Tag: politics

“Never worked a day in her life”

James Taranto correctly excoriates the feminist philosophy that served as the foundation for Hilary Rosen’s epically stupid attack on Ann Romney:

In truth, anti-momism was the very heart of “The Feminine Mystique.” Friedan’s argument was that motherhood and homemaking were soul-deadening occupations and that pursuing a professional career was the way for a woman to “become complete.” She agreed with the midcentury misogynists that a stay-at-home mother was, in Friedan’s words, “castrative to her husband and sons.” But she emphasized that women were “fellow victims.”

The book might as well have been titled “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” Today, of course, she can, and because feminism has entailed a diminution of male responsibility, she often has no choice. As we’ve noted, an increasing number of women are choosing domestic life, finding it a liberating alternative to working for a boss. But to do so requires a husband with considerable means.

Fifty years ago, Ann Romney’s life would have made her just a regular woman. Today, she is a countercultural figure–someone who lives in a way that the dominant culture regards with a hostile disdain. And she has chosen to live that way, which is why Hilary Rosen, as an intellectual heiress to Betty Friedan, regards her as a villain rather than a victim.

Taranto also points out something that I consider vital. He effectively draws the distinction between Romney’s accomplishments and Rosen’s: “Raising children is a lot of work, and we’d venture to say it’s more valuable work than, say, lobbying for the music industry or helping BP with its crisis communications, to name two of the highlights of Rosen’s career.”

I’ll go even farther. Bearing and raising children is far more important than anything any working woman has ever done in her professional career in the entire history of Mankind. The silly, short-sighted, white trash teen mothers on MTV are contributing more to the human race than the most intelligent, highly educated, and accomplished women have ever done for it.

If a woman wants to devote sixteen or more years of her life to “education”, then follow it up by sitting in a cubicle and transferring information from point A to point B, that’s her legal right. But it’s not doing anything for the human race, and indeed, considering the economically negative effects of the government agencies and human resources departments where women are inordinately employed, economic irrelevance is probably the best case scenario.

Linda Hirschman once claimed: ““The tasks of housekeeping and child-rearing are not worthy of the full time and talents of intelligent and educated human beings.”

But she had it wrong. She had it completely backwards, because there is absolutely nothing a woman, however educated and intelligent, can do that is more important or more vital than raising children. And while home-making not the physical equivalent of working in a coal mine, it is at least as laborious as most white collar employment. I have no affection for Captain Underoos and if he wins in November I think he will probably be even worse than Obama has been. But it is as evil as it is stupid to attack his wife for doing the one thing that the human race absolutely requires for its survival.

It’s over, it’s Romney

The intrepid Republicans are going into the election led by Captain Underoos:

Finally embracing reality, Rick Santorum decided to take the easy way out rather than the hard way, leaving the GOP presidential race before a potentially humiliating loss in his home state.

It’s nice to see Republican respect for tradition. They are certainly living up to their reputation as The Stupid Party. Even if Romney wins, Republicans will lose.

WND column

Republicans nominate Romney

Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.
– Narcotics Anonymous

Four years ago, the Republican Party faced what appeared to be a reasonably winnable presidential election. The expected Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, had blundered away what should have been a sure thing by her refusal to take a stand against the unpopular military occupations, as well as the failure of her campaign manager to understand the rules by which Democratic delegates were awarded, and so Republicans were facing a national neophyte who had never won a competitive election at any level.

I can’t disagree

But that’s hardly the salient point:

“I think if President Obama came out as gay, he wouldn’t lose the black vote,” a cheerful Van Jones told MSNBC this afternoon. “President Obama is not going to lose the black vote no matter what he does,” he added.

He’s certainly not going to lose it to Mitt Romney. But what a very strange thing to say, considering the rumors that have surrounded Obama in Chicago.

The transformation of the secular left

At the end of the day, the Left’s addiction to authoritarianism exceeds their commitment to secularism:

George Galloway is the founder and sole personality of a political party that he calls Respect. A veteran of the hard Left, he is the most prominent person in Britain to have made the transition from Communism to Islamism…. Everything is different now because Galloway has won a by-election in the constituency of Bradford West, and re-enters parliament as an independent. The Labour Party has held this seat since 1974 and expected to do so again. But Muslims, mostly from Pakistan, have replaced the old Labour voters in huge numbers and they like Galloway’s Islamism. Presenting himself as a pseudo-Muslim, he talked about Allah and dropped Arabic words into his speeches, had posters put up in Urdu, had supporters speaking in praise of sharia, and criticized his Labour opponent, a Muslim by birth, for drinking alcohol. A landslide followed. Galloway had a majority of over 10,000 and a swing from Labour to Respect of 36 percent.

According to the media, this swing is due to the discontent of the working class who would like the Labour Party to be old-style Socialists. Class resentment is in order but Muslim separatism and racism is taboo. Reporting the news of the by-election, the BBC couldn’t bring itself even to utter the word Muslim. A senior Labour Party ex-minister could only say there was a local “problem” and refused to elaborate what that might be even though a crowd of young men with beards could be seen on television swarming round Galloway.

I wish I could find it more amusing that the secular Left is, precisely as expected, being replaced by the Islamic Left. The abhorrent vaccuum is being filled. Galloway is a freak and we can hope that he is simply a one-off, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Power struggles in China

The fact that the battle is taking place behind the scenes and away from the news cameras doesn’t mean that it won’t have a serious impact on the geopolitical situation:

After three hours of eloquent and emotional answers in his final news conference at the National People’s Congress annual meeting this month, Wen uttered his public political masterstroke, reopening debate on one of the most tumultuous events in the Chinese Communist Party’s history and hammering the final nail in the coffin of his great rival, the now-deposed Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo Xilai. And in striking down Bo, Wen got his revenge on a family that had opposed him and his mentor countless times in the past.

Responding to a gently phrased question about Chongqing, Wen foreshadowed Bo’s political execution, a seismic leadership rupture announced the following day that continues to convulse China’s political landscape to an extent not seen since 1989. But the addendum that followed might be even more significant. Indirectly, but unmistakably, Wen defined Bo as man who wanted to repudiate China’s decades-long effort to reform its economy, open to the world, and allow its citizens to experience modernity. He framed the struggle over Bo’s legacy as a choice between urgent political reforms and “such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution,” culminating a 30-year battle for two radically different versions of China, of which Bo Xilai and Wen Jiabao are the ideological heirs. In Wen’s world, bringing down Bo is the first step in a battle between China’s Maoist past and a more democratic future as personified by his beloved mentor, 1980s Communist Party chief Hu Yaobang. His words blew open the facade of party unity that had held since the massacres of Tiananmen Square.

This October, the Communist Party will likely execute a once-in-a-decade leadership transition in which President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen hand over to a new team led by current Vice President Xi Jinping. The majority of leaders will retire from the elite Politburo Standing Committee, and the turnover will extend down through lower tiers of the Communist Party, the government, and the military. Wen hopes his words influence who gets key posts, what ideological course they will set, and how history records his own career.

The vicissitudes of civil war amongst the Chinese nomenklatura aside, I thought this was a particularly illuminating, if ironic, comment. “Hu taught his children to resist the idea, wired into the Communist Party psyche, that they had any particular hereditary right to high office.”

And thus we see the Ciceronian political cycle at work, as democracy, aristocracy, and tyranny all represent temporary phases rather than stases.

John Edwards, celebrity john

Lest we forget, this is the man for whom the self-appointed champion of women, Amynda Marcotte, worked because she thought he should be the President of the United States:

A call girl working for alleged “Millionaire Madam” Anna Gristina told investigators she was paid to have sex with former U.S. Sen. John Edwards when he was in New York raising money for his failed presidential bid, DNAinfo has learned. Edwards is the first big name to surface in connection to Gristina’s alleged prostitution scheme run out of an Upper East Side apartment.

The only remarkable thing here is that this news didn’t break when Obama was battling Edwards for the Democratic nomination in 2008.

Shoot the scientists

They’re now openly embracing technocratic world totalitarianism:

Since doing that issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer. Moon shots and Manhattan Projects are child’s play compared to needed changes in the way we behave.

A policy article authored by several dozen scientists appeared online March 15 in Science to acknowledge this point: “Human societies must now change course and steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that might lead to rapid and irreversible change. This requires fundamental reorientation and restructuring of national and international institutions toward more effective Earth system governance and planetary stewardship.”

Scientists have been on the wrong side of every political movement of the 20th century. Because they are narrowly educated elitists almost completely unschooled in both logic and history, they tend to be heavily inclined towards top-down authoritarianism. And there is absolutely no reason to believe they will be on the right side of any of the geo-political issues of the 21st century.

Libertarianism in one country

It’s too late for the USA, but from a theoretical perspective, Steve Sailer is correct about the impossibility of using liberty to lead by engaged example:

It’s time for us good guys to take a lesson in prudence from the bad guys. As you may recall, Trotsky and Stalin had a little falling out. Trotsky wanted to pursue “permanent worldwide revolution.” In contrast, Stalin thought it wiser to concentrate on “revolution in one country,” and only pick off buffer states as circumstances allowed. Stalin won the debate with Trotsky through the penetrating power of his logic (and ice pick), and went on to be the most enduringly successful of the 20th Century’s sizable cast of monsters.

This is what libertarians must realize: There is staggeringly too much inequality in the world for America’s love affair with capitalism to survive importing massive amounts of it.

As my Southern Baptist pastor used to say, it is much easier to pull someone down than it is to lift someone up. Free trade and open borders have turned out to be nearly as significant factors in the American decline as increased government spending and women’s suffrage. None of which, of course, were as important as the establishment of the third central bank, but it is worth noting these things in the process of the ongoing decline and fall in the hopes that future generations will turn out to be wiser than we were.

Just as many of the arguments that pervade our political debate today were presaged one hundred, and sometimes one thousand years ago, we can reasonably expect politicians of the far future to be arguing over whether free trade with the aliens in the Gar Zephrod sector will be of benefit to the economy or not. And we can also expect that leftist equalitarians of the far future will be shocked when the carnivorous Hleetongs of Xpicol IV, who were permitted to settle en masse among the posthuman colonists of New New York, begin devouring their neighbors.

Mailvox: the logic of suffrage

This dialogue with Bohm merits its own post.

1. Do you concur that when the government imposes a law on the populace, it is intended as a restriction on human behavior?

2. Do you concur that a general restriction on human behavior is a restriction on human liberty, given the definition provided by Icarius?

For the sake of argument, I will concur with both your propositions, with the caveat that restricting one’s ability to rob, maim and murder, say, is obviously beneficial to general liberty.

3b. Do you concur that laws are passed in order to modify existing human behavior?

of course I concur, since I’ve said as much already, except perhaps to say ‘prohibit’ instead of ‘modify’, since people will carrying on murdering other people even when they know they shouldn’t really.

4b. Do you concur that the threat of government force causes humans to behave differently than they otherwise would?

Agreed.

5. Do you concur that laws are backed by the threat of government force.

Agreed. I would have thought that, for the purposes of this discussion, 4b) and 5) amounted to the same thing.

6. Do you concur that because they are backed by the threat of government force, laws cause humans to behave differently than they otherwise would?

Ha! So we have another transitive relationship. I am bound to agree with proposition 6.

7. Do you concur that the imposition of laws backed by government force amounts to a restriction on the behavior of those humans who would otherwise choose to behave differently?

I suppose so. I would prefer the term ‘modification’ rather than ‘restriction’. Are we going to address those humans who choose not to behave differently.

7b. Do you concur that a “modification” amounts to a “restriction” when the legally permissible range of human behavior has been reduced?

I find myself balking at this supposedly ‘logical’ approach. This formula is too vague to be meaningful. The ‘range of human behavior’ remains the same whether it is permitted or not. What constitutes a ‘legally permissible behavior’ is decided by a judiciary on a case by case basis. You’re presuming that human behavior is a range that is measurable; reduced or extended, which presumes that behavior comes in some kind of unit. Is unlawful killing of a human being a unit of human behavior? Or is simply killing a human being the unit to be measured? There are myriad different circumstances under which a death might be deemed lawful or unlawful, depending on the circumstances and who is doing the killing. Is gambling a unit of behavior? Or should it be divided into smaller units, depending on the nature of the punt? Laws against sports gambling in the US do not prevent Americans gambling on other stuff or indeed on sports. Furthermore, what is considered unlawful in one place, is perfectly legal elsewhere, even within the US. This is probably not what I’d say precisely if I had more time today, a bit rushed but there you go. But I really think we should stop talking about ‘human behavior’ and address something more tangible.

There is nothing vague about “the legally permissible range of human behavior.” Nor is this approach anything but logical, there is nothing supposed about it. The fact that you are balking at this approach is because you are increasingly beginning to understand that your position on the matter is not a logical one. So, I will repeat the question. Do you concur that a “modification” amounts to a “restriction” when the legally permissible range of human behavior has been reduced?

OK, I’ll play ball. I concur just to see were this is going.

8. Are there significantly more state and federal laws than there were in 1919?

I would have thought so, yes.

9. Do you concur that because laws restrict the legally permissible range of human behavior and because there are now significantly more state and federal laws than there were in 1919, the legally permissible range of human behavior has therefore been reduced since 1919?

That’s certainly true.

10. Do you concur that the majority of the electorate is capable of effecting change in the number of laws passed by its representatives?