Tag: women

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.

Free society or political equality

The Republicans, like the Democrats, have chosen the latter. And, as Larry Auster points out, in doing so they have also chosen sexual socialism:

Mrs. Romney, along with the GOP which approved her speech, has inadvertently demonstrated once again why women should not have the vote and should not have prominent positions in politics. Because once women have the vote, they become a separate constituency with interests separate from those of men. This inevitably results (1) in female emotionalism and female resentment becoming central in politics; (2) in everyone bowing down at the altar of the mistreated, overworked “moms” of America, who are thus turned into a new type of oppressed ubermensch; and (3) in women as a group demanding substantive equality with men as a group. In short, sexual socialism….

Republicans say they believe in a free society. But the truth is that women’s political equality is incompatible with a free society, because women’s political equality moves society irresistibly in the direction of socialism.

Women will never, ever, be freedom-oriented voters. They will always be security-oriented. Even women who are intellectually freedom-oriented – and what percentage of the electorate is even remotely intellectual? – find it necessary to fight off the emotional appeal of security arguments that appeal to them more powerfully than any man can hope to understand. Mussolini is one of many socialists who knew this, which is why political equality, including a guaranteed percentage of representative seats in the parliament, is the very first plank in the Fascist manifesto.

The Democrats accuse Republicans of fighting a war on women. It’s not true. But they should be. Instead, they are putting the dreadful Ann Romney on display, who I suspect will make for a more baleful influence on American society than any first lady since Nancy Reagan. Hillary only engaged in a bit of financial corruption and fired her lawyer in an unusually untidy manner. Nancy gave us the War on Drugs.

And now we live in John Adams’s DictatorshipTyranny of the Petticoat. How terribly surprising to discover that the nation’s credit cards are maxed out. The choice is between Suffrage or Liberty and you can only choose one.

Women ruin everything: DEFCON edition

From atheist conferences to hacker conferences, women are complaining about them:

[E]veryone at DEFCON benefits from more women attending. Women “hackers” – in the creative technologist sense – are everywhere, and many of them are brilliant, interesting, and just plain good company (think Limor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, and Angela Byron). Companies recruiting for talent get access to the full range of qualified applicants, not just the ones who can put up with a brogrammer atmosphere. We get more and better talks on a wider range of subjects. Conversations are more fun. Conferences and everyone at them loses when amazing women don’t attend.

When you say, “Women shouldn’t go to DEFCON if they don’t like it,” you are saying that women shouldn’t have all of the opportunities that come with attending DEFCON: jobs, education, networking, book contracts, speaking opportunities – or else should be willing to undergo sexual harassment and assault to get access to them. Is that really what you believe?

Yes. Absolutely. The conference should do everything it legally can to dissuade “amazing women” from attending. Because what this foolish woman, in her obvious ignorance of cause-and-effect, is asserting that the absolute highest priority of the conference should be that women feel comfortable. The problem is that once that principle is established, the seeds of the conference’s destruction will have been planted, because women will always find a reason to claim they are uncomfortable. No one at DEFCON would benefit in the long term from more women attending, at least not under that principle, because it only creates more opportunities for women to feel uncomfortable. Therefore, more female attendees would eventually eviscerate DEFCON as the small core of male attendees who actually make the conference valuable would stop attending as their activities increasingly infringed upon female comfort. History is very clear on the way women degrade every male institution they successfully invade that they do not succeed in destroying entirely.

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the policy statement recommended by one of her commenters: “This conference is for everybody and everybody visiting this conference should feel comfortable, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion.” That’s not a hacker conference policy, that’s one establishing a comfort conference. The priority defines the purpose.

And lest you think I exaggerate concerning what might be erroneously dismissed as a slippery slope argument: “These guys can rationalize until they’re blue in the face but IT IS NEVER OKAY TO GIVE A LADY THE HEEBIE JEEBIES!”

We’re not even 100 years into the great equalitarian experiment and Western civilization is already on the verge of economic and demographic collapse. This is not a coincidence. Consider that it only took 79 years for the United Kingdom to go from granting all women over the age of 21 the franchise to voluntarily surrendering its national sovereignty in the Lisbon Treaty. When the Sports Guy said “the lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything”, he spoke nothing but the bitter truth.

Dr. Helen asks about doors

And the opening thereof:

I have been pondering this question lately as I have noticed that it is mostly older men that open doors for women anymore. Younger men tend to go in first and let the door hit you as you walk through. Though I am a woman, I tend to hold the door if I get to it first and will hold it for men or women….

I can understand why men no longer want to open doors or help women. I do feel sad, however, that it has come to a situation where society is at this level. In fact, in my forthcoming book on the war against men, I address how our society is breaking down because men no longer want to, or are even afraid to interact with women and girls.

I open building doors for men, children, old women, and young women who don’t carry themselves with an attitude. I used to open car doors for women, but I don’t anymore because I got tired of feeling stupid every time I went to the other side of the car only to stand there uselessly as the woman, already in the car, closed the door herself. I suspect remote door entry might play a role in that, but it might also be simple female impatience.

It’s probably a character flaw, but I do tend to get a minor kick out of the affronted look on an entitled modern princess’s face as she arrogantly marches toward the door, expecting me to dutifully hold it open for her, only to find it closing on her face. It actually took some time to unlearn the habit, as I had been raised to always open doors, but as with the car door situation, I got tired of encountering the negative reactions. I suppose the instinct to help women is still there, but it is now easily quelled by experience and reason. The change that Dr. Helen is noting is reactive behavior; don’t blame the young men, blame the women who, instead of simply saying “thank you” or even just smiling in response to having a door opened for them, sniff haughtily or sneer in contempt instead.

So, my answer to Dr. Helen is that whereas it was once the social norm for men to open doors for women, that is no longer the case and it will not be the case again until men and women finally reject equalitarianism. Unfortunately, we will probably have to go through a cleansing period of behavioral barbarism before society can be expected to return to some of its civilized practices.

Personally, I think bringing back dueling wouldn’t be the worst idea.

Natural enemies

Louis CK observes that feminists and comedians are natural enemies. And he also demonstrates on The Daily Show that whereas backing down and apologizing is neither funny nor courageous, kicking fascistic feminists demanding male subservience to female sensibilities in the teeth can be a bit of both.

LCK: For me, any joke about anything bad is great. Any joke about rape, the Holocaust, the Mets, whatever — any joke about something bad is a positive thing.

JS: You have now crossed the line, mister!

LCK: I’ve read some blogs during this whole thing that has enlightened me with things I don’t know. This woman said something how rape polices women’s lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t dress a certain way, because they might — that’s stuff I didn’t know. And it’s a part of me now in a way that it wasn’t before and I can still enjoy a good rape joke….

Here is the last thing I want to say about it. This is also about men and women. Because a lot of people are trading blogs and stuff about this with each other. Couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes. But they’re both making a classic gender mistake. The women are saying here’s how I feel about this. But they’re also saying my feelings should be everyone’s primary concern. Now the men are also making this mistake, they’re saying your feelings don’t matter, your feelings are wrong, your feelings are stupid. If you’ve ever lived with a woman, you can’t step in shit worse than that, than telling a woman her feelings don’t matter. So, to the men I say listen, listen to what the women are saying about this. To the women I say now that we’ve heard you, shut the fuck up for a minute and let’s all get back together and kill the Jews. That’s all I have to say about it.

JS: Send your complaints to Brian Williams, care of NBC….

Girls are crazy, patriarchy blamed

This series of “school poisonings” would appear to be a cogent and ironic argument in favor of the Taliban’s position:

The World Health Organisation (WHO) working with the Afghan government has investigated attacks for more than three years but found “no conclusive evidence of deliberate poisoning”.

Thousands of girls have been taken ill at schools in that time, in incidents of mass fainting and vomiting. Pressure has mounted on Hamid Karzai’s government to stop the apparent attacks as their frequency has increased in recent months. Pictures of girls being carried to ambulances, or hooked up to drips in provincial hospitals, have become an increasingly common sight. The symptoms are always short-lived.

The incidents have been widely interpreted as a campaign by the Taliban or other insurgent hardliners to crackdown on girls’ education.

In other words, the Taliban had nothing to do with what is simply an example of mass female hysteria. I’m sure this incident has gone a long way towards hardening the position of the hardliners. They’re already highly skeptical of democracy and female education, can you imagine what this does to their opinion of female suffrage?

“Let’s see, they’re blaming us for stuff we said we didn’t do even though we quite happily take credit for beheading people and blowing them up, and these girls are all quite literally crazy, so yeah, let’s definitely give them a voice in government!”

The amazing thing about feminism is that it regularly makes 7th century cretins look sane by comparison.

Oh, relax and enjoy it, Kate

One of the things I find remarkable is the readiness of outspoken feminist women to crucify themselves with their own words. It’s as if they have absolutely no conception of the logical consequences of their ideas, and despite their confrontational tone, they appear to have no expectation that their position can or will be criticized.

Consider the following excerpts from the linked cartoon, which features a retarded form of Socratic dialogue between a cartoon figure and an even more cartoonish version of anti-feminist arguments.

It’s not fair that I have to be terrified when I go jogging after 6 PM or when I’m on the bus or going to get milk.

Then don’t go out alone at night. That’s common sense.

That’s rape culture! When you tell me it’s my responsibility not to get hurt, you take away the responsibility of a human being not to rape!

Why are we even talking about this? I’m not a rapist.

Because it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in equality!

First of all, Kate being terrified of rape when she goes to get milk is her problem. Some women are terrified of bats, others are afraid of heights, and those fears are no more your problem or my problem than Kate’s terror of rape on the milk run. It is very, very easy for Kate to significantly reduce her chances of being raped, as getting a concealed carry permit and avoiding the company of black and Hispanic men will virtually eliminate the possibility that she will be forcibly raped. Even without taking any such defensive measures, the national rate of forcible rape is only 24.7 per 100,000 population, one-third lower than it was in 1990. This means that in a population of 308 million, Kate’s chances of being raped in any given year are less than one in 12,000 and declining. This cannot be reasonably described as a “rape culture”.

If Kate genuinely lives in constant terror of a one in 12,000 risk, she is delusional and may be clinically paranoid. And this doesn’t even begin to take into account that unless a woman is raped at home by someone breaking into her residence, it is very difficult for a woman to get raped without her not only contributing to the situation, but contributing significantly to it. And yes, in such situations, that does make the victim at least partially culpable from a legal perspective. If you don’t understand that, try looking at it this way. If insurance companies sold rape insurance, are there any behaviors that would conceivably increase or decrease the premium?

Furthermore, Kate is quite obviously crazy. If she had said “it gets really fucking exhausting trying to believe in a future where I’m not treated like a crazy person for believing in rainbow-tailed unicorns”, everyone would quite correctly conclude that she is a lunatic. But there is no more evidence for equality than there is for rainbow-tailed unicorns. Human equality simply doesn’t exist and it has never existed. As I have pointed out before, both logic and genetic science demonstrate that human beings are not even all equally human. Her lunacy is further evidenced by her bizarre attempt to justify her broaching the topic with the non-rapist by an appeal to her own exhaustion. That does not follow. Moreover, it is apparent that Kate, by her own admission, doesn’t actually believe in equality anyway. Consider her final rant:

So fuck ANYONE who thinks they have the right to tell me not to care! FUCK THEM! I do care. I will always care.

Here Kate is expressly denying that others have the right to free speech, which is not only encoded into various legal systems but also happens to observably exist in a material manner, while simultaneously asserting the legitimacy of her attempt to believe in a future that is not only nonexistent, but improbable to the point of near impossibility. From which we are forced to conclude that she’s not only crazy, she’s outrageously stupid to boot.

The fundamentally nonsensical thing about her position is that she wants others to do what she will not. If she can’t be bothered to put any effort into defending herself against rape, why should anyone else? If it’s not her responsibility to act on something about which she professes to care so deeply, how could it possibly be mine, or anyone else’s, when we do not care in the slightest about her feelings or her fate.

Kate declares her opinion that angry posturing on behalf of nonexistent female rights is “hot as hell”. Which is fine, I suppose, so long as she is hoping to attract angry, rancid feminist women. But it certainly isn’t going to be attractive to men who have access to better options, such as Internet porn or voluntary chastity.

For further amusement, I highly recommend the emotional posturing in which various Pharyngulans are engaging as they attempt to demonstrate which one of them is the anti-rapiest of all. Apparently the winner will be awarded a tiara carved from the horn of a pink unicorn by PZ Myers himself. This was one of the finer examples of the intellectual fireworks on display:

I can’t think of one, even one, precaution that a woman (or man) can take that actually has a good chance of preventing rape that would also be considered “reasonable” by any rational or honest individual…. And if you want to talk about “reasonable” precautions, I think, the first burden on you is to describe your proposed precaution and demonstrate that it actually works to prevent rape.

This total inability of humanity to prevent any rape no doubt explains why rape rates never change over time and do not vary from one nation to another. It is a very strange belief system indeed where human action can modify the global climate, but rape is random, inevitable, and completely immune to human action. Of course, it would be deplorably raciss to notice that a 31 percent increase in the number of incarcerated black men, mostly for harmless drug charges, has corresponded with the 33 percent decline in forcible rapes per 100,000, from 41.2 in 1990 to 27.5 in 2010.

Feminism is failure

Female careers are a fallback plan:

Forget ambition, financial security and that first-class degree. A controversial study has concluded that the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married. The research team, made up of three women and two men, said that when men are thin on the ground, ‘women are more likely to choose briefcase over baby’.

And the plainer a woman is, they claim, the more she is driven to succeed in the workplace.

It’s long been observed that the uglier a woman is, the more likely she is to be a feminist. And it was always logical, too, that women who couldn’t compete with other women in the traditional manner would seek to change the rules of the game. But now there is some scientific evidence supporting both the logic and the observation, and it could be very useful in helping counteract the feminist propaganda that inundates young women from the time they are girls, encouraging them to waste their youth and fertility in chasing careers rather than families.

The message is a simple and straighforward one: feminism is for female losers in the game of Life.

“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.