Vox Popoli

GY reminded me that I was remiss in failing to personally thank those who sent me their corrections on the PDB collection of short stories. He is correct, my excuse, as you may recall, is that I still don’t have access to any emails prior to April, so right now I don’t have those corrections nor do I know who sent them. If you previously sent me an email with corrections, please resend it as I did not finish applying all of them before the little incident with the keyboard.

The OC and I have currently embarked on a project that may be of some interest to those of you who enjoy our fiction. It’s too soon to say much about it, except that any pro-level graphic designers who are willing to volunteer their services should fire me an email. (TimF, I need you to email me anyhow about the 3D stuff – I don’t have your contact info.) This is a low-budget experiment, so the only recompense will be glory, a modicum of exposure and a spot at the head of the line when the budget does allow for art.

The Mexican Foreign Secretary says the United States and Mexico will be integrated in the future, and took issue with the Minutemen Project. Mexico’s Foreign Secretary told a group of Texas-Pan American students he envisions a day when Mexico and the United States are “integrated.”

I know the many Republicans here – even those who are not the Three Monkeys variety – don’t like to hear this, but there’s no question that George Bush will eventually be proven to have been far more worthy of impeachment than Bill Clinton ever was.

The signs are all there. You just have to be willing to look at them. The President’s unwillingness to defend the southern border has nothing to do with economic growth or being pro-immigration and everything to do with the end of America in its current incarnation.

Even the LA Times recognizes legacy media bias in explaining the failure of Air America and left-wing talk radio:

• Entertainment value. The top conservative hosts put on snazzy, frequently humorous shows. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, observes: “The parody, the asides, the self-effacing humor, the bluster are all part of the packaging that makes the political message palatable.” Besides, the triumph of political correctness on the left makes it hard for on-air liberals to lighten things up without offending anyone.

• Fragmentation of the potential audience. Political consultant Dick Morris explains: “Large percentages of liberals are black and Hispanic, and they now have their own specialized entertainment radio outlets, which they aren’t likely to leave for liberal talk radio.” The potential audience for Air America or similar ventures is thus pretty small — white liberals, basically. And they’ve already got NPR.

• Liberal bias in the old media. That’s what birthed talk radio in the first place. People turn to it to help right the imbalance. Political scientist William Mayer, writing in the Public Interest, recently observed that liberals don’t need talk radio because they’ve got the big three networks, most national and local daily newspapers and NPR.

Unable to prosper in the medium, liberals have taken to denouncing talk radio as a threat to democracy. Liberal political columnist Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker, is typically venomous. Conservative talk radio represents “vicious, untreated political sewage” and “niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive,” Hertzberg sneers.

If some liberals had their way, Congress would regulate political talk radio out of existence. Their logic is that scrapping Air America would be no loss if it also meant getting Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bennett off the air.

It’s the third reason that is the most important one, of course, and is also what’s driving non-radio media phenomenons such as WorldNetDaily and the blogosphere. And, like the good fascists they are, American liberals will continue to try to ban that which they cannot control.

Will the last straight white man to leave the Democratic Party please turn out the lights….

Pan-Galactic illustrates the reluctance of the Southern man to hit back:

She punched him the face.

He took it. I’d seen him fight. I knew he knew it was coming, and he could’ve blocked it, dodged it, or simply beaten her senseless before she even threw it… but he didn’t. He just took it.

“Look… calm down. I don’t fight girls. It ain’t right.”

She punched him in the face again, then started cussing him. She said everything you can imagine. She even started calling him a coward, too scared to fight a girl.

“Don’t hit me again. I’ve already told you, I don’t fight girls. It ain’t right.”

Red faced and seething now… she punches him again, and then she cusses him, and his family.

“You need to go home. That’s three times you’ve hit me. You ain’t gonna do it again.”

Perhaps because I was raised in the worker’s paradise of Minnesota, I’ve never understood this Southern reluctance to unleash physical force on women. How is a girl or a woman supposed to learn to control her tongue if no one is going to administer the correction that is often so desperately called for? I’ve just never had a big problem with allowing someone of either sex to experience the reasonable consequences of their actions.

In the dojo, of course, this gentlemanly behavior isn’t possible, given that the whole point of the training is to teach one to react prior to thinking. If you’re reacting to a flash of movement or the glimpse of an open window, the thought of your target’s sex isn’t going to enter into the picture until afterwards.

Outside the dojo, I’ve only hit a woman once. I’d been arguing with this psycho at a college party, a girl I later learned actually ended up in the loony bin, when she leaned forward and bit me in the chest. It was almost summer, I wasn’t wearing a shirt, and she actually bit through the skin on both sides; I could feel her teeth meet.

I was in an odd position, because I’d just been turning away to get away from her when she lunged, so my right hand was across my body and under her jaw. I threw a backhand uppercut as I rotated my body back to the right, and she literally flew up, up and away. She was laying there about five feet away, stunned, as everyone whirled around to unleash their righteously indignant wrath on a despicable girl-beater.

Of course, as soon as they saw my bleeding chest, their disapprobation immediately shifted from me to her. Some of her friends helped her exit the premises in disgrace while I endured rabies jokes and having my wound washed out with vodka. I’ve been smacked around rather thoroughly on plenty of occasions, had bones broken and been KO’d, but I’ve never experienced sharper pain than that psycho’s bite. It hurt for three days.

I’m no Southern gentleman. My only regret is that I didn’t go with my left instead of the backhand.

JR assumes a portion of the blame:

I really enjoyed your piece on men…let me suggest also that along with the absent fathers, many mothers can and did contribute to their son’s stay into boyhood. I was one of them.

As a single parent I often told my son “not to fight back” in school if at all possible. Knowing the insane policy of the school to expel both victim and bully. I brought him up to not like guns, and I wish I would have taken him to a firing range to learn how to use one. One day, when he was around 10, I saw a neighborhood black kid (who was around 15) kicking my son in the side, while his best friend stood by and watched.(we are white) That day I was awakened to reality and told him, inside of murder, go ahead and fight back with all full fury, damn the schools. IT was a little late, but better late than never.

Thank goodness my son loved sports and learned many “manly” examples from teammates and coaches.

It’s a man’s world, you guys built it, most of the time woman just take care of it.(now, I’m not putting us down, just thinking of a bell curve) I grew up in the 60’s with all the woman”s revolution crap, and I played drums for a living in bands, and lugged around a lot of heavy equipment until one day, I looked at the size of the forceps on the guys and said, “here, I’ll carry the microphones and carry my set, but I’m not lugging those huge 4560’s JBL speakers anymore.” No one said a word….

I still believe that men and woman can be equal in intelligence, but I’m always telling my x-Navy Seal husband, who never believes me, that if HE would just call when we have a complaint about something, it would get taken care of…..it’s the pitch of the voice, it’s the respect of sheer force…it’s mother nature…and to ignore it is stupid. I wish I could convince him of all the trouble I have to go through when all it would take would be one phone call from him.

Men are needed as parents. Period.

I suppose there’s something to the idea that you can’t have a mama’s boy without a mama. But then, JR was raising the boy as a single parent. There are plenty of men who have abdicated their responsibility to be a role model, in which case the mother is acting as a virtual single parent.

Living as I do in Mexico, I get mail from guys saying “Hey, what’s the deal on women? I hear things are pretty good. Come on, spill it. What’s down there? Now, what are Mexicanas like?

I don’t suggest that women in the Third World (whatever exactly that means) are flawless gems. Ain’t none of us that good. You can find rotten apples in any barrel, regardless of country or sex.

What you will find, though, is that Mexicanas do not resent you for being male. They can get cranky, as most of us can, but it will be about what you did, not what you are. They are women, not sexual halflings in search of slights as pretexts for being disagreeable. It is this, not nice legs, that constitutes their greatest appeal. As wives, provided that you understand their strengths and limitations, they are just plain fine.

I think one of the single most important things an American young woman could learn is to realize that the ability to go in search of blame and successfully pin it on someone is not a strength, but an irritating weakness. There is almost nothing more annoying than having to constantly guard your words around someone, knowing that if you give them the slightest opportunity, they will intentionally misinterpret whatever you say and assign the worst possible interpretation to it.

For some reason, young women often seem to think that this is empowering and gives them a leg up on those around them, men and women. It’s a control mechanism and I guess it’s considered empowering because if you’re on offense, you’re not on defense and that is desirable in a zero-sum game like football. But a functional relationship is not a zero-sum game, no one is awarding points and this sort of behavior makes even the most reasonable man want to grab the woman, shake the proverbial waste products out of her and demand to know if she is actually brain-damaged or only pretending to be.

I find that the most effective way to deal with this nonsense is to not only agree with the stupid interpretation, but to up the ante. For example, if a reasonable remark about the fact that a particular outfit does not fit inspires the shocked intake of breath and the angry demand to know if you think she looks fat, the correct response is not to frantically deny that you could ever have possibly implied such blasphemy, but to say “yes, and obviously I don’t love you anymore.”

Once it becomes apparent that acting stupid means getting treated as if she’s stupid, she’ll give it up. Unless she’s a complete psycho, in which case you’re doomed no matter what you do so there’s no point in wasting any time worrying precisely which action of yours is going to set her off.

A point that has completely escaped me on, what for lack of a better term, one might call the masculinist side, is the attitude towards a man’s theoretical bastards. Now, I’m as opposed to divorce-at-will as anyone and I personally feel* that a woman who take a man’s children away from him simply because she isn’t happy at the moment deserves to be strangled with her fallopian tubes.

And yet, if I were to learn that a child of mine was not, in fact, mine biologically, I cannot fathom the notion of loving that child any less. To be honest, were I to learn that Big Chilly or – Cthulhu forfend – Bane were the actual father, my first thought would be to shake his hand and thank him for a gift of such inestimable value. I might even have tears of gratitude in my eyes, although I’m not a Bane-class weeper.

Now, I’m not saying that I wouldn’t eventually get around to kicking his ass on the whole cuckoldry thing, of course, as well as wreaking a degree of just havoc on the other party responsible. But what does this have to do with the child? I am not saying that men should ever be held legally responsible for that which is provably not theirs, but I strongly suspect that most of those men who are so militantly against the thought of raising another man’s child do not have children of their own.

I’ve seen far too much love on the part of adoptive parents to believe otherwise. One of the stories that most amused me growing up was hearing how a Korean neighbor, adopted as an infant, went to her white parents and demanded to know if she was adopted. She was ten. And despite the glaring differences between her and her blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian siblings, the thought that she didn’t belong with them had literally never crossed her mind.

*in other words, this is not my rational and reasoned position on the matter, it’s simply how I feel. I have no interest in attempting to debate or discuss my feelings. If you have a burning desire to do so, go away and watch Oprah or something.

WS doesn’t think much of the men of today:

You very well expressed my female, older-woman observations. Would to God that men would find their God-given masculinity again and start acting like adults instead of little boys! I can remember when boys, even as young as 12, acted like heroic men, standing in the face of danger to protect girls and women. Now boys are made afraid to even look at a weapon without being told they are breaking the law. They have become conditioned sissies.

And don’t even GET her STARTED on that media-manufactured, might-as-well-be-queer metrosexual thing.

Ellen Ratner discovers Internet porn:

The other day I was at the gym at 4:30 p.m. mindlessly ticking off those calories one by painful one when I read the VH1 trailer, “Coming up next: Celebrity Sex.” The program proceeded to show various ill-gotten photos and videos of celebrities gearing up for, having or having just engaged in sexual activity. VH1 then showed the audience of little monsters how to search for and click onto these videos and photos from their own computers.

VH1 is not exactly a porn channel, but they must understand that pornography is big business. There are more porn Web pages than there are Americans in this country. Yet we have hardly heard a peep out of the usual self-anointed suspects. Tom DeLay, Jerry Falwell, Bill Frist, Rick Santorum, James Dobson – to name a few – are so focused on making a mountain out of a molehill with regard to gay Americans that they are getting crushed by an avalanche of what my mother used to call, “debauchery.”

Seriously, is she kidding? I don’t know about the politicians, but Falwell and Dobson have never hesitated to preach against the ills of pornography. But Ms Ratner practically on top of this new porn sensation by recent standards; she’s only years late instead of the decades it took for Michelle Malkin to discover that girls were cutting themselves and for Maureen Dowd to learn that men don’t particularly want to date career women.

I’m not saying that a columnist should be able to identify every porn star making a cameo in a Eminem video, but if you don’t even know who Jenna Jameson is, you do not possess the requisite information to express a meaningful opinion on modern American society.

It was clear to me that things were changing when, ten years ago, a discussion of CD-ROMs at the Computer Game Developers Conference revealed a telling fact. The number of reported CD-ROM-based software sales was 25 percent less than the number of CD-ROMs manufactured and sold. There was much discussion of various conspiracy theories on the part of the software publishers, until one bearded fellow raised his hand and asked if porn CDs were included in the reports.

As it turned out, they weren’t. And there’s your missing 25 percent, which is probably more like 35 percent of DVDs these days. America is not a Constitutional Republic, it has devolved into a pornocratic krinocracy.