien to me.

So obviously, this didn’t happen:

The daughter of a church minister who made false allegations of rape against four separate men has been jailed for two years. Abigail Gibson, 22, made the “vile” claims against a work colleague, an ex-boyfriend, a stranger and even her father, Ian, who is a respected minister at a young offenders’ institute. One of her victims, Mark Berry, 26, had known Gibson for just two weeks after meeting her at a supermarket where they both worked. But when she learned he had complained to bosses about being bullied by one of her friends at the store, she set about trying to get him sacked.

I think that the penalty for knowingly bringing a false charge against someone should be the same as the false charge brings. Although of course in Cool Brittania these days, it’s entirely possible that two years in jail is the maximum penalty for rape.

As I’ve been writing for the last three years, the neocons and warbangers have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t know military history, they don’t understand military strategy and they don’t comprehend the likely outcomes of the actions they’ve been advocating. Why so many conservatives continue to pay attention to them and echo their demonstrably incorrect blathering is a mystery to me:

We have been getting it wrong in Iraq, says new US commander

President George W Bush faced fierce new criticism over his policy in Iraq yesterday as both military strategists and his new commander in the Middle East delivered negative assessments of America’s prospects of quelling violence in the war-torn country.

In a blow to Mr Bush’s latest attempt to seize back the initiative in Iraq after almost four years of violence, Adml William Fallon, his nominee to be the new head of Central Command in the Middle East, said that the Bush administration needed to be “more realistic” about its objectives and admitted that he had no way of defining victory in Iraq. He told a Senate confirmation hearing: “I don’t know what winning is.”

…. In a damning assessment of America’s record to date, he said: “Securing the stability of the country has been more difficult than anticipated. Our ability to correctly assess the political, economic and security situation in Iraq has been lacking.

“It seems pretty obvious to me that what we have been doing has not been working,” he said, adding that the US could not hope to win “militarily”.

So, here’s the new commander in the Middle East repeating the same thing I’ve been saying about the past strategy… I’ll be interested to see if all the neocons and Three Monkeys in the convervatariat admit that they’re wrong or not, or if all of their fans will hold them accountable. Somehow, I rather doubt it.

When one of the guys responsible for winning comes out and says “I don’t know what winning is”, you can be assured that not only will you not win, but you’ll be lucky if you can manage to avoid getting your head handed to you.

Don’t you military ignoramuses understand that this “triumph of the will” stuff won’t work any better for the USA than it did for Germany in WWII or the Arabs during the Arab-Israeli wars? Winning wars depends primarily on technological advantage and logistics, and in the current situation, our technology is of little use and the logistics are against us.

If China or Russia or even Turkey chose to weigh in with their sometime ally Iran in the next year or so, the US forces in Iraq would risk elimination without the resort to nuclear weapons. At this point, I’m not concerned about winning, whatever Admiral Fallon may eventually determine it to be, I’m starting to worry about extricating the troops successfully.

Blithely assuming that everyone who isn’t in will stay out is an error that has been made by more than one defeated combatant.

Meanwhile, Bane links to a letter from a soldier in an Iraqi ops center:

Know this, our soldiers will not quit. We win every battle, we hold any piece of ground that we want to take. Do not listen to those in Washington who influence events by dishonesty, manipulation and greed. Listen to your hearts and know that America is a winner. We will not accept defeat. Don’t be fooled by the news media who so dishonorably portrays one side of the story for gain and sensationalism. We are not losing, we are not running, the enemy is reeling and is scared….

I tell you, we are kicking ass here. It’s good to be on the offensive.”

These two messages demonstrate the difference between STRATEGY and TACTICS. It is entirely possible to kick non-stop ass, win every battle and still lose the war. Success is quite often the father of failure, and it takes strong mental discipline to be able to discern the point at which hitherto successful tactics are nevertheless leading one towards a failed strategy.

RK sends us a link informing us that John Edwards’ campaign is officially doomed:

New Blogmaster
Amanda Marcotte in Diaries Feed of Amanda Marcotte’s Diary
1/30/2007 at 5:50 EST

This is both my first post to the Edwards blog and my announcement that I’m joining the presidential campaign for John Edwards for 2008. I’ll be taking over the job of Blogmaster (mistress?) over the course of the month of February.

Here’s a nice chance to compare political acumen. I’ve been asserting that Hillary Clinton has not only the nomination, but the election in the bag. Amynda obviously feels that John Edwards has a shot. Time will tell.

Of course, considering that the Edwards’ campaign will be saddled with the incomparable intellect that we’ve so often seen on display at Pandagon, it’s really not a fair test, is it.

Merely the latest demonstration of why the Original Cyberpunk is the most undeservingly unappreciated science fiction writer today.

He was waiting there for me, in the good chair. “Hello, Bruce.”

“Hello, Mr. President.”

“Please, call me Dick.”

I tried to. I couldn’t. “Sorry, sir. I can’t. Even Jack Bauer would call you ‘Mr. President.'”

He frowned. “Jack who?”

“Never mind. It’s good to see you again, sir.”

If you haven’t been reading it, you’ve been missing out. Go catch up, right now.

The Fraters Libertas point out a bitter irony:

Woman’s Unborn Child Killed In Maplewood Assault

A 12-week-old unborn child was killed Sunday after an assault in Maplewood, Minn., according to authorities. The incident happened at an apartment building on the 1800 block of Beebe Road.

According to police, an 18-year-old woman was taken to St. John’s Hospital just after 11 a.m. The woman was about 12 weeks pregnant and miscarried at the hospital.

Since when is it illegal to kill an unborn child in Minnesota? It actually happened in this state more than 65,000 times over the four year period ending in 2004.

Since abortion is not murder, why should we not bring racial discrimination in America to an end forever by proactively aborting all insufficiently Caucasian fetuses? By bringing Saint Sanger’s dream together with Dr. Martin Luther King’s, we can realize total racial harmony in our lifetimes!

I await the Nobel Committee’s telephone call….

Nienna finds her Dutch courage:

I will disagree with all your fan-boys on this one. (just guessing, but after years of reading comments in this blog, I know how they go.) I really do think a mark of intelligence is to make complex…ideas easy to understand. I’ve personally only had trouble understanding ONE sentance of one article and I told you which one it was. (Whether or not you read any of my silly ramblings is another story).

But now, I’m drunk enough to actually say “I disagree!” I empathise with all those who can’t understand you. After all, I really believe that your ideas are relevant to our society and ah..*could* make a difference. Sure, you may say “But only an X amount of people read my drivel.” To which the answer is, of course, that people influence each other. That, and what’s the point of writing an article if only I dunno..I’ll make up a number…%5 of the population can understand it? I’m actually currious on this one.

It seems the ever-inebriated Aussie has started a new trend here…. Anyhow, the short answer is: you are obviously confusing me with someone who gives a damn.

I don’t believe that my writing is particularly difficult for anyone with reasonable intelligence to follow, although I will admit that my more iconoclastic ideas can sometimes be difficult to contemplate upon one’s initial exposure to them. I suspect it’s unfamiliarity with ideological commentary taking place outside of the Rep-Dem kabuki box that is the real source of the difficulty for most people. The Republican hears “pull out of Iraq”, the Democrat hears “women shouldn’t vote” and their brains shut down as their knee-jerk reactions kick in.

I disagree about intelligence being concerned with making the complex easy for the non-intelligent to understand. That is a third-rate intelligence, of which Richard Dawkins is a fine example. A first-rate intelligence creates, a second-rate intelligence synthesizes, a third-rate intelligence popularizes. That’s why most successful businessmen, while brighter than the norm, are seldom the most intelligent.

The evidence tends to suggest that I am a second-rate intelligence, furthermore, popularizing ideas is not why I write. Writing is essentially a selfish act, an arrogant act, mine is merely a little more openly so than most. I write because it amuses me, because it occupies me and because without writing it out, I cannot properly articulate my thinking. An extremely intelligent and half-insane college girlfriend – she ended up requiring psychiatric hospitalization – once said something to one of her friends that made a great impression on me: “Great thoughts floating through your head are nothing more than feelings, until you articulate them and prove their existence.”

Now, imagine living in a world where nearly everyone else, nine out of ten, has an extra chromosome and are moderately retarded. And then imagine that of the remaining ten percent, nine out of ten have been voluntarily lobotomized in order to better fit in with the retards. How much interaction could you bear to have with them, how much effort would you devote to make them understand what you are thinking? How much pleasure would you derive from interacting with them at all?

This may sound frighteningly arrogant, of course, but it’s not as if I had no reason to essentially withdraw from the world before I turned 25. I vastly prefer to keep the moronic world at arms length, even so, one can’t escape it entirely; it’s somewhat annoying to be considered a mediocre fantasy novelist when it’s possible that “The Wrath of Angels” might even be considered a brilliant work of social commentary if there were readers capable of grasping that the religious fantasy is only a thin veil over the real story.

(And no, I’m not going to spell things out, there are enough blatant hints right there in the text. There’s no humour in a joke explained.)

It may not, in fact, be brilliant, and certainly the world is knee-deep in whiny artistes who consider themselves misunderstood and underappreciated, but the truth is that a verdict can’t be rendered one way or another by those who are demonstrably unable to even begin to consider the question. After all, you can’t argue that Calvino is a better writer than Battistelli if you don’t read Italian.

Still, it is rewarding when a Starwind reminds me that no one is beyond the need to double-check the historical record, when a Jefferson demonstrates that not all atheists are closed-minded, insufferable prigs and when I see an individual who previously couldn’t argue his way out of a paper bag using Ockham’s Razor to slice and dice an interlocutor.

So, Nienna, please simply regard me as intellectually autistic, take the columns for whatever they happen to be worth to you and don’t worry about it. If you wish, if you believe there is some benefit to the ideas I am expressing, feel free to provide appropriately dumbed-down, kabuki-boxed translations on your blog for the Three Monkey crowd.

Larry Kudlow is appalled by the unwillingness of American college students to fight for their country:

According to a Family Security Matters.org poll, one thousand college students across the country were asked whether they’d consider joining the armed services if America went to war. (We’re talking every region here—not just small, liberal arts colleges in New England with crummy football teams…)

Get this: Men came in at 14 percent with women at 40 percent—basically a 3 to 1 margin.

Why should he be surprised when his fellow member of the conservatoriat, Ben Shapiro, can’t be bothered to sign up for what he constantly tells us is a vital war to defend America.

I certainly wouldn’t lift a finger to defend this government myself. I couldn’t help but notice that when Newt Gingrich was trying to scare Americans about what Iran could do with just three nuclear weapons, he didn’t dare mention New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Washington DC, but instead talked about Boston and Atlanta.

No doubt Newt was afraid that if he had, a substantial minority of Americans would react by demanding that we supply Ahmadinejad with the nukes, the missiles and a cash incentive based on completion percentage.