Vox Popoli

Post an Apology might soon find himself in an Austrian jail:

Who SHOULD BE Sorry Now?

This idiot, Vox Day, a Christian liberaterian (whatever that is). And all of us should be verrrry careful as the immigration rhetoric gets really scary. Are you proud to be in a country that has columnists citing the ability of the Germans to “get rid of” 6 million Jews as evidence that mass deportation works? OMG.

So, is he saying that mass deportation doesn’t work? Or is he saying that the Holocaust never happened?(!) Doggone it, where did I put that Anti-Defamation League hotline number, I know I have it around here someplace….

Meanwhile, RP means well, but isn’t exactly likely to get what he’s looking for.

I did understand your point that a removal of illegals is possible, but the use of the Holocaust as an example for how it could be done distracts extremely from the point that you were trying to make. Perhaps a better example would have been the annual removal of four million innocent children from their homes to the government schools.

I realize that you probably meant well and am very sure that you are not endorsing another Shoah. Please, for the sake of your own reputation and that of WorldNetDaily, issue an apology that admits that you were foolish to bring up the Holocaust in this case for the simple reason that, well, when you bring up the Holocaust, you have just brought up the Holocaust–and that whatever the grammar of your sentence would lead a robot reader to conclude, you have just connected illegal immigrants with Auschwitz, and for that you apologize.

For the Nth time, I could not care less what illiterates and cretins such as the sort popping up today think about me or anything else. I suspect WND is similarly indifferent. The idea that anyone should apologize for the mere mention of the Holocaust is absurd. I mean, even those Jews who were previously so quick to get their panties in a bunch over my postulating that perhaps medieval anti-semitism was not merely the result of chance took no umbrage over today’s column, presumably because they are capable of reading at a functional level.

The point is simple. President Bush states that something is not possible. There is a very well-known historical example which proves otherwise. Whether one is sexually stimulated by that historical example or enjoys moral preening by condemning it more often and more loudly than his neighbor, it does not change the fact that Dear Jorge is completely wrong.

And, since it seems to have flown right over many moronic heads, I shall belabor the point of today’s column. The reason I am against a border fence is because I oppose strong central governments and the obvious temptation such a fence would present to a strong central government of the sort that is now gestating in America.

I’ve never been terribly optimistic about the Left’s ability to read, as most of their political positions tend to indicate that they haven’t done very much, at least not with regards to history and economics.

But apparently today’s column gave numerous double-digit IQs the vapors, as they were unable to ascertain that the IDENTIFICATION, FORCED TRANSPORTATION and MURDER of six million Jews in four years by the National Socialists proves that President Bush was absolutely incorrect – and presumably lying – when he stated that IDENTIFYING and FORCIBLY TRANSPORTING twelve million illegal aliens was not possible.

Quite clearly, it is. As for those who find all mention of the National Socialists or the Holocaust inherently beyond the pale, I am certainly open to hearing any suggestions that similarly prove the case. Has anyone else besides the National Socialists been identifying and transporting millions of people lately? Does anyone else put the lie to Dear Jorge? And if not, do we simply pretend that it never happened and that there are no lessons to be learned from it? Wasn’t the whole point of the Shoah documentaries and the survivor recordings and the Holocaust museums to make sure that no one ever forgot?

Mike writes from AMERIblog:

Too bad you weren’t born in an earlier era, Vox. You’d have done so well in Hitler’s Gestapo.

Yes, I don’t even want the government to build a fence because they’ll surely use it for evil purposes. Quite clearly I’m a big fan of strong central authority.

Jairo writes from Colombia:

Only an ignorant Christian fanatic would cite the Nazi final solution when discussing immigration. Good job redneck.

I don’t think you should be wasting your time commenting on matters beyond your ken when you could be better occupied harvesting coca, Jairo.

JK doesn’t seem to have thought things through:

Did you seriously just compare deporting illegal immigrants from the US to what the Nazis did to the Jews in the 1930’s and 40’s?!?! That was NOT deporting; it was more akin to, say… killing. The Nazis KILLED 6 million Jews, they didn’t deport them. You, sir, are an idiot with no knowledge of history and an extremely limited undertstanding of the role immigrants currently play in this country.

Actually, I compared it to what the National Socialists did between December 1941 and June 1945. Perhaps you’ve never heard of concentration camps – really death camps – such as Dachau and Auschwitz. Before they killed the Jews, the National Socialists had to identify them and transport them. The point, as seems to have escaped you and many other morons, is that it is quite clearly possible to enact deportations on the scale required.

There’s not exactly a shortage of quasi-illiterates at Fark, unsurprisingly. Here’s a pair of examples:

Look at the picture and read the article 10 – 1 this guy was wearing his hitler youth boots while he wrote it… wow… just wow

All this article’s missing is praise for Mussolini’s ability to make the trains run on time.

My favorite, however, is this gem:

Your statements in this article are morally reprehensible. I cannot believe you made this claim:

“If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.”

What kind of sicko proposes torture, gassing and genocide of illegal aliens? Surely there must be more humane and Christian solutions than this. I did not realize that members of World Net Daily were also Aryans who share the same beliefs as Hitler. Not to mention the fact that it is a completely baseless analogy….The Germans did not put the Jews into concentration camps and mass murder them because they entered the country illegally and tried to gain rights, they did it because of Hitler’s Master Plan to ethnically cleanse the region and leave only the Blonde-haired Blue-eyed Whites which he claimed was the superior race. I was not aware that it was part of Jesus’ teachings to believe in White Power and ethnic cleansing…but maybe your church was different.

You are a bad Christian, a horrendous individual, and an irresponsible journalist. I don’t believe in censorship because of the freedoms we allow in this country, but I do believe in personal responsibility, and putting this kind of trash out there where impressionable Christians may read it is disgusting.

I don’t even remember what I wrote on this week. Ah well.

Whoa-oh-oh. And we hear again from JB:

Yeah, I agree it was a poor e-mail that I originally wrote. I should’ve just summarized my objection in one sentence: if it’s better for women to stay home because it reduces supply, why not keep most of the men home, too, putting salaries through the roof?

JB – who is actually a decent guy – isn’t referring to the previous email posted here, but one sent to me several weeks ago that I ignored. (You may wish to note that the longer and more meandering an email, the greater the chance that I will not respond to it. Either present a complete case or ask straightforward questions.)

While I won’t say that he now presents a good question, it is at least a straightforward one. But to address the question directly, an economy with dearth of men will not thrive in the short and intermediate terms, because economic growth depends on technological advancement. As has been demonstrated quite conclusively over thirty years of equalitarianism, technological advancement is a man’s game, and indeed, largely a young man’s game* at that.

In the long term, the economy requires more women to stay home and raise families than currently do because working women are less likely to marry, less likely to have children and more likely to have fewer children. Men simply can’t do that and the alternative, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is to import Muslims and Mexicans. Subsituting gastarbeiter for children has not worked well for the Bundesrepublik and it is unlikely to work any better in America.

*I was once invited to an elite gathering of 20 CEOs. Andy Grove of Intel was the host, and the head of Viacom was there along with several other Fortune 500 organizations. When one of the big kahunas wondered aloud why there were three young guys with leather jackets and earrings at the table with his respectable ilk, Grove explained that we were there as representatives of the game industry and the only ones pressuring Intel to make faster computers.

Now I’m the one wondering what anyone needs a 3GHz computer for. But I’m not so old that the thought of a physics model accelerator doesn’t give me a momentary thrill.

It’s not hard to understand why he’s kicking back in Mexico, watching events unfold with sardonic amusement:

From the Washington Post: “Nearly half of the nation’s children under 5 are racial or ethnic minorities, and the percentage is increasing mainly because the Hispanic population is growing so rapidly, according to a census
report released today.”

Now in newspaper parlance, “minorities” means “permanently underperforming and inassimilable minorities,” which is to say blacks, Latinos and, when anybody remembers, American Indians. It very seldom means successful minorities, such as Chinese, Greeks, white men, Jews, or Anglo-Saxons.

As we look forward to a massive slewing away from the dominance of European whites in America, what may we expect? What will these huge minority populations do? It is instructive to look at what they have done so far….

Law enforcement in America relies on having a white population that is mostly law-abiding. It has no good way of responding to large numbers of violent criminals, especially when they are backed by politically potent voting blocs. The crucial question, or a crucial question, is what proportion of the new minorities will fall into the permanent underclass? How much permanent underclass can the nation stand?

Another crucial question is this: If half the children today are of minorities, then in no more than eighteen years half the kids of college age will be. Unless they show a sudden scholarly afflatus which has not heretofore been in evidence, this means that soon the US will have to compete with China with the brains of only half the nation. This is not to mention secondary effects, such as enstupidating all schools to hide the failures of the minorities.

Here’s my prediction. Within 20 years, the vast majority of White Americans who are today so proudly pro-diversity and anti-racist will be more openly and virulently racist than was ever seen in South during the Civil Rights struggle. Those who have read Thomas Sowell or have travelled widely will know USA that daily exposure to significant ethnic and cultural differences increases tensions and the potential for violence, it does not reduce it.

Most Americans would be shocked at the way Italians discuss Germans, the way Germans talk about the French and the way the English talk about everyone, especially the “pakkis” in their midst.

Multiculturalism is a slow-acting social disease.

Dan badly needs a new tool:

Vox Day is still claiming that women in the workforce are bad for the economy. I still stand by my assertations that: (A) women in the workforce give employers more choice in selecting employees and allow for better overall employee value (in the absence of government interference in selection of employees or amounts paid to them), and (B) any drops in wage rates are compensated by drops in prices and better selection due to the increased productivity of having a larger worker pool in a free market. However, just in case there was something I overlooked, I checked the empirical evidence.

I pulled up Google Gapminder (previously blogged on here) and checked some data. First I pulled up a graph of Income per Capita vs. Percent of women in the workforce. I set the date at its earliest time and “played” the graph (this let the graph move through time). There was no correlation. I did the same for economic growth vs percent of women in the workforce (hint, put the economic growth axis on a log scale). While playing it through was entertaining, it did NOT show any correlation either. Finally, I did the same for fertility rates vs women in the workforce. Here, actually I was expecting to see some correlation, but I STILL didn’t find any. In fact, after playing through a number of other factors, the only correlations I could find were by inference. Women in the workforce correlate fairly well with time (the little bubbles tended to go up in general) and they correlate very well with Geographic Region (the balls clumped fairly closely together according to color).

Now, Correlation does not equal causation. However, causation DOES lead to correlation – unless the cause is so weak that it can be masked by background noise. In any case, percent of women in the workforce is NOT a significant factor an empirical look at income per capita, economic growth or even fertility rates – contrary to what Vox would have you believe.

I began to put together a comprehensive rebuttal, until it became quite clear that one was unneccessary. Dan’s tools simply aren’t up to the task and his entire argument is structured on their faulty foundation. This is what comes from relying on pretty Internet graphs instead of looking up the actual data yourself.

To give the most blatant example, Dan states that the percent of women in the American workforce is not a significant factor in fertility rates. However, the statistics clearly show otherwise.

Percentage women in the workforce 1960: 37.7 percent
Percentage women in the workforce 2000: 60.2 percent
Delta: 61.8 percent increase

Births per 1000 women 1960: 118.0
Births per 1000 women 2000: 66.3
Delta: 56.2 percent decrease

Far from being background noise, that’s a tremendous correlation and further investigation will reveal the obvious causation, as no one will be surprised to learn that working women are less likely to marry, less likely to have children if they do marry and have fewer children if they do have children.

As for the theoretical meanderings which these errant facts are supposed to support, the less said the better. Spurious and shallow are two of the first adjectives that spring to mind. And again, my original statement was that women working are bad for wage rates, which creates a host of other social ills. It is bad for the economy in many ways, beneficial in others and I have not worked out the net.

Back to the blackboard, Dan. You’re certainly welcome to try again, but I suggest doing your research next time.

Like all good neocons, Podhoretz attempts to point the finger anywhere but at his own crew:

As for dealing with the illegals already here, there’s a sense in which this debate has been radicalized to such an extent that the Right won’t be satisfied with a policy that does not explicitly advocate expulsion — all other policies being dubbed “amnesty” and therefore illegitimate — while the Left refuses to consider any policy other than special-treatment affirmative-action line-jumping legalization. In other words, there is nothing our politicians can do, absolutely nothing, to satisfy the activists — because neither extreme will be reflected in any kind of law or policy that emerges even from a Washington energized to deal with them.

If a more sober reckoning of political reality does not intrude here, the Right will hurtle headlong toward schism, division, a third party and all sorts of other “pox on all your houses” actions. The cost of this is what I detail in the direst parts of my book Can She Be Stopped? — the easy transfer of power on Capitol Hill and the White House to the Democrats, and particularly to Hillary Clinton.

It’s doubtful the policies she will follow as president on immigration will please anyone on the Right. It’s certain that the policies she will follow on courts, on social issues, on foreign policy, on taxes, on regulation and on almost everything else you can think of will be deeply displeasing to people on the Right. And then, as a result of the pursuit of an impossible policy of purity on immigration, the country and the world will suffer the consequences.

The potential for self-destruction is terrifying. The potential for grave national harm is worse. Please, you guys, pull back from the edge.

Mr. Podhoretz’s first problem here is that granting anything except expulsion is an amnesty for an illegal alien. If a thief steals a car, it would be considered outrageous to let him keep it as long as he agreed to take care of it for two years, in fact, it would be considered outrageous to let him keep it even if he served a short jail sentence.

Even more outrageous, however, is Podhoretz’s attempt to shift the blame from those who created and exacerbated the situation to those who are angered by it and are motivated to bring it to an end. Pro-immigration Republicans have no one but themselves to blame if the Lizard Queen outmanuevers them and steals a very popular position from them, and they will be among those Republicans most responsible for her victory, not those who rightly refuse to support a majority party that has repeatedly refused to respect their political positions.

It was clear in Mr. Podhoretz’s email to me several days ago – it was not a public discussion and so has not been posted here – he subscribes to the ownership view of voting. His interpretation is that Republicans have an inherent right to the votes of everyone who identifies themselves as being left of center, so therefore one must vote Republican no matter what Republicans do or say. Failure to do so is voting for the Democrat because this is a two-party system, all those other names on the ballot notwithstanding.

I assert that this is absurd, that the vote count starts from zero in every election and every vote must be earned every time. The Republicans have richly earned their right to return to the political wilderness, due to their repugnant behavior regarding immigration and many other matters. They will not have my support in either 2006 or 2008 and I hope the lesson will be bitter enough to prove salutary to those shallow “pragmatists” in the party who stupidly continue to insist that moving left and expanding the big tent is an election-winning strategy.

They are mere tacticians, not strategists, which is why they consistently fail to see the big picture.

Considering that the most successful Republican politician of all rejected that strategy in favor of forthright conservativism, it is amazing that so many “conservative” commentators and Republican strategists continue to cling to it even in the face of what may be an epochal defeat.

By the way, notice what I wrote back in 2003, when all the talk was of the Lizard Queen running for president in 2004:

While I have much respect for the raw animal cunning and devious creativity of America’s most famous foot-fetishist, I honestly think that Dick Morris is forgetting something about his former client. The Lizard Queen is cold-blooded. She is not a risk-taker, at heart, and she is far more prone to finishing off the sick and wounded than taking on an alpha male in a full-frontal attack…. So, the Lizard Queen will continue to lurk quietly in the gaseous morass of the Senate, biding her time, waiting for the right moment to strike an unsuspecting America and drag it beneath the dark waters of her totalitarian vision.

I suspect that moment is fast approaching. Her 2008 campaign shifts into a higher gear as soon as the polls close and all the votes are counted this November.

JB is obviously unfamiliar with my ouvre:

I predict you won’t have the balls to publish or publicly address this e-mail (you seem to be the type of charlatan who only engages in fights he can manipulate, like only publishing and eviscerating letters easily dispatched in front of your drooling fan club). But can you please explain again how it is that having women stay home from work is better for the economy? I’m sure it’s better for kids, but if having women stay home improves the economy, then wouldn’t having half the men stay home be even better, still? You seem to know just enough economics to make a fool of yourself. It is true that labor prices will go up if women stay home, but that doesn’t mean it will be good for the economy. It may be that we have a glut of labor (though with brick layers making more than college professors, I doubt it) but it’s ludicrous to say that the women in the field are exactly the people who should leave. Why not the men? Why not half of each?

Jonathan Birge
Ultrafast Optics and Quantum Electronics Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

To JB’s credit, at least he recognizes what so many feminists keep stubbornly trying to deny, that labor prices will go up if women stay home. However, I have never argued that increased labor prices will be good for the economy, I have instead argued that they would be good for wage rates and household income. Household income |= GDP. Still, I can certainly make that case on at least two different grounds without even having to seriously ponder the subject.

First, the fact that real GDP growth has grown while wage rates have not only failed to keep pace but have actually declined proves that a growing economy is not beneficial to every aspect of that economy. If the benefits of economic growth is channeled towards corporations that invest their profits outside the national economy and away from workers/consumers, the results of current economic growth is likely to be detrimental to both wage rates and the economy in the intermediate term.

Second, higher wage rates and increased household income equates to either increased spending or increased savings, or more likely, both. Since GDP=C+I+G and, the Keynesians assure us, S=I, then increased spending (C) and increased savings (I) have to lead to an increase in GDP. One seldom sees a country with low wage rates and high GDP per capita, after all.

Now, one could certainly argue that since the increase in wage rates derives from a decrease in the supply of labor, that there is no difference. But there are two big differences, one immediate and one long-term, even if the total household income was identical. The immediate difference is that due to household realities and the current tax regime, two household incomes equals more C at the expense of I(S) and more G at the expense of C. I don’t think there’s any question which of two identical GDP’s, one with larger G and smaller I and one with smaller G and larger I, is the healthier. And, I note, two household incomes with increased government spending and no net household savings is exactly what we’ve got, just as my little model here would predict.

The long-term problem with two household incomes instead of one is the birth rate. Two-income, one-kid families are going to shrink the economy in the long term, which is why every country with low birth rates is importing hordes of Muslims, Mexicans and other foreigners. That leads to other problems, of course, but that’s not relevant here.

In the perfect world of economic modeling, it would make no difference if men or women were working. And in fact, the deleterious effects on wages of women entering the work force was largely hidden until 1973, when men finally stopped leaving the work force in numbers sufficient to conceal what was happening. In fact, one could characterize the period from 1950 to 1973 as women working so that men over 60 could play golf. The BLS numbers make this clear.

But in the real world, labor is more than a mere variable and women in the work force come with unique costs all their own. They inhibit productivity, inspire a host of costs ranging from regulatory compliance to the loss of experienced and productive workers. It has been repeatedly proven that students in same-sex classrooms learn better, and I have little doubt that a study on workforce productivity would exhibit much the same results.

Why can’t the men stay home, JB asks? Well, if you’ve seen what women have done in several decades of academia and believe an economy revolving around Women’s Studies would be a functional one, then there’s no reason why they can’t. Should some brilliant man conceive a system wherein economic growth relies primarily on group discussion, personal expression and color-matching, men will be able to head home and fire up their Playstations. But as long as economic growth depends on technological advancement, men will be the necessary component of the labor force.

You see, JB, I don’t have to cherry pick the emails I eviscerate. It’s just that as an Internet Superintelligence, I’m so far beyond most of my critics that I make it look easy.

Derbyshire doesn’t grasp the possibilities:

I shall run screaming from the room if the President utters any of the following words or phrases:

jobs Americans won’t do
nation of immigrants
compassionate
family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande
good-hearted people
path to citizenship
my good friend Vicente Fox
this is not amnesty

I, on the other hand, am happy to interpret this as the required list for Dear Jorge’s Immigration Speech Drinking Game. One merely slams a shot of one’s chosen poison or a healthy slug of beer – chug the whole can/cup if you’re in college – upon hearing any of these phrases.

This is also known as the Jamie R experience. It is rumored that upon completion of the game, one may actually be able to comprehend the wisdom of the sage from the Land Down Under.

Good news on the coffee front:

One to three cups of coffee a day may protect people from heart disease and strokes, according to research which contradicts numerous studies that have suggested that coffee is bad for you.

The good news for coffee drinkers comes from a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and is based on a study of 27,000 older women, followed for 15 years.

Between coffee and red wine, I appear to be assured of a healthy old age. If they can find similar benefits to amaretto, buffalo mozzarella and Maddens, I may well prove to be immortal.