Vox Popoli

Fortunately, there are women editorialists out there who are not as hopelessly hapless as Ms Janice Turner:

When young women now in their early twenties hit 30, they will find egg-freezing mightily attractive. This is a generation of girls educated for success, who now fill our law, medical and business schools, who will not throw away their chance of glory or shorten their prime handbag-buying years for motherhood before they are ready. These über-consumers have an immense sense of entitlement, an American propensity to buy into quick, manufactured solutions to life’s deeper dilemmas, are unafraid of medical intervention or whacking £2,000 on a credit card for a holiday or a boob job. So why would they not break down the last biological impediment to sexual equality: that the male reproductive window is at least a decade longer than theirs?

And why should they, like too many women of my generation, live with a man from college to 37, own property, even discuss marriage, until one day he decides he doesn’t want babies? Well, not hers, anyhow. While he runs off to marry a decade-younger spouse, she is left stranded on the reproductive rocks. Because it is not avaricious career women who postpone motherhood until the odds are stacked, but non-commital men who can safely and selfishly bide their time.

So, those women who “will not throw away their chance of glory or shorten their prime handbag-buying years for motherhood” are not postponing motherhood? And while it’s not selfish for a woman to bide her time, it is for a man to do so? And why shouldn’t a man leave a woman any time he wants, any time he feels like it? After all, we are assured by the many women’s journals that abandoning an unwanted relationship is one of the most positive and empowering actions an individual can take.

Aren’t you simply delighted to know that thanks to the successful campaign of the British suffragettes – prior to their joining and founding various fascist organizations, of course – Ms Turner possesses the right to help determine the makeup of the next British government?

Democracy is bad enough. Limited, representative quasi-democracy with universal suffrage is a destructive, tragi-comic farce.

Between Mr. Adams and myself:

Have you ever noticed that the heads of state that oppose the United States are always crazy? Take the Iranian President Ahmadinejad for example. He believes 9/11 might have been orchestrated by the U.S. government. That makes him either certifiable crazy or possibly French….

Ahmadinajad questions whether the holocaust ever happened. That would make him a person who trusts the education system in his own country, and we know how crazy that is, unless you live in America. Americans learn true history as opposed to the crap they learn “over there.” That’s how I know that Squanto the Native American taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn by putting a dead fish in the hole with every seed. I’ll bet the Iranian university system never even mentions that story….

I’m not pro-Iranian or anti-American. I’d pave the rest of the world to save my American cat. The only thing I oppose is muddy thinking. If we need to send Americans into harm’s way, I want reasons and I want a full discussion of the options. Excuuuse the fuck out of me for asking for them.

I think it would be a fantastic thing for Ahmadinajad to come to the United States and debate President Bush, or even any of the major neocons. It would be extremely educational in demonstrating to everyone that mere opposition to a particular evil does not make one inherently good. Did the Soviet Union cease to be evil when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa? And, of course, it would also serve to let the Americna people understand that the Iranian people have a justifiable casus belli against the United States that has nothing to do with Islam.

America ceased to be a positive force for good in the world some time ago; while it is still much better than the People’s Republic of China or the Islamic Republic of Iran, that’s mere damning with faint praise. Pointing back sixty years to WWII in order to claim innocence behind our current occupations of numerous European countries, African nations, Asian states, former Soviet Republic-stans and Middle Eastern emirates isn’t the reason that the violent Muslim expansionists hate us, but it is the reason that the peaceful atheist Swedes and the peaceful Catholic Italians are rightly suspicious of us and refuse to take our side.

Don’t forget that it was the USA which saddled the world with the United Nations either.

The United States is a schizophrenic empire in denial. This is the result of a bipartisan poltical elite habitually deceiving the people about its actions at home and abroad. It is remniscent of Rome without the national will to power or the British Empire without the techno-economical muscle. It seems probable, therefore, that this Pax Americana which has lasted for sixty years will collapse in a shorter period of time than either the Pax Romana or Pax Brittania did.

The surreal legend of the American amazon continues to grow:

Maj. Jill Metzger, a personnel officer, was last seen at a Zum shopping center in Bishkek, according to the Air Force. In response, 22 OSI agents have been dispatched to Kyrgyzstan to aid in the search. Col. Joel Reese, 376th Air Expeditionary Wing Commander, has sworn “not to rest” until Maj. Metzger is found.

Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic, is 75% Muslim. It’s also infamous for the brutal tradition of “bride kidnapping,” where brides are kidnapped and forced into marriage by Kyrgyz men.

I sincerely hope they recover Miss Metzger alive, unharmed and healthy. And I fully recognize that any military officer can be captured by enemy forces.

But even the most sour-faced lesbian feminist couldn’t miss the irony and black humor if it turns out that an American military officer is forcibly married to her Muslim kidnapper. Some conservatives worry about cutting and running having a negative effect on the way in which the American military is regarded? This could make it a laughingstock.

The Baseball Savant is curious:

Be honest, if you were to start competing in UFC, how well would you do? I’ll give you the context of training time and getting back a good nutriton/supplment regiment.

What’s the talley?

I haven’t watched any UFC other than the first three, but I assume that I’d probably be forced to tap out in the first round. I’d have reasonable size for a middleweight, as 185 is an ideal fighting weight for me so there’s a reasonable chance that I’d have somewhat of a speed and strength advantage over my opponent.

The problem is that I’m an upright fighter and I’m not all that comfortable when forced to grapple, as it plays to neither my strengths nor my training. I don’t know if UFC is still as grappling-heavy as it was at the beginning, but while the 12-15 locks and holds that I know are more than sufficient for everyday situations, it would be a serious disadvantage against someone who is at home on the ground, to say nothing of a Royce Gracie sort. Unless my opponent screwed up and gave me window for a KO strike while coming in, the probabilities are high that I’d end up locked up and tapping out.

I did win the only UFC-style match I’ve ever fought, however, as I choked out a friend and fellow Dragon who had beaten me for the trophy in a conventional karate tournament a few months before. We were very evenly matched in terms of strength and skill, (he had a bit more of both at the time), but in the shoot fighting match I think my speed and height (read: longer arms) made up the difference since neither one of us really knew how to wrestle.

I should note that another Dragon did quite well in one of the UFCs, I think he came in second in the light heavyweight class, but he could not only kick my ass without much effort, he was a formidable jiujitsu wrestler as well, so I don’t see how that’s useful information.

In any event, I have zero desire to enter the Octagon these days and I don’t think Spacebunny would regard it with favor either.

This is why I consider Bill Simmons to be a sports fan who happens to write for ESPN, not a sportswriter:

To the dumbest round of preseason stories: glowing features about Art Shell’s coaching comeback with the Raiders, which proved the age-old adage, “If you let enough time pass in sports, people are bound to forget just about anything.” Shell’s 14-year absence from the sidelines had nothing to do with color; he was a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE game coach. Do you know why we started using the phrase “bad clock management”? BECAUSE OF ART SHELL!!!! During the last two minutes of a half, Art Shell’s math skills made Herm Edwards look like Will Hunting. Really, nobody remembers this? For God’s sake, that’s why he got fired! That’s why I’ve been making “Art Shell School of Clock Management” jokes in my column for the past 10 years! That’s why he hasn’t worked since!

Everyone forgets this, too, but those Raiders teams were almost criminally loaded; it’s astounding they never appeared in a Super Bowl, although they did end up going down as the greatest Tecmo Bowl team of all time. In real life, they committed 12-15 penalties per game under Shell and were a mortal lock to blow any close game…. Unfortunately, no channel shows old Raiders games from the Art Shell Era, so nobody remembers how he stood frozen on the sidelines as the announcers said things like, “Wow, ANOTHER holding penalty on the Raiders; that’s their 10th today!” and “I’m not sure Art Shell knows that you can’t carry over timeouts from one half to the other.” Watch what happens this season. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Except for the hardcore baseball analysts, the sports media grasp of recent history is almost as bad as the mainstream media’s grasp of national and world history. As the Sports Guy points out later in the piece, the combination of a terrible game coach with the dumbest quarterback in the league should make for an fascinating season. This is why I didn’t draft any Raidess… throw in Randy Moss getting frustrated by Week 5 and you’d have to think that the Bay Area would feature the worst two teams in football if it weren’t for the ongoing debacle that is the Houston Texans.

But I don’t think the Sports Guy has to worry about a lack of material this year, even with the absence of the Mikes. I mean, the season hasn’t even begun yet and we’ve already got starting quarterbacks being benched and naked Lions coaches being arrested. As for the latter, the only thing missing was that Matt Millen or his wife weren’t somehow involved.

Forget the NBA, I love THIS game!

The Telegraph addresses the abhorrent concept of the wifely duty:

Why is it suddenly fashionable for women to brag about how little sex they have with their husbands? Because in their quest for independence, writes the provocative American writer Caitlin Flanagan, today’s exhausted working women have neglected one thing…

So pity the married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day’s end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual manoeuvre, and still seething over his failure to wipe down the worktops after cooking the kids’ dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his email, catch a few minutes of Match of the Day and call it a night.

Given the curious alchemy of feminism, which transforms anything women choose to do into a crucial element of liberation doctrine, confessing that one has given up sex has become a very right-on and empowering act.

Perhaps you’re more likely to wind up in a sexless marriage if you’re foolish enough to marry a career woman, but at least you can count on getting screwed in the divorce.

I’ve never quite understood why some women get their thongs so twisted about the idea that there is a sexual duty attached to marriage. After all, no one is making anyone get married these days. I’d like to see how many men would still marry if their fiance informed them that she did not see providing sex as her responsibility. I’m guessing that figure would be below 5 percent.

What I find weirdly irrational about most married women, even the more traditional wives, is their screwed up sense of priorities. No wife has a problem with her husband eating at a restaurant or hiring a cleaning lady, and yet many of them place a higher priority on everything from cooking, cleaning and watching TV than on having marital sex. It makes no sense, especially in today’s pornotopia.

I repeat… why do sports editors insist on foisting this ignorant self-centered Chick Split on us? Perhaps you recall what I said last time about the lunacy of assigning women with no interest in sports to write about them for a sports page read primarily by men:

I’m a 26-year-old woman born in upstate New York, raised in bucolic Connecticut suburbs and educated by friars in brown robes at a small college in the Berkshires. I listen to public radio. I drink nonfat lattes while thumbing through the L.A. Times in black, plastic-framed reading glasses. I display a Human Rights Campaign bumper sticker on my car. I had a vegetarian phase.

I hate to pigeonhole myself, but I’m not supposed to like the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I’m supposed to think it’s barbarically primal, and offensive, and artless.

But you met me at a very strange time in my life.

After my first trip to Las Vegas, my attitude is different. I was completely riveted by UFC 62.

Short Translation: “ohmigod, you would totally think that i’m, like, so above that icky boy stuff, but, like, i actually liked it! can you believe it?

Subtext: “I’m a college-educated career woman and feminist with all of the approved female sensitivities pursuing a media career, so please cut me some slack and understand that I’m being ironic when I pretend to like this grotesque exhibition of neanderthalic male violence to which my patriarchist editor sent me only in order to keep my job. Sweet goddess, if they don’t put me on camera within six months, I swear by Gaia’s gargantuan vulva that I’m sending another application to the New York Times Style Section.”

Seriously, ESPN couldn’t find a single writer anywhere in the country who actually follows UFC? I don’t follow it at all, and even I watched the first four.

Catkiller! comments asthe Original Cyberpunk explains a principle of union labor:

I worked for the parks commission for two summers chalking and raking baseball fields and keepign stats. I always had a deadline–game time. The cool thing was doing girls’ softball twice a week. Since I did the write-ups for the paper, there was always a group of desperate girls around me after games.

So, who wants to break it to him?

Another from the “Women are fascists” department:

The confrontation at Hewlett-Packard started innocently enough. Last January, the online technology site CNET published an article about the long-term strategy at HP, the company ranked No. 11 in the Fortune 500. While the piece was upbeat, it quoted an anonymous HP source and contained information that only could have come from a director. HP’s chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, told another director she wanted to know who it was; she was fed up with ongoing leaks to the media going back to CEO Carly Fiorina’s tumultuous tenure that ended in early 2005. According to an internal HP e-mail, Dunn then took the extraordinary step of authorizing a team of independent electronic-security experts to spy on the January 2006 communications of the other 10 directors—not the records of calls (or e-mails) from HP itself, but the records of phone calls made from personal accounts. That meant calls from the directors’ home and their private cell phones.

When feminists tell everyone that the business world needs more female executives because they will do things differently than their male counterparts, it would be helpful if they would explain precisely what they mean by that.

Ann Coulter’s support of Tony Blair is the one position she has ever taken that I cannot at least somewhat defend. Go, and take Cool Brittania and George W. Bush with you:

“Tony Blair’s administration has been dealt what may turn out to be a fatal blow by the resignation of seven members of his Government.Tom Watson, the under-secretary of state for defence, wrote to Mr Blair this morning telling him that it was no longer in the interests of Labour or of the country for him to remain Prime Minister. This afternoon six parliamentary private secretaries – MPs on the lowest rung of the Government ladder – also handed in their resignations.”

I hope this will be Blair’s political death knell. He combined the worst traits of Bill Clinton with those of George W. Bush. Not only did he destroy the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, but he put Britain well on the road to becoming the EU province formerly known as Britain. May 31, 2007 is not soon eough to get rid of the man.