Tag: mailvox

What you can do, part 2

This is the second part of my response to someone who asked what they could do to help fight the SJWs. A few days ago, a #GamerGater named @Ignideus with less than 500 followers came up with the idea for #OpSkyNet as a prospective solution for the tendency of e-celebs to dominate the public discourse on Twitter. Today, it is the #3-trending hashtag on Twitter and #GamerGate has been re-energized as the leaderless, decentralized force that it is.

Larry Correia did little more than mention a few SF/F writers he felt had produced work that merited award consideration, and in the process, exposed the corruption and hyperpoliticization of the SF Awards process.

Yesterday, a non-gamer named RooshV announced the creation of Reaxxion, a pro-#GamerGate game review site for men. He writes:

My younger brother, who considers himself a gamer, gave me the
definitive push into starting Reaxxion. He plays Xbox, PC games on
Steam, and also some mobile games. He particularly likes games with long
and intricate story lines, telling me that gaming is just not about
pushing buttons to advance a level but to be affected on some level by a
compelling story, but now those stories are being perverted by people
who truly believe that men are evil and holding women down just because
they may want to enjoy a traditional story line with attractive women.

The infiltration of SJW’s into gaming may mean that my brother will
have to put up with their narrative in his games. It may mean that his
entertainment options become more limited because a developer was subtly
threatened unless he inserted another “empowered female” in a game
where such a character simply doesn’t fit. I’ve learned that unless you
fight back against these people, unless you spread awareness and develop
a megaphone as big as them, they will surely get what they want and
impact the culture in a way that hurts normal men who don’t subscribe to
their strange worldview.

Roosh isn’t a gamer, but he understands the importance of #GamerGate as the current Schwerpunkt, or focal point, of the SJWs. That’s why he’s stepped in with the sort of material assistance that only someone of his stature on the Internet can; the very name of the new game site is a gesture of contempt for those who consider themselves progressives.

Ingnideus was an unknown. Larry is a New York Times bestselling author. Roosh is Internet-famous, or if you prefer, infamous. But all three of them are taking what action they can take and all three of them are having a real impact.  What you can do entirely depends upon your capabilities, resources, and inclinations, but all of it is, at the very least, capable of mattering.

Most people who want to get involved are more akin to Ingnideus than Roosh. What that means is finding someone who is already leading the way by doing something and lending support to their efforts. Find a Schwerpunkt of interest to you and throw your weigh behind it. Many of you are already doing this with Castalia House, by buying our books, subscribing to our New Release newsletter, or in some cases, proofreading, formatting, narrating, and slush-reading. A few are assisting Alpenwolf, Joe and Kirk have been helping with the First Sword art. But we can always use more and we are far from the only independent writer, developer, publisher, site or blog that can use the help.

General

  • Support the good. Don’t support the SJWs in any of their flavors.
  • Get on Twitter. Tweet once with #OpSkyNet. Retweet and favorite one #GamerGate tweet per day.
  • Email one Gawker (or other #GamerGate target) advertiser per week.
  • Join Recommend. Write one Game- or Book-related reco, good or bad, per week and I’ll add it to the appropriate list. Be sure to follow me first so I will see it.
  • Try an indy game from a #GamerGate developer.
  • Submit an article to Reaxxion. 
  • Speak out. Do a blog post. Tell a friend.
  • Stand by those under attack, especially if you don’t agree with them. The primary SJW tactic is 3rd Generation. They cut off, isolate, then swarm. They can’t do that if you refuse to permit them to separate you from their target.

Castalia House

  • I’m ridiculously behind on submissions. We need new slushreaders and probably someone to manage the process.
  • PR. We haven’t sent out a single press release to anyone yet even though we have a pretty good story to tell. We’re too busy producing to talk about it.
  • Bloggers for Castalia House. Mascaro is too busy now and Jeffro has needed to take a few weeks off due to burnout. It’s difficult doing one quality blog post per week; many people can manage one or two, but consistency is the key.
  • PDF Layout. LL is getting up to speed on this, but we have a pretty big backlog already and we are contractually obligated to get some of our newly signed books out in print.

Alpenwolf

  •  Art. We’re doing all right for code, I think. (Markku, correct me if I’m wrong) but we could use additional art help. 
  • PR. We don’t need it yet, but we will.
  • There is probably something else I’m missing.

Why bother? Who cares about random guys living in their mother’s basements fighting for large pixellated breasts sporting chainmail bikinis in their games? Nero explains why he, a non-gamer, is following the battle:

GamerGate is remarkable—and attracts the interest of people like me—because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.

Games are merely the current battleground. TV is already lost to the SJWs. Movies are lost. Literature is largely lost. Genre literature is all but lost. Remember, this is the mentality we’re up against:

Humphrey, the former Subway worker, had been living with her uncle before she lost her job. She now bounces from couch to couch in her circle of protester friends — a sacrifice she said is worthwhile, because what is the point of working when she says she could be killed any day because of the color of her skin? Now, she said, standing at the Rowan Community Center on a run-down block in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of St. Louis, “I sleep, eat and breathe this.”

Sure, that sort of commitment easy for someone with no talent, job, or responsibilities, who has literally nothing else to do to throw themselves into something 24-7. But we’re not talking about that level of commitment, but rather a small and spare-time, but persistent one. My perception, and I could be wrong, is that far too many people on the Right are overly concerned that someone, somewhere, might profit from their assistance whereas there are no shortage of volunteers on the Left who don’t care at all about that. (This may, admittedly, be due to their general failure to grasp the concept in the first place.) Did Joe Farah benefit from my contribution of more than 500 columns to WND? I should bloody well hope so! What would be the point if he didn’t? I didn’t give him money, I gave him 30 minutes per week, and I remain pleased to see what effective use he made of it.

The Catch-22 is that there is never any money involved in getting something started from nothing, which is why it is hard to start anything without the approval of the SJW gatekeepers who have successfully infiltrated the foundations and the large corporations. There is only one way around this, which is for the talent of the right to be willing to follow the example provided by the Free and Open Source crowd.

This sort of thing should never be seen as a job, but a contribution to the cause given out of a positive spirit. It might turn into a job one day, but it probably won’t. And if you’re worried that Castalia, or Roosh, or the guys at Recommend, or might one day end up making a buck due in part to some of the time you’ve put in, consider this: Would you be here in the first place, reading this, if I has been unwilling to write columns or blog posts without being paid for my time?

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. Some of you will have additional ideas, and feel free to throw them out here. This is an open discussion, so brainstorm, don’t critique. And above all, one thing is clear. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t expect direction and management. Adopt a Fourth Generation mentality. Ignideus is the Leader of #GamerGate, Roosh is the Leader of #GamerGate, I am the Leader of #GamerGate, and so can you.

What we can do

That’s what I was asked in the comments yesterday. I came up with one solution, which I’m pleased to see that about 100 of you implemented right away. But that’s just a start. First, I think it is important to take Cailcorishev’s observation into account of why the SJWs are so often successful with their entryist tactics and how they so regularly obtain positions of power in an organization or an industry.

They’re able to take over the things they do because normal people just don’t care that much. It’s how they run all the committees in a school: no one else wants to. People who create games and play games don’t care much about the incidental stuff like reviewing. We don’t need that to exist at all, so when someone emerges to do that, we figure “Better her than me.” Most of us don’t realize until too late how much power that concedes to them, because what they do looks so irrelevant from our ends.

This is true. I know the power of what he’s saying, because I entered into the industry via reviewing games myself. I started out as a contributor to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, then was syndicated by Chronicle Features, and before long was appearing in papers from the North Bay Nugget to the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution. Within 18 months, I was personally acquainted many of the major game developers, guys like John Carmack, Richard Garriott, and Chris Roberts, as well as important media and publishing figures like Johnny Wilson and Scott Shannon.

How? It was easy. No one at the Pioneer Press seriously played computer games. They didn’t have anyone to do it, and they even started to rely upon me to do things like analyze the Unabomber’s manifesto for the editorial page. Of course, the Left polices itself much more carefully than the Right. When there was a vacancy on the op/ed page, I asked for the spot. The editor met with me – I was only the sixth columnist in the paper’s history to be nationally syndicated, so he couldn’t just blow me off – and politely made it clear there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to put a libertarian extremist on the page every week. But the tactic works.

Now, I have to go for the time being. Work takes priority over the Cause. It might, however, be worthwhile to consider this until I’m able to finish this post and provide some concrete suggestions. Everyone knows that I don’t get paid for blogging. But what many people don’t know is that I never took any money to write eleven years worth of columns on WND. (Hence my amusement when people talk about Daddy getting me the “job”.) They couldn’t afford it when I first started, but I supported the alternative media that the Farahs were attempting to build.

That’s why the Left is progressing. Because they are willing to invest the time.

Mailvox: Vee have vays

Uff making you borrow, hein? JD asks about the prospective new Attorney General:

Wikipedia reports that the Black woman being considered to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General spent seven years on the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank for New York. Fed alum as Attorney General.  Is that ominous?

It depends. If she’s a black woman of the sort you see at the DMV, everything should be fine. I would absolutely approve of such an appointment; that sort of AG isn’t about order children burned to death or automatic weaponry sold to Mexican cartels. All she’ll demand is to be left alone in the near vicinity of a well-stocked vending machine. If, on the other hand, she’s a true-believing freshwater Chicago School monetarist, Americans may soon find themselves being prosecuted for the federal crime of Willful Failure to Borrow.

That would be one way to boost L1, anyhow.

Mailvox: why C&C isn’t strategy

RD asks about strategy vs tactics:

I was browsing through some of your old columns on WND and came across
an article where you mentioned that one of the premiere, defining games
of the RTS genre, Command & Conquer, could could not actually be
described as a “strategy” game. You wrote:

“Like those video game
reviewers who insist on describing RTS games like Warcraft and Command
& Conquer as “strategy” games, the media consistently confuses
tactics with strategy.”

Would
you care to elaborate on this point? As a long-time fan of the C&C
series and the RTS genre, I am most curious to hear your justification
for distinguishing between tactics and strategy with respect to
describing RTS games. Also, what in your opinion is the best example of
an actual “strategy” RTS game?

The difference between strategy and tactics is pretty clear. If you’re trying to win a war, it’s strategy. If you’re trying to win a battle, it’s tactics. Even Wikipedia is useful in this regard:

Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, “art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship”) is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the “art of the general”, which included several subsets of skills including “tactics”, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in East Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word “strategy” came to denote “a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills” in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact. The father of Western modern strategic study, Carl von Clausewitz, defined military strategy as “the employment of battles to gain the end of war.” B. H. Liddell Hart’s definition put less emphasis on battles, defining strategy as “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy”. Hence, both gave the pre-eminence to political aims over military goals.

Military tactics are the science and art of organizing a military force, and the techniques for combining and using weapons and military units to engage and defeat an enemy in battle. Changes in philosophy and technology have been reflected in changes to military tactics; in contemporary military science tactics are the lowest of three planning levels: (i) strategic, (ii) operational, and (iii) tactical. The highest level of planning is strategy, how force is translated into political objectives, by bridging the means and ends of war. The intermediate level, operational level, the conversion of strategy into tactics deals with formations of units. In the vernacular, tactical decisions are those made to achieve the greatest, immediate value, and strategic decisions are those made to achieve the greatest, overall value, irrespective of the immediate results of a tactical decision.

That’s the formal distinction, and it should be fairly obvious that most RTS are intrinsically tactical in nature. But there is also another way of looking at it, which is the one I actually had in mind, which is that strategy implies thinking and planning, whereas tactics implies acting and responding. Most RTS games such as Warcraft and C&C, involve considerably more of the latter than the former. Indeed, even if we disregard the fact of the old “grunt rush” tactic or the fact that success often boiled down to superior click speed, thanks to the “technology tree”, most RTS involve virtually no thinking or anything that can reasonably be described as strategy.

My old friend Chris, who has designed a few notable RTS games, is even quoted in the RTS article: “[My first attempt at visualizing RTSs in a fresh and interesting new way] was my realizing that although we call this genre ‘Real-Time Strategy,’ it should have been called ‘Real-Time Tactics’ with a dash of strategy thrown in.”

So, for both reasons, I don’t think it is possible for an RTS to be a proper strategy game. I actually designed an RTS, as it happens; the original WAR IN HEAVEN game was supposed to be an RTS. It would have been a lot better if we had gone that route too, but Valu-Soft wanted to chase Walmart with a DEER HUNTER-style game, which, as I have related in the past, backfired rather spectacularly when they foolishly hired the buyer who wanted it before the game was finished.

Mailvox: DISQUALIFY!

They just never stop. Which is fine, the important thing to keep in mind is that they never stop lying. A comment from Judge Judy & Executioner:

Vox; your late latching on to #gg and insistence on establishing yourself as a cheerleader despite the fact that the main #gg either didn’t know who you are or if the did, didn’t want you, has made me realize your sigmaness is less about being an alpha with no interest in playing the game and more about being a gamma who’s figured out how to.

Maybe that analysis is wrong, but this who thing has been very gammay of you

This is interesting because it not only demonstrates the usual SJW dishonesty and inability to understand the other side, but also shows how #GamerGate is now perceived as having status that must be denied to opponents deemed dangerous.

As to the “late latching on to #gg”, I merely note the obvious:

  • On August 20th, Vox Day posted Another Purge? about the purging of 4chan and wrote: “My purging from SFWA was, as I warned at the time, a small harbinger of
    much bigger things to come. Don’t think you’re safe simply because
    you’re not controversial. It’s not only the controversy they hate, or
    even the open resistance, it is the mere fact of failing to kowtow to
    their dogma.”
  • On August 21st, Vox Day posted “Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy”. 
  • On August 27th, Vox Day posted “A female dev on the Quinn debacle”.
  • On August 27th, actor Adam Baldwin posted a tweet linking to Internet Aristocrat videos along with the hashtag #GamerGate. 

Also, gammas don’t turn into sigmas. It is omegas that do so. The gamma mindset can never transform to the degree required; they care too deeply about the social order.

Mailvox: somehow, I doubt it

One of the Baby Boomers who was defending her generational cohort emailed me this morning:

Well, I’ll give you this much, Vox. In twenty years of Internet discussions, this is the first time I have ever been told by a fellow Christian to SHUT. THE FUCK. UP and hurry up and die. I have never talked about myself in the NYT (or, for that matter, the Poughkeepsie Palimpset); I didn’t destroy America; I haven’t personally ruined your life. In fact, up until three months ago, neither of us had ever heard of the other. But I guess none of that matters. Because I’m a boomer.

I have no idea what inner demons you’re wrestling with on this issue, or why. I would wish you peace, but the truth is I don’t give a rat’s ass.  However, I do have more important things to do with my time than hanging around just to be abused by you for the apparent crime of not sharing your personal hatreds.

Therefore, your wish is granted. I will SHUT. THE FUCK. UP. and go away.

The amusing thing is that this is the commenter who kept saying that GenX was whining. Who is whining now? Isn’t it terrible that we don’t abase ourselves in admiration before their special world-changing specialness! The amazing thing is that even when it is being directly pointed out to them, this sort of Baby Boomer is so haplessly narcissistic that they cannot tell the difference between personal and generational criticism. Their identity is apparently so closely tied to that of their generation that any criticism directed at it is taken as a personal affront.

Nor can the commenter bear to recognize, in spite of the evidence right in front of them, that my feelings about their generation are, in fact, quite widespread. I do not know a single member of Generation X who admires or speaks well of the Baby Boomer generation. If you do, by all means, I’m quite open to hearing your reasons why… but only from an actual member of Generation X. Not from a Baby Boomer with cool stories about how the kids think she’s amazingly with it and not at all old because “love Sam Cooke!”

I will be utterly shocked if this individual does, in fact, manage to shut up and go away. Because, let’s face it, few Boomers can resist when someone is t-t-talking about their g-g-generation.

Steve Sailer adds:

Babyboomers like me are pretty much impervious to the strategies that we pulled on our parents to put them at a generational disadvantage, which disadvantages newer generations.

See how cool they are? They’re still at the top of the generational heap and impervious so you totally can’t, like, say they’re old and irrelevant. Now, I wonder why that might be? I find it telling, as only a Boomer would be so obtuse as to brag about his generation’s bulletproof self-absorption.

They certainly don’t seem to be impervious to hearing that they’re not admired.

Six of Five

Seven different people have independently come up with the notion that this should be my Borg name, so I suppose in the event that I am ever assimilated by the science fiction hive mind, I shall most certainly adopt it. Nerd minds really do think alike. What I think is funniest about the Hugo results is the speed with which the Wikipolice were quick to add them to the Wikipedia page about me; apparently I am so important that I am the only not-winner to have his not-winning deemed notable. Not even the massive International Lord of Hate is a figure of such significance.  I thought the quad-sourcing was particularly amusing. (Blame Jamsco for the image. Why do I have the feeling it is going to end up on the Encyclopedia Dramatica?)

In 2014 Beale’s novelette, “Opera Vita Aeterna”, was nominated for the Hugo Award.[17] It came in sixth out of five nominees, behind “No Award.”[18][19][20][21]

Four sources makes it that much more true! The pinkshirts just never learn, do they? The more they go out of their way to exhibit the extent of their irrational hatred for me, the more they seek to DISQUALIFY me, the more interesting I become to everyone else who isn’t part of their twisted little world. I suspect some of them, like John Scalzi, are aware of this but lack the necessary emotional control to restrain themselves. The call of the hate is simply too strong to resist.

Speaking of McRapey, it was suggested that it was not entirely fair for me to call out him out for his traffic fraud when I haven’t publicly provided any evidence of the Google pageviews at VP. (There was no similar complaint about AG, as the running “monthly” total is displayed on the left sidebar there. If anyone knows how to get that widget running on the old Blogger template, please let me know.) After all, the Sitemeter pageviews are considerably lower than the Google pageviews claimed, so it was theoretically possible that my traffic might be lower than I was asserting. Fair enough, if perhaps a little insulting to even an intelligence much more modest than mine. So, I grabbed this screenshot yesterday towards the end of the day; yesterday’s total was actually 36,241.

This covers the last month, so it is no one-day spike. As you can see, the daily pageviews have averaged about 34k; at no point in the last month have the daily pageviews descended below 26,328. And one has only to visit Alpha Game to see that the running 30-day total is 1,475,512 at the moment, or rather, a bit more, since the number rises throughout the day. August should end up somewhere around 1,535,000, plus or minus 25k. Anyhow, there it is, so I hope everyone is satisfied that everything is scrupulously fair.

I shall now await all the fawning puff pieces about me in various media sources and the inevitable book contracts offered by eager mainstream genre publishers now that it is proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that I have nearly four times more traffic (3.75x more, to be precise) than the “extraordinary amount of traffic” that impressed so many people in the recent past.

8 million views

8 million views for 2014. Just passed the number. Thanks to ESR for the assist. I’ll note again that this is just the views recorded by Google’s software; the actual number of views is higher. I’ll have a full report at the end of the year. But still: 8 million views. It doesn’t suck. Thank you.

I’m afraid I’m not being completely honest here. The actual number of Google pageviews recorded was 8,352,092, so 8 million was passed about a week ago. I just thought it was funny to imitate McRapey’s self-congratulatory auto-backpatting for his all-time best year… at the end of July.

And speaking of things I found amusing, this extended apology from Giuseppe, who felt he misjudged me, would have forced me to accept it on that grounds alone, if I had been inclined to take any offense in the first place, which I’m not.

Hi Vox.

Fuck! I read a lot more of your blog. And actually writing this e-mail is literally kinda painful. Honesty and honour demand it, but fuck, I don’t need to enjoy the process right?!

It has become quite clear, at least with respect to your elucidation of rhetoric vs dialectic that your understanding of the subject far surpasses mine. One could put this down to the simple fact that a number of things would seem to indicate you simply have spent more time studying the subject, and while this is undoubtedly true, as is the fact that your training as an economist no doubt also allows you to sift through volumes of data that personally I would find too boring to bother with (not saying they are devoid of instruction, just that they would not grab my attention to the required extent necessary for me to indulge enough in it that I would benefit from it anywhere near as much as you seem to have) and no doubt, other endeavours I may be better at, but the fact is that it has become clear that you excel at it compared to me because of another factor.

I don’t think you are materially smarter than I am. That is, you are very smart and in your chosen fields you will be more capable than me as a result, but  I would guess in my own chosen fields I would be more capable than you. It’s sort of academic anyway, and I don’t care, but precisely because it is extremely rare for me to come across someone smarter than me (and in a demonstrable fashion) I did notice it. Painfully sharply I have to say….

Your post on Modern vs Postmodern discourse on the Alpha Game blog was enlightening because it made me aware of how much I despise the postmodern methods (long before I came across you I came up with my own virulent hatred of all postmodern bullshit). It was so strong I literally had to take three goes at reading the postmodernist list, because it literally made my head spin with discomfort as if I had got a decent punch to the jaw. Now that this has become conscious knowledge, of course, I realise that psychologically I now have basically no option but to temper myself by full immersion/exposure to all that postmodernist babble, if for no other reason than banishing its existence wherever I find it trying to enter my life.

 [Long personal section redacted]

On some levels I still harbour a suspicion (increasingly I think I know it’s unfounded) that maybe, deep down, you’re still maybe just a very smart and well-read racist, fundamentalist Christian asshole… but… deep down I am realising this is not really the case. In fact, I recognise a certain level of natural ostracism by the crowds precisely because they are not smart enough to cope/see what you are really saying. Possibly, if I may even go so far, there may even be a certain level of humility in you. If I can see it, it is only because certain aspects of your style are not foreign to me. If the monkeys are gonna label you arrogant anyway, so be it, it’s a quick filter for stupidity.

And you may be guilty too (I know I have been) of probably taking a somewhat excessive pleasure in teasing their monkey-like brains (you bad Christian you!)

Nevertheless, all that said. I really just need to read more of your blog and learn more…. I know we are strangers, and that it probably means little or nothing to you, but I had clearly misjudged you. Honesty demands I apologise, at least to the extent that I was wrong, which I was. There are few people I can have honestly engaging discourse with. I have no doubt however, that you are one of them. Even if we were to disagree totally on some things, I am certain I would be able to respect your position for its integrity at least.

So yeah. Bastard of an e-mail to write, only one of its kind really, but it had to be done.

It is unusual for a writer to find a reader who genuinely understands him, even in part. What does Giuseppe mean by a certain level of humility in one of the most nakedly arrogant bloggers on the Internet? Well, he may not have been clear on the difference between rhetoric and dialectic, but unlike normal binary thinkers, he understands the difference between “I know I’m right” and “I know you’re wrong”. One can be humble with regards to the truth and yet utterly arrogant and dismissive of various peoples’ incorrect assertions regarding it.

He also grasps that the reason I don’t get upset about what he describes as “natural ostracism” is because I expect it. It’s exactly what has happened my entire life whenever I didn’t go to the trouble of veiling my intelligence and refraining from openly departing too far from the acceptably defined borders of consensus reality. Those who called me racist because I observed human differences when they insisted that “we are all the same inside” didn’t apologize to me when it was discovered that Caucasians and Asians are genetically different from each other, and from Africans, anymore than anyone apologized to me after repeatedly mocking me by demanding to know where the second Great Depression was when the economic recovery was declared for the first, second, and third years in a row.

It’s the behavior that is expected out of midwits. Stray too far from the intellectual fold and they are threatened by it. I’m not the first to be hated for it and I won’t be the last. But it is encouraging to learn that so many people are sufficiently open-minded to consider what I’m saying and actually think about it, rather than simply dismissing it out of hand because it is alien and scary to them.

Mailvox: contra suffrage

Chris Gerrib asks

VD, why shouldn’t every free adult human be able to vote in the country they are a citizen of?

For the same reason unfree children who are not citizens are not permitted to vote: it is expected that their votes will not be in the long-term interests of the country or its citizenry.

Another commenter, Shelles, appears to be of the David Futrelle school of debate, in which her inability to imagine an effective argument is confused with the nonexistence of such arguments. Which I found a little amusing here, since she somehow manages to touch on two effective arguments while missing the aspects that make them effective.

The only way to win the argument that women should not have the vote is to be able to successfully equate them with others that do not have the vote: minors, felons. The condition of being a woman is in no way like either of these.

The other possibility is to argue that the country will be better off if women don’t vote because women have a tendency to for for X, Y and Z, all of which will harm, if not destroy the country. The obvious problem with this argument is that it depends on one’s personal on view of exactly how the country ought to operate. This is countered by offering another personal view of how the country ought to be that is best advanced by women having the vote.

Done.

In essence the argument is: Women should not have the vote because it’s in the interests of a certain group.

It is certainly not the only way, but it is true that one will win the argument that women should not have the vote when one is able to
successfully equate them with others that do not have the vote: minors,
felons, and so forth. However, the fact that “the condition of being a woman is in no way like either of
these” is irrelevant and does not suffice as a counterpoint. The way women are successfully equated with others who do not have the vote is to demonstrate that their votes are equally incompatible with the long-term national interest as the other classes of current non-voters.

This can be done using a variety of metrics, including what Shelles describes as another possibility to the only way. Just to give one example, if the reason children are not permitted to vote is due to their limited time preferences, a comparison could be made between children’s time preferences, women’s time preferences, and men’s time preferences. If women’s time preferences were determined to be more akin to those of children than those of men, that would be a clear justification for denying the vote to them.

But to return to the option to the only way, Shelles says “the obvious problem with this argument is that it depends on one’s personal on view of exactly how the country ought to operate”. But since the argument rests on the country’s freedom, well-being, and future existence, her counter relies upon arguing that the country should be unfree, worse-off, and nonexistent. This is not a successful or convincing counter, even if it truly represents the personal view of the interlocutor rather than a hypothetical position of Shelle’s imagination.

One should always be careful when attempting to summarize an opponent’s position. Words like “in essence” or “basically” tend to be red flags alerting a critic to holes in one’s arguments.  They aren’t necessarily so, but in this case, they are. Because the statement is true: Women should not have the vote because it’s in the interests of a certain group, so long as that “certain group” is defined as “all the citizens of the country, including the women”.

There are very solid rational, Constitutional, and historical reasons for denying female suffrage. John Adams summarized them best in his famous written exchange with his wife:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.

“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.
 
“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
– Abigail Adams, 31 March 1776

“Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects.

“We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.”
– John Adams, 14 April 1776

Events have proven John Adams correct. Free men are accustomed to voluntarily limiting the use of their power and not pushing it to the full extent of its capabilities. Women, to say the least, are not. Just as an angry woman does not pull her punches, women in politics do not restrain their instincts to attempt to control the uncontrollable. Abigail Adams is projecting: she wrongly assumes all men would be tyrants if they could because she knows that is true of herself and other women. And women do not hold themselves bound by laws in any case, regardless of whether they have had voice or representation or not. They are bound by fear.

This is why a nation that wishes to remain wealthy and free does not permit female involvement in its governance, and why totalitarians from the Italian Fascists to the Soviet Bolsheviks have historically made a priority of female involvement in the political process.

Speaking of preferential treatment

A longtime member of the Dread Ilk has a job opportunity in Ohio:

I have a Dread Ilk job opportunity. My local sales firm in the Ohio region is hiring two sales people, one experienced and one entry-level. They plan to make decisions in the next month. If anyone is interested, could they communicate through you? This is a golden opportunity for an entry-level sales person to break into the oil and gas industry.

The successful person will be working for my rep firm, and indirectly working for me so I would only pass on quality people, obviously. Would love to see one of the Ilk get hired so whatever you can do I would appreciate it.

If you’re interested shoot me an email with Ilk Job in the subject and I’ll pass it on.