Vox Popoli

Stephanie shakes a finger:

I wonder why you associate yourself with Jesus. You have poured out your contempt for Black women- ” fat, unattractive, unemployable” . Why associate this with Christ? Do you want to make His name more hated? Do you hope to make all Black women loathsome to themselves? Are good old boys patting you on the back? You are really on a roll. How clever that you get to appear as if you are a defender of Black infants while heaping derision on their mothers whom you so ably describe as less than animals. Why not leave Jesus out of this little enterprise which clearly is not His?

As you enjoy the applause of a well-fed, White and demonically led constituency, remember whose approval you do not have. Remember who has vowed to humble lofty eyes and destroy arrogant mouths. You have scorned the image and likeness of God. You have failed to recognize Christ in His distressing disguise. You have mocked the Blood that was spilled to save these “fat, unattractive unemployable” women. Tremble. Repent.

Now I did not see this one coming… I wonder if she would have liked it better if I hadn’t defended those innocents whom those women are destroying. She must be pure death on critics of Herod; I never considered the possibility that he might be the good guy in the Christmas story.

And I’m truly sorry if my errant Super Bowl prediction led anyone astray. Being off by a point is really inexcusable….

Scott Adams on how to be a henpecked man:

The biggest relationship mistake you can make is to assume that because you have some special training or knowledge on a topic, that your opinion should be extra important. You could be the world’s most respected expert on insects, for example, but if your mate insists that caterpillars grow into chipmunks, there will be no talking him or her out of it. You could try saying, “I have a doctorate in bugs, I know what I’m talking about” but your mate will hear “I am an overbearing ass pimple who doesn’t know a fly from a suspicious mole.”

So forget about how much you know, or how smart you think you are, or how much extra information you might have recently collected. That will not help you. Instead, I offer you the only solution: The WCM Method.

WCM stands for Who Cares Most. If you want your relationship to have a chance, defer all decisions and interpretations of fact to the person who cares the most.

This is simply a combination of the “Yes, Dear” method of relationship management with the old adage about squeaky wheels and grease. It’s not exactly surprising, since Scott Adams is a classic Gamma Male who can barely find a date despite the advantages of intelligence, great wealth and fame. I’d no more take his advice on this sort of thing than I’d ask a childless lesbian feminist for advice on child-rearing, or a homeless man for advice on derivatives.

(Don’t get me wrong, I very much like Mr. Adams’ blog and his cartoon, I simply suspect his mastery of the opposite sex isn’t exactly on par with Derek Jeter or Mick Jagger.)

If one must follow an Adams on the matter, John’s advice about refusing to bow to the dictatorship of the petticoat is rather superior, both for individuals and society at large. The sexual dichotomy is this: the man who accepts female abuse in pursuit of pleasure will soon find himself left to his own devices. Never forget that there are plenty of girls on the girl tree.

Peter King lauds the NFL’s choke artiste supreme:

I think I applaud Peyton Manning’s selection as the NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year…. The best thing he said this morning at his news conference was about the advice he often gives kids: “Take 10 seconds and think: What is the right thing to do?” he said.

Well, no wonder he kept getting sacked by Pittsburgh.

G guesses correctly:

I think it’s now safe to assume that Vox is using a cracked version of 3D Max.

And the reasons are several, most of them federal. Actually, it really boils down to one reason: Autodesk is the most reliably hateful company in the world. I own seven legitimate copies of 3DS Max, plus seven legitimate upgrades. Older versions, but completely functional and our software worked well with it, along with a slightly newer version (3) that had a feature we needed to use.

When I wanted to upgrade to a newer version, I was informed that our versions were now worthless, and that I would have to purchase brand new copies of the latest version, as if I had not paid full retail on the original seven copies and upgrades. Furthermore, I could not purchase version 3 either as it was no longer available. This left me with three options:

a) Do nothing and remain inoperative.
b) Pay lots of money for new versions of software I already own, knowing that they will not work and thereby remaining inoperative.
c) Get a cracked version of 3 and keep trucking.

Needless to say, we went with option 3. No-IP 1, Pro-IP 0 on the innovation front. We’ve since updated our software and are using a newer cracked version, (which they won’t let us buy either, since it’s not the latest), for the very good reason that the latest version broke a feature that we require. No-IP 2, Pro-IP 0. If we were to respect IP law, we’d have been dead in the water twice now. So much for the pro-IP innovation argument.

I’d be interested to know how this could be considered theft, by the way, as in addition to the obvious challenge to demonstrate physical loss, I am using a product that the copyright holder has informed me no longer exists and has no value whatsoever. By the way, I should mention that I am not attempting to justify anything here, as I would cheerfully burn down Autodesk headquarters with every Autodesk employee in it. Autodesk is the very last company with whose IP rights I am concerned, as I once worked for the company from whom they blatantly ripped off Autodesk’s pre-Windows iconic interfaces.

(Big Chilly was point man on the project, Autodesk was “working closely with him” to implement the interface in an important licensing deal for about a year, then suddenly turned around and claimed that they had been working on an independent design all along, killed the deal, and introduced exactly the same thing in their next version of AutoCAD. This was back when I had a conventional understanding of IP rights, so it infuriated me. To this day, they’re the only company I actually hate, as I still have some regard for certain people at Microsoft as well as their game strategy.)

Piracy made legal would put an end to the wealthy artist. It would revert back to the age of Mozart who spent his life running all over Europe kissing up to wealthy patrons (Electors, Emperors, Kings, Archbishops) in the hope of getting a commission for work.

The elimination of IP would mean that the only work of value would be that work which is kept private. It would be the end of pop music and the return of the choral symphony written in praise of, and for the unending glory of the Wealthy Elite Patron who paid for it because the composer certainly couldn’t make a dime trying to sell music elsewhere.

I daresay this could be construed as an anti-IP argument. Instead of catering to teenagers with disposable income, artists would be catering to a wealthy, educated and highly aesthetic elite with a genuine appreciation for art.

And we wonder why instead of Shakespeares and Mozarts, we are producing Jenkinses and Eminems.

Steelers by 10.

QB – Steelers
RB – Even. Alexander is better, but from the Peyton Manning school of performance.
OL – Seahawks
WR/TE – Steelers

DL – Even
LB – Steelers
DS – Steelers

Coaches – Edge to Holmgren. Cowher is a good coach and I like how he chews up the clock with a lead, but I don’t like how he chickened out twice in the Maroon Zone last week.

Tiny Cat Pants invokes the immutable losers’ law:

It makes me think that there are libertarian men who just kind of are powerful, cantakerous, assholes by nature, but who, at heart, are good men. And then there are men who feel powerless in the face of whatever it is they fear and who set out to adopt the posture** of “powerful, cantakerous asshole.” They’re just pretending to be what they wish they were naturally….

TCP’s reader Gina adds: I had the same thought the original post, Exador and other do…if Vox Day has to say he is dominant, and Alpha, etc., then he isn’t. That guy’s internet persona must be the most contrived bunch of cr*p I’ve ever seen.

This is a typical Gamma Girl reaction. Hiss and deprecate, but from a safe distance. Of course, the fact that one is incapable of speaking factually about oneself – or anything else – doesn’t mean that everyone else is.

The truth is that those who are genuinely self-confident about themselves or their abilities don’t bother to hide it. I find false modesty to be far more offensive than honesty; your mileage may vary. Does a 6’6″ man saying that he is tall make him short? Does a man with a net worth of USD 3 million saying that he is wealthy make him poor? This is what passes for female logic… emotional “truth” trumps factual data.

There are no shortage of individuals here who know me personally, some of them very well. As they have not hesitated to bust on me at every given opportunity – WB, you totally had me going on “Antone”, by the way – does anyone truly believe that any of them, with the possible exception of Space Bunny, wouldn’t call BS on me? (And the evidence suggests that SB isn’t completely averse to doing that here either.)

Of course it’s true that some people are completely full of it, on the Internet as well as in real life. But the fact that some people are does not mean that everyone is. I wonder what these skilled amateur psychologists would make of Matt Leinart’s recent comments: “I’m a great leader. I just have a passion for winning. I’ve lost two games in my college career. I have the will to win, the passion to win.”

Clearly, the guy has to be a complete loser to say that. And Rod Marinelli is quite obviously a quitter, since he described himself as “relentless”.

I believe there are a lot of nasty little people out there like the appropriately named Tiny who simply hate anything that excels or anyone who does better than they do. I’ve despised their pettiness and refused to bow to it ever since I discovered that people who didn’t mind my enthusiasm for my beat-up, semi-functional MGB – which I LOVED – suddenly considered the mere answer to the question “what do you drive” to be bragging after I moved up to a Porsche. And four years of keeping my intelligence under wraps in order to socialize with the A-crowd in high school and my first year of college was about three years too long.

I assert that if you’re good at what you do, if you’re so smart, so successful or so pretty that it is immediately obvious to everyone, it is an insult to everyone’s intelligence to pretend that it isn’t so.

Farah on Buchanan:

I believe foreign aid is immoral and unconstitutional. I believe it is wrong to redistribute money confiscated by force from U.S. taxpayers to any foreign government. As a freedom-loving constitutionalist who still believes in limited government as envisioned by our Founding Fathers, I believe it is wrong to confiscate money by force from U.S. citizens for the purpose of redistributing it – even inside the United States. I’m incredulous, frankly, when any so-called “conservative” – neo or paleo – attempts to justify such a thing. But for someone who calls himself a “conservative” to suggest that it is appropriate to give away U.S. taxpayer dollars to a terrorist quasi-government of a non-existent state that hates everything the United States stands for defies reason.

But that’s just what Pat Buchanan did yesterday in suggesting Hamas should be placed on “probation” with U.S. aid continuing to flow to the barbarian thugs and murderers who now control the Palestinian Authority – an entity, by the way, that has always been controlled by barbarian thugs and murderers.

It is flip-flops like this on matters of absolute principle by conservatives that has forced me to distance myself from all conservatives.

I’m completely with Joseph on this one. I like Mr. Buchanan, I think his Death of the West is one of the most important books to have been written in the last decade and I think his call for continued financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority – probationary or otherwise – is totally insane.

Americans should not be funding any foreign government, and of all the foreign-governments in the world, the Palestinian Authority should be near the bottom of the list.

On the other hand, I thought it was equally ludicrous for Clinton and Bush to be forcing American taxpayers to fund Arafat and Fatah, so I don’t see why funding for Hamas should be considered inherently more outrageous.

Shrub repeats a common myth:

Intellectual property laws are put in place to maintain scarcity of the commodity and dominion & control and if the creator is not assured control over his creation then you stiffle creativity as there are no longer any meaningful incentives to create.

This is a common myth and a wildly silly one. First, the great majority of the greatest artistic works of mankind were produced prior to the existence of IP. The IP era has produced few great writers, few great musicians and almost no great painters, mostly because IP transfers power from the producers to the publishing corporations which always reduce things to the lowest common denominator.

Second, people do not create for primarily financial reasons. It is estimated that 100 books are written for every book that is published. Of those books that are published, only a small percentage provide the creator with an income above the poverty level. The elimination of IP might harm the Stephen Kings of the world but would counter-intuitively benefit those authors who are currently shut out by the IP-dependent gatekeepers.

Technological advances are also not dependent upon IP. Consider how quickly tech goods are reverse-engineered and cheap knockoffs are produced. Apple’s IPod sales are not dependent upon IP, they are dependent upon people’s desire to own an IPod from Apple. If anything, eliminating IP would speed up the pace of innovation, as companies could not depend on using the threat of government force to inhibit competition.

And before you ask how I’d feel about my books being distributed freely in electronic format, please understand that I asked the vice-publisher of Pocket Books to publicly announce the free download of my books from their web site two years ago. They declined, unfortunately, but I anticipate being able to convince them in the future.

Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost reflects on my answer to his question about blackmail:

How can blackmail be considered a sin that should not also be classified as a crime?

When I posed this question the first time I blackmailed these libertarians by threatening to expose their “dirty little secrets” unless they provided a quick response. Because they all answered the question, the compromising photos were returned to the safety deposit box. The following is a brief summation of their responses, though I recommend reading their posts in their entirety…

Vox’s response, contra Josh, is that to ban blackmail is to necessarily engage in “thought-policing” since it is the intentions, rather than the actions, which are being judged. Your intention is to buy my silence; you are operating under the assumption that I intend to inform others if you do not pay. Blackmail is therefore inherently a thought crime since if it occurs, no action has actually been taken by the blackmailer.

As for the Christian side of the equation, he argues that “exposure is a virtuous act under Biblical principles, it cannot and should not be viewed as something negative, much less as the basis for a crime.” Exposing HS would, under Vox’s view, be a virtuous act.

All three are intriguing, though I think they all ultimately fail to be convincing. Josh’s appeal to the “right” to be free from forced labor appears to stretch the definition of both “forced” and “labor” in an attempt to cover blackmail. Under this application, moral suasion could also be deemed as “forced labor” if I try to convince a person that they should change their mind about an issue. Also, as Vox argues, blackmail laws allow the State to step on a person’s rights of privacy and freedom from forced labor.

I don’t think that Vox’s reason, however, is any sounder than that provided by Josh. If blackmail should not be criminalized because it is simply a “thought crime”, then we should also decriminalize all other forms of threat. Using this logic we could not arrest anyone for simply threatening to commit murder, they would have to actually commit an actual “physical” act (as opposed to a mental one) first. Does libertarianism really argue that the strong have an inherent political right to intimidate the weak?

The underlying problem with all three defenses appears to be how we apply the libertarian conception of “freedom.” In his excellent rebuttal to these original posts, Jeremy Pierce includes this insightful paragraph:

This is a real conflict in libertarian political thought, because it seems that anyone’s freedom will almost certainly end up restricting someone else’s. So when you try to figure out which freedoms you’re going to restrict, you have to decide it based on some factor other than the pure value of freedom, because freedom is what’s creating the conflict. We need a choice between freedoms, in particular between the freedom of one person and the freedom of another. Libertarians argue against slavery on the grounds that it’s an uncontroversial case of one person’s freedom restricting another’s, but isn’t the same sort of thing going on in all kinds of other social relationships?

I will let Josh and John defend their own arguments; they’re certainly capable of doing so without my help. The answer to Joe’s first rhetorical question is simple: since there are no shortage of sins that are not crimes (adultery) and crimes that are not sins (downloading a pirate MP3), it is not difficult to theorize that blackmail COULD be sinful without being criminal.

The first problem with Joe’s critique is that he equates the threat of committing a legal and virtuous act – letting the truth be publicly known – with the threat of committing an illegal and immoral one. (Leave the question of gossip aside for now.) I should think that to argue that a “threat” to buy an apple is in any way equivalent to making a threat to murder someone is an obvious reductio ad absurdum, and therefore obviously erroneous.

More later.