Vox Popoli

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.

In case anyone still doesn’t understand that recruiting is now the toughest job in the Army, the service missed its April goal by 42 percent. It was the third month in a row that the active-duty recruiting mission was not accomplished.

It looks as if they’ll either start bringing troops home soon or start drafting new ones. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Wave III.

Jay Nordlinger writes on NRO:

I have said it before, friends, and will remind you again: There will never be another like him. Enjoy it while you can.

In light of my column today, I found myself wondering if that is a threat or a promise?

TJ doesn’t want to get chipped:

Do you see any way around this? My first idea is to get out of this country while the getting is good.

It’s important to keep in mind that Christians have been expecting the end times for 2,000 years, and so far, they’ve been wrong every time. The historical odds are that the equation of implantable chips with the Biblical mark is incorrect. That being said, most Americans aren’t aware of how far in advance of the rest of the world we are in terms of going cashless.

Only the UK comes anywhere close to our bias towards electronic payments and you can pay cash for a new car everywhere from Italy to Norway without anyone blinking an eye, much less filing a government report on you. Until quite recently, one could buy a cell phone without providing ID as well, although that’s changed under pressure from US authorities.

But if the mark is not some sort of metaphor but truly is a mandatory cashless currency implant, at this point one would have to assume that it’s going to begin in the United States. This is because Asians an Europeans don’t like credit cards; debit cards are about as far as they’ll go, and despite the EU’s average tax on savings at 53.5 percent, Europeans still sock away much more money than Americans do. German households, for example, save 11 percent of their after-tax income compared to less than 1 percent by their American counterparts. This is tangential, to be sure, but is indicative of a mentality not likely to be easily swayed by the current marketing appeals of Verichip and other advocates of cashless currency.

Anyhow, it’s a point to ponder, since most Christians have long assumed that the USA was the last and best defense against one-world government, not where the ball would start rolling.

The Trunk writes on Powerline:

I would go one step further and observe that the little history that contemporary high school students learn (Hanson refers to it as “therapy”) is more often than not factually wrong — that blacks and women were excluded from the proposition that “all men are created equal,” that the founders believed in the rightness of slavery, that Lincoln was a racist and a politician who would change his tune depending on his audience, that the Civil War didn’t have anything to do with slavery, and so on.

I don’t know where Scott went to school as a kid, but in my Minnesota public school, we sure learned that the Civil War was about slavery and nothing else. Also, I’m pretty sure that if George Bush proposed shipping off America’s blacks to Africa tomorrow, he’d be considered a racist by people of every color. There’s no debate about Lincoln’s personal racism, which he repeatedly demonstrated in his own words.

And while slavery played a role in the events that brought about the Civil War, it certainly wasn’t the primary element involved. The fact that 35 percent of the slave “states” fought for the Union – Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, the District of Columbia and the rump state of West Virginia – suffices to prove that.

Lincoln was the great centralizer, who respected American freedoms and civil liberties, not to mention the Constitution, less than any president prior to FDR. He was, in my opinion, the third-worst American president, following FDR and Woodrow Wilson. Of course, if George Bush manages to turn NAFTA into the Union of the Americas within the next three years, I may have to rethink that rating.

Nate, if you’re so inclined, perhaps you might email Scott a few of Mr. Lincoln’s choicer quotes regarding his warm feelings towards his fellow human beings possessed of more melanin.

However, the Trunk remembers things a little closer to our own historical epoch very well indeed, as he demonstrates in this amusingly titled piece on the Star & Sickle’s two-faced approach to filibuster reform.

CORRECTION – I am informed by our resident War of Northern Imperialism expert that Kentucky did not send troops to fight for the Union as a state although it stayed in the Union and contributed money and supplies to Union armies. As this was a blatant violation of the state’s neutral position, the state legislature was disbanded and the new legislature voted for secession. However, it is estimated that three times as many Kentuckians fought for the Union as for the Confederacy despite Kentucky’s status as a slave state. In fact, Kentucky and Delaware, two Union states, were the last American states where slavery was legal and both voted against ratification of the 13th Amendment.

The key point of deception is that it has to, at the very least, confuse people. While some evils announce themselves with trumpets blaring from down the street, the more dangerous ones are adept at concealing themselves in a manner that many people will find convincing.

For a long time, I’ve found it very annoying that most pastors don’t ever stop to think, “You know, the Bible says that there will be people working to destroy my church from within. I wonder who they are?” I’ve only ever met one pastor who watches out for wolves hidden within his flock, and he only does this because he’s learned from experience.

Early in his first pastoral experience, a group of families that were heavily involved with the church began pushing hard for a restructuring that would make the pastor accountable to a board of deacons. When the pastor refused to go along with this, the families, who dominated the board of deacons, caused a schism within the church. About thirty percent of the church left, reducing it to around eighty members.

What was intriguing, though, was that two years later, the pastor learned that the same group of people had unsuccessfully tried to take over two other churches prior to his own, and had successfully managed to install a supreme board of deacons at a fourth church, the one they’d invaded after leaving his. It is interesting, I think, to note that the method of conquest was to promise the people of the church more power by giving them elections and oversight.

Mere human organizational politics or something more? The pastor told me that to him, there was a definite “hint of brimstone” about the whole affair. I don’t know what happened to that fourth church since then, but it would be interesting to find out.

Like the church, America is too powerful to be destroyed from without. But it can be destroyed from within and like that fourth church, there is some reason to believe that its enemies may already be in a position to do so at an opportune moment.

UPDATE – Spacebunny reminds me that I left out one significant fact. In the three years after the schism, the church that had seen attendance decline by a third due to the pastor’s stand on principle, was forced to move twice into bigger buildings in order to accomodate all of the new members who began coming.

tick… tick… tick….

Nihilist in Golf Pants explains the real reason for The Miss:

4. January 1999. The 15-1 Vikings are about to ice the NFC Championship Game with a field goal by Gary Anderson, who hadn’t missed a single one all season. As they line up for the kick Ben says “That f——- going to miss. I know he is.” The f——misses. Ben takes no solace in his spot-on predictive skills.

I do hope someone nearby gave him a resounding slap on the back of the head after that happened. Come to think of it, I may do it myself when I finally meet Atomizer. It’s not that I’m still bitter, it’s just that I’m still pissed. There’s a brief spasm of inchoate rage that courses through my veins every time I see Gary Anderson knocking one through the uprights for the Titans. If no one is around, I sometimes snarl at the TV. “Oh, yeah, sure, no trouble hitting THAT one.”

I am absolutely certain that someone is eventually going to prove that through some freak of quantum mechanics, wearing or not wearing your gamer has a decisive influence on sporting events.

And when they do, we’ll have to put a suicide watch on Big Chilly.

Transcendent Visions, aka Khross. Get it to me on Friday with a maximum of 1k words. Bane, my darling, is this too group-bloggish for you?

John Hawkins polls the right-wing of the blogosphere about its most popular columnists:

20) William F. Buckley (14)
18) Jeff Jacoby (17)
18) David Limbaugh (17)
17) Michael Barone (18)
16) Christopher Hitchens (19)
14) John Podhoretz (20)
14) David Brooks (20)
13) John Leo (22)
12) Walter Williams (23)
11) Rich Lowry (28)
10) Peggy Noonan (30)
09) James Lileks (36) — 1
08) Ann Coulter (45) — 4
06) Michelle Malkin (48) — 1
06) George Will (48) — 1
05) Thomas Sowell (58) — 3
04) Victor Davis Hanson (72) — 3
03) Charles Krauthammer (75) — 4
02) Jonah Goldberg (76) — 3
01) Mark Steyn (96) — 24

There’s some interesting things here. First, it seems remarkable that when the 2004 Jewish vote went overwhelmingly for Kerry, a solid 25 percent of the most popular columnists on the “right” – including two of the top three – should be Jewish. Second, it’s even more remarkable that a Democrat, Victor Davis Hanson, should come in at number four. Don’t get me wrong, I quite like VDH and have several of his books, but I do wonder if the bloggers polled have ever read anything but his war-cheerleading on NRO. And, of course, Christopher Hitchens is very far to the left as well. Somehow, I doubt that ten percent of the left-wing bloggers’ most popular columnists lean rightward.

My votes are below. I find it amusing that except for the inimitable Miss Coulter, none of my top five even made the list. I would have voted for Thomas Sowell as recently as two years ago, but he’s slipped quite a bit of late. VDH is one of the better writers, but I realized that I’ve been skipping his column more and more since his repetitive war-cheerleading went from being tiresome to instant REM generation over the last year. Also, PJ O’Rourke and Camille Paglia are still my favorites but neither are actively writing commentary and while I do have two favorite Italian columnists, I assumed they didn’t really count. Do keep in mind that the determinative factor was “favorite” not “best”, because Will, Buchanan, Brooks, Reed and Ponnuru would top my list if it were based on pure quality.

1. Vox Day (the greatest love of all)
2. Fred Reed
3. Ann Coulter
4. Jay Nordlinger
5. John Derbyshire
6. George Will
7. Jonah Goldberg
8. Pat Buchanan
9. David Brooks

It’s really funny to see that the lefties couldn’t even find 20 columnists THEY find worth supporting. Krugman, Hitchens and Alterman, despite their various flaws, are the best of the lot. The left is clearly in complete disarray; the reliably buffoonish Arianna Huffington was nearly able to crack their top ten. She makes Maureen Dowd look astute and educated by comparison.

Who’s your favorite right-wing and left-wing columnist, present company excluded?