Vox Popoli

It has become apparent that I am going to have to reform the government of the United States. Frankly I’d rather remove one of my lungs with a ballpoint pen. Still, I’m nothing if not perfervidly public-spirited. I will not stand around like Nehru fiddling while Rome burned. Noblesse oblige, that sort of thing.

To begin, we have much too much democracy. We need to discourage people from voting. In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school Marxist society.

At least eighty percent of the electorate lives in blank medieval darkness regarding any matter of public policy or history. They might as well vote on the incisions needed in cardiac surgery as try to govern themselves. Poll after poll shows that even graduates of America’s pathetic Halloween universities (where the young disguised as students are hornswoggled by mountebanks disguised as professors), which means most of the universities, do not know who fought in WWI, or within a century when the Civil War took place, or who Galileo was. These are the better informed. The rest barely know what century they live in.

Unalloyed ignorance is not an obvious qualification for governing, despite all appearances.

Only two possible reasons exist for universal suffrage, both bad. The first is that if you let idiots vote, the Democrats will sometimes be elected. That is, it is a sort of affirmative action for the Democratic National Committee; this is perhaps slightly more desirable than, say, price supports for hemorrhagic tuberculosis. The only good thing that can be said about Democrats is that, when they are in power, the Republicans are not.

The second reason is that, in principle, the idiot vote will keep idiots from being maltreated by the bright. It does not, however, keep the bright from being maltreated by idiots, who are far more numerous. They run the schools, for example, which is why students often can’t read after twelve years.

OLD MAN’S WAR
by John Scalzi
Tor Books
Rating: 7 of 10

Style: 4 stars
Story: 3 stars
Characters: 2 stars
Creativity: 4 stars

Those of you who remember the Electrolite affair, wherein a small horde of science fiction and fantasy writers discovered, to their horror, that not everyone in the SFWA is in sync with their androgynous vision of humanity, may recall Mr. Scalzi as one of my foremost critics at the time. Unlike many of his socially maladjusted peers, however, Mr. Scalzi is capable of distinguishing between an opposing point of view and the individual who holds it and we engaged in a friendly post-contretemps exchange of emails in which I volunteered to review his latest novel, OLD MAN’S WAR.

Having recently re-read GLORY ROAD and HAVE SPACE SUIT WILL TRAVEL, I can state with some delight that Mr. Scalzi is as close to resurrecting Robert Heinlein as we are likely to enjoy without serious advances in the black art of necromancy. OLD MAN’S WAR is both stylistically and thematically informed by Heinlein, especially STARSHIP TROOPERS, but manages to be so without being a thinly disguised ripoff. In this book, Scalzi wisely dispenses (for the most part) with the usual authorly fixation on Making A Point, instead focusing on enthusiastically telling a military adventure tale that entertains the reader. There are one or two twists that come as a genuine surprise, and when he does mix a little sentiment into the melange, he does so rather deftly, in a manner that enhances the adventure tale instead of detracting from it.

Style: Definite points for managing to pull off the forthright Heileinesque prose, which so many have attempted and failed. Scalzi is a straightforward writer and his strength is descriptive simplicity. There are a few rough spots in the early going – for example, Scalzi is unable to resist the all-too-typical dialogue where an unbeliever lectures the crude caricature of a believer using his superior knowledge of the Bible – but he quickly settles into a groove and lets the reader relax and get carried away by the story.

Story: Space opera, to a certain extent, but good space opera. Or perhaps space infantry opera would be a better term. Scalzi wisely eschews long and boring descriptions of how every piece of technology works in favor of moving the story along. And the story is a good one, revolving around the idea that technological advances now allow old and decrepit individuals over the age of 70 to be rejuvenated, albeit at the cost of joining Earth’s galactic infantry. Given this unique blend of Golden Age feel and geriatric plot, one might call it the first “rejuvenile” novel. Nicely plotted and with plenty of action, OLD MAN’S WAR is in some ways more coherent than its classic predecessor, STARSHIP TROOPERS.

Characters:: This is probably the weakest link of the book. While Scalzi makes some effort to provide motivations for his characters, only the protagonist and, ironically, a character who knows next to nothing of herself, come across in full-color. The crude bigot who gets his, the delightful gay man, the crusty drill sergeant, the overenthusiastic fool and the sexually uninhibited beautiful women are all oft-seen staples of SF fiction and they’re simply plugged in as required here. That being said, they’re no more cardboard than one sees in most novels today and they serve their purposes well.

Creativity:: It is very hard to come up with a new spin on anything these days. Scalzi does so and he does it with that effortless ease that causes one to shake one’s head and marvel that no one had thought of it before. His plot twists are also well-conceived and based on a logical extension of the technological innovations around which he’s built his story. This isn’t the mind-blowing originality of Stross here, but in my opinion, it’s nearly as hard to come up with a genuinely new twist on a classic tale as it is to simply throw all the rules out and start from scratch.

Text Sample: Dr. Russell smiled. “Mr. Perry, when you signed up to join the army, you thought we’d make you young again, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Everybody does. You can’t fight a war with old people, yet you recruit them. You have to have some way to make them young again.”

“How do you think we do it?” Dr. Russell asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Gene therapy. Cloned replacement parts. You’d swap out old parts somehow and put in new ones.”

“You’re half right,” Dr. Russell said. “We do use gene therapy and cloned replacements. But we don’t ‘swap out’ anything, except you.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I felt very cold, like reality was being tugged out from under my feet.

“Your body is old, Mr. Perry. It’s old and it won’t work for much longer. There’s no point in trying to save it or upgrade it. It’s not something that gains value when it ages or has replaceable parts that keep it running like new. All a human body does when it gets older is get old. So we’re going to get rid of it. We’re getting rid of it all. The only part of you that we’re going to save is the only part of you that hasn’t decayed — your mind, your consciousness, your sense of self. “

Dr. Russell walked over to the far door, where the Colonials had exited, and rapped on it. Then he turned back to me. “Take a good look at your body, Mr. Perry,” he said. “Because you’re about to say goodbye to it. You’re going somewhere else.”

“Where am I going, Dr. Russell?” I asked. I could barely make enough spit to talk.

“You’re going here,” he said, and opened the door.

From the other side, the Colonials came back in. One of them was pushing a wheelchair with someone in it. I craned my head to take a look. And I began to shake.

It was me.

Fifty years ago.

Note: this is not part of the review, but I would be remiss if I failed to note my great personal amusement that my accusation of Mr. Scalzi’s apparent rectal fixation during the Electrolite dustup appears to have been well-founded as it is rather strongly supported by the text of this novel.

The White Buffalo casts aspersions:

Liar liar pants on fire VD!

The last time VD and I went out to a bar, I ordered a beer and got a phone call. It was two fer night, so they put two nice big glasses of Harp down in front of me. Upon finishing my quick call, I turn just as the waiter delivers two Blue Hawaiians for Vox and the whole of the bar sitting population turns and raises their eyebrows. I promtly announce loudly that those electric blue concoctions are the gayest drinks I’ve ever seen. Vox shurgs his shoulders, states simply that he can’t get them in his local bar, pushes his little umbrella aside, and takes a healthy sip.

Actually, you got one minor detail wrong, hornbrain. My electric blue beverages had swords in them, not umbrellas, and I asked the bartender if I could have little umbrellas instead. The bartender just raised his eyebrows and shook his head with a very dubious expression on his face, which made you nearly choke on your Harp.

It takes a real man to order a chick drink.

Another funny Blue Hawaiian situation was when I was in downtown Minneapolis one evening. My car was hung up in traffic when someone started pounding on the window – it was the Blue Hawaiian guy. He said “wait here a second”, ran into Jim and Billy’s place and came out a minute later with a Blue Hawaiian. I said “thank you very much” and took off with it.

The best part was taking a big sip, looking over at my dumbfounded date and saying “what?”

Plagiarism is one of the worst accusations to be made of a writer. Morgan of the Lake has now seen fit to twice accuse me of doing so, so I think it’s worthwhile to compare my 2004 column “How to Argue Like a Liberal” with an Internet post that preceded it by eight years, “How to Argue Like a Creationist“. I note that I had never seen this piece prior to today, and while the construction of the title is not particularly original, everything else was written solely based on my experience of arguing with a very liberal friend.

The first point is from my column, the older one is in italics.

1. Make an untrue statement, preferably on the subject of something about which you know nothing.
1. Make outrageous claims, but don’t dare to support them. Make other people prove them wrong.

2. Express astonishment that your source could possibly be inaccurate.
2. Keep repeating your claims. People will believe them eventually.

3. Demand what motivation your source would have to lie.
3. If someone asks you specific questions about one of your claims, make up answers.

4. Assert that the other party’s inability to articulate this motivation is tantamount to proof that your source is not lying.
4. When presented with evidence that contradicts your claims, trivialize it. Say, “ha ha! you only presented X pieces of evidence!” Hope they won’t notice that you presented none.

5. Question the motivation of the contrary source.
5. When caught in an error, redefine the English language to accommodate the error.

6. Argue that all sources are equal and that therefore the contrary source is irrelevant.
6. Refuse to provide references for any claim unless at least 10 people ask for them.

7. Change the subject.
7. When producing your reference, assuming you have one, provide a vague citation with no page numbers or publisher information.

I think it should be fairly clear that despite the obvious similarities inherent to the subject, my column contains two step-by-step 7-point processes describing an argument between two people whereas the other piece is simply a list of 25 randomly listed points for use in a group setting.

Is it plagiarism or does MOTL simply not understand the English language? You be the judge. I further note that Tom Tomorrow appears to be guilty of similar “plagiarism” in his “How to Argue Like a Conservative” cartoon of February 22, 2005.

Morgan of the Lake doesn’t get it:

I particularly enjoyed SB’s diatribe – which I guess was her only other significant intellectual contribution other than offering to be covered in oil. Then I realized that her italicized comments aren’t even hers! I’ve read the exact same words a number of times on other forums.

Yes, so have I. No doubt the plagiarizing little minx stole it from here.

Morgan adds:

To the people here who want to see women stripped of the vote, it’s never going to happen, no matter how bad you want it to. The women like SB and Jeanne who feel too stupid to make such decisions always have the option of not voting and I’m sure they will.

This actually made me laugh out loud. You see, Morgan, it absolutely will happen, in fact, we are on the track to this now, although not in the manner I have recommended. Once women are successful in realizing their goal of establishing a government where collective security is finally given firm precedence over individual liberty, one of three things will happen.

1. All voting will permanently end. This is the Chinese/German/Kampuchean model.
2. Voting will not only be permitted but required, but voting is meaningless as it is nothing more than a legitimizing stamp on the ruling party. This is the Soviet/Zimbabwean/Egyptian model.
3. Voting for a wide variety of parties will be permitted, but voting will be meaningless since all significant legislation will be passed by a superlegislature of unelected bureaucrats. This is the new European Union model.

I would say that we have quietly evolved into a crude variant of (2) while all indications are that we are headed quickly towards (3).

BR informs me of a few Bush-related prophecies:

Anyhow, what God said through Kenneth Copeland is that 2004 was the Year of Fullness and the year 2005 is the Year of Overflow. Us Christians are going to get our rewards and the sinners also reached the Year of Fullness for their sins and then they are going to be punished for their sins. God was going to punish those who did not vote for George Bush, so it is very possible God spoke to the preacher and he kicked out the people who did not vote for President Bush. God said His Children would listen to Him and vote for the person He picked and He picked George Bush. If you didn’t hear that, then you aren’t listening to God. There is something missing in your walk with Jesus and I tried to tell you about that, before.

It’s true, I didn’t vote for George Bush. How can I argue with that? I’m not surprised that something is missing, I guess I’m just kind of surprised it turns out to be that. I’m afraid haven’t been reading my Bible very much either, but what is that compared to turning my back on God’s chosen leader?

“The Spirit of the Lord says Now that you have put the man that I have chosen into the White House… and you did… I will send you an unusual fire. I will send you an unusual rain. I will send you an unusual measure of My Spirit says the Lord…
…For you have raised up a gatekeeper over this Nation, George W. Bush. Though many do not agree with the way he is, I raised him up to pray. I raised him up to open up the gates of righteousness. I raised him up that he may open the floodgates, that heaven may bring forth a blessing upon this Nation.
Fallujah, there is a battle that will come to a swift end. For God will honor His President and give a swift victory in Fallujah. For as Arafat slips into eternity, I’m raising up a new generation that shall bring a short period of peace. And that short period of peace will give me access into the land that they call holy. Watch me, for the great victory that shall come before January in Fallujah and the regions surrounding Iraq, you will see it and they will not believe it. They will say it’s impossible, it’s impossible, but God says how can it be impossible when you have elected a gatekeeper that shall watch over this Nation with prayer and with praise? That’s why you shall be honored – Fallujah!”

I don’t really recall that Fallujah was ever in doubt. I mean, on the one hand, we had the most feared fighting force since the Waffen-SS with armor support and air supremacy, on the other, a few barely trained guerilla fighters armed with AK-47s and old Russian rocket launchers. But perhaps I simply failed to note its significance and the Creasy estate will soon be releasing 16 DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WORLD, with Fallujah taking its rightful place beside Marathon, Arbela, Hastings and Waterloo.

(Dated 2/11/2005) The Spirit of God told me to tell you “He will root out and pluck out the corruption that exists in high places in the politics of this Nation. And every accusation that comes against the President, an accusation that is not warranted, that is not of the Spirit, that arises, I will expose two that are corrupt within the political system, pluck them out, expose them, take their clothes off so that they are naked before the people. For this shall not continue in this Nation. For I have raised this Nation up as a righteous Nation. I am raising up Daniels in Washington, D.C. Daniels that will explain to the King how he should act and how he should live. I want you to know that Daniels are being raised up in the schools and in the Universities. Watch, in the next three months for the corruptions that are going to be exposed and every accusation that rises against those that are placed in high places, there will be two that I will undress. There will be two that I’ll expose and I will clean the house so that righteousness will prevail in this Nation, says the Lord.”

Tom DeLay? Although if someone is getting undressed, you have to assume that either a Clinton or a Kennedy is involved. In any case, I suppose shouldn’t express my doubts about the veracity of this last prophecy. There’s still one more day before the three months are up.

The thing that always makes me wonder about this sort of thing is this. If God picked George Bush, then didn’t he pick Bill Clinton too? I don’t seem to recall a lot of conservative Christians beating on that drum six years ago.

John Derbyshire writes on NRO:

If your national economy consists of a large private sector and a large public sector, and if neither big political party is nakedly hostile to either, or looks like doing serious harm to either, then politics comes down to a dull, wonkish tussle between those who think that the private sector is over-regulated and those who think the public sector is under-funded. Right now in Britain the economy is humming along nicely; the welfare state is in reasonable working order; and the public-private mix in life services like health, education, and pensions seems to offer about as much choice as people want.** Center-left or center-right? A state that occupies 40 percent of the national economy, or one that occupies 38 percent? Why change?

There isn’t much room in there for a strong, principled conservatism. Nor do the British seem to want such a thing. Look at those voting figures. Since the Lib-Dems are to the left of Labor, and most of the little nationalist parties are even further left than that, the vote breaks down as one third for conservatism — the much diluted conservatism of the post-Thatcher Tories — and two thirds for everything further left. Apparently our cousins across the pond are pretty happy in their Old-Europe-trending welfarist consensus. Real conservatism is dead in Britain.

Is it any better off here in the USA? Hardly. Executive, legislature, judiciary — where can we look for strong promotion of, and adherence to, conservative principles? We think of our president as a conservative, but in what respects can he be said to have advanced conservatism? John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, in The Right Nation , tick off the six fundamentals of classical, Burkean, Anglo-Saxon conservatism:

a deep suspicion of the power of the state.

a preference for liberty over equality.

patriotism.

a belief in established institutions and hierarchies.

skepticism about the idea of progress.

elitism.

“The exceptionalism of modern American conservatism” (the authors go on to say) “lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke’s principles and contradiction of the last three.” All right, let’s ignore the last three of those principles and mark George W. Bush on the first three.

Definitely a worthwhile read. Some readers might remember my comments a few weeks ago about how triumphalism is the last sign before the reversal. And if the USA is going the way of the UK, it’s not terribly hard to figure out what is going to take the place of the EU in that analogy.

Ace of Spades examines the Grey Lady’s attempt to cover her nakedness:

In part because the Times’s editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolithic.

WHAT!?! THE NEW YORK FREAKING TIMES just admitted that it is LIBERAL?!? But they told us they were journalistically trained to be objective and that any perception of liberal bias on the part of their elite commentators was merely because they were smarter, better educated, more caring people than those grunting sky-worshipping clods with dirty fingernails in flyover country!

I’m frightened! Hold me, Ralph!

The LA Weekly on the latest debacle of California’s clown princess:

Judging from today’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington’s bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it’s clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences….

Still, the celebs aren’t to blame here, because they made the bad mistake of allowing Arianna to sweet-talk them into believing that they had something to say in the first place.

If one examines the writings that have survived from Rome and Athens, one seldom discovers anything worthwhile written by the charioteers, gladiators, thespians and Olympians who were the celebrities of their day. The hubristic optimism of our own celebrities in thinking that things would be any different now is more than a little amusing. I haven’t read the Huffer Puffer nor will I do so in the future, just as I’ve never listened to Air America. They’ll both be gone soon enough.

Craigp asserts that men and women are fundamentally the same:

I hold that these voting patterns backup my idea that women and men vote PRETTY MUCH equally, and that the idea that women are going to usher in massive socialism is overstateed I think one can fairly say that women are a LITTLE BIT more likley to vote socialistic but not all that much at all.

Of course, that seven-to-eleven percent gender gap between support for the openly socialist faction and the secretly neo-socialist faction in the USA is nearly triple the entire Jewish vote and comparable to the entire Black vote, the latter of which, thanks to the laws against prisoners and ex-felons voting, is heavily female. It’s worth noting, too, that the concept that women vote very differently than men for reasons solely relating to their sex is hardly new as it has been the position of feminists since the nineteenth century.

“In continental Europe, some socialists saw the demand for the women’s vote as being unnecessarily divisive in the working class movement, while others successfully fought for it to be accepted as a necessary part of a socialist program.”
– A History of International Women’s Day

It’s hard to be much more clear than that.

“Women’s support gave Blair the edge. It was women voters who last Thursday delivered a comfortable majority for Tony Blair. That is the clear message from a detailed analysis of nearly 18,000 MORI interviewees weighted to the final result. Thirty-eight per cent of those women who voted gave their support to Labour, 32 per cent to the Conservatives and 22 per cent to the Liberal Democrats. By comparison, men voted 34 per cent each for Labour and Conservatives and 23 per cent for the Lib Dems.”
– The Guardian (UK)

This doesn’t include the three percent of the vote that went to the anti-EU UK Independence Party and British National Party, both of which the British press presumes to be heavily male. There’s the magic 7 percent again, which appears to be the minimum gender gap.

“The Nazis projected themselves as a youthful, dynamic party, and Nazi members were younger than those of other parties. Yet the Nazis were also successful in picking up the votes of pensioners and the elderly, especially those whose pensions and savings had been eroded in value. This group, especially elderly women, were a reservoir of previous non-voters to whom the Nazis made a real appeal…. People were more likely to vote Nazi if they were Protestants from rural areas and small provincial towns, especially if they were from the middle classes and if they were female and young.”
– History Today

Playing off the fears of the elderly while being fundamentally dependent on young unmarried women… that does sound rather remniscent of a certain American political party, does it not?

“On the one hand, the women who voted for Hitler at the time were in the majority. Without them, he may not have come to power. They had surrendered to him like a bridegroom, just like religious women in the Middle Ages who worshiped Jesus as their bridegroom. Hitler’s success was to a large extent based on this love—the dedication and enthusiasm of German women.”
– Margrethe von Trotta, German filmmaker

A common mistake made by those who attempt to study women and left-wing totalitarians is that they concentrate solely on how the Fascists and National Socialists turned against women once in power in defining the relationship between the two as inherently negative. This is true, but ignores the critical fact that the men in the totalitarian parties are dependent upon their demagogic appeal to women to obtain the position of power required to alter the system to their advantage in the first place. For example, contrary to what most Americans would assume, the largest Islamist party in Turkey, (Refah Partisi, which means Welfare Party), has a majority of female members and is the party most popular with Turkish women.

Female representation in national legislatures:
Sweden 41%, Finland 39%, Norway 36%, Switzerland 17%, Ireland 12%, United States 11%

Pop Quiz: Of the six countries listed above, which three are more heavily socialist? And which three are relatively less socialist?

I am, of course, opposed to every part of the socialist program, most particularly the necessary ones. If you wish to fetishize some non-existent “right” to vote, that’s up to you, but doing so at the cost of destroying your country’s wealth, sovereignty, birth rate, environment and liberties while risking the murderous governance in which socialists so often engage strikes me as borderline insane.

I do, however, agree that the Revolutionary principle of no taxation without representation is an important one. Therefore, my suggestion is that if women should ever be denied the vote, they also be exempted from all income, property and capital gains taxes.

None of this is to say that women are to blame for socialism. Socialism was created by men, socialist parties past and present are led by men and men have engineered every one of socialism’s greatest atrocities. But if evil men are the socialist internal combustion engine, it is their support from women that appears to be the gasoline required for it to run in peaceful societies.