Vox Popoli

Minnesota Vikings center Matt Birk will try to play through the pain of a torn labrum in his hip this season if the team guarantees the Pro Bowler’s contract for 2006, the player’s agent said Wednesday night.

Birk needs surgery to repair the injury to his left hip, which came about as a result of his early return from a torn labrum and sports hernia in his right hip. The four-time Pro Bowl center has been cleared to play with the injury with the help of painkilling injections.

“He’s happy to play when he shouldn’t be playing, but he wants assurances that he will be with the team next season before that happens,” Birk’s agent, Joe Linta, told The Associated Press late Wednesday night. That would guarantee his nearly $4 million salary that is due him for the 2006 season. If the Vikings do not guarantee his contract, Linta said, Birk will have surgery that would keep him out of action for about three months.

Guaranteed contracts are a pox on sports – one of the many reasons why the NFL is far and away the best professional league – but in this case, considering what is at stake, Birk’s request for a guarantee is totally reasonable. Considering how he’s willing to let the Vikings rescind the guarantee if he ends up needing surgery, it should be an absolute no-brainer for the team’s management.

It’s not quite a make-or-break year for the Vikes, but having Matt Birk at center gives them a much better opportunity of winning an NFC that looks very up for grabs. Birk is smart, loyal and an All-Pro center. They can’t possibly screw this one up… can they?

Constantine comments:

Frustrated with the way the world works, you simply cling to the fiction that one day — poof! — all your problems will disappear in a full swoop of inevitability. We also saw this attitude amongst the Y2K-apocalyptics and the Marxists holding out for the Revolution.

Um, I’m the one that you left-wingers repeatedly dismiss as the rich guy, remember? I’m more than content with that which God has blessed me, or, if you prefer, the hand that fate has randomly dealt me. I’m just fine, thanks.

But stick to your theory if you like, by all means. I think it works for you.

The point is that very few people are capable of seeing the cracks in the foundation, even as they widen and spread. Thus, when the structure collapses suddenly, it is a surprise to most. This has happened again and again; when the tipping point for the West will arrive, it’s impossible to say. But unfortunately, no society lasts forever and ours will be no exception. One need not anticipate something negative in order to expect it.

Thoughts From Kansas answers:

A few days ago I asked “Why don’t Republicans all agree that women have to be allowed to vote?” I was worried that people would think I was making a little straw man there…. Women are people. How’s that for an argument? Women are people, and people have a right to self-determination, and voting is how people in democracies determine the direction their lives go. Vox apparently doesn’t think much of democracy, but I’m not going to refight the battles of 1776 right now.

If that’s a straw man, you’d think it would be a lot easier to knock down. What TFK proposes is not much of an argument at all. Children are people. Criminals are people. Tourists are people. Immigrants are people. Illegal aliens are people. And still, none of them have the right to vote. Therefore, voting is not predicated on personhood, which undermines his entire argument. Furthermore, the United States is not a democracy. However, TFK is right; like the Founding Fathers, I don’t think much of democracy. I would nevertheless prefer true democracy to the fraudulent bi-factional system of false representation we now have in place.

If the Will of the People is all, why don’t we move towards true democracy? We have the technology for it, after all. The truth is that most of those who consider themselves to be defenders of democracy don’t actually want it either.

Vox tosses out bullshit statistics (Correlation between rising government spending and a women’s vote? Do I really have to explain the gross methodological flaws in any such study?) and justifies his misogyny in various ways. And Jesus Christ, Singapore and Hong Kong are not democracies to be praised. One is a subservient to the repressive communist China, the other is a repressive regime that restricts free speech in ways that are intolerable. The fact that it’s undemocratic is the least of its worries.

Yes, you do have to explain the gross methodological flaws before you can dismiss any such study. I provided the link, either demonstrate how the study is flawed or concede the point. Surely TFK would not wish to imitate the defenders of women in the labor force by making the absurd assertion that adding billions of women voters over the past 85 years has had no effect on the nation whatsoever?

The problem voting rights fix is that some people can’t vote. They aren’t out there so that we can reduce crime, or have lower taxes, or whatever. Monarchal Great Britain abolished slavery before democratic America did, but that’s not an argument for monarchy.

That is circular reasoning at its worst. The end is the entire point of voting, which is why every quasi-democratic state has a constitution limiting what the people and their elected “representatives” are permitted to vote for. And yes, if slavery is considered to be evil, then the fact that a monarchy abolished slavery before a “democracy” would be an argument for monarchy. It might not be a clinching argument for it, but it is an argument for it nonetheless.

In a Kantian framework, he’s treating all women as means to an end. That’s not moral (it violates the Categorical Imperative) and it’s not fair. If Vox were to “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law,” would he advocate restricting the civil liberties of any person if some other person would benefit from that? What if that were a universal law, that anyone’s vote could be taken away if doing so would achieve some laudable goal? What if it were Vox’s vote, or Vox’s right to speak freely?

No, I am treating voting as a means to an end, which is precisely what it is. Kant doesn’t enter into the question. Not that it is particularly relevant to the matter in question, but I do act according to that maxim. I have lived for years in quasi-democratic societies where despite being a person, I am not allowed to vote, and yet my life, liberty and property rights were protected. I had no problem with that then and I would have no problem with it now. Bringing up freedom of speech is a red herring, it is primarily Democrats, with their speech codes and campaign finance reform, who wish to limit freedom of speech.

Thinking women who value their freedom, who value life, liberty and property rights, understand that allowing women to vote is demonstrably anti-freedom, which is why many of them support my position. Of course, even more women don’t value such things, which is why they are offended, and since they are fascists at heart, would very much like to eliminate my ability to espouse such offensive ideas.

In any event, I’ve concluded that it doesn’t really matter what anyone thinks. I estimate that within 40 years, Western women will lose most of their perceived gains, including the right to vote. It took 70 years for Soviet-style Communism to fall apart, and the sterility and social pathologies of the equalitarian society cause me to conclude that it is even more precarious.

This is the most pathetic bit of rationalizing I’ve seen in a long time. For fuck’s sake, first we pretend Nazis were left-wingers and what next? Holocaust denial?

The Left has a tendency to twist its tiny little maleducated minds around vicious circles. If the Marxian Communists represent the left wing and the National Socialists the right, that political spectrum cannot explain anything from Burkean conservatism to Misean libertarianism.

What they are describing is, in fact, the political spectrum of the leftmost half of the Left wing. Where do the Fascists fit, for example, in between National Socialists and Communists? They don’t. Amanda’s mention of the Holocaust reflects the typical left-liberal’s belief that being racist is an inherently right-wing phenomenon. It would be interesting to know how she would explain these quotes from an anti-semitist and an anti-bourgeois:

“Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew — not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time…. We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development — to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed — has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry”. – Karl Marx

The bourgeois is about to leave the historical stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political. It is not merely a matter of pay, not only a matter of the number of hours worked in a day-though we may never forget that these are an essential, perhaps even the most significant part of the socialist platform-but it is much more a matter of incorporating a powerful and responsible class in the state, perhaps even to make it the dominant force in the future politics of the Fatherland. – Joseph Goebbels

It’s worth noting that the concept on the historical inevitability of bourgeois decline is an overtly Marxist one.

And it just keeps getting better. As NateM predicted, we’re now at the Irrational Idiocy stage over at Pandagon:

Neil: Communists and Fascists got into a lot of scrapes because they were barking up the same tree. Of course there is rhetoric from each group decrying the other. Communist and Fascist ideologies developed seperately. They had very different justifications, but at the end of the day they often ended up looking quite similar. If one group demands sacrifice for the Nation and the other group demands sacrifice for the people, well, if the people are in your nation then that ends up being pretty much the same thing. I wouldn’t want to be the one advocating for individual dignity and rights under Fascists or Communists.

Jesse: Neil – small problem with your explanation: ideologies that result in some similar outcomes do not, in fact, constitute similar ideologies…. a car and a plane both take you from point A to point B, and both have wheels. Are both therefore the same thing? Unless you’re being patently dishonest.

Of course, it is undeniable that Fascism and Communism are both offshoots of Marxism founded by members of European socialist parties, both require the supremacy of the State over the individual, both appealed to collective consciousness, both advocated what were considered “progressive” government policies, both were openly anti-religion and both demanded and enacted the nationalization of a significant proportion of the means of production in their respective countries.

So, given his admission above, Jesse is now reduced to asserting that ideologies which spring from the same source, were created by members of socialist political parties, have similar ideals and result in similar outcomes do not, in fact, constitute similar ideologies.

A better analogy would be to compare two ground vehicles, both designed by automotive engineers working for Ford, both with four wheels and running on internal combustion engines. One is painted red, has a four-cylinder engine and runs on diesel, the other is painted black, has six-cylinders, runs on gasoline and features a machine gun mounted on the front. It also comes with a spiffy driver’s outfit. Both vehicles share a tendency to crash and kill everyone on board. I submit that to deny that they are both cars requires either ignorance or sheer, willful idiocy.

These heroic efforts to deny the inherent leftism of Fascist and National Socialist ideology is nothing more than a desperate attempt to hang something evil on the right wing. Never mind that great men of the right such as Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek, were actively warning people of the evils of all forms of socialism, Marxian, national, Communist and Fascist, as early as 1922. As Mises prophetically wrote in that year in his landmark work, Socialism:

Nationalization of all the means of production involves complete Socialism. Nationalization of some of the means of production is a step towards complete Socialism. Whether we are to remain satisfied with the first step or whether we desire to proceed further does not alter its fundamental character.

The fact that the Fascists were not complete Socialists does not alter their fundamentally socialist character.

Padraig swings wildly and misses:

VD, you’re full of shit. Leninism was hardly peasant/agrarian socialism, and you know it. Both Russia and China went through massive spurts of industrialization, and for both regimes industrialization was seen as the goal. It was the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot who depopulated their cities for the farms. As far as Socialism being Fascism, where are you getting that from? What Fascist nation has EVER not liquidated it’s socialists?

The mere fact that Russia and China had to go through industrialization at all is the primary reason why one has to distinguish Leninism and Maoism from Marxism. Marx’s socialism was predicated on a natural and unavoidable evolution from a mature industrialized capitalist society into a socialist one; this obviously did not apply to two very backward, pre-industrial agrarian societies like Russia and China. Therefore, both men were forced to pursue creative means of interpreting Marx and modifying his principles in order to fit the square theoretical pegs into the round holes of reality.

I will admit that characterizing Maoism as anti-industrial is a poor choice of adjectives. The fact that the Great Leap Forward was a great leap backward in which the Chinese economy grew so fast that 30 million people starved and production levels plummeted to pre-1958 levels does not change the fact that industrialization was one of its twin goals. Perhaps I should have said “national pre-industrial agrarian socialism”. In any case, it was Mao’s decision to emphasize agricultural growth in order to catch up with the rate of China’s industrial growth that was the essence of the Great Leap Forward and is a complete departure from Marx’s focus on industrial production.

That last question is particularly funny. What Communist nation has ever not liquidated its socialists? I don’t seem to recall reading about how Trotsky retired to his dacha on the Black Sea.

Jesse wants to go:

Fascism is an offshoot of Marxian socialism like pro-lifers are an offshoot of the pro-choice movement. Fascism and Nazism were explicitly anti-socialist, anti-Communist doctrines that promoted doctrines of unified nations across class strata to compete with the class-struggle propoganda of socialist theory. The nascent fascist movement was, in fact, filled with former socialists who turned their back on socialism. (Think David Horowitz, but capable of writing more than one book.) It was, at best, a repudiation and address of socialism’s flaws, but it was expressly an anti-socialist movement.

As I can see Vox’s blog is filled with continual whining that nobody provides facts to combat his halfassed thoughts, I simply leave him with these quotes of Mussolini’s, and ask him to rectify it without making a total idiot of himself:

“Socialism is a fraud, a comedy, a phantom, a blackmail. The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building.

Let’s go, son. I ain’t got all day.

I assume Jesse is referring to Benito Mussolini, member of the National Executive Committee of the Italian Socialist Party and editor of the socialist party’s newspaper, from 1912 to 1914. David Ramsay Steele notes: Mussolini’s election to the Executive was part of the capture of control of the Socialist Party by the hard-line Marxist left, with the expulsion from the Party of those deputies considered too conciliatory to the bourgeoisie. The shift in Socialist Party control was greeted with delight by Lenin and other revolutionaries throughout the world.

From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. In 1913, while still editor of Avanti!, he began to publish and edit his own journal, Utopia, a forum for controversial discussion among leftwing socialists. Like many such socialist journals founded in hope, it aimed to create a highly-educated cadre of revolutionaries, purged of dogmatic illusions, ready to seize the moment. Two of those who collaborated with Mussolini on Utopia would go on to help found the Italian Communist Party and one to help found the German Communist Party. Others, with Mussolini, would found the Fascist movement.

Like Hitler, Mussolini was a much more intelligent man than Marx, and both men recognized some of the more fundamental flaws in Marx’s approach to socialism. Contrary to what individuals like Jesse appear to believe, Marxism is not socialism, it is merely the most famous subset of it. Marx himself bitterly attacked the Fabians, and Mussolini’s numerous attacks on socialism and socialists were primarily rooted in his political opposition to the Italian party from whence he sprang, not from complete ideological opposition.

In the same way, his attack on the Liberal state is an attack on the concept of the classical liberal, which in modern terms is known as a conservative. In support of this point, I note that the Partito Liberale Italiano was the right-wing conservative party banned by Mussolini in 1926.

Mussolini’s split with the Socialist Party was not a major ideological one, but a political one based solely on the question of Italian participation in WWI. And as long as Jesse likes quotes, consider Mussolini’s signature slogan: Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato. “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

Does that sound more like Kirk, Burke, von Hayek, and Mises, or more like Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao? Perhaps more definitive is to examine the hallmark of Mussolini’s program, the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle, wherein Mussolini lays out a program of:

1. Universal suffrage
2. Progressive taxation and wealth expropriation
3. Government seizure of all church property
4. Government seizure of the transportation and arms factories
5. A Soviet-style industrial council with members elected by unions
6. A minimum wage and an 8-hour workday
7. Social security (at 55)
8. Union representation on corporate boards.

Fascism truly was, as the original fascists billed it, a Third Way, an attempt to create a workable compromise between dysfunctional communism and functioning capitalism that would allow an elite to maintain a stable one-party rule. Its heirs in Europe even use the same term to describe their policies now, although it is the Chinese Communists who most closely approximate historical fascism today; perhaps fifty years from now, Jesse’s intellectual kindred will be denying that whatever the corporatist Chinese system comes to be known as is an offshoot of Maoist communism. But it is undeniable that Fascism’s roots lay entirely in the Left and it is properly described as an offshoot of Marxian socialism, not Fabianism or any other socialism, much less conservatism, capitalism or classical liberalism.

In his exhaustive summary, Ramsay finally concludes: Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries.

In answer to a question today from a left-wing female columnist, yes, I was referring to myself a few weeks ago. As I posted a while back, one of the last songs I wrote with my friend Paul was released as BPM’s first single last year and now you can download an MP3 of the radio version for free.

I wish they’d kept the cool African horn sample in the chorus, but I’m not involved with BPM except as a cheerleader. Regardless, Paul is a truly gifted musician and I have always liked his work. As for the review stating that BPM is nowhere nearly as dark as Psykosonik was, well, one guess as to why.

And yes, the line from the chorus of “Alone” does come straight out of Susan Cooper. Here’s another piece of trivia for you. Hednoize’s Dan took the title for “Loaded Gun”, their song on the La Femme Nikita soundtrack, from the lyrics of “Teknojihad”, an old Psykosonik song for which he wrote the music.

Amanda embarasses herself by defending women’s suffrage:

I considered mocking the onslaught of conservative bloggers who’ve picked up the baton that Drudge threw and are dogpiling the grieving mother of a fallen solider, each more sure than the other that they know that this man would hate his own mother for not wanting him to be dead. But it’s too depressing. Instead, a reader sent me another article by Vox Day at WorldNetDaily calling for women to give up the right to vote because voting means they have to get out of bed, shut their legs so they can walk and get thee to the voting booth, losing valuable baby-making hours. Civilization is in great danger….

Why of course women are supposedly clamoring for the opportunity to get into an unequal relationship they are legally prevented from escaping is beyond me. Then he makes up a bunch of shit about the economy that he doesn’t understand, but to summarize–incomes went down and women were forced to work because women were already working. Those who didn’t sprout penises, that is. All this means that men shouldn’t be able to retire. No, I’m serious. That’s what he concludes.

That’s quite the rebuttal… apparently citing easily verifiable BLS statistics and comparing them to government-supplied wage and GDP data is equivalent to making up “a bunch of shit”. And she wonders why I don’t think women voting is a good thing.

As you’d expect, her commenters are even more hopeless. I’m still curious to know how these poor cretins believe 21 million immigrants are a serious threat to American jobs and wages, but expect 34 million women to be able to enter the labor force with no effect on anything whatsoever. And, like a good left-liberal, she believes that ending sex-selected gendercide is a simple matter of re-educating 6,000 years of cultural tradition out of 1.3 billion people. If Mao couldn’t do it by killing 50 million people, a little finger-wagging is hardly going to do the trick. Isn’t it remarkable how feminist solutions inevitably involve someone else’s re-education?

Insular and maleducated Americans of Amanda’s ilk don’t understand that Western civilization is imperiled because they live in the only Western country with birth rates that are even close to the replacement rate. Spend an afternoon in one of Italy’s ghost towns or walk through one of the Islamic ghettos of France and you’ll soon begin to realize that this is not an abstract issue, but a serious and problematic challenge.

UPDATE: here’s another nice example. The amazing thing is how they found the Electrolyte people to be convincing. My favorite was the one guy’s attempt to cite the woman professor with the astrophysics BA as proof of women’s interest in hard sciences when she was employed by the women’s studies department and teaching classes on homosexuality in Indian film.

Orac demonstrates that he doesn’t know much about fascism or socialism:

Not that Vox’s arguments are usually all that difficult to refute, given his love of confusing correlation with causation an dubious historical analogies, but Vox seems to have attracted a posse of sycophants, toadies, and lackies (apologies to Curtis Sliwa) who descend upon other blogs that criticize Vox whenever he mentions articles critical of him. To that end, in the comments of Ed’s post, I pointed out my encounter with Vox a few months ago, when I lambasted him for a post he made in which he said that “too many women are fascists at heart,” using this as a justification for arguing that they should not have the right to vote. He then went on to blame the women’s franchise for the “West’s continental drift towards socialism.” (But how can that be, Vox? I thought you said women were “fascists at heart.”)

Fascism, is, like national socialism, an offshoot of Marxian socialism. They were attempts to correct for Marx’s obvious errors, as were Lenism (agrarian pre-industrial communism), Stalism (national communism) and Maoism (agrarian anti-industrial communism). And while correlation is not necessarily causation, when the correlation a powerful and reliable one across a variety of samples, then one needs to at least consider the possibility that the relationship is causal. As to the historical analogies, I find it interesting that no one ever seems to be able to refute them or explain why they are dubious.

And again, the obsession with Mensa. I like to “point it out”? Really? I’d like to see if anyone can cite a single example of when I’ve brought it up aside from the single line in my bio. I wouldn’t consider removing it, in light of how much it obviously bothers these comparatively low-wattage individuals.

With regards to the supposed ease with which my arguments can be refuted, it seems rather strange that it is nevertheless so infrequently done. Why people are even complaining that other bloggers do not deign to bother with this remarkably easy task. Perhaps Orac does not understand that merely asserting an argument has been refuted is not tantamount to actually doing so.