Tag: women

Programmer-prostitutes #icanprogramming

In the end, that’s what the result of GRLZ CAN 2 CODE and pushing more women into pseudo-programming degrees is going to be. Using their sex to sell software to real programmers. Consider the function of the “developer evangelist”:

Developer evangelists are definitely a different
breed. You have to, on the one hand, have the technical chops to be able to
code software, and on the other hand, have the ability to talk about it. I know
a lot of people that are knee deep in their technical savvy, but when it comes
to explaining it to someone who’s never used it before, they fall short. You
need someone that can not only walk the walk, but talk the talk and communicate
it to the community.

Developer evangelists should also
be forward thinking. You need visionaries who can assess the developer
community and see how you should be steering the ship. Otherwise, the developer
program might not necessarily take off. Developer evangelists need to be community
focused. This means elevating the developer community. It means being present
and going out there and working with the developer community.

As
it happens, I was an developer evangelist back in 1990, back when Apple
first popularized the concept. The formal title on my card was
“Transdimensional Evangelist” and my job was to visit the various hardware
manufacturers and computer game developers and convince them that they should be focused
on 3D-acceleration hardware, not MPEG-decompression hardware, for their
next generation of video cards and games. I was initially unsuccessful, but as I had been telling them, the superior technology won out in the end. It may be almost impossible to imagine now, but at the time, the vast majority of the industry was convinced that accelerated 2D video was the future, because 3D was flat-shaded, processor-intensive, and ugly… never mind that one could do so much more with it.

Now, unlike
most “evangelists”, I was actively involved on the strategic development
side; as it happens, I was the individual solely responsible for a chip
designed for the CAD market also having the critical features required
for the game development community; namely, accelerated Gouraud-shading
and texture mapping. I even named the chip: the 3GA. It’s not an accident that Creative Labs didn’t hold the original trademark on “3D Blaster”. However, (and this
is the relevant part), I was under no illusion that being the industry’s
first evangelist for the inevitable move from 2D to 3D made me an engineer, much
less a chip designer.

You may recall that I’ve said one
reason women are unlikely to succeed in programming per se is because
they tend to have an allergy to being held responsible for their own work.
This is mere anecdotal evidence, not conclusive proof, but consider what
sort of “technical chops” are required for this “developer” to “walk
the walk”:

I’ve had issues where my code
didn’t necessarily compile on the first try, and it’s great, because, all
of a sudden, you see them trying to figure it out with you, and it becomes an
engaging activity, as opposed to walking through a bunch of slides.

Isn’t that great? When you can’t do your job on your own but can get someone to help you figure out how to do it? And isn’t that totally unexpected and not at all anticipated by anyone who is sufficiently familiar with the female approach to technological responsibility?

This
is not to say there isn’t a place for women in technology. Nor is there
anything wrong with saleswomen actually knowing what they are talking
about; in fact, this is actually a highly desirable development. But what is
wrong is the pretense that this is not the probable outcome of a computer science degree, or that the
evangelist, (which is a function that combines marketing and strategic
sales), is even performing a production-related job at all.

And this part cracked me up:

Right now, some of the most interesting mobile app developers I know are people who started programming just two years ago. But they’re able to plug stuff together now in such a way to make something that’s cool.

Developers who aren’t Gamma programmers and didn’t study computer science engineering at university are always the most interesting, are they not? And they must be bang-up programmers to have picked it up so quickly!

Women Ruin Everything: Academic edition

This open argument in favor of abanoning the Doctrine of Academic Freedom in favor of a Doctrine of Academic Justice is an excellent example of why women were not allowed into the universities in the first place. This is why they were not permitted to vote. We ignore the great minds of the past at our peril, and we have no right to complain about having to suffer the obvious consequences of entirely predictable actions:

In its oft-cited Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the American Association of University Professors declares that “Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results.” In principle, this policy seems sound: It would not do for academics to have their research restricted by the political whims of the moment.

Yet the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do. Two years ago, when former summer school instructor Subramanian Swamy published hateful commentary about Muslims in India, the Harvard community organized to ensure that he would not return to teach on campus. I consider that sort of organizing both appropriate and commendable. Perhaps it should even be applied more broadly.

Women are, and have always been, intrinsically fascist at heart. With a small minority of exceptions, they hate freedom and will always trade it for the promise of security, physical and emotional. The Fascists understood this. The medieval philosophers understood this. The Founding Fathers understood this. The West rejected the idea in favor of sexual equality and the myth of progress, and now the university has abandoned its centuries-old tradition of academic freedom.

Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, not all women are the same. Yes, there are brilliant and sensible women. But the salient point is that the price of female involvement is reliably too high across the board. How much more destruction can Western Civilization be expected to survive before women of sense are willing to admit that the price of female participation in matters of governance is too great? Do we really need to undergo the Great Collapse before the ancient truths can be accepted once more?

“The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.”
– Bill Simmons

The comparative danger of eating disorders

It’s fascinating how “eating disorder” as it is conventionally used doesn’t appear to cover the statistically most dangerous health consequence of eating abnormally. And, for some reason, in an overstuffed society we’re supposed to worry about the women who are too skinny:

A “disease” that affects 30 million people and kills one out of every 206,897 of the individuals who contract it is simply not a serious societal problem, especially not when considered in light of how diabetes contributed to 231,404 deaths in 2011. 28.5 million Americans suffer from diabetes, so the risk of death from diabetes is one in 111. That means the risk of dying from diabetes is 1,855 TIMES HIGHER than the risk of dying from an eating disorder.

Stuff that in your piehole, fatty. Better yet, stick your finger down your throat if you want to live… and that’s not even considering amputations, blindness, and other non-fatal complications.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.

Au contraire, mon ami

I think Captain Capitalism read a bit too much into yesterday’s post in concluding the college credentialists got me:

A well written and charty-goodness post, but he still considers the education/college degree gap a “real” gap. There are two brief points I shall make as I’m trying to knock out a chapter per 4 days of my book:

1.  Women earn the majority of EASY DEGREES.  When it comes to engineering and anything that requires significant math men beat them at a ratio of 4:1. 
When it comes to Masters in Farting Unicorns and Doctorates in Feelings
with Minors in Oprah, yes, women dominate.  But for the stuff that
matters in the world, men by far outcompete women.

2.  Women are NOT going to be ahead in the world for this.  It is NOT a
good thing for women that they are earning the majority of degrees
because they are buying into a bubble.  It’s like having women
purchasing 70% of the housing in early 2007 and citing that as an
example of some kind of performance gap.

The college degree gap is real. The fact that the degrees are worthless is irrelevant. Captain Capitalism appears to have forgotten that I am not a credentialist, and moreover, I was one of the earliest commentators to point out the increasing irrelevance of the college degree. Consider what I wrote on the subject in 2004:

“The universities abandoned their Christian roots over a century ago.
Beginning in the ’60s, they abandoned their commitment to intellectual
development as well. Having already purged their collective Borg-minds
of almost every vestige of religion and non-leftist thought, the tenured
faculties that dominate the academic asylums have ensured that the
devolution of the academy will continue, until eventually the idea of
sending your child to college for intellectual development will seem as
absurdly counterproductive as watching ABCNNBCBS to learn what’s really
going on in the world.”

I wrote a few more columns on the subject, and in the 2012 WND column entitled “Education is not an investment“, I pointed out five flaws in the various “return-on-investment” calculations used to justify college degrees, such as the failure to take student loan debt into account.

“The Payscale study concluded that the average 30-year ROI was $387,501;
however, the study did not take into account that the average 2010
college graduate owed $25,250 in college loans upon graduation. And
since this debt figure does not include the 40 percent of non-graduating
students and the rate of defaults on student loans has risen to 8.8
percent, it should be readily apparent that the interest owed on that
seemingly small amount of debt will tend to considerably reduce average
ROI from the estimated $387,000. Note that at the current Plus Loan
interest rate of 7.9 percent, the 30-year value of that $25,250 in debt
is $247,118.”

Ironically, one could build a solid case for a young man being better off financially by lending his $25,000 college fund to college students while going off and working instead of getting a degree, so long as he is able to earn more than $4,680 per year for the next 30 years in addition to collecting his federally guaranteed debt-tribute.

What Captain Capitalism failed to realize is that I don’t see the growing preponderance of women in higher education as evidence that women are going to run the world. To the contrary, I see it as evidence that higher education is in the late stages of collapse. Because women ruin everything. The final stage will be reached when Title IX is successfully applied to the STEM degrees, which is already federal law, and math and the hard sciences are sufficiently dumbed down to permit women to receive what is determined to be an equitable number of those degrees.

By that point, men will have likely created alternative systems to the university credentials that are as unpalatable to women as the universities once were, and successful businesses will be increasingly prone to utilize those systems. Some sort of online achievement-based system like those popular in the IT world would appear to be the likely candidate, especially as the availability of online degrees from prestigious institutions continues to increase. Once 50,000 Indians and 100,000 Chinese are graduating with degrees from Harvard, its social cachet will plummet.

Women and military discipline

As bad as this sounds, the reality is even worse:

I once asked a friend who is a retired Army command sergeant major how
they disciplined the women. He replied, “You can’t. If you try, they
charge you with sexual harassment.” I said, “Then how do you get them to
do what you need them to do?” He said, “We don’t. We just let them do
whatever they want.”

I have a friend who was forced out of the service only a few years before his scheduled retirement due to false sexual harassment charges.  The reason his female subordinate made up the charges had nothing to do with his relationship with her, she was just angry that he had disciplined one of her male friends for committing a crime.

Women in the military destroy more than unit cohesion, they destroy all military discipline across the board, from the top to the bottom.  It’s exactly the same as the difference between raising a generation of children in the traditional manner, and raising a generation using only single mothers. We already have a feral black underclass and an increasingly feral white one; in another two decades we will likely have an equally feral military.

This is precisely why I support an all-female U.S. military populated by a draft.  Anything less would be sexist and fail to account for more than 200 years of unmitigated male privilege.

Ruthless compliance

The Marine Corps appears to be going about complying with the Defense Department’s decision earlier this year to repeal the Direct Combat Exclusion Rule in a correct and effective manner.

The Marine Corps will allow enlisted women to participate in basic infantry training beginning this fall as part of ongoing research to determine what additional ground combat jobs may open to female personnel.

New female enlisted Marines will volunteer for spots in the service’s Infantry Training Battalion, mirroring a related effort allowing new female lieutenants to enroll in the Corps’ Infantry Officer Course, according to an official planning document obtained by Marine Corps Times. Titled “Assignment of Women in Combat Units,” the document is dated Aug. 16.

“Female Marines will have the opportunity to go through the same infantry training course as their male counterparts,” the document states. However, as with the research involving female officers, “female enlisted Marines who successfully complete infantry training as part of this research process will not be assigned infantry as a military occupational specialty and will not be assigned to infantry units.”

The correct way to address female claims to equality is always to insist upon completely objective standards.  Women tend to be highly skilled at manipulating subjective standards, which is why so many of them shriek with indignation whenever they discover that their tears, emotional appeals, prostitution, rhetorical sallies, and negotiating tactics will avail them nothing.

Take the oft-cited “women make 77 cents of the male dollar for doing the same job”, for example.  There is a very easy solution to that “problem”. Eliminate salaries and put everyone with the same job on equal hourly wages. Women will still be making less money on average, but their complaints won’t be credible because it is objectively clear why they are earning less: they work fewer hours.  As Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.”

Now, it can be expected that the Marine Corps will eventually come under considerable pressure to reduce the difficulty of its basic infantry training. But with a growing number of Obama Wars to fight, the Corps has very good reason to resist the political pressure to produce inferior Marines, and in the unlikely event a woman proves capable of successfully completing the course, (note that none of the 10 women who have tried have passed the Infantry Officer Course and only one of those ten made it through the course’s very first test), she is likely to be an extraordinary individual who will not be disposed to creating the sort of problems that most women in the military do.

WRE: technology conference edition

It is customary for women to lament the way men are openly hostile to their presence when they insert themselves into hacker fests and technology conferences.  And yet, it is hardly difficult to understand why men tend to be less than enthusiastic about opening themselves up to be patrolled by volunteer speech police and self-appointed equality cops.

A Playhaven developer was fired after making sexual jokes in the audience during a keynote session at PyCon, a conference for Python developers. Now Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for SendGrid, is getting rape and death threats via Twitter.

Richards was sitting in the audience immediately in front of two developers. After someone made a comment about forking a software repository, the two began making jokes about forking in a sexual manner, and “big dongles.” After listening for some time, Richards got fed up, took a picture of the two, and posted it to Twitter:

    Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…
    — Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

One of those two developers is Alex Reid, an engineer at PlayHaven, the mobile gaming monetization and marketing company. The developer on the left, whose name is not yet known but goes by mr-hank on Hacker News, was apparently fired by PlayHaven for the incident.

Adria Richards, having successfully gained the attention she was there to seek, tries to justify her actions in the usual self-lionizing language: “Adria Richards explained her perspective on her blog, But You’re a Girl,
saying that she took the comments for as long as she could, but when
she saw a picture of a little girl onstage, she felt she needed to make a
stand for her, and all the women who have not considered technology as a
career path “because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible
for her to do so.”

What Richards clearly doesn’t realize is that she is the parasitical ass clown making it more difficult for women to pursue technology as a career path.  What sort of idiot employer would want to hire disruptive, self-seeking, controlling employees actively looking for causes to fight instead good engineers who will simply do their jobs and may happen to tell a mildly offensive joke now and then in the process?  At this point, I have no doubt that the conference organizers are regretting their decision to permit Adria Richards to attend.

After all, who wants to attend the sort of conference where merely being overheard by a fellow attendee comes with a proven risk of losing your job?  I’m not a Python developer, but if I was, I’d certainly wouldn’t bother to clear a spot on my calendar for it.  And as a game developer, I’m certainly going to be looking at PlayHaven with a deeply skeptical eye going forward.

As one female developer – in other words a woman who actually works in the industry, as opposed to patrols it on behalf of her equalitarian ideology – correctly observed: “Honestly, I feel like this kind of crazy shit makes it harder for women to manage in tech.”  It does.  It absolutely does. People like Richards are parasites who have no place in technology because they contribute nothing, they create nothing, they construct nothing, they only destroy.  They only seek to destroy.

Even the lowly white knights who desperately desire to be considered good and proper equalitarians understand the problem:  “She damages the reputation of everyone trying to make this industry more
female-friendly. She’s done the opposite of making men and women feel
more comfortable working together; now men will be looking over their
shoulder every time a woman is present in the workplace or a conference
because hey, she might do what Adria did. This is not an environment
anyone wants to work in.”

It is reported that 20 percent of  the 2013 attendees at PyCon were female.  If the men who attended this year have any sense at all, that percentage will be considerably higher next year.  Meanwhile, those of us who don’t give a quantum of a damn about making “industry more female-friendly”, but are focused on creating compelling, entertaining, and useful technologies, see our skepticism vindicated.  Again.

UPDATE:  Apparently SendGrid was unimpressed with their employees decision to evangelize feminist speech control rather than SMTP relay services.  It is a wise move on their part, and should serve as an object lesson to other would-be though police.

“Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.“

Mailvox: which is worse, work or rape?

A drive-by commenter throws out a few questions:

women don’t have to stay home and breed simply because it intimidates
you that we’re in the workforce. What about the fact that women may
wish to work and be very capable of doing so. Are you saying women are
less intelligent than men? Is there any reason that a man couldn’t stay
home and provide childcare if that is best suited to a family? 

1) True.  Women don’t have to stay home and breed because it intimidates anyone that they are in the workforce, about two-thirds of them have to stay home and breed in order to prevent society from either collapsing into demographic and economic ruin or being transformed by the imported replacement workers into a third world society.  The birthrate has already fallen well below replacement level without the rate of female employment even drawing completely even with the male employment rate; one wonders how low it would go if all women were required to enter the workforce.

One can look to Londonistan if one requires an example of this process at work: “[F]or the first time, white Britons are now in a minority in the country’s largest city…. White Britons now make up 45 per cent of the population, compared with 58 per cent in 2001.  London’s population has been boosted by immigrants. Three million foreign-born people now live in the capital.  

2) The fact that women may wish to work and are very capable of working no more implies that they should always be encouraged to do so anymore than the fact that men may wish to rape and are very capable of raping means that they should always be encouraged to do so.  The ironic, but logically inescapable fact is that encouraging men to rape would be considerably less damaging to a society than encouraging women to enter the workforce en masse.  Widespread rape makes a society uncivilized.  Widespread female employment makes a society demographically unsustainable.  History demonstrates that incivility can be survived and surmounted.  Unsustainability, on the other hand, cannot.

3) Are women less intelligent than men?  On average, no.  In terms of the highest standard deviations, yes.  However, I think it is readily apparent that both men and women are to blame for constructing an equalitarian society that, in terms of intelligence, doesn’t even rise to the ability of a dog to avoid defecating in its own bed and staying off the railroad tracks.

4) Yes, there are a number of reasons that a man cannot stay home and provide childcare.  The three most important are that a) most men don’t want to provide childcare, b) most women don’t want to work to support a man, and c) doing so significantly increases the probability that his wife will stop being attracted to him and his marriage will fail.  A woman simply OUTEARNING her husband increases the risk of divorce by 50 percent; this implies that it is untenable to expect women to be willing to completely support their families.  But certainly, if there are women who dream of marrying men who will stay home and play video games with the children while they work 60 hours per week to support the family, there is no reason they should be barred from doing so. 

I tend to doubt there are enough of these hard-working snowflakes to be of any statistical, let alone demographic, significance to society.

I am still not a conservative

Ed Trimnell is operating from a fundamentally flawed logical foundation in his defense of what he calls conservatism:

Today I read a piece on Vox Day’s blog, entitled “Women ruin everything.” (Vox Day bills himself as a conservative.)

Leaving the title aside, most of the blog post deals with the excesses of the radical gender  politics that have arisen in collegiate sports since the passage of Title IX. In other words: the excesses of leftwing, political feminism. This portion of the post is generally reasonable, and generally conservative.

But then Vox ends his post with a non sequitur:

 “Do you really think it was an accident that women were never permitted any voice in the governance of the Roman Republic or the great historical democracies such as Athens, Thebes, Imperial Britain, and Revolutionary America?  Do you really believe it to be a mere coincidence that many modern democracies, including Germany, Italy, and the member states of the European Union, were not able to survive even 100 years of female suffrage?”

What about Jeane Kirkpatrick–and Margaret Thatcher? Would Vox seriously deny these women the vote? (A true conservative would not apportion any political privileges or penalties based on race or gender. Once again–that is the game of the Left and the Democratic Party.)

The implication in Vox’s post is that members of one gender are inherently wiser than those of the other. And there is one gender which–by virtue of being that gender–“ruins everything,” in his words.

This is exactly what the radical feminists say–only in reverse.

Conservatives cannot fight irrational gender politics by becoming sexists ourselves, just as we cannot fight the tribal politics of the race card by becoming racists. Conservatism is for men as well as women–and for people of all races and ethnicities. (Let us not forget that most of the welfare states in Europe are essentially the creations of white males, while there are some fairly astute Asian capitalists. And yes–some of them are women.)

The logical flaws in Vox’s “Women ruin everything” post are obvious. What is not so obvious is how this sort of rhetoric plays into the hands of Obama and the Obamaites.

One phony conservative can do more damage to the conservative movement than all the prattling leftwing lemmings on The Daily Kos and John Scalzi’s Whatever combined.

I will begin by pointing out that Mr. Trimnell’s reasoning is generally sound, as evidenced by his observations concerning the material difference between Vox Popoli and the warren that is Whatever.  However, his reasoning happens to go significantly awry here because it is built upon false foundations and erroneous assumptions.

First, I do not bill myself as a conservative.  I am not a conservative.  Neither am I a Republican.  I have never claimed to be either since I first began writing political op/ed in 2001.  While I did briefly belong to the Young Republicans in 1988 and attended both the national convention in Houston as well as the inaugural ball, I have never voted for a Republican for President. To the best of my recollection I registered as a Libertarian in 1992 and have only ever voted for Libertarian presidential candidates.  It may be worth noting that my blog is repeatedly listed as one of the top libertarian sites and my positions on the drug war, the foreign wars, immigration, the banks, and free trade, among many others, are considerably different than the conventional conservative positions.

Second, the connection between the observed and incoherent evils of Title IX and female suffrage is far from a non sequitur.  It may be ironic and unexpected that feminism can ruin even the most notable fruits of feminism, but it was both anticipated and predicted by many brilliant past writers that women’s suffrage would bring about both “the despotism of the petticoat” better known today as liberal fascism as well as the eventual demise of those societies that were foolish enough to embrace it.

In answer to his question, I would absolutely deny women such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Margaret Thatcher the vote if the responsibility was given to me.  (It may interest some to know that I’ve actually met both women; I even have a picture of me with Mrs. Kirkpatrick around here somewhere.)  While Mrs. Thatcher was a great woman of genuine courage, she betrayed her country in the end.  And she did so for the very reason women would not be permitted to vote in any society that wishes to sustain itself: she was taken in by the lies of dishonest men.

“We had to learn the hard way that by agreement to what were
apparently empty generalizations or vague aspirations we were later held
to have committed ourselves to political structures which were contrary
to our interests.”
– Lady Margaret Thatcher, “The Downing Street Years”

Third, while one “gender” is not wiser than the other, gender being a grammatical construct, it is an observable, provable, statistical, and scientific fact that the two sexes possess different brain structures, different thought patterns, different hormonal balances, and different time-preferences.  By a timely coincidence, I happened to address this very subject on Alpha Game earlier today.

“[I]f one is able to understand how women’s cumulative socio-sexual
preferences affect the housing market and the economy, how is it
possible that one is not able to understand that those preferences will
also affect the governance of a nation as well as the scope of human
liberty deemed legally permissible.”

What Trimnell fails to realize here is that he is inadvertently attempting to undermine everything from insurance premiums to science and human reason, which I would characterize as a profoundly unconservative act.  Due to its false foundations, his “conservatism” is not only neither rational nor coherent, it is more firmly in accordance with the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution than anything that can be credibly identified with conservative thought dating back to Athens.

Once he claims that “Conservatism is for men as well as women–and for people of all races and ethnicities”, it should be eminently clear that he is unwittingly preaching the same sort of revolutionary equalitarian nonsense that real conservatives, who have always understood that there are fundamental differences of race and culture, have rejected for centuries.  It is pure equalitarianism, which is based on an intellectual foundation every bit as credible and materially substantive as unicornology and leprechaunics.

As for fighting tribal politics, I would submit that they cannot be understood, much less engaged, without becoming what he describes as “racist” and what I would describe as “scientifically and historically observant” or even “sub-speciesist”.  It is a little ironic that men like Mr. Trimnell are still trying to argue that race does not exist when genetic science has demonstrated that humanity is not even made up of the same sub-species.  As it no doubt justifies its own detailed debate, I shall set aside, for now, the obvious observation that to not be sub-speciesist is absolutely and necessarily equivalent to denying human evolution.

In summary, I recommend Spengler, the real Spengler, to Mr. Trimnell, as well as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as a corrective.  He is an intelligent man, so I have little doubt that even a modicum of exposure to such classic works will prove an effective palliative to the equalitarian propaganda in which he, like me and most of the readers here, was steeped throughout his intellectually formative years.

Since I am not a phony conservative, or indeed, a conservative of any kind, I hope that Mr. Trimnell will understand my concern for any potentially negative effect upon the “conservative” movement is a matter of complete and utter indifference to me.  I should also note that  for once, I am in complete accordance with Mr. Trimnell’s commenter, as Hunt correctly notes: “I think it’s important to say that you should not feel as if you are in
any way obligated to account for anything VD happens to think or say….
VD would
probably not pledge any allegiance to the conservatism that you support.”

I am, of course, entirely willing to defend my positions from Mr. Trimnell’s assertions, be they reasonable and compelling or not.  I hope it is readily apparent that I am only attacking what I see as the deficiencies in his ideas, not his character.

Dr. Helen calls out the compassionate

Unlike the good doctor, I don’t believe in human equality, either between the sexes or in any other context.  I believe science, history, and casual observation are in accord on the matter. Nevertheless, I have to concur with her cogent observation on the extraordinary distaste for criticism demonstrated by some women:

I don’t agree with Venker’s whole “theme” about women’s femininity, I
believe in equality between the sexes. However, the response to Venker
just illustrates that women can’t stand being called out in any way. If
men on my blog even complain mildly about something women do, they are
called misogynists, sexists and liars. This just goes to show that most
women can dish it out but can’t take it. Ladies, this double standard is
appalling and sexist.

Dr. Helen adroitly twists the knife with her ironic reference to the myth of superior female compassion in the title to her post.  It is, indeed, a strange form of compassion that wishes death on anyone who dares to view a woman’s actions and ideas in anything but the rosiest light.