Vox Popoli

In which a mild admonition is administered to Zapata King:

And then there’s Vox. He’s allows dissent, but he does make sport of his readers. Here he’s getting rather brutal with Jonathan Birge. This, though, could just be a case of him casting stones at the high and mighty. It all depends on who is attacking who. The little guy should be given more lattitude in how he can attack the big guy. So, is this a case of equals attacking each other, or, as they say, is their asymmetry involved? Either way, we can assume that Dr. Jonathan Birge regreted his decision to send Vox an email.

Notice, though, the use of one of Vox’s favorite words. I hate that word, and I never use it to refer to women. Vox, on the other hand, uses it very often to refer to women. That’s one reason Vox Day is a punk. But punk is a soft insult to Vox, or not even an insult to Vox. His former days were the life of a punk.

Yes, punk is not so much the insult to any aficionado of William Gibson or the Original Cyberpunk his own bad self. And while I’m less openly enamored of the essential ethos of punk, Do It Yourself, most days I still live by it.

My blog creed is clear: thou shalt criticize in the mode which thou shalt receive criticism. (I except punctuation and grammar, as I simply don’t possess the Pan-Gargler’s innovative, free-associating approach to such things required to respond to him in like manner.)

In any event, I must take exception to Zapata King’s assertion that I use the word “bitch” very often to refer to women. The truth is that I usually use it to refer to men. When I wish to slur a woman, I refer to her as a “feminist”.

We shall eagerly await word of an appropriate edit. We apologize if the strong language or adult subject matter contained herein has offended any tender sensibilities. No animals were harmed during the production of this post.

Vox Popoli is an Equal Opportunity Offender.

that I killed your baby…. Unsurprisingly, the High Priestess of Cthulhu’s Coven is primarily worried about the woman’s mental health. Screw the kid. Screw the guy who would otherwise have been expected to provide for, protect and love that child. Because it’s all about what women want right now… in nine years, that same woman will probably be single and getting shot up with fertility drugs and anonymously donated sperm.

I strongly suspect that my wife’s miscarriage last year was intentional, i.e., she had an induced abortion. At the time we were both 31 years old with a combined income of just over 100K. We were married for about a year. My wife was on medication for depression and anxiety (Paxil with the occasional Xanax). The pregnancy was unplanned and she expressed a desire to terminate the pregnancy a few days after we found out, saying she wasn’t ready to have kids yet, maybe in another year. I really wanted to have a baby and was very upset that she felt this way. We made an appointment for counseling about two weeks out. However, prior to that she claims she had a miscarriage.

From the sound of his letter, I suspect he’s right that his wife is lying to him. He doesn’t really sound like the kind of guy you can tell the truth to, since the options he gave her when she told the truth were, “Have a baby against your will” or “Be harangued until it’s too late for you to terminate.”

If he harbored such serious doubts as to her veracity, this guy should have gone ahead and examined his wife’s medical records, because as Amanda clearly demonstrates, merely believing that you have the right to an opinion about your wife’s desire to murder your unborn child makes you an evil person anyhow. You’re already there, dude, might as well learn the truth.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend an immediate slashing of ties to a man whose wife secretly aborted his child, much less one who is evidently a neurotic murderess. (I’m sorry, perhaps you’d prefer “is receiving chemical treatment for mental instability and was not ready for motherhood”.) The first duty of a man is to protect his children, and that includes protecting them from their mother if necessary.

As usual, feminists want it both ways. They want women to be able to murder a child if she doesn’t want it, but they want to use Big Daddy Government to make a man who doesn’t want a child to provide for it and its mother for 18 years. This makes no sense, but then, if feminists were capable of grasping logic, they wouldn’t be feminists. Equality demands that a man have an equal right to reject responsibility for a child he does not want, which is only one of the many reasons that I reject the concept of equality.

Anyhow, I don’t see why anyone would ever marry a woman who believes in abortion rights in the first place. If she buys into that reasoning, she’ll buy into the idea that marriage is an outmoded, unnecessary and Patriarchal institution oppressive to women too. Run that one past her a few times along with a few strategically-timed Friedan quotes and she’ll soon feel guilty for even wanting to get married, let alone pressuring you for it.

UPDATE – Coven member JBR adds this:

Does my husband have an interest on whether I take birth control pills for menstrual suppression? Whether I have an epidural for my child’s birth? Whether I breastfeed? How far does his opinion hold when it’s my body?

Well, I’m sure men will be glad to relinquish any interest in that sort of thing just as soon as women relinquish their interest in what men put in their bodies. It seems to me I’ve heard more women expressing a strong belief that they have some say in what their men eat, drink, smoke, dip and snort in a week than I’ve ever heard about epidurals in a lifetime.

So remember that the next time your girlfriend makes a disapproving face and a comment about how she doesn’t think you need that tequila shot. “Keep your matriarchy off of my body!”

It’s not enough that they’re bringing the wage rate down and helping force other mothers into the workforce, but they can’t bother to spend as much time with their kids as I do with my exercise bike:

A typical working parent spends just 19 minutes a day looking after their children, official figures revealed yesterday. The startling research shows the devastating impact that working full-time has on children who hardly see their parents. With less than 20 minutes spent with their parents every day, this is only enough time to eat a quick breakfast together or have a couple of bed-time stories.

The Office for National Statistics looked at nearly 4,950 people over the age of 16 in Britain to find out what they do all day. The findings make grim reading for working parents who already worry that they spend too much time at work – and too little at home. Parents who work full-time spend just 19 minutes every day “caring for [their] own children”, according to ONS’s “Time Use Survey”, published yesterday.

A further 16 minutes is spent looking after their children as a “secondary activity”, but this means that they are doing something else – such as the weekly supermarket shop – at the same time.

While I’m sure those 19 minutes are serious quality time, it is telling that the average amount of time spent watching television is much greater. One ray of hope is that only six percent of working mothers actually want to work full time, indicating that they’re not quite the self-centered psychopaths that the one statistic seems to indicate.

Obviously, single mothers have no choice but to work, barring the sort of supportive family structure that is increasingly rare these days. And given the flexibility that the Internet provides, there’s no reason why many other mothers can’t work part-time, ideally from home. Any employer with a modicum of human decency should do what he can to accomodate such women, who are often completely dedicated to their families and make excellent employees. But to idealize the Hollywood dream of the fashionable mother with fabulous career and a fabulous relationship with the children with whom she spends 19 minutes per day is as ludicrous and as childish as a man who thinks he’s going to be James Bond.

I think we should all try to do our part in helping these women see the benefit of spending time with their children. So, any time you see children with a full-time childcare provider, be sure to address the nanny as “your Mommy”.

All the football fans have seen this one, but let’s face it, it just never grows old. I discovered that one of my boys hadn’t seen it, so I’ll rectify the situation for the rest of you. You can’t deny it, The man is a happy guy.

It will be very telling when many Greens fail to get into their usual environmental uproar over this water purity issue:

A third of male fish in English rivers are changing sex due to ‘gender-bending’ pollution, alarming research shows. Experts say female hormones from the contraceptive pill and HRT are being washed into our rivers and causing male fish to produce eggs. The problem – which is country-wide – has raised fears that the pollutants could also be contaminating our drinking water – and even be affecting the fertility of men.

Fear of the pill being banned is the great feminist bugaboo, even more so than their abortion fixation, although they don’t talk it up nearly as much since no one is seriously pushing the concept these days. But if pumping estrogen into the water supply is responsible for even half of the things that scientists are beginning to suspect, there will likely be some sort of push for a ban from serious environmental groups.

Of course, the trendy Greens, who are only enviro granola out of a strange desire to have sex with individuals with personal care issues, will leap off that bandwagon faster than fantasy football owners abandoning Priest Holmes in favor of Larry Johnson.

Is what we had over the last few days. Normal posting should resume this evening.

Those nasty Nazis at Powerline:

Dr. Goebbels, call your office

In an obscene attempt to obtain political mileage, the Democrats are claiming that President Bush is responsible for the outbreak of war in the Middle East. Howard Dean claims that the war would not have occurred if the Democrats had been in power because the Dems would have worked the past six years to prevent it. And Sen. Dodd has made basically the same assertion. Meanwhile, Rep. Jane Harman contends that the Bush administration is to blame for our poor to non-existent relations with Syria and Iran which, she says, prevent us from using diplomacy to end the crisis….

In terms of the style of its propaganda, this is a party in which Joseph Goebbels would feel at home.

Paging Michael Medved…. Paging Michael Medved! I shall watch with interest to see if the Gay Mustachio, Captain Ed, the Pilgrimess and others of their so easily offended ilk will bravely take the evil Powerline Nazi boys to task.

Oh, wait, it looks like the francophobe J-Pod is already on top of it. “The Nazi analogy is disgusting when lefties use it about conservatives and it’s no better when conservatives use it about liberals.”

Remember, no one is allowed to make comparisons to the National Socialist German Workers Party, even if the target of criticism is supporting key planks in the Munich Manifesto, annexing Austria, invading Poland or launching missile strikes on Britain! Anyone guilty of making such a comparison is also guilty of being a National Socialist.

So sprach der schwul Schnurrbart

From the Bulletproof Pimp:

Frequent sexual activity may reduce a man’s risk of prostate cancer, according to a study in the April 7 Journal of the American Medical Association. The cancer risk in men who reported more than 20 monthly ejaculations was 33 percent less than that of other men, the Harvard University study showed.

I don’t know if this is a medical argument in favor of polygamy, prostitution or pornography, but perhaps it will benefit those poor men married to undersexed women who prefer television, eating and romance novels to sex. (How anyone can claim they don’t have time for sex when the average adult watches 150 minutes of TV per day while the average sexual interlude requires 28.2 minutes is beyond me.) Pretty soon, marriage vows will revolve around control of the remote, not physical faithfulness.

Of course, it’s quite possible even a raised awareness of the risks won’t help, since pointing out that turning you down every night means increasing the risk of leaving your poor children without a father may not prove as compelling a case as might be thought if you are in possession a decent life insurance policy. And as for the impotence risk, obviously that’s not so much a problem from her perspective.

This is why I don’t have any problem with state-approved homogamy. State-sponsored marriage has proven to be a complete disaster for men and women alike, so I don’t see any point in worrying about further wrecking a broken model.

As for any Christians who find all this appalling – don’t bother to email; I know, I know, I’m taking my libertarianism too far etc – I find it interesting that we are seldom slow to condemn marital unfaithfulness, but I have never, ever heard a pastor or any other church leader criticize those who, in direct contradiction to the Apostle Paul’s warning, reject their husbands and wives for reasons other than devoting themselves to prayer.

One sin can never justify another, but when one leads so reliably to another, it seems strange to ignore what is at least a potential cause of the problem.

It’s funny, but now that I’m not doing radio,* I’m actually getting more invitations to more radio shows than ever before. The producers are always quite polite, but they often seem to be a little surprised that I’m not interested in their medium.

Actually, I find that I’m getting less and less interested in political commentary anyhow, (as if you hadn’t noticed.) When the New York Times takes five years to recognize something that was immediately obvious from the start, you have to wonder what point there is in writing about these things. Even now, unless something is reported as fact by one of the Big Four newspapers, Fox, the talk radio circuit or the ABCNNBCBS cabal, most people refuse to even consider the possibility that it could be true.

Anyhow, they’ll have to find some other way to stir up outrage among the sheep. I’m not interested in playing sock puppet.

*The exception being the NARN gang, of course. But they’re not into selling faux outrage, in fact, I don’t think half of them even know what it is they’re supposed to be selling.

From the New York Times:

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

Let’s just say I’m not particularly surprised. Three Monkey Republicans and National Security Democrats can repeat the “we are at war” and “The Islamic jihad will stop at nothing” mantras all they like, but this has never been about terrorism. Terrorism is simply the vehicle by which central government expansion is accomplished.

The idea that a powerful central government is required to defeat Islam is absurd. Islam has been trounced before, repeatedly, by leaders with less authority than your average city mayor and by generals with fewer men in arms than the chief of the NYPD.

But then, I’m not surprised that people fall for the imminent danger lie either. As I’ve written before, that old chestnut was already a classic when Marius was using it to tighten his grasp on Rome. The fact that the danger is real – Rome was in more genuine danger from the Cimbri and Teutoni at that time than the USA is from Iran and Saudi Arabia now – doesn’t change the fact that after the danger was defeated, Marius demonstrated that power, not protection, was his genuine object.