In Search of Reality

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So I was reading about Henry VIII (No, I truly don’t get this, but not only is No Will But His selling better than anything else, I have, the sales are accelerating.)

While the Baen books still have priority, I’m going to try to – G-d willing and this week being atypical for the year (I am better, thank you, and no longer living in the bathroom) – find enough time this year to write the other queens.  (On the good side, I’ve done two of those books.  One took me 2 weeks and one 3 days, so…)

But it’s been years since I read anything about Tudor England and there have been new books.  So I’ve been reading about Henry VIII because frankly I haven’t been up to reading fiction this week.

Anyway, so every author agrees Henry VIII as a young man was a true renaissance man, good at everything and so very good looking.  And every author wonders what dread disease caused him to turn not just into a murderous tyrant, but a stupid murderous tyrant in old age.

Except if you dig in you find that when his dumbest moves were made was after he’d killed his two ministers, first the great one and then his apprentice.  (Wolsey and Cromwell.)  Which brings us to… was he really that brilliant or were they great at manipulating him.

But surely – say you – he composed music, he wrote poems, he wrote theological dissertations, for crying out loud.

Except that Thomas Moore put the finishing touches on the “theological dissertations” – were they “finishing touches” or book doctoring?  And at least one book casts doubt on whether he had the same kind of help with his music and, let’s face it, his sonnets to Anne Boleyn are remembered because of their very unfortunate romance, not because he was another Thomas Wyatt.  (And for all I know Thomas Wyatt helped him “with the finishing touches” too.)

While I read, I started getting this incredibly familiar feeling.  “They tell me he’s a genius, but there’s really no proof and no one would dare have said anything else in writing because he was an absolute monarch.”  It could be argued in that way they fed the ego of a man who was just a man till he became, ultimately, a monster.

And while we’re at it, when the same forces apply in a supposed democratic republic that applied in Henry VIII’s absolute monarchy, something must be done.  I’m just saying.  We’ve seen this movie many times from Henry VIII to the Sun King to Kim Il Jung.  It always ends in blood.  And it’s rarely the blood of those responsible for making the people suffer.  I’m just saying it’s time for America to be exceptional again.

Oh, and while on that, when Henry VIII died he left England near bankrupt.  I was snorting with laughter at an author who couldn’t understand why Henry VIII stayed “protestant” – in the most Catholic way possible – after his first two wives died, instead of submitting to Rome.  Sigh.  Apparently this is an historian who believes the ledger part of the reign isn’t history.  He couldn’t go back to Rome because he’d dissolved the monasteries and pillaged their wealth in land, houses and rents.  DUH.  And then he still took the kingdom into penury.  Good thing he didn’t have a printing press he could run at will to create fiat money, uh?

And speaking of other people who have been told what they wanted to hear or what other people wanted to be true until they’re drinking their own ink and completely out of touch with reality – here’s a few more examples:

Like all monsters of legend, Bill Blasio is attacking New York City.  Only the Castro-admirer was elected to lead it.  Yes, I know most people there drink their own ink, too.  They’re too wealthy and comfortable and think reality no longer applies to them. But there is something wonderful and special about the city.  Try to go see it before it becomes Detroit.

As for the Ship of Fools in search of global warming, who got stuck in ice – no matter how much the tv stations hide it and no matter how much they call the occupants “tourists” the gig is up.  It’s like the summer of recovery, guys.  You’re telling people digging out from under snow they’re having a heat wave.  Your climate refugees failed to show up.  Most of us know we’re not stuck in a tropical paradise.  Oh, and most of us know, too, that the Earth was much warmer than this before, sometimes when there weren’t humans.  You can indoctrinate people going through the schools, but in time they get out and the scales fall from their eyes.  And sometimes, if you push hard enough, you create people like me, who went through a much more biased system than even you have managed. Sure those who are like me will be one in a hundred, but all the same, think on it.  Consider telling the truth now and then.

But this – this is an example of drinking your own ink that leaves us absolutely breathless.  I’m linking to the Chicks on the Right Holy Mother of Whack, instead of to the original article.  You’re free to read that, but TRUST me, you’ll be dumber for it.

I’m not going to go into EVERYTHING that’s wrong with the original article – a cry for psychiatric help if I ever heard one – but will just point out the person seems to think of evolution as a god.  However we’re formed, we can tell for if it hurts or not that it is or isn’t meant to be used in some way.  Older son who is a fully trained biologist tells us that the hymen is actually a “seal for freshness” not in the sex sense, but because it keeps most disease-causing germs away, until the woman is of reproductive age, which increases the chances she’ll reproduce and pass on the gene for it.  (This btw, explains why women in the middle ages were kept from strenuous exercise, which is known to rupture the hymen.  They didn’t have antibiotics.  Another myth of male supremacy exploded.  Sad.)

The sad – truly sad – thing is that this psychological cry for help is not that individual.  For instance, while on a panel with one of the glittery whoo has who later plunged into the SFWA kerfuffle, I watched her try to articulate the same argument.  She was CERTAINLY sure that men only had sex with women to impregnate them (wait, what?)  And that this was the primary purpose of rape.

Don’t get me started.

When a significant portion of the population gets this far away from reality and CAN live, our society is so wealthy that most of us can afford to be like Henry VIII completely divorced from reality.

The question is – can it go on?

I think it can, but I think that the gods of the copybook headings will make a comeback tour before we’re on the right course again.

WELCOME Instapundit Readers and thank you Glenn for the link!

518 thoughts on “In Search of Reality”

  1. I lived in NYC until 2001. I don’t want to go back and see what a mess they’ve made of it. Did you know that the Research Library (the one with the lions in front) is being destroyed piecemeal?

    Going back would be like renewing acquaintance with a friend who’d become a junkie and married an abusive man.

    No than ks!

    1. I visited 1988, had a hotel near Times Square which had cockroaches, peeling paint and interestingly dressed women (high heels, very heavy make-up, short skirts… :)) around. So I never managed to see the place at its recent peak. If I manage to get enough money together for a trip, well, even in the best possible scenario not going to happen at least in the next two, three years, and if I manage it after that it may be well on its way to what it was in 88 than what it has been recently. Pity.

      1. *sigh* And actually it was 1987. I’m lousy when it comes to remembering dates. Or years. Usually I do get the decade right, if it’s about something which happened when I was alive. If we are talking about historical events, the further back you go the more likely it is I may get confused even about the exact century. 😦

        Anyway, what I remember was something kind of scruffy, but in the process of being renovated (lots of those temporary walls (whatever they are called in English, the plywood ones which are put up around construction sites?) around. I always figured I’d get the chance to visit again so I ended up spending most of the week in the Natural History Museum and various bookshops. But I have never gone there again.

        1. Possibly. Of course 50 years is forever in electoral politics, and the horse *may* learn to sing.

          1. What difference, at this point, does it make?

            Sorry. just trying that out for size.
            Right. Doesn’t fit here, as an excuse, either.

      2. Inertia only lasts so long. You have repay debts/A countries money becomes devalued. As far as redistribution goes there are two things: One, The overtaxed productive leave if they can. Two, you run out of other peoples’ money.

  3. By banning horse-drawn carriages, Blasio is just freeing the horses for other, better careers. Like being senators . . .

      1. I think I saw something about making sure they’d get nice retirements. I suppose there are some sort of horse protection shelters or something around. I suppose he’d better make sure of that, if they do go straight to glue factory and that gets even some publicity it will not look good for him, so he does have bit of a personal stake here. Especially since this being the first things connected to his reign it is getting noticed better than it would have been if it had happened later.

        Well, always possible the horses will go somewhere nice for a year or two, long enough that we can get a few pretty pictures of them lazing on some pretty green pasture, and then they will be slaughtered once it’s likely nobody will no longer notice.

        1. My question is, who pays for it all? Those aren’t publicly owned horses, so how can he justify using tax money to put them out to pasture? Does he have any idea how long horses live?

          The bill ain’t going to be cheap. My guess is that it’s going to be glue factories, and then the horse lovers are going to get up in arms, and this is going to end Very Badly(tm) for him.

          I’m curious, though: When the hell did this rise to the top of the list, for New York City issues?

          1. The expense is why I’m guessing that if those horses really will be initially taken somewhere nice they won’t stay there long. Or else it’s just something he said when somebody brought up the question ‘what will happen to the horses’.

            As to the issues, I also read some speculation that this may have something to do with the land where the stables now are. One of his backers is interested in building something on that spot? That does sound plausible.

            1. I expect to hear that they’ve gone to retirement homes in Canada. Shortly thereafter they’ll be shipped to France in small packages. There’s a huge overseas market for horse meat, and plenty of unwanted horses to fill it.

    3. “Blasio is just freeing the horses for other, better careers. Like being senators . . .”
      So what’s the front half of the horse supposed to do?

  4. I think some of Henry’s behavior is his reaction to his father’s apparent weaknesses.

    The contrast of course between his apparent strong grip on power and his daughters’ far more precarious reigns is interesting.

    2. I dunno that I’d call Elizabeth the Great‘s reign “precarious” … yes, she faced threats, but she beat all of them. Including, sadly for her, the rebellion of one of her favorites. She had one of the longest reigns of any European monarch ever; interestingly, two monarchs who beat her at this were also English Queens — Victoria and Elizabeth II.

  5. I feel dumber by just reading Chicks on the Right analysis. *sigh Could feminists get any worse? I will have to use PIV in a conversation with the hubby to see if he has heard it before. Lol it will be fun.

    2. Well, I’ve heard this before. Not that term, but the concepts. I was very close to a radical feminist as a child. She said to me screaming over the dinner table “life is cheap!” These ideas have been around a while, and is the logical endgame to all that prevails in our culture at this time.

      See, once putting sperm in a bucket with some eggs qualifies as a valid mode for creating life on demand, (with the necessary step of exterminating all the life you don’t want) suddenly natural birth and all it implies will become disgusting and vile. The lives of the Naturally Born won’t be valid, and that term will become a slur. All the things that give life it’s ultimate value will be despised. Left is right, up is down, War is Peace, and Ignorance is Strength. We will call the sky pink because we have sunsets– and that is as close to the truth as we dare come.

      I think some aspect of vegetarianism is the same idea. Killing meat to eat is not sanitary enough, and is “icky” and “unfair”. Using chemicals on your vedgies is icky too. Just as pregnancy is slavery and birth is torture. *rolls eyes* Yep, all that, and housework too! Talk about cruel and unusual punishment… I’m not saying that birth is not a traumatic or even unbelievable experience. I don’t know. The miscarriage was bad enough. But… it’s still not torture.

      1. Miscarriages are much worse than birth, because in birth you get a baby. That might sound sappy, but seriously. The one natural birth I had (Robert was unnatural, of course, as always :-P) it was like being in love and in heaven for about a month after. Trust me. The stupid hormones make it all worth while.
        As for the rest — I agree with you, with one minor protest. HOUSEWORK IS CRUEL AND UNUSUAL. Why has no one created the robots from Door into Summer? (Yes, I know why, but long story.)

        1. Tee hee! about housework! 🙂 Also, I was trying to not count the raging case of toxic shock I got after. But the two events are hard to separate in my mind.

          1. I got that with Robert’s birth — 3 days (I almost wrote years) in labor then emergency caeserean… well, it was purpureal fever I think they used to call it. RAGING uterine infection. Antibiotic resistant. Two weeks in hospital. THEN I got post partum depression for a year.
            You know what? Still worth it for the kid now, but I wouldn’t go through THAT again.

        2. Ah, one of my favorite novels rises into the conversation 🙂

          I’m working on the robots, but Thorenson hasn’t inished inventing the tubes we need to train them.

      3. This scenario is straight out of Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ — babies were ‘decanted’ in artificial wombs, and live birth was considered disgusting.

        1. Exactly. That book was so personally horrifying that I had to set the book aside (before finishing it) and hide under a blanket. This was when I was in high school, and I read Russian Literature for fun. I haven’t quite convinced myself to pick it up again. Yes, Huxley is an excellent writer, and his points are dead sound, but…

          1. It was, you know, meant to be a dystopia. What horrified me was not so much the artificial birth aspect, as the fact that they were deliberately crippling their own children both phenotypically and emotionally, just because they wanted a smoother-running society. And that there was no real future — their culture was utterly stagnant, going nowhere — despite all their biological technology, they were living like ants.

            1. For some people this is a utopia. They like the idea of ruling over ants. Regular people are so unpredictable, uncooperative and messy.

            2. Yes, but he also deftly showed how doing one interleaved with the second. The acceptance of artificial birth made it POSSIBLE to cripple their own children. Because they are always and everywhere someone else’s. It is the tragedy of the commons applied to life. The implications, plus the current trends alive in society at the time, which made the darkness of blankets so necessary for my sanity.

              1. Without the family and without even mothers; I think that world would quickly become a Hobbesian nightmare.

                  1. I think that they’ve to the point of — effectively–saying burn it down. They are all a bunch of malignant narcissists.

                    2. Not to mention they haven’t a clue that something should replace it– before the bonfires commense. But… but… bonfires are fun! *headdesk*

                    4. Destroying is the easiest thing in the world. In fact, all you have to do is make sure good men (in proximity) do nothing. So what looks like a blazing acomplishment is simply leaving sand castles out to the incoming tide.

                      Though one must admit that Critical Theory is the most caustic tool since nihlism, save you aren’t even obligated to be honest. But once it’s set free… putting the brakes on requires physical interventions that the applicant never dreamed of being possible– nor necessary. Then he discovers his words are ash, and what he loved is gone– or could never be.

    3. I have a vague notion that the “PIV” was the result of someone mistyping “PVI”– which I know the CDC uses– and not wanting to admit they were wrong.

        1. Normal male/female intercourse– it’s a work-around to avoid using synonyms for “sodomy*” to describe various other activities.

          *technically doesn’t mean PAI

          1. What’s wrong with intercourse or copulation or screw or…? There’s a million words for having sex and they had to come up with a new one?

            2. All of which point out that it’s the only actual form of sexual intercourse. They want it to be no more than anything else you can do in bed to gratify yourself.

              1. Take all the love out of the world. I say it’s the work of the Devil or ZPG. These are miserable people trying to make everyone else miserable.

            3. My guess: it has to be something which has no risk of bringing out any emotions whatsoever in the people who use it or who hear it so nobody will blush or anything. Would be embarrassing if the professional got all bothered or embarrassed when she has to talk about something to a patient. And acronyms can be good that way.

        2. Penis Vagina Intercourse. PIV is Penis in Vagina. I’m sorry. I hate to destroy your beautiful innocence as in “WHY DOES ANYONE EVEN NEED TO REFER TO THIS?”

    4. Anybody think that this article (the original, not the CR folks) is a test balloon for the next salvo? So far, too many people are remembering that they like family. Traditionalism must be stopped, so show it as worse than death camps.

      1. I don’t care how oikophobic they are,; I’m not going to think like the deranged nuts they are. My sister annoyed me when we lived geographically closer. I’m not going to say that family life is hell. The author of the original article needs I think intensive therapy and medication.

        1. The lady thinks that *everyone* needs intensive therapy and medication. Can you imagine her perception of the world? She literally thinks herself into hell on earth.

          1. I’ve had daymares where I thought things were atrociously bad but never for more than a few hours.

            I think that fantasies are necessary when the real world is horrible. She has the Sadim (Midas reversed) touch. She is in a good place politically and economically at least, and creates horror for herself. She doesn’t do it for fun like horror writers do– I don’t know her or her motivations–but because this is the way the world is. It’s like something out of The Matrix.

            I guess it’s a modern version of a hair shirt.

            1. My husband has this theory that because we don’t have the pieties of the church in every day life, that it is necessary to invent them. Because all of the traditional barriers are removed, there is no force to gravitate these practices to moderation. Also, this may be the sad outcome of having it too good, and not having anything to struggle against or any sort of misfortune to give one’s life meaning. So, hey, why not destroy Western Civilization? That’ll keep you occupied until at least lunchtime.

        1. Don’t mess with Texans. Don’t try to take away my family. You will not like the outcome.

    5. I read the article when it first came out (Weaselzippers? The Jawa Report? I don’t recall who gets the blame). Yeah, that individual needs serious help and then to be whomped up side the head with a biology book. I also get the sense that she’s never read_Lysistrata_. It wasn’t just the men who were complaining about the “strike for peace” IIRC.

      1. Talk to any divorced woman who is willing to be honest. Or any widow. BUT as I said, what scares me is that she’s fairly normal among the glittery who-has of SF.

        1. “BUT as I said, what scares me is that she’s fairly normal among the glittery who-has of SF.”

          Like Scalzi.

            1. convert the middle h into an r and you have a lovely word: OORAH!! Usually spoken by Marines. 🙂

              Anyone here reading John Ringo’s new series Black Tide Rising?
              1. Under A Graveyard Sky
              2. To Sail A Darkling Sea
              3. Islands of Rage & Hope
              4. Strands of Sorrow.

              #1 came out last September, #2 is out next month (2/14)and is available as an eARC at Baen.com, #3 is due out 8/14, and #4 hasn’t been scheduled yet. #2 and #3 can be pre-ordered on Amazon.

              I’ve read Under A Graveyard Sky and To Sail A Darkling Sea numerous times and they are both fabulous! They also have a number of Marines who say OORAH!

              1. Yup, read the first, the second will be along once the baen monthly bundle unfolds. *grin* It’s how I pick up a bunch of ebooks, new and old, for cheap, because money may not buy happiness, but having enough to meet my obligations is essential to my sleep cycle.

            2. I believe that the usual rendering is “hooh-hah”. Referring, of course, to the glittery sort of thing the rest of use less refined terms for, like “vagina”, or… er, I think I’ll stop there.

              There’s also the Marine “Ooooo-Rah”, which is their tribal call. The Army is more a “Hooo…Ah”. Subtle difference, that, but you can always tell which branch formed someone’s military origin point by the presence or absence of that middle “R” sound.

              The use of the “Hoo…Ah” in the Army is sometimes controversial. Generally, it is more used by the identifiably overly enthusiastic and less bright. Usually 2nd Lieutenants who have recently had their minds washed in the waters of the Airborne or Ranger schools. What’s bad is that there is a tendency to “pick up” speech patterns, and when you work with a guy whose use of the term is virtually pathological, well… You can easily get laughed at.

              I had a Lieutenant I worked for when I was a newly-promoted Sergeant First Class, meaning I officially was at the level where I could run a platoon (around twenty-thirty men). This young man had his hooah switch set to about eleven. Seriously–Every other word, hooah. “OK, Sergeant K, hooah, we’re going to take the platoon, hooah, down to the river, hooah, and we’re going to build a bridge, hooah? What do you think we’ll need, hooah, to get ready, hooah?”.

              The word quite took up most of the uses of punctuation and emphasis, not to mention communications, period. I had a couple of conversations with him that consisted of virtually nothing else. Which led to me picking it up, despite myself. Kind of a negative thing, given that the lifers like myself weren’t really supposed to use the word, it being relegated to the young and impressionable.

              1. “OK, Sergeant K, hooah, we’re going to take the platoon, hooah, down to the river, hooah, and we’re going to build a bridge, hooah? What do you think we’ll need, hooah, to get ready, hooah?”

                Wow, that’s downright smurfy!

                1. Dear God…

                  Do you know that that’s the first time, ever, that I’ve made that connection? I wonder if that’s where the hell that stuff comes from, some kind of subtle, Saturday-morning mind-warping?

      4. Well, you could file her under “Villains, for inspiration.” Except that she’s too villainous. People won’t believe it.

        You can also use her as a reminder that when people say that real people aren’t really as villainous as some characters — they’re not telling the truth.

    6. Look at the bright side: they are getting brighter. In the days of Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, they thought that they could just tell us that it’s rape and we’d all believe them.

      Not enough brighter, though. sigh

  6. I read the summary and . . . I . . . I . . . I don’t even . . . I don’t . . . I . . . I . . . I . . .

    1. I had the same reaction. My question to someone like this is precisely how they explain women who seek this “PIV” sex out?

      I mean, seriously: Were you to tell the average woman I’ve known intimately that you just wanted to cuddle, the usual response would be violent opposition. “WHAT? I went through all this, to get you here, and now you don’t want to do it? WTF is wrong with you!?!?!”.

      And, judging from the reaction on the occasions that Priapus has failed to do his job, I have to think that her attitude is a bit, shall we say, anomalous?

      It’s my observation that anyone who gets this deep into the rabbit hole over sex has mental health issues. I knew a guy when I was a teenager who I feel I observed talk himself into being gay, simply because he was obsessively introspective about things, and overthought the whole issue of what his “sexual identity” was. “Oh, that ass I was admiring belongs to a guy… I must be gay…”. Literally–That was his thought process, starting out. I’d seen the same hippy with the androgynous hips, which I admired with him, and my response was “F***, I need new glasses…”.

      Most normal people leave things the way nature made them. “Oh, I’ve got a penis? Well, let’s play this out…” or “Oh, I’ve got a vagina? Hmmm… Lucky me. I get better orgasms… Let’s just leave it at that, shall we?”.

      You start obsessing over things, and the next thing you know, you’re in a full latex gimp suit wearing a ball-gag. Most people stop with their sexual thinking at “turn-on”, and never get to “fetish”. The ones who get to the level where they’re only aroused by tiny female feet? Kinda a sign of, ya know, issues.

      I dropped by my middle brother’s place the other night, and found him watching one of those serial killer profile things, one about that Canadian Air Force Colonel who turned out to be a serial rapist and killer. Now, from my point of view, there is a lot of congruency between him and the woman who wrote that “PIV” blog posting.

      Not apparent to you? Well, consider this: Both that woman and that killer started out with a position that most normal people could look at and go: “OK, I can kind of see that…”, and ended somewhere completely off the reservation. His thing apparently started out with a bit of a turn-on, attracted to trying on women’s underclothes. Not that strange, I suppose–I’ve been shocked at the number of heterosexual men I’ve discovered who are aroused by that. Me? I’ve taken one look at the idea and gone “How the hell would that even work…?”

      But, most people leave that kind of thing at “Hmmm… Kinda interesting… I like this… But, I’m not going to go any further than maybe buying some stuff that fits me…”. Him? Sweet Jesus, this guy took things to the logical extreme, and then turned it up to about 21 on a dial that only goes to 10.

      Same way that the blog author went from “Normal male-female sex makes me uncomfortable…” to full-on OMFG batshit crazy-town. She’s at about 11 on the dial, I’d say. When she’s found with a knife outside some guys apartment after cutting his wedding tackle off, then I’d say she’d matched the colonel in terms of cra-cra.

      Both of these people got where they’re at by obsessing over issues most normal people just look at and go “Oh, that’s interesting… I’m apparently aroused by that… Maybe a little more…?” or “Hmmm… I don’t like that, let’s not do too much of that kind of thing…”.

      As with everything, balance is essential. There’s a vast difference between someone who’s aroused by their of-age partner wearing a schoolgirl uniform, and someone who has to have the real item to become aroused. The difference between the two is where the insanity lies…

    3. I went over and read more of her essays. Everything male is the enemy, and males can possess women through brainwashing women into thinking that coitus is pleasurable when it really isn’t. Yeah, apparently 95% of women throughout the course of history have been programmed to misunderstand fear and pain as being pleasure. And then it gets weirder. Just as women were throwing off the chains of male oppression in the 18th and 19th century, “sexologists” and others redirected the feminist movement to serve the goals of the patriarchy.

      Some of her thinking backs into some of the Salafist and Wahabi teachings about women and their effect on men – how women can tempt men away from virtue and how women must be locked away from men for the sake of everyone’s morality. Except in this case it’s women must avoid men and male society for the good of women’s morality. *shakes head* She lives in a very unhappy world.

      1. I had a conversation with someone who I think could be termed a radical feminist, one that quite blew my mind.

        What we got into turned on Islam, and the mistreatment of women therein. Her position was that Islam was better, not because they abused women more than the secular West or Christianity, but because it was more honest.

        You read that right. Honest. Her opinion was that it was better to live under openly oppressive Islam, than to live with the hidden conspiracy of the Western Patriarchy. Which was precisely how she phrased it.

        She’d flipped things around in her head so that that sort of thing was preferable. Literally. I don’t doubt but that there will be a not-so-slight element of the radical feminist movement that will quite comfortably slide right into purdah, and even work to make it happen. Why? Because it justifies everything. I think a lot of these women are pissed off that they’re not actually being actively oppressed and suppressed, and that they’ve really got nothing to fight over. Most Western men have basically said to them “Oh? OK, you want the pants? Here they are…”, and they really, really don’t like that. In order to wear those pants, they’d have to f***ing grow up, and they don’t want to. So, they continue to behave as though things haven’t changed, and perpetuate their little systems of grievances.

        When the time comes, a lot of these women are going to be standing by, enabling and applauding as the rest of you ladies are put into purdah, and forced into the burqah. Why else do you suppose that they’ve been so lacking in support for the women of Afghanistan? They quite literally want this, because it justifies everything, and gives it all a certain nobility.

        Hell, some of them are going to actively help the process, putting the rest of you into the coffle. The so-called “White Widow”, Samantha Lewthwaite? Perfect example of what I’m talking about.

        1. Kirk — seriously — who the hell will force me into a burqah? Are my husband, sons and male friends all dead?

          They want this because none of them are as amazing as they thought they were. So they want an excuse. Stupid bints.

          1. Sarah, I don’t see it happening willingly. At all. Especially not to women like you, from the here and now.

            But, your granddaughters?

            The fact is that when the society shifts significantly enough, people will shift with it. If they’re assaulting women for not wearing headscarves in the next generation, women will wear headscarves to be safe. The generation after that? They’ll wear more, and the one following will be in full burqah. And, as the process takes place, the “radical feminists” of today will likely be opining that it’s all for the best, and that women need to learn their places.

            Islam is only a thin veneer when it starts to take over, but that doesn’t last very long. Look at anywhere in the Middle-East, where it started as a thin veneer. Syria was once the heart of the Christian world. Iran? Zoroastrian majority. What happened? Forced, gradual conversion and consolidation, over generations.

            All it needs to happen here? For that same thin veneer of Islam to be grafted on, starting with the “elite”. From there, time will take it’s course. Hell, you can watch the cancer starting in Scandinavia in real time, as we write this.

            1. IMO, burkas are absolutely ideal for concealing weapons. And the face of the person who just shot you. Attempts to put American women into burkas is going to backfire very very badly.

              1. I’m not as sanguine on the issue.

                Islam is a syndrome/condition that gains a toehold, then a foothold, and finally takes over. And, it starts like any other opportunistic pathology, it takes over the host best when the host is beset by other issues–In this case, economic collapse, loss of cultural confidence, and just about every other thing that our current set of maladaptive idiots have their hearts set on causing. They’re doing it in the hopes of grafting on Euro-socialism, but the likely result is that we’ll skip that and move on to end-stage religious fundamentalism.

                What sect comes out on top? Who the hell knows, but I’ll guarantee you this much: Islam is going to make a killer offer to a bunch of pissed-off, “socially irrelevant” males. Most of whom are not going to be well-educated enough to be able to parse the bullshit out of the arguments made to them. Guess where that’s going to leave most women, in the Brave New World ™?

                We’re setting up a cusp state. Where the tipping point will be, when it will happen, and which way it goes, I would not even venture to predict. But, there are a whole lot of social trends going on that could potentially direct things towards things none of us “odds” would really like very much.

                1. Kirk — not true. The land I come from kicked islam. It’s more a matter of money/culture pressures. BUT if they take the whole world they’ll disintegrate.

                  1. Spain and Portugal are almost unique, in having managed that. And, the jury is still out as to whether they’re going to be able to make it last.

                    Something is going to fill the void left by the staunch Catholicism of yore. Whether it’s a revitalized Catholic Church that’s regained its confidence and power, something like a Pentecostal brand of Protestantism, Mormonism, or Islam is a question only our great-grandchildren will know. The only think I know is that something is going to step in to fill that void, and it ain’t gonna be secular humanism as we know it.

                  2. And, I do agree that in conquering, they’ll be conquered. That’s going to be small comfort to the eggs like you and I that get broken in the mess that’s produced, that’s for damn sure.

                    2. What’s the term of art in biology? The Red King’s Race?

                      The Red Queen’s Race refers to the idea that you have to keep running in place just to stay stationary, and that the only way you get ahead is by going faster than anyone else.

                      This is kind of a strategic summary for how we drove Islam out of the Peninsula, the first time we did it.

                      The converse of the Red Queen’s Race is the Red King’s Race, which is the converse of the Queen’s strategy: You win through slow, steady endurance. Being the guy that shows up.

                      That pretty much summarizes Islam’s approach to the spiritual realm, world-wide. The rest of the faiths lose their faith, and Islam remains monolithically, steadfastly primitive and reactionary to the modern world. This has a strength of its own.

                      Which is the winning strategy? I don’t know, but I do know that the future belongs to the guy that shows up for it, and all too many of the other religious faiths aren’t bothering to do so.

            2. Islam is reversible.

              But first, we have to recognize Islam as the evil memetic virus that it is, and plan our campaigns appropriately.

              I am sure that the West can do it. I am less certain that we can do it without destroying our own freedoms. But …

              … I would rather we did it by destroying our freedoms than going under, if those are our only two choices. For even our authoritarian phases are better than Islam’s normal nature.

              1. Islam is as reversible as Communism. What the heck do you think the Reconquista was? Sarah, if I’m wrong please correct me, I’m going on vague memories of history.

                For a good novel on this subject read Kratman’s Caliphate. It doesn’t show victory over Islam but it does show how the world might be.

                1. Islam is reversible. But remember it took around 700 years.
                  Though I wonder if Columbus had managed to get English backing for his expedition if Spain would have kept pushing into Northern Africa against the moors.

                  1. I think it wouldn’t take that long in these modern days. What we lack is the will to oppose Islam not the weapons. WWII took 6 years. I’m sure that if we had the will could beat back Islam in 75 years or less. Possibly even 25 years or less.

                    1. If we had the will, we could beat back Islam in _days_. But I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that gaining the will would take decades.

                2. You’re not wrong. Northern Portuguese are more mixed than the South because not only were we a Crusade land, but then the crusaders parked there to stage the invasion of the rest…

                3. And as emily61’s hubby (me) says, first we would need that civil war to get rid of our own communist Fifth Column. Can’t fight external enemies with internal enemies at our backs.

        2. Well, clearly, being in charge doesn’t make them happy. Perhaps they think that it’s all like dominance and submission and somehow there’ll be a safe word. Sounds like she was smoking some of that awful Anne Rice softcore slave ‘romance’… Not Exit to Eden, but that other series set in The Mysteriously Oversexed Middle-East. For them there is no such thing as cooperation anyway. You can’t have peace, so you may as well live by red tooth and claw.

      2. Maybe she is generalizing from her own experiences and feelings? If she has had bad dealings with men and finds sex painful that might explain how she has come to have these crazy ideas. Painful sex can happen due to diseases and disorders of the body. Fibroids in one’s uterus can cause painful sex. It can also be caused by extreme nervousness and consequent muscle tension or even spasm.

        However, shouldn’t one do a reality check i.e. check out how other people feel about it? The other people shouldn’t be just other women in your dorm but women in other situations and lifestyles. Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa shows how gullible researchers can be sometimes.

          1. I agree. I actually had a therapist who was convinced that women never have fun during sexual intercourse. What is even more mysterious is that he was a classical Freudian. People actually think this is scientific. So… how does nymphomania work again? Why is it the stereotype with this disease is female? Or are we just being enslaved by our genes again?

            1. IIRC, the technical definition of nymphomania includes an inability to achieve sexual satisfaction (she just thinks she’s satisfied.)

              I think it no coincidence that Freud & Kafka arose in the same civilization.

        2. “Reality”, with its claims to “objectivity” is a tool of the Patriarchy. The “other women” you refer to have been Type II colonized by men, so their belief in the pleasures of PVI is merely a false consciousness. The medical suggestions you make are inventions of the whitemale (sic) heterocage to otherize womyn’s natural sexuality. Also ’splaining.

          1. You are a BAD man. Go to the corner with the other reprobates… And stop high fiving each other. I saw THAT. (Oh, and thank you for correcting my Amazon links. They ARE working now.)

            1. Joel isn’t exaggerating or making a joke. People actually believe this. Women (the fools) actually argue this. I’m serious. When I first encountered it, (in a feminist wiccan thing) I got VERY upset. The women then accused me of being a MAN. Trust me, I am not shaped even remotely like a man. I may *think* like a man, but that’s not the same thing. They politely (nay, compassionately!) suggested I get an operation to quell my cognitive dissonance.
              Um, NO. NO. NO.

      4. Coitus is not pleasurable, and any woman who thinks it is is a victim of male brainwashing? To paraphrase Admiral Ackbar, It’s a kafkatrap!

        1. BTW, if men actually were able to exercise such powers of mind-control, does anyone really think they’d limit it to coitus? I suspect there’d be an awful lot more shirts ironed.

        2. Why am I picturing her a a female Ren Hoek, from “Space Madness” saying that she’s not the one who is crazy, she is the one who is sane….

        3. If there’s any gender that’s got the ability to control minds, it’s not the male one.

          The things I’ve observed men and boys doing for the glittery “hooh-hah”, over the years? There is no doubt, in my mind, that there’s an element of mind control going on. One bordering on near-perfect parasitism, to be quite honest. Which gender is it, that does 90% of things in clear violation of rational self-interest? Which gender is the one that goes out and gets itself killed off in radically huge numbers, just to impress the other one?

          Women want to impress other women, or men? They buy new shoes, get a new haircut, or some new clothes. Men? Sweet Jeebus… Do I really need to list the number of stupid things we do? Shall I spend billions of electrons, elucidating and enumerating them?

          Patriarchal mind control? What “minds” are we supposedly using to do this with? It sure as hell ain’t the one in between our ears, and apparently since nobody likes the other one, it can’t be that…

          1. It should be obvious, contrary to the claims of such “radical feminists,” that men are equipped with a convenient handle for ease of manipulation.

            “Of course, a guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay.”
            Annie Savoy, Bull Durham

    4. Now I don’t read porn, and definitely do not write it, but my mind went in funny directions anyway. Cats. And cat people, which seem to be something popular in some sorts of porn, presumably because of the way female cats in heat behave. And tomcat penises, and the fact that intercourse does seem to be painful to the females, at least when he withdraws. Combine her article with that, and… well, it might make for a porn story. Somebody like her meets a male cat person? Would be one sort of fulfilled fantasy, wouldn’t it?

        1. Heh. I think I’ll pass. As said I don’t read porn. The problem is not that I don’t have a dirty mind, just that for whatever reason written smut pretty much never connects. Visual stuff, sometimes, maybe because it can leave more to imagination – you see how they pretend to react, but don’t get details of what they are supposedly feeling – but generally speaking I prefer to imagine my own smut, not read or see what somebody else has imagined. 🙂

            1. Both of you: Too. Much. Information.

              And, contrary to popular thought, that particular information does not, emphatically does not, want to be free.

              For the love of God, leave we poor males our illusions, pitiful though they may be.

              1. When it’s woman talking to woman, it’s best for most men to just step back and find something else to talk about. Preferably loudly, so as to drown out what the women are saying.

                Being a stealth male, I’ve heard way more than I wanted to, many times. 😉

                1. No, no… It’s that you’re pulling aside the veil, and revealing the Secrets of the Sisterhood. Down that path lies madness, sheer madness, I tell you. Things mere men aren’t meant to know…

                  1. sigh. you know we do it on purpose? At a party where I’m talking something private with a friend and a guy wanders in that we can’t just tell to go away, we smoothly start discussing problems of menstruation. He usually runs out.

                    1. That’s where my lack of noticing hints kills me. I would be standing there fascinated and add comments based on my wife’s troubles. It generally takes me until the looks get VERY pointed to figure out that I’m supposed to be walking away.

                    2. *sigh* You and me both, Wayne. There’s not much about human biology that’s going to discomfit me overmuch. And I figure folks ought to know how to say, “apologies, we’re covering some private stuff, would you mind?”

                      ‘Course in today’s atmosphere, that sort of polite request would be received as an insult. So I know why the diversion/redirection tactics are necessary. I’m just socially dense.

                    3. you aren’t the only one. I don’t see pointed looks or hints. Usually hubby has to squeeze my hand or prod me to see them.

                    5. Oh, I know y’all do it on purpose.

                      It’s a plot. It’s a conspiracy. It’s a desert topping…

                      See, this is how it works. Y’all are insidious, and you’re completely willing to work your collective evil on your own kith and kin.

                      Growing up, a young man is usually first exposed to the women in his own family, who practice a devious methodology in cahoots with their sisters: When your mom or sister ask you a question, like “Does this dress make me look fat?”, the response to a “Oh, hell yes… That looks horrible on you…” receives nothing more than an honest “Oh… OK, I’ll try something else…”. This accustoms the young male to treating women with a rational, true response to their questions, never realizing that there’s a whole other game going when he responds that same way to other women in later life.

                      The whole intent is to keep the male of the species off guard and unsure of himself. He grows up, accustomed to the rules and rationales of these things within his own family, and then when he tries to apply them in the outer world…? Disaster. Tears. Recriminations. Violence. Abandonment.

                      It’s a plot, I tell you. And, the more of the inner workings you expose to us, the deeper in we’re lured. I refuse to play… As Admiral Akbar would state, which is the obvious thing, “It’s a TRAP!!”.

                    6. hehehehehehehehehehe. . . .

                      You have given me the chance to be a Gender Traitor, and boy am I going to jump on it.

                      If a woman asks you how something looks and wants an appraisal, the question for the disaster is Can she change it back?

                      If she can’t, you say, “I’m sure I’ll like it once I get used to it.” (Sincerity optional.)

                      If she can, you say, “I don’t think it does anything for you.”

                    7. How should a man respond to the most dangerous question: “Does this make me look fat?”

                    9. Helix has the only Right Answer.

                      Followed by finding a deep, dark hole, and pulling it in after himself…

                    10. Oh, and the other problem with the whole situation?

                      Usually by the point that the “She” in question has deliberately drawn your attention to whatever changes she’s made in her personal attire/coiffure, it’s too damn late: You’re already at fault for not noticing, and making some form of validation for it.

                      I’m telling you, from the male perspective, the whole thing feels like some sort of cruel game, like asking your color-blind dog to sort things by color, in order to get his food.

  7. Well, I’d better hurry up and get to Dave Arnold’s bar before something happens to it. That’s a bucket list entry– and I meant mine, not NYC’s.

  8. Pingback: In Search of Reality | According To Hoyt | Head Noises

  9. Wait, I thought that rape was purely about power/domination?

    And how does the “men only have sex to get the woman pregnant” thing work with the number of males who murder the woman they impregnated when she refuses to kill their offspring?

                1. I picked up a button at a convention in the 80s: “Doesn’t Microsoft really mean small and limp?”

  10. I’ve mentioned before that I feel we’ve done the mentally ill a horrible disservice by treating their delusions as “insight”. This piece is a prime example; she needs therapy, not indulgence and reinforcement.

    1. Yeah, but who’s going to bell that particular cat?

      They’ve taken over the psychiatric and mental health industries, and I think that that was a deliberate, planned effort. They’re never going to declare themselves to be the mad ones, so who’s going to be able to get this stuck into the DSMV?

      There are times when I really wonder if maybe good ol’ ElRonious Hubbardski didn’t get it right, with his vituperation of the whole mental health industry. It might have been a case of a stopped clock, but every time I start to do some deep reading in that realm, I feel like I’ve stepped through the looking-glass, and the people on the other side aren’t quite… right.

      1. Of course they’re not. Kids go into the psych classes, hoping to cure themselves… Med students have “med student syndrome”, where they’re convinced they have every disease and syndrome they’re studying. This is easily tested for truth or not, and then cured by negative test results and a dose of sarcasm and sympathy from older docs.

        Psych students, unfortunately, get the exact same thing – and nobody tells them they’re being hypochondriacs. So they generally graduate more mentally scr—d up than they started, self-medicate, and try to treat themselves with thinking that started logically (if teenage-hormonally-fueled) once, and has long since derived by faulty principles to go way off the rails.

      2. Yeah, that’s one area where I have to agree with the Scientolologicalists (you’re doing that just to avoid showing up on Google, aren’t you?). The whole psych industry has done an amazing amount of damage to our society, and what’s worse, they’ve infiltrated not only the schools, but our legal system. You can end up in jail basically on the say-so of one of them who hasn’t even met you and just theorized about your motivations.

        1. You’re right about the effort to avoid Google. I didn’t think Sarah would like me naming the Name That Should Not Be Spoken, Less You Draw Attention Of the Really Raving Loons.

        2. Fall not for the Velokovskyan Fallacy. Being right in one particular does not, repeat, not, equate to being right in general.

          1. Of course, just because they’re right on the shrinks doesn’t mean they’re right about the Space Clams, or whatever.

            But they’re dead on on the Shrinks.

            1. Nuggets of truth help with the propaganda. Goebbels, contrary to the claims of the Big Lie (he never said that), urged that they stick to the truth for its persuasive value.

    2. And despite being a nominal adult, cannot see that humans are hardly alone in that means of reproduction – and that we as a species are built for it (but Its all mens fault. of course). We require it. We would disappear without it.

      Scarier – she may actually welcome the last result.

  11. Excellent. Henry VII was a murdering swine who blamed everybody else (when did he date his reign from? Who did he blame for murdering the princes in the Tower – long after he was in control, instead of immediately saying, “They’re gone, someone has killed them!”?). Henry VIII was the the same. Convinced of his exceptionalism from childhood, which was only reinforced by his older brother Arthur’s death, when he became truly doted on. I think you’ve nailed him, Sarah.

    As for the PIV – The Alien has well and truly taken me over. Because I couldn’t get more than a few sentences into the original article without the crazy dripping off and running into my keyboard.

            1. I know. I’m just flabbergasted that someone who wasn’t clinically insane could write this.

              1. Bingo! Or at the least obsessive/compulsive.
                Which is when all said and done just fancy talk for a raging nut job.

                1. I might be obsessive/compulsive but I’m not a — well, raging occasionally…and I have nuts…

                  Nevermind.

                  1. There are some professions where some obsessive/compulsiveness is a good thing. Pilots and surgeons, for example.

                  2. You might be OCD and you have testes, but you are definitely in contact with reality and don’t sound delusional.

              3. “I am normal and I do not like this, therefore it is not normal to like this.”

                The problem is that the premises are flawed and the logic is invalid. Pace Klavan & Whittle, I think the course I would reinstate in schools is Logic.

          1. No, no, no; these are the people who attack male-to-female transgender folks as being male interlopers on sacred femininity.

            (I was bored today, so I followed the links, and followed links from there, and… wow, the crazy is strong with these.)

            1. One problem of the internet is its facilitation of such echo chambers wherein participants reinforce one another’s delusions, allowing participants to chase their own tails, getting ever faster until they a) turn into butter, to cite a now forbidden meme or b) run their heads so far up their butts that the only daylight they see is what passes through their navels.

              Not that there is any risk of such a thing happening here.

                  1. She thinks critically important details comprising the collective social subconscious are “trivia;” who knows to what other strange and peculiar beliefs she ascribes?

              2. And this lot aren’t even the worst, since they aren’t encouraging each other in criminal behavior.

                1. There is a Lil’ Sambos in Lincoln City OR, the operators, I think, bought it out when the chain was downsizing. Has tigers on the walls and everything.

    2. Yeah — the main difference between Henry VII and Henry VIII was that Henry VII knew in his heart that he was King by cunning and luck, not divine right, so he never took it for granted. Henry VIII, by comparison, really believed his own propaganda, and that anything that interfered with his whim-of-the-moment was foul treachery to the core.

  12. Unfortunately, some people take on these ideas willingly. What to do about them, or those who teach them to others at young ages when they don’t know any better? I had to fight for YEARS against this exact demented thinking in my own head.

    1. Oh, my favorite part of this is where corporations made women like sex. So… all the sex going on, often historically initiated by women, way back to pre-history…. uh…. corporations have time travel! (panics and waves hands.)

      3. That “history” — even the word is a tool of the patriarchy! — is invented to get women to buy into their oppression, of course.

        /sarc — please, tell me that wasn’t necessary

            1. HERstory has more digressions, talks more about feelings, and doesn’t look for solutions.

              1. And usually ends with sulking and suggesting all the guys crowd onto the metaphorical moth-eaten sofa of history… Until they’re needed to open the jar of innovation, of course.

      4. What’s bizarre is that the lesbian feminists don’t seem to understand how biological evolution works. Of course people (both male and female) like sex. Those who liked it less were less likely to reproduce: we are all the descendants of those who liked sex, and liking sex is at least partly heritable!

        (To respond to the obvious objection: since there is k- as well as r-selection and humans are very k-selected creatures, this does not necessarily mean selection for satyromania or nymphomania!)

          1. Well that’s my point — this is so obvious that even people who choose to deny evolutionary biology should get this. Yet the lesbian feminists — who all claim to despise Creationism — don’t get it.

  13. Years ago I was involved in one of those late night con round robin discussion groups and the topic turned to a story about a female character finding herself suddenly alone on a world filled with hostile alien flora and fauna. One precious gem piped up with the opinion that the character must have felt great relief since she was then free from the constant overpowering fear of rape. The comment sent a visible ripple around the room as pretty much everyone had a WTF moment and we all sort of drew away from the young lady. Certainly destroyed any fleeting desire on my part for PIV with her. eeeeuuuuww!
    And then I recall another one of these nut jobs who appeared on a late night talk show and expressed her ongoing and constant fear of rape. Her premise was similar to that of the article in question that all men are rapists and always have that foremost in mind. I believe the host’s response was “don’t flatter yourself.”
    Regarding NYC, it’s had its share of bad mayors before. The current doofus will do damage, but I predict a sad and failure filled single term before he’s thrown out and someone with some practical sense steps in to fix what got broke.

    1. The fear of rape thing — the only person I ever knew, I mean personally and over time, who had this was my English teacher in high school. She was an EXCELLENT teacher (truly. I wouldn’t be writing books in English if I hadn’t lucked into having her. She used the old fashioned “You will memorize lists of vocab” method, including false friends, tested us till our eyes bled, and then in the third year when we KNEW vocab and grammar rules, THEN enforced English only in classroom.) but she looked exactly like Marat in the painting of Marat dying in his bath. (Look it up.) I know rape isn’t about beauty, but given she was also very tall and not… uh… rounded, I think most guys would think she was a guy until she told them otherwise.
      Weirdly she got married (for the first time) at sixty and changed personality completely.

      1. I’ve always wondered at the source of that sort of fear, especially when I encounter it in women who’ve never experienced either rape or sex.

        I was out with my guys doing a mission on a public highway in the middle of winter up here in Washington. Going the normal route we took between the base and the firing center, you have to cross a fairly substantial mountain pass, which can get profoundly nasty. There’s an exit onto an old section of highway that the military has set up as a rest area for convoys, with porta-johns stationed just off the road. You always stop there, because, well… Logistics dictates a stop like that, when you’re driving at fifty miles an hour.

        Anyway, we stopped this particular time, and as we pulled up, I observe this woman stick her head out of one of the porta-johns, see us, and then run through the snow, stumbling and sliding, jump into her car, and try to take off like a bat out of hell. Which didn’t happen–There was a layer of ice under the snow, and her car didn’t have traction tires, so all she did was spin out and dig her tires in.

        As we parked, and got off the truck to use the facilities and stretch out, she continued to frantically spin her tires, trying to leave. This just looked weird, to me, so I walked over to her car to ask if she needed help. When she saw me coming over, she just panicked even more, stopped with the tire-spinning, frantically locked her door, and then began fumbling with her purse. When I got close enough to the car to touch the window, I saw she’d been looking for her Mace, and had it out and aimed at me. What the hell she thought was going to happen when she used it on me through the still-closed window, I don’t know. At that point, I’m sort of nonplussed, to say the least, and I went to sign language to try to communicate with her, motioning as if to ask if she wants help getting her car back onto the road. All I got was wide-eyed fear, and a super-hesitant nod. So, I call over some of my guys, and we push the car over onto the road, where as soon as she gets traction, she takes off like a bat out of hell, fishtailing and careening all over the road. We just stood there and shook our heads, wondering what the hell was going on.

        My guys wanted to take a substantial break, due to not having gotten breakfast that morning, so we paused to eat our field rations before hitting the road again. While we’re there heating them up and eating, this state patrolman comes driving past us, and then turns around to come back and talk to us. Since I’m in charge, I go over to the cruiser, and asked him what the problem was.

        Turns out, our good deed for the day has flagged him down out on the highway to tell him that she was attacked by a vicious band of rape-minded thugs, and she’d barely escaped with her life and virginity intact…

        I think you can gather from the fact that we weren’t at gunpoint that he hadn’t taken her too seriously, and we showed him the evidence in the snow for what had happened, which included the tire tracks where she’d fishtailed. He was pretty polite about things, after that, and told me not to worry about anything.

        I made damn sure I got the particulars for this incident from the patrolman, and reported it to my bosses as soon as I got to a phone, this being the era before ubiquitous cell phones. Something about that whole incident just spooked me, and I wanted to make sure we were all unquestionably in the clear over what happened. No report or complaint was ever filed with the Army, though.

        I did call that patrolman back, later on, because I wanted to follow up on what the hell was going on. I’d figured we’d helped a rape survivor or something, and she’d freaked.

        Not the case–She was some women’s studies wing-ding associate professor/activist from the University of Washington who was going over to Central Washington University for a seminar on women’s studies or something, and as far as the patrolman could find, had no justification for her reaction. She’d gotten pulled over for reckless driving later in her trip, and her response to the other officer stopping her had been so bizarre and reactionary that the officer who stopped her had called for backup, and she wound up going in for a state-sponsored mental evaluation. Apparently, accusing a cop of wanting to rape you when he stops you for driving like a maniac on snow and ice, and then using Mace on him is not a really good idea…

        I looked her up, later on, in the library, and what I could find made me think she probably belonged in a mental health institution instead of being paid to theorize about gender issues at a major university.

        Weird little encounter, and one I think of every time someone tells me that they majored in something like “Women’s Studies”.

        1. She was indoctrinated into thinking every man is a rapist. This is mind-boggling, but a lot of women are. EVEN women who are married and have apparently normal lives.

          1. I pity their husbands. And their sons. And, for that matter, their daughters. And the society that lets them roam about at liberty, and disproportionately gives them jobs with influence over impressionable young minds.

            1. We need nunneries for these women who’ve been severely impaired by today’s feminism.

              I thought that the point of feminism was women weren’t or shouldn’t be victims?

              2. The point of feminism is get them whatever they want. Which is why you get such interesting answers to questions.

                Q: Are women responsible for anything in history? A: Depends on whether you are apportioning blame or credit.

                Q: Are women as aggressive as men? A: Depends on which you are asking, whether they can do as well in business, government, military, etc, or whether they can initiate domestic violence.

                Q: Do women belong with their children? A: Depends on which matter you are settling, whether they should get custody if they want it, or whether they should have to make sacrifices for them.

                Etc.

                1. “The point of feminism is get them whatever they want”

                  I presume handed to them on a silver platter. They should be treated like the two year olds they are emulating.

                2. And I read more of the other site and came upon these gems

                  There seems to be two types of colonisation:

                  #1: one where the woman is colonised but something of the spell or the rigidity of the colonisation has been broken somewhere and she is ready for the leap. In other words, radical feminism has the potential to create connections and liberate her from invasive male presence. If talked to about radical feminism, it will immediately make sense, or very shortly after. These women are great to be around with as a radfem because convos just flow, there’s no mental blocking out to what you’re saying and you can trust that she understands the words you use, which is not a small feat in patriarchy.

                  #2: one where men have placed auto-immune defences against feminism in a woman: she is made to fear and block out feminism from her mind or some parts of it, to see it as a threat, and will eliminate, sabotage or shut it down or turn against herself and other women. It works very much like an auto-immune disease or cancer where she is unconsciously, unwittingly acting on men’s behalf, defending their interest by destroying her healthy cells. (Men are cancer).

                  and

                  I make friends with women, I introduce them to feminism, I’m full of hope that finally there will be women with whom to discuss and further radical feminism, just BE with them and not in dissonance as it usually is with colonised women, but at some point they end up betraying me, hurting me, they stop and stagnate in the middle of their tracks, may revert even, turn against me, because i’m too far ahead and they can’t go there yet, because they’re not ready to meet certain feminist standards, they have a boyfriend who keeps undoing what she just learned, they’re still not feminist enough to value our friendship and the feminist space we’re giving each other, they have no idea how rare and precious it is, or may still prefer male company. It hurts every time the same.

                  Poor dear, she keeps hoping to meet a blank-brained woman who will obey her in all things, but they keep acting on their own judgment.

          2. Irony is a be-aitch:
            YOU MEAN, WE NEED MEN?
            Youth violence shoots up when males are missing from the neighborhood, concluded researchers at the University of Michigan in a new study released last week.

            The study centered on Flint, Mich., the former auto manufacturing center that is now one of the most impoverished and violent cities in the country. Researchers broke the city down by zip codes, comparing the number of males in the area to the number of assaults committed by young men.

            The results were striking. Researchers found an enormous chunk of the difference between a neighborhood with lots of youth assaults and one with relatively fewer could be explained by “male scarcity.” While a difference of 3 to 5 percent would have been significant, Daniel Kruger of Michigan’s Public Health Department and one of the study’s authors, found that 36 percent of the difference was explained by lack of adult males in the neighborhood. Add one other mammoth variable — high school graduation rates — and you get 69 percent of the variation in assaults committed by young men.

            In Flint, Kruger said, the absence of males can be traced to three factors: men who left to look for jobs; young men who have died in gang violence; and men who are incarcerated.

            “When we don’t have men as positive role models, we get much higher rates of violence,” Kruger said.

            It’s a vicious circle, the authors say. When young men get caught up in crime, they are more likely to end up incarcerated, which results in fewer adult males in the community, which leads to more dysfunction.
            END SNIPPET

            Some benighted fools not only cannot distinguish between males and men, they actively promote the former to the detriment of the latter.

            HT: Urgent Agenda

        2. My teacher used to describe to us every time she had avoided getting raped in an elevator, and she was convinced elevators were installed to allow men to rape women.
          Most of the “avoided getting raped” boiled down to “Acted weird, so guys on elevator acted odd, in reaction.”

          1. For the reverse situation see Nathan McCall

            http://jordan179.livejournal.com/169764.html

            who complained once that a white woman looked at him suspiciously on the elevator, as if he were some sort of murderer or rapist.

            The thing is …

            … Nathan McCall is a murderer and rapist. Admittedly, he hasn’t actually murdered or raped anyone since his young adulthood, as far as we know, but it’s rather disingenuous for someone who really has been a depraved criminal to take offense at someone reacting toward him as such.

            Maybe she was picking up on something from him?

            1. I don’t know. I read McCall as a fabulist on the order of Glass.

              I really doubt he did half the crap he claims he did. I read that book of his for a course, and the whole thing just completely failed to come across as even remotely “authentic”. It reads like a lot of the black guys I knew in the service who acted all tough and “street-smart”, but who were really frightened little boys posing at being “hard guys”.

              I had a couple of guys in my unit who were great at talking a big game about how rough and tough they were, and who claimed to have been involved in gang violence, up to and including the killing of others. Took them to a unit school, one which included a survival phase that required killing an animal for food.

              Care to guess who couldn’t do it? Who literally fainted, when observing the killing of small animals for food?

              The other interesting phenomenon about that was the abject fear that those two idiots demonstrated when they suddenly noticed that two people they’d heretofore showed no respect for, which was myself and quiet little black guy from Alabama who’d grown up on a farm, had precisely zero problems and no remorse about turning the cute little bunnies we were handed into meals. Our mutual note-comparing on the preferred method of removing skin and organs made one of my “gang-bangers” vomit. Profusely.

              It was interesting watching the two of them blanch when I remarked that the best meals were ones with whom you’d been on a first-name basis with…

              What was also interesting was observing that the petty harassment of the guy from the country utterly ceased.

              McCall reminds me of those guys. A lot.

              1. They would probably have blanched at my dad’s method, too. He would pick at the skin around each hind foot until it came loose, then peel up from there. Then he would cut open the body cavity, grab the back feet and the head, and snap it sideways like snapping a towel. All the organs were flung off to the side. Took him just a couple of minutes.

                1. Didn’t he want to save the heart and liver?

                  So long as I live, I’ll never really, viscerally understand people who’ve lived their lives so disconnected from reality that they don’t know where their food really comes from. I’ve had conversations with some of those types, and when I run into that brick wall of “I’ve got no idea how meat gets onto my table…”, all I can do is stare at them like Donald Sutherland.

                  Look, fools… Human beings are opportunistic omnivores, who developed an innovative hunting technique of running their prey down, and killing it through exhaustion. It’s why humans can literally run other animals to death, enduring long pursuits that would kill any other carnivore on the planet. We harassed our prey to death, to put it bluntly. That’s why we are what we are. Denying it is both foolish, and contemptibly stupid.

                  Personally, the way I see it, my ancestors went to a lot of trouble to get to the top of the food chain. It would be disrespectful of me to get all maudlin, and feel guilty about that. Don’t want to be on my table? Grow some damn brains, or make yourselves useful, I say. I don’t eat dogs because they’re pets, I don’t eat them because they’re valued partners of mine. Which would sort of make them co-conspirators, I guess?

                  1. I never asked him, but apparently he didn’t care to. Strange, though, since he grew up in the Depression and would eat any of the offal parts of a chicken, which he said was the filthiest farm animal on Earth.

                    Which reminds me – I have watched some videos of field dressing deer, on the off chance that I would get my act together and bag one, and no one seemed to care to save any of the organs from those, either. Seems odd, to me.

                    1. Parasites, usually.

                      Organ meat from wild animals can be very iffy. Some will take the risk, some won’t. Most white men won’t save the hearts, most Native Americans look at you like you’re mad for not saving them. Of course, they’re the ones with the immune systems that are better at dealing with such things…

                    3. I grew up with the saying of my dad’s, “You’ve got whole [insert whatever animal is appropriate] to eat, why would you want to start in on the guts?”
                      I don’t eat liver or kidneys, while I have ate deer heart and found it perfectly acceptable if prepared right (otherwise it is like chewing on an old tire) I don’t save it myself. You really aren’t wasting much by throwing away the heart. A deer heart is only about the size of your fist, and somewhat hollow, it would take two or three of them to make a meal for even one man.

              2. Reminds me of Junior High (I was mostly home-schooled, but there was choir, orchestra, etc).
                My best girl friend and I sat down to eat lunch. Some boys sat down with us and thought they’d gross us out by talking about a squirrel they’d supposedly seen run over by a truck.
                Unfortunately for the boys, we’d spent the previous weekend butchering rabbits (mine, at my house). The boys turned green and didn’t finish their lunches. My friend finished them off a few weeks later by bringing in a complete rabbit intestinal system to her biology class. We never had trouble with boys again.
                The moral is, I think, don’t mess with the country kids.

        3. I’ve never run into anything quite that extreme, but I have had women stare at me with apparent revulsion (fear?) for deigning to notice them while being male. Oddly, in most of those cases it was probably more a case of the obstacle avoidance radar going off, scanning and evaluating and moving on. Maybe that’s discomfiting?

          Doesn’t happen often in Texas, thankfully. And the more likely locations are predictable.

          As to precious flower and her ‘radfem’ moniker — I had my fill of the blinkered idiots long ago. High school probably. There’s only so many times you can be bitched at (loudly) for daring to hold a door and defer to a female before your instincts clash with your inclinations and training.

      2. I think Kirk has part of the current problem – too much immersion in a toxic atmosphere. His crazy prof spent so much time in a mental world where male=danger that she brought it into real life. I suspect that’s a massive chunk of what goes on on college campuses and other places. One or two true believers or real honest to g-d abuse victims start telling their stories, and if they get into a position of authority, they start imposing that view on everyone (mostly the True Believers). I suspect you only need one or two charismatic (or dogmatic enough) people in the right positions to afflict a whole lot of others.

        My undergrad college had a larger than average number of women who’d been assaulted or had other wise bad experiences with guys, in part because it was a women’s college. Some gals (like me) came there precisely because there were no male students. (I stayed for the academics.) So for a while I could take the “1/4 of all women have been assaulted” thing as being valid. Now I know better.

        1. They get things like the “1/4 of all women have been assaulted” statistic by defining it very loosely, conflating everything from actual, violent rape to a slap on the butt to (sometimes) sexual contact of any sort that the woman later regrets. This is bad, because it deeply trivializes serious sexual assault (such as rape).

          1. Going along with that, some of these people “defined” as “violence against women” a man getting so upset at a woman that he leaves the room. [Frown]

            1. “Sexual violence” has been defined to include NOT PARTAKING IN SEX because of an argument.

          2. I am, by feminist definition a BAD person. I grew up in a society where getting pinched on the butt was a “how do you do” and only slightly impolite, and okay in informal occasions.
            My reaction — don’t ask, but I HATE being pinched on the butt — was to warn on first offense and on second turn around and deck the offender. Even one I was dating, once. It stopped it. I didn’t need to be in fear or to think every man was bad. Some were idiots, but even they learned when they got punched.

            1. Yeah, there are physical things I can’t do to my wife without annoying her. Not even sexual ones — just forms of body contact she finds irritating. Despite the fact that we’re mostly very physically affectionate to one another, both in terms of sex and cuddling.

              People are just different about what they do and don’t like.

              1. Yes but she has the gumption to tell you she doesn’t like it. These fragile flowers can’t do anything except run away. They also are so ill informed about the world, that they believe that ALL men are evil rapists.

                1. Hee hee … my wife is a very socially shy woman with people she doesn’t know well, claims to be rather submissive — and has a will of steel about anything really important to her.

                  I love her 🙂

            2. True stories. My “Adopted” sister has two daughters (now 17 & 19), both 2nd/3rd degree Black Belts in Karate. M (the older) was “slapped on the butt” by a student a year older. She flattened him. Gained the reputation as a *Freshman,* of “don’t mess with her.” Think Buffy in the original movie.
              Younger, K, similar event, she slapped him so hard (in full view of a teacher) that he had a red mark for about 15 minutes. (Teacher backed her up as seeing the whole event.) Both had the events happen in 7th-8th grades.
              The sad truth is that both sides of the “nut job” bar, are increasing in numbers.

              1. Yeah.

                Your nieces remind me of my older sister. Thanks for refreshing the trauma… 😉

                During the first part of her freshman year at high school, a cluster of senior jocks was there at the bus stop when the buses unloaded. Someone made a dare to one of the more obnoxious ones that he should grab, grope, and kiss the next girl getting off the bus. Emphasis on “grope”, and the more, the better. Ideally, the girl should have been crying, at the end.

                Unfortunately, the next girl off the bus was my older sister.

                More unfortunately, she was carrying her flute case. Her heavy, German-made, metal flute case. With which she proceeded to demonstrate why it was a bad, bad idea to get at all up front and grabby with her personal space. She knocked him unconscious with at least two, maybe as many as three blows to the head, before he hit the ground.

                As I recall, he required dental surgery and some other work that kept him out of the football season that year. Lawsuits only didn’t happen because this sort of behavior had been going on for a bit, and many parents of young ladies had complained, to no avail. To be honest, I think the incident quite improved the tone of gender relations at the high school.

                People who know both of us have referred to me as the “friendly one”, if that gives you any more of a clue. Ask some of those same people what they think of me, and they’ll usually tell you that I’m a complete, consummate asshole they’d really rather not have to deal with when provoked.

                Even so, I’ve used her as a threat, successfully, on more than one occasion: “Oh? You won’t fix this? Gee… I’ll have to let (sister’s name) know about that… I’m sorry…”. I usually get corrective action. Promptly.

                Sadly, that only works with people who’ve met her, or had dealings with people who have. Even third-hand reports have been effective…

        2. TXRed, sadly, the “1/4 have been raped” is much truer than you realize. I’ve known 3 assault/rape victims, and two others that may have been. I’ve also known a number of “men” who could have been, rapists (“women are always asking or it”). My experience is that most women (and men) will not talk about it, or even admit it happened. Just like alcoholism actually is more prevalent than many realize. NOT as widespread as some claim, but more than many realize.
          Yes, there are some who “brag” about it, or make false complaints (Tawan Brawley, the Rutgers? victim, etc.), but most “want it to go away.”

          1. I have a lot of trouble with that “1/4 have been raped” thing. Statistically, that means I should have been around a lot more rape victims than I have, which is not that many, at all.

            What I have been around a bit more of, however, is women who I have come to conclude lied about their experiences, for whatever twisted reasons they might have had.

            It’s a very useful little tool, when you set out to manipulate men. Don’t enjoy sex that much, but want the intimacy and the attention? Tell him you were raped once, and haven’t enjoyed sex since. Hell, it’s a useful tool to get out of sexual commitment with a guy whose company and money you like, but who you don’t find sexually attractive. I’ve known women who openly admitted that to me, when confronted with it. Literally. “Oh, I just told Jon that (I didn’t like sex because…) I got raped in college, as an excuse… I like sex fine, just not with him…”. Very illuminating words, those, about that particular manipulative little girl. Who was pulling this sort of thing into her thirties…

            Had a relationship with a woman who claimed she’d been raped by her father from the time she started grade school. It was a wonderful tool she used to manipulate me, but the interesting thing is how the whole narrative fell apart after a bit, and I found her sister, who was another supposed victim. Sis filled me in all about what was going on with her sister, and told me the girl I knew had been performing this histrionic dance ever since high school, when some “therapist” helped her recover “lost memories”.

            Her dad, the rapist? Dead since the girls were in toddlerhood, something I verified in records. Probably nine-tenths of the stories she’d told me had to have been made up, since the “bad guy” she went on and on about had been in his grave for years when she claimed it happened.

            If you know a lot of women who tell you that they’ve been raped, enough to make you believe that “1/4” number without question, you might want to ask yourself what about you it is that’s attracting these women to you, and why they’re telling you these things. In my case, before my eyes were opened by rude reality, it was because I was Mr. White Knight, trying to save the forlorn.

            What I’ve reluctantly come to conclude is that there are a lot of sick, manipulative people out there, who will tell you anything in order to get what they want. Even if it means telling you things as horrible as that–Normal, healthy people can’t imagine doing something like that, but there’s a significant fraction of the population that take to it like a duck takes to water.

            I don’t know what the real numbers of rape victims there are out there, but I do know that of the ones I’ve known who’ve made a point of telling someone about it, they were mostly liars.

            In my experience, it’s a lot like the fabulists who claim to have been Rambo in the military–If you hear someone claim in casual circumstances that they were “Special Forces”, you can almost count on them not being such. The real SEAL team members will never tell you what they did, usually reverting to their original rating “Oh, I was a machinist…”, when you ask what they did in the Navy.

            Rape victims usually won’t tell anyone, outside of those they absolutely have to. I knew a woman who was attacked and raped horribly when she was in her teens, back in the 1950s. Her husband never knew, until after her death. The only way he ever found out about it was because he found the evidence that it had happened, including police and medical reports, in her personal papers after cancer took her. Her family didn’t even know, but it had happened, and she’d taken care of business all by herself. The guy who did it went to prison, and she’d made a point of being at his parole hearings until he finally got killed in prison sometime in the 1970s. Said parole hearings? Her husband never knew about them, other than as “business trips”.

            I really, really don’t think that the real rape victims that are out there are going to be mentioning things like that, unless they absolutely have to. And, that doesn’t include casual friendships, dating, or even marriage. It’s too intimate, too private a violation.

            I could be wrong, but my experiences tell me otherwise. I know the military stats are bogus, so I have just as much problem with the other ones.

            1. Which is why no one should ever vote to convict on a jury unless there is unmistakeable physical evidence of coercion.

              1. Even then. Such evidence can be, and has been, fabricated.

                I really, really hope I never have to sit as juror on a rape trial. I fear I’d have to disqualify myself, based on personal experiences.

                What’s really, massively screwed up? I know that there are real rapes happening. What I can’t do, however, thanks to these immature, lying little girls, is reliably ascertain which are real, and which are wholly the product of imagination or convenience.

                Personally, I think the penalty for a false rape report ought to be a hell of a lot heavier, in cases where it can be incontrovertibly proven that the woman lied. That woman who put that football player in jail, and sued the school for a rape that never happened? She ought to be doing the sentence he did, multiplied by ten.

                Of course, the argument would then be that you’re discouraging reporting of real cases, but what the hell is the answer? The current situation with regards to this is too far out of balance. Way too far.

            2. Kirk—don’t forget that those statistics include pedophilia and molestation. I have a number of friends who unfortunately fall into that category—most of whom I didn’t know about until they flat-out told me. One of them *knows* that her daughters should be safe at a sleepover with only the father in charge—she’s not stupid—but her experiences means she hasn’t been able to give permission for her daughters to be left in the charge of an adult male who is not their father, because she ends up having anxiety attacks. (In her case, it was a “funny uncle” of the time period when that just got covered up rather than properly dealt with.)

              Mind you, she wrote a PLAY about this in college and I still missed that she had been victimized until she flat-out stated it. There are a lot of women who aren’t talking about their traumas, and some of them don’t because they don’t want to be seen as victims. And others don’t talk about it because it’s been dealt with and is none of the greater public’s concern.

              1. Saying that “1/4 of all women have been raped” is a bit different than saying that “1/4 of all women have experienced some form of sexual abuse”. I might buy off on that one.

                Maybe.

                But, as we’ve started to see with the spate of teachers who’ve been brought out and convicted of sexual abuses with their students, it’s not solely a male prerogative. Nor is it precisely defined, either. It’s all left in the realm of the perceptions of the person reporting the sexual contact.

                There’s also the issue of what’s going on in the heads of these women. I have, myself, been accused of sexual assault.

                Care to guess what for? Picking up a “casualty” in training, precisely as I was taught to, and using the standard techniques used with all such victims. Yes, picking someone up in a fireman’s carry is an assault, a violation of their personal space. Even though that particular idiot voluntarily joined the Army, volunteered a second time to serve in a direct-combat unit, and then volunteered a third time to participate in training as a casualty. She just didn’t like being literally man-handled like everyone else. All I did was grab her by her gear, throw her over my shoulder, and run. In her mind, that turned into “He groped my breasts…”.

                I still haven’t figured out how the hell I was supposed to have moved her without touching her, but I guess that’s something for the psychiatrists to figure out.

                I’m a little dubious about these massive claims, where they rely on the victims to self-report. If I go by the numbers reported in the literature, about every fourth or fifth family out there should be participating in some form of incest. Is that really going on? I can’t honestly say, but I find it really hard to believe. My encounters with people who’ve demonstrated the sort of damage that that abuse usually causes have been comparatively infrequent. The ones I have run into, that I was sure of? Lots of signs of something being wrong, very wrong.

                For me to accept that 1/4 number, I also have to accept that there are lots and lots of women who go through that sort of thing, and then come through the other side able to behave quite normally. The women I know who I’m also certain of having gone through that trauma haven’t been able to mask it, at all. There’s always a set of signs that something is wrong, even if you can’t discover the source of it.

                So, forgive me for having my doubts. I’ve got some damn good reasons for them, based on my experience. Others experiences may be different, and I accept that.

                1. First off, you have to understand that being roofyed the buggered by a superlative artist and liberal does not constitute “rape-rape.” Nor does being viciously knocked down by your state’s (liberal) governor actually constitute “rape-rape.” Just as having one’s boobs squeezed in the Oval Office by a (liberal) president nor having a (liberal) political candidate drop trou and order you to “kiss it” amount to molestation. Even being sent explicit photos of a (liberal) congressman’s wienie & beans does not really equate with “unwanted sexual advances.”

                  All of those politicians are exempt because they’re more than happy to make somebody else pay for your abortion while denying there’s any trauma to a woman’s eviscerating and ripping an unborn child from her womb removing a bit of excess tissue that compares with the trauma of having your illusions destroyed lies you tell yourself exposed pictures of in utero babies displayed.

                2. By that standard, I would have been “assaulted” in ballroom dance. I mean, the tango has full-body contact from right shoulder to right knee. I get your skepticism.

                  I’m just seeing the other side, where I keep tripping over occurrences where a friend experienced something, and I *never* would have pegged them as having been in that sort of situation. It’s one of those things where you start counting and realize the number is a lot larger than you thought—and my friends generally come from married-parents-suburban-types, which (statistically) have fewer incidences of that type. (Biggest risk factor for abuse of all types? A resident, unrelated male who is not the father.)

                  1. I’m now in a place where I take everything someone tells me along these lines with a bushel of salt, not just a teaspoon or so.

                    Psychologically, when someone behaves strangely and gets called on it by someone else, telling that other someone about a horrible experience like being raped has three effects: One, it justifies and explains the behavior, two, it shuts down further discussion of the original issue, and three, it garners sympathy and nurture.

                    So, you might be in a position a friend of mine found himself in, where when he called his fiance on some BS she was pulling, she “broke down”, and told him of the horrible night she and her friend had been assaulted, kidnapped and raped…

                    Right before the wedding was to occur, he found out the truth from her fellow victim: There hadn’t been any such incident, and that his fiance was using it to cover up an affair when they’d been dating (which they’d been doing for about five years…). Needless to say, the wedding was cancelled.

                    I don’t think every victim out there is lying–Far from it. What I do think is that there are a bunch of women (and, some men…) who are perfectly willing to play this particular card off the bottom of the deck. More than you’d likely think, too.

                    Another questionable thing? Girl I knew at the age of 14-15 (her statement) who literally raped the father of a friend when she was on a sleepover. How the hell do you class that one, pray tell? Was she a victim, she who went into the guy’s den when he was passed out after having a bit too much alcohol, and then basically took the identity of the guy’s girlfriend? She thought it was so funny, relating that to me: “He never knew the difference…”.

                    At the time I was hearing this, I kinda thought “Oh, this is kinda funny… She’s a bad, bad girl…”. Later on, the actuality of what this girl did hit me, and I realized what the full implications were. What can I say? I was young and dumb, as well.

                    But, what was that? Female rape? Male rape? Something innocent? Was it a crime, and if so, who was the criminal?

                    See, things like that go into the stats, as well. I know they do, because she self-reported that on a survey they were taking in a college class I was in with her. How did that wind up reflecting in that “1/4 of all women experience a rape” number? As a perpetrator, perhaps?

                    1. Under current law she could, had she gotten pregnant, have successfully sued him for child support. I believe the criminal would properly be her, for theft, misappropriation by virtue of fraudulent inducement.

                    2. exactly. The left believes that everything you are and everything you own, and everything were or will be, everything you owned or will own, is the property of the state. In short you are the property of the state.

                    3. You get commentators who have vapors over the idea that there is something wrong about forcing a teenaged boy to pay child support to the teacher who molested him — arguing it’s for the child’s sake.

                      (In those cases, in civilized states, the boys’ parents should sue for termination of parental rights on the grounds the child was conceived by rape. In the uncivilized ones, they should sue for damages, equal to the projected amount of child support plus punitive damages.)

              2. Lots of people write plays and other works about stuff they haven’t experienced. Rest assured that you can easily offend someone by NOT “missing it.”

    3. “Ah, at last my virtue will be safe as I am devoured by alien creatures.”

      You know, Victorian heroines didn’t generally think like that — unless they wound up in the wilderness due to a pursuit by actual intended rapists!

      1. They are out vaporing actual Victorian heroines. Fragile flowers that they are acting, they need someone to take care of them. It sounds like they can’t take care of themselves.

        1. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking on their part. They want us to listen to them. Since that would take total spinelessness on our part, they imagine we’re totally spineless, it’s just that the men got there first.

    4. How on earth could she feel great relief? Is it not possible that men might sneak into her location to rape her?

  14. I was thinking this morning that in the people in the regions that are being hit with the ice and snow and sub-zero temperatures would not appreciate any comment about how this administration is shutting down coal powered generating plants to better their lives.

    1. Here in Alberta we’ve had freeze, snow, thaw, freeze, snow, thaw. We’re in the middle of freeze again. If I hear someone yakking about global warming, I might have to be restrained.

        1. We just went through a 40F drop in temp overnight to 0F (5C down to -18C), and it’s expected to go down still more over the course of the day. They say it’s the coldest it’s been in 20 years.

      1. Sadly, they think they’re improving our lives. “Once we’ve eliminated agriculture, industry and technology, we’ll all live in a peaceful, matriarchal utopia forever and ever!”

        2. And we will. As we butcher the neighbors with flakes of recycled bottle and roast them over the coals that used to be a book titled “Das Kapital”.

          1. Maybe it’s their “cunning plan” to turn us all into miserable serfs. I don’t think that’s going to happen here. These malefic pols will be lynched before we are turned into serfs.

    3. I’ve just learned that new construction in CA cannot have wood stoves or wood-burning fireplaces. (recent weekly podcast, after another panelist commented on always having wood ready in Boston for icy days). The commenter is hard to peg but not really conservative as it’s a technical show, not a political one, and he plays it straight (unlike the Boston guy at times, who lets his disdain for things slip on occasion).

      I’m thinking, especially in terms of a recent reading of “Antifragility” and personal observations re: efficiency vs. distributed self-directed redundancy (ecosystems, the internet, etc.) – that it was a guaranteed way to have people freeze to death if the power went out in a bad storm.

      Interestingly, same commenter, a year or so back (he’s a regular) discussed how, since they fly all over the world to do video shoots, they never store their gear in CA anymore to avoid the onerous taxes for stuff they almost never use in CA.

      1. This is something I’ve identified as a concern. If we ever do have a serious dislocation, there is a lot of modern housing stock that is going to be utterly useless. As in, the people living there aren’t going to survive if they stay there useless.

        The sad thing is, though, that there’s not a hell of a lot you can do about it. Redundant and robust heating, in a cold climate? Good luck finding something that isn’t essentially a toy. Everything that isn’t is horrendously expensive.

        We made provisions for building a Russian Stove into the house we just built the family. Actually building it was economically not viable, as of yet, but we’re hoping to do a work trade to make it happen. Until then, I’m really hoping the local PUD keeps the dams on the Columbia operational…

          1. Love that design. I am hoping to get my stuff together to a point where I can do something like that.
            When I was really little we had the power knocked out by an ice storm and we cooked on the fireplace. We would have been awfully cold without that.

            1. Yes, and right now I live in a house with only electricity, heat and cooking. We’ve discussed at length what we would do in a prolonged power outage. I’m not used to having no woodstove as at least a back-up. The neat thing about the rocket stoves is that you don’t need wood, you can burn corn stalks, or sunflower stalks, or…

              1. I have a double propane cooker that I got for canning on the back porch (No AC so in July and August I can can (heh) without turning the house into a sauna). It has the second use as emergency cooker and heater if the power goes out. As a makeshift it is a good thing to have. I’d just make sure the CO2 alarm works….

            2. I’m going to have to start nudging my parents to get the chimney in their house fixed so they can use the fireplace. Yes, they are in town, where power supplies are usually more reliable, but . . . Right now, to be safe while using the (gas) fireplace, they’d have to open a window to be certain that they got enough air flow, and someone would have to go out every half hour to make certain that the roof was OK.

        2. Kirk, don’t worry about it, all that modern housing stock will burn. In ten minutes.
          My husband the volunteer firefighter tells me they’re being warned not to even attempt to enter houses built in the last ten years. If they get there before it’s a pile of smoking foundation, that is. A house built to the new standards will be gone before a fire in a fifty year old house has spread from the first room to a second.
          After the first bad winter, it’s going to be all about packing the survivors in ten-to-a-bed in the surviving housing, and when they’re that tight they won’t have room to get cold.

          1. My head is a little fuzzy today. Did you say that in houses built 40-50 years ago fire doesn’t spread as fast as in houses built in the last 10 years?

            If so, it’s a reason to be glad that our house is relatively.old.

          2. I’ve heard this too, from local firefighters. The wood products (notice, not simple “wood”) catch quicker and burn faster.

          3. Errr… I do construction. And, I know whereof I speak, on this one: You’re wrong.

            One of the reasons modern fire departments are a lot less busy these days is because modern houses don’t burn as often, nor do they burn as badly. Disbelieve me? Talk to the fire departments. One of my fellow contractors is also a veteran firefighter, and he’ll be the first to tell you this fact. The materials are more fireproof, and the techniques have improved immeasurably. Code requirements have come in that make the spread of fire in a modern home quite a bit more less likely than it used to be.

            Now, what has changed? The contents. People have more crap, and that crap isn’t generally fireproof. It’s also a lot more likely to produce noxious chemicals when it burns.

            1. So people need to have fewer possessions to be safer from fire? And the one they have should be fireproof? Would you recommend fewer books and clothes? And of course pictures and toys?

              Do you have any place I can check beside your vague “talk to fire departments.”?

              1. The various building codes address fire retardation requirements, including “time” to ignition. (It’s in quotes because it’s a lab derived time and not expected to be real-world applicable.) Approved materials used as designed greatly reduce the initial flammability of modern structures.

                Occupants skew the designs, though. Open doors, forced air circulation, etc. complicates the design.

                1. Precisely. Modern construction practices drastically reduce the likelihood and extent of fires, when they do get started. However, once they get past a certain point, things get worse.

                  The reason why fire departments aren’t going into these buildings when they’re past that point boils down to the unpredictable nature of what’s been going on. On a house built with conventional wood floor joists, you can rely on them failing at a certain predictable point. With the modern composite joists, known as TJI joists, you really can’t know when or where the fire has damaged the web stiffener. When that burns through, and it’s much thinner than the old solid wood joists, you’re done, and the floor is going to cave in.

                  The new standards are a lot more effective in the sense that they now require fire blocking everywhere, and that the materials are a lot less flammable. Fires don’t spread in hidden cavities, because your framing is blocked to prevent that. Overall, I’d prefer a newer house over an older one, if only for reasons like that.

                  Now, past a certain point in the fire? Yeah, you’re done. But, the time you’ve got to get out of the building is greater in a new house, not least because of window opening requirements and other safety features that are now baked in, so you’re far more survivable. In today’s homes, the occupants are more likely to survive. In older homes, the structure was usually more likely, due to the solid wood framing, particularly floor joists.

                  Now, another issue is this: Most modern construction framing is done with planed, smooth wood with rounded edges. Compare that with the rough-cut wood used in the old days: The rough-cut stuff was dimensionally what they said it was, true 2″X4″, vs. 1 3/4″X3 1/2″. Why does this make a difference? Ever try to start a fire, and find that you have to “fuzz” the wood, to get it to catch? Same-same with the wood in today’s houses: There aren’t any sharp edges on it to help speed things up.

                  Modern housing stock is far safer. That’s one point I’ll have to concede, even if I don’t particularly like it. I’d rather be building with cement, to be quite honest, but that’s unaffordable.

            2. I was told that particle board and the various permutations are worse in fires … is this just not true, then? Or is there some assumption I’m not getting, like maybe various chemical treatments of the wood or whatnot? It was a real life firefighter who talked to me about this, so I’m really confused now.

              1. Particle board is going to produce more chemical outgassing when it burns. Where the benefit of modern construction lies is in the techniques used to build, where the fire pathways are blocked off and less likely to cause structural fires to spread through the structure without the occupants knowing it.

                Old-school ballon framing had studs running between floors, and no blocking. Once a fire got into the cavity inside the walls, it would and could spread rapidly throughout the structure, and before you noticed it. Today’s platform framing has a block at every floor, and mandates that there be fire blocking everywhere that something could communicate through to another floor.

                In the old days, say that you had a fire start in the basement. Flame and combustion would propagate through the entire house structure, and usually without the occupants noticing. We did an insurance rehab job on an old house from around 1910, and got to talk to the occupants who were there when it started. The chimney had failed at the base, and fire had started in the wall cavity adjacent to it. Their first sign that it had happened was when they felt the plaster on the exterior wall on the second floor, and it was burning hot to the touch. In a modern house, that wouldn’t have happened because the fire would have been restricted to the first floor wall cavity.

            3. Kirk, this was the subject of last month’s fire department meeting. The new building materials burn faster than the old. Do not enter buildings built in the last decade or so that are on fire. This is what the fire chief out here is telling her crew. She’s shown them comparison videos of fires in demolition burns in both types of building–you know how the fire departments do: take a building and burn it down for practice. Since we’re a rural volunteer department, the response times are long.
              Emily and Birthday Girl, I’d highly suggest calling your local fire department about it on the non-emergency number, or stopping by when they have an open house. All the firefighters I know are happy to talk shop–it’s getting them to shut up that’s the problem!

              1. You are confusing “less safe in general” with “less safe to fight fires in”, which is not at all the same thing.

                Sure, once the fire gets going past a certain point, the modern homes are going to burn. Anything will. The problem is that you’re mistaken in your thought processes–Older homes, particularly ones built with balloon framing, are a lot less safe, the fires are a lot more likely to spread without the occupants noticing, and the whole process of a housefire will usually result in fires where the occupants don’t make it out.

                I’m really kind of incredulous that your fire department leadership would put this crap out the way that they are. The building department in your county needs to rein this idiot in, because they’re completely wrong in the impression they’re leaving with people they talk to. Modern housing stock is a hell of a lot safer than the old, period.

                At least, for the occupants–I’ll agree that fires are more dangerous to fight in them, but that’s not my major worry as a builder or homeowner. I want the occupants to live. If the place is a total wreck afterwards? I can rebuild.

              2. I suspect there’s some technology/terminology mismatch here. One of the consequences of compartmetalization in modern construction is that a modern building that is fully engulfed is well and truly fully involved. The fire has progressed beyond each compartment and invaded the rest. In older construction it’s possible to have shell engulfment with partial or no interior involvement (see Kirk’s bulding specifics). Walking into a modern building with full involvement would be…unpleasant. However, a modern building with good containment and partial involvement? Chances are better that other rooms are clear, for a bit.

                  1. I think the point of safer for the occupants to exit vs safer for the fire dept. to combat is well founded. A compartmentalized fire is a hot fire. Once containment is breached…

                2. Thanks, that helps. I think the info I got was more from the firefighter’s perspective … including comments about open-plan construction vs. compartmentalizing. We toured a controlled-burned house and there was a half-bath just off the utterly destroyed open living/dining/kitchen area — that bath was untouched. The flimsy interior door had been kept closed and that was enough to protect it. OTOH, the open stairs and a balcony area leading to bedrooms was just crumbles held together by air pressure or maybe magic.

                  1. That makes sense, but I’m concerned that when they did this training/tour/briefing, they left you with the impression that you related from it.

                    That’s just bad business, because it would leave someone with the idea that the older housing stock was safer to buy/live in, when that just isn’t so.

                    I’d have a talk with the guy who led you through that experience, and make sure that he’s intending to pass on what you took from it, and if he isn’t, to revamp his presentation.

                    If he does mean to communicate that older=safer for the occupants, he needs to be reeducated, and the place to start with that is likely going to be the local building department. So far as occupant safety goes, things have gotten exponentially better than what they were before.

                    1. Kirk, I understand you’re talking about how great the building codes are supposed to be. I understand you’re in construction. They aren’t working that way in practice. The old housing–with asbestos, all that stuff, doesn’t burn as fast as the new does. The new houses are gone in ten minutes.
                      They might be easier for an occupant to get out of, I don’t deny that, but they go up like the old mobile homes.
                      This is not just a weird fire chief–this is material that’s being disseminated from higher up to the local departments.

                    3. Holly, you’re going to have to prove that to me. I just got done talking to my contractor friend who’s also a fireman, and he gave me that “dog trying to figure out calculus” look, then he wanted to know where the hell I’d heard that idea.

                      Whoever is telling you this is absolutely, flat-out, wrong. Period. New construction is exponentially safer than old, even going back as recent as the 1980s. I’ve torn the old stuff apart for remodeling, and demolition–Including insurance work after fires. The old stuff is much, much worse, and it’s precisely for the reasons Eamon and myself have described.

                      Think about this: Every damn year I was a kid, there were fires in my hometowns, and fatalities. It was routine, and an expectation. Now? I can’t even think of the last time around here where someone died in a fire. And, that’s not something that comes from poorer construction standards or materials. What it stems from is better firefighting, better construction, and better codes. We’ve got fire alarms now, and the construction standards militate against having whole structures getting involved before the occupants notice.

                  2. Glad to babble! Open concept does complicate the compartmentalizing design, so consideration has to be paid to alternate egress as necessary. If your bedrooms are on the second floor, serviced only by an open staircase leading down to the open concept kitchen/living area and the fire starts in the kitchen… You better know how you’re getting out the windows. But at least you’re likely to become aware of the fire while you still can get out the windows, rather than when the light of the burning wall wakes you up. Trade-offs, they’re everywhere.

                    I second Kirk’s concerns with the impression the tour left you with. I’m a big fan of older buildings, but only after remodel. Aside from the structural design we’ve been addressing there’s the issues of electrical installations, insulation, lead based coatings, asbestos (in all kinds of unexpected things), alternate egress, etc. that make older buildings something best picked by informed choice.

                    As a caveat, the other thing to be aware of: there are large differences in residential and commercial construction practices and oversight. So, there are regional variations and instances of unscrupulous builders/developers putting up whole neighborhoods that create problems down the road. Firefighters are going to gain more experience of shoddy workmanship than of craftsmanship, and it colors their experience.

  15. I guess I’m in a perverse mood today, or my empathy machine is glitching (again)…Those made me chuckle.

    Regarding NYC, I hope they get everything they wish for. I know there will be consequences, I know there will be innocents caught up in the mess, but the refugees have someplace to go (for now). And maybe a lesson can be learned. Even without the lesson, today (and today only) I’m willing to enjoy the thought of those smug bas*…um, folks reaping their rewards.

    The press doing it’s self-chosen job of suppressing the truth about the ice-locked ‘tourists’ irritates me, of course, it always does. But that’s balanced out by how the story is making the rounds anyway. And the sheer joy of a warmist mission ice-locked in summer.

    And that other one? Oh, wow:

    Lastly, from a structural point of view, as a class oppressed by men, we are not in any position of freedom to negotiate what men do to us collectively and individually within the heterocage. Men, by whom we are possessed, colonised and held captive, are the sole agents and organisers of PIV. Men dominate us precisely so we can’t opt out of sexual abuse by them; intercourse is the very means through which men subordinate us, the very purpose of their domination, to control human reproduction.

    I read the original. I even read some of the comments. Because my perverse mood lets me laugh, raucously even, at what on a normal day would make me scream. Or cry. All I can say is I stand in awe of the tremendous power I and my brothers in penile oppression wield over every female ever born. Regardless of her circumstances, her raising or education, economic status, intellectual capacity, or anything else. Because of the heterocage.

    Now I’m going to go do a brainwipe before the glitch resets and I start weeping in rage and pain and loss. My dog doesn’t dig it when I do that.

    1. The lady is obviously nuts. She has no connection to the real world. She’s taken one too many Women’s Studies courses.

          1. There is one abiding, undeniable truth in human life, and that is that there is no peg on the nuts-o-meter. Whenever you think that they’ve hit it, you find that there are considerably more clicks available.

            Trust me on this–I’ve seen the crazy go so far that you’d think they’d come back around to sane, but they never do. They just keep exceeding the standard.

            1. Pegging the meter doesn’t mean you’ve hit the maximum of crazy. It means that after a while, it gets too hard to distinguish between the levels among the truly batty.

    2. When I read the original yesterday, I went through the comments looking for any disagreement. None. Either there were none, or she removed all of them. The crazy level is scary on that site.

      1. Removing all contradicting opinion is SOP for the genre of crazy. All criticism, objection, and negative comments are hate speech aimed at silencing the victims, and by censoring such speech and denying those people the right of expressing their opinion is actually a virtuous act. This is why I do not comment on the local newspaper’s website.

        1. I wish it wasn’t so fashionable to act as a victim. You can do so much more, and be so much more, if you are acting like a victim.

          1. Ah, but victimhood is such sweet, sweet wine… The very nectar of the gods, for these people. It enables, it justifies, and it ennobles one so very much.

            Plus that, it excuses every failure, every act of faithlessness, and allows one such latitude in life.

            I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be healthier for us to regard victims with the sort of social disdain that we do to other failures. We may find out, if this current maudlin thread in society starts to disgust and annoy as many people as it should.

            Things go on until they reach their final illogical and excessive conclusion. And, then they stop. After which, we find something else, some other way of doing things.

            1. Victimhood does make the victims sympathetic. I mean, eventually you want the Coyote to have the Roadrunner nicely roasted. (Not so much Jerry, because whenever Jerry was doing too well against Tom, something would go wrong, and Jerry would be the one in trouble — he’d launch an array of knives against Tom for instance, and discover he was facing a cascade or forks, with pointy tines.)

            2. One more example of this crying wolf thing which seems to be rather prevalent nowadays. When half of the population or more starts to claim some sort victimhood the ones who really are, and who would deserve our sympathy no longer get it. Either they get lost in the crowd or are not taken seriously. Especially since the self designated ‘victims’ tend to be a lot more noisy and often hog most of the attention.

              1. It’s sometimes valuable to turn things around, and ask the obvious question.

                In this case, that would be “Why should being a victim garner sympathy or benefit?”.

                The answers to that question will tell you a lot about the attitudes and core beliefs of the culture. What it says about us, and our current maudlin obsession with and veneration of victim? I don’t know, but I have a feeling that it’s nothing good.

                Where did it even come from? I don’t think that the majority of European cultures had anywhere near the current level of regard for the cult of the victim, and I know for a fact that current non-western ones generally don’t, either. When did it become a path to power and authority, to be a victim of something?

                1. Being a (real) victim garners sympathy because bad stuff happened to the victim. Often through no fault of his own, or for faults we can all see ourselves committing. Sometimes through his virtues.

                  1. We have each of us at some point been “a victim”, therefore there is an easy empathetic connection with victimhood. Especially when the victim is eliding the many acts and provocations they engaged in which led to their victimhood.

                    Volubly sympathizing with victimhood has become a form of moral preening that is especially popular with those parts of our polity who enjoy unearned moral superiority the way Stephen Green enjoys vodka, the way I enjoy puns.

      2. When you’ve crafted a philosophy that defines all opposition as a result of the patriarchy (either you’re part of it, or you’re blind to it’s effects on your mind) then deleting critical comments is simply in service of the truth.

        And that’s how the precious flower got this far down the rabbit hole without bumping her head. In the absence of seismic shifts in the mental landscape she is locked in. Scary.

          1. Sounds crazy to me. Unless you define it as a religion; I wouldn’t. In religious terms, if you wanted to classify that way, I’d call it a cult.

            Even the most stringently religious people I know connect with reality. Their religion requires certain observances on their part. But it doesn’t require them to deny obvious reality.

  16. From Mad Magazine as filtered through my dad’s recollection, and then mine:

    There are wives whom you divorce;
    There are wives whom you behead;
    There are wives who are so stupid that you wonder why you wed;
    There are wives so irritating that you want to start a war—
    But, what the heck, I’ll try one more.

  17. There’s a theory that Henry VIII deteriorated (and degenerated) later in life due to the effects of syphilis. It’s way too late to test him now, of course, but his conduct fits many of the known long-term symptoms – and his lack of success in impregnating his wives may also be an indicator.

      1. I noticed that “lingering effects of cerebral trauma” is also trendy right now. Possibly because it lets the TV producers stage a joust.

      3. And scurvy, perhaps; at least, someone came up with that suggestion a number of years ago. The prestigious diet was heavy on meat, not fresh fruits and vegetables, meaning that men of the upper classes were likely to be vitamin deficient. Even if Henry VIII didn’t actually die of scurvy, poor nutrition may have contributed to whatever else afflicted him.

          1. And you can get most of the vitamins you need if you also eat the internal organs of animals, and as far as I know people back then did, the upper classes included.

            1. Liver: nature’s multivitamin.

              Speaking of liver, lots of people are raving about this recipe, which basically boils down to “soak it in milk beforehand to get the bitter taste out, and then don’t overcook it so it doesn’t become rubbery.” I haven’t tried the recipe myself yet, but wanted to pass on the recommendation.

              1. Thanks. I like liver, can always use new recipes. One part I have never quite figured how to turn into something tasty are kidneys. Cats like them so I sometimes buy them, and have tried eating them a few times, but I never managed to make them taste particularly good. Other parts you can easily find here are hearts and tongues, and those I eat. Lungs can sometimes be found in a couple of special shops, never tried those. Pretty much nothing else can be found, apart from cleaned intestines and fat for those people who like making their own sausages, and pig fat is also popular as bird food during winter. I buy that and render my own lard since lard is not sold here.

                1. You can try buttermilk rather than plain milk for the kidneys. The higher acid content seems to take out more bad flavors. And it leaves it more tender, as well.

                2. I used to love fried (cow) stomach, but I can’t MAKE it. My grandma did. I think she boiled it for like… a day before. Had to have, otherwise it’s like sole.

  18. I find the parochialism of the anti-normal-sex woman interesting. Apparently it doesn’t occur to her that *every other mammal* (and reptiles too I think) uses the same impregnation process. How is it “unnatural” when cows, dogs, rats, bats, etc. all do it pretty much the same way? How was the Patriarchy able to retroactively impose penetrative intercourse on those other species, and why did we bother?

    Yeah, she’s nuts.

    1. The Patriarchy imposed intercourse on animals in an attempt to convince human women that it was fun and natural, of course. It’s all part of the plan.

            1. I would, but there would be SO LITTLE of it. Honestly, I want the boys out of the house because when they’re not living with us Dan and I keep the house clean by just picking up after ourselves. On the weekends there would be litter boxes and vaccuuming and that’s it. And no, the boys aren’t that bad, but four people adds exponentially. For instance three bathrooms need to be thoroughly cleaned instead of one cleaned and one given a quick wipe-down because never used.

    2. This thought occurred to me, but having read the source article — it goes so far beyond parochialism into delusion that it’s hard to imagine how she functions.

      How, precisely, the patriarchy is supposed to have arranged things so that the survival of the species since origin is dependent upon male-preferred PIV in essential opposition to the natural non-penetrative love preferred by females is — a puzzle left for the reader, I guess. Biological sciences, dominated by males, are a tool of the patriarchy. Thus, any scientific understanding derived from those sciences is oppressive. Surely.

      1. Intercourse, aka PIV, seems evolution’s preferred strategy for most vertebrates, molluscs, annelids and crustacea. Even bedbugs have penetration, though not PIV, apparently.
        The author of this screed must have flunked highschool biology and led a very sheltered life.

          3. An actual Victorian view on the female of the species:

            Are you really under the impression that English girls are so ridiculously demure? Why, an English girl of the highest type is the best, the most beautiful, the bravest, and the brightest creature that Heaven has conferred upon this world of ours. She is frank, open-hearted, and fearless, and never shows in so favorable a light as when she gives her own blameless impulses full play!

            A wonderful joy our eyes to bless,
            In her magnificent comeliness,
            Is an English girl of eleven stone two,
            And five foot ten in her dancing shoe!
            She follows the hounds, and on the pounds–
            The “field” tails off and the muffs diminish–

            Over the hedges and brooks she bounds,
            Straight as a crow, from find to finish.
            At cricket, her kin will lose or win–
            She and her maids, on grass and clover,
            Eleven maids out–eleven maids in–
            And perhaps an occasional “maiden over!”

            Go search the world and search the sea,
            Then come you home and sing with me
            There’s no such gold and no such pearl
            As a bright and beautiful English girl!

            With a ten-mile spin she stretches her limbs,
            She golfs, she punts, she rows, she swims–
            She plays, she sings, she dances, too,
            From ten or eleven til all is blue!
            At ball or drum, til small hours come
            (Chaperon’s fans concealing her yawning)
            She’ll waltz away like a teetotum.
            And never go home til daylight’s dawning.
            Lawn-tennis may share her favours fair–
            Her eyes a-dance, and her cheeks a-glowing–
            Down comes her hair, but then what does she care?
            It’s all her own and it’s worth the showing!

            Go search the world and search the sea,
            Then come you home and sing with me
            There’s no such gold and no such pearl
            As a bright and beautiful English girl!

            Her soul is sweet as the ocean air,
            For prudery knows no haven there;
            To find mock-modesty, please apply
            To the conscious blush and the downcast eye.
            Rich in the things contentment brings,
            In every pure enjoyment wealthy,
            Blithe and beautiful bird she sings,
            For body and mind are hale and healthy.
            Her eyes they thrill with right goodwill–
            Her heart is light as a floating feather–
            As pure and bright as the mountain rill
            That leaps and laughs in the Highland heather!

            Go search the world and search the sea,
            Then come you home and sing with me
            There’s no such gold and no such pearl
            As a bright and beautiful English girl!

  19. First, you are completely correct about Henry VIII, and I’m glad to hear someone not treating him as having been a brilliant monarch when he was younger. Henry VIII achieved absolutely nothing brilliant, at least not on PURPOSE. (His break from Rome in the long run helped England a lot, but this done for entirely selfish, personal reasons: the essence of his theological disagreement was “I should be in charge”).

    He’s remembered as a good king in his youth for three main reasons: (1) he interfered less with the actions of his competent ministers; (2) he was a wannabe-totalitarian paranoid whack-job murderer of his own ministers and wives when he got older, so by contrast people remembered the younger Henry VIII more fondly; finally (3) since the English (literal) Establishment comes from his break with Rome, most English historians had to view him more or less sympathetically or admit that their Modern order rested on an obvious historic injustice.

    Secondly, I really do think there’s a long-term (multi-decade) warming trend, but it’s slower and spottier than the alarmists imagine, and furthermore it’s not likely to get much further than a return to Atlantic Optimum (c. 6000 BP) sort of conditions. The transition will cause problems, but such problems are probably not beyond the ability of a high-technology civilization to handle.

    Thirdly, the lesbian feminists are flat-out insane. They come up with convoluted pseudo-logical arguments to justify their own pathological hatred and fear of men, maleness and sexuality, and then claim that women who have a normal attraction to and respect for men (just as men generally have a normal attraction to and respect for women) are brainwashed, crazy and in denial of the truth. They have managed to combine the worst errors of Marxism and Freudianism to produce an unfalsifiable (meaning: it won’t accept any contrary evidence) theoretical structure which directly contradicts human biology. The cherry on the sundae of madness is that many of them are also “back-to-nature” types, who would shun the technology that alone might make their dream possible even for a minority of human females.

    1. On the warming trend — sure. We’re on the way up from the ice age. But what the sun is not doing is scaring crap out of me. Unmentioned is that humanity thrives in warm periods and dies off in cold ones.

      1. Yeah, I really don’t want the normal to be the way it was in the years of ’77 and ’78 around here.

        I saw an article a while back that said the sea level was apparently much higher during Roman times, because they have ports that are now many feet higher and over a mile inland from where the shore is now.

          1. I’d have to try to find it again,but I’m pretty sure they were talking about the stones where the piers were anchored.Sedimentation wouldn’t raise those.

          1. And some of it could be tectonic too. Ephesus is in Anatolia, which has gotten massive earthquakes in recorded history.

        3. Try the book _The Mountains of St. Francis_ by Walter Alvarez. The most readable geology and geographic-history of central Italy that I’ve found. Yes, Alvarez of Chuxulub and the dead dinosaurs.

      2. I wouldn’t bet on the warming period theory. Just look at how that ship of fools (excepting crew) got stuck in the ice during the Southern hemisphere summer.

      3. That’s my fear, too. The fable of the boy who cried wolf is all too apropos.

        Looking around me, I see a bunch of things locally that militate towards the idea that people have forgotten how to cope with really extreme weather in this region. Look at the old photos, going back to the 1890s, and you see snow up past the eaves of houses. We had a local ski area, with a jump that hosted the national-level ski jump competitions back in the 1930s. Houses used to be built to take heavier snow-loads, and care was taken with siting, so as not to put them at the bottoms of avalanche funnels. We used to have a system set up to convoy trucks over the passes, one direction of travel at a time. The marshalling yards are gone, in both directions.

        If the cold weather comes back, we are well and truly going to be screwed when it comes to adapting to it.

        There’s an author named Mitchell Smith, who wrote some really evocative tales of what a renewed ice age would look like. Some of his scenes are quite literally chilling, to use a really bad pun. Enjoyable reads, too–It’s the Snowfall trilogy, for those interested. I wish he’d write more, but alas, he’s not.

        1. “If the cold weather comes back, we are well and truly going to be screwed when it comes to adapting to it.”

          I don’t think so. You remember it, others will, too. It won’t be fun or easy, but we haven’t lost the knowledge.

          1. It’s not the knowledge that is the issue. It is that they forgot why those things were necessary, and they changed everything. The marshalling yards are long gone, turned into housing and so forth, the avalanche funnels have been built under, and God knows what else we’re going to find out when the conditions the old-timers knew return.

            Some of that stuff isn’t going to be easily adapted to. At all.

    2. The cherry on the sundae…

      Misogynist! Don’t you know the word “cherry” is a tool of the Patriarchy to make the taking of a woman’s maidenhood sound like the savoring of a succulent fruit??!? You should be ashamed!

      (Running away, while trying to hold my head together after writing that)

  20. Eh, slightly too the edge of the Henry VIII topic, anyone interested in the other side of the English Reformation might want to look at Eamon Duffy’s books. He’s done a lot of work on the pre-Reformation popular church, and what the average Englishman and women (as best we can tell) thought and enjoyed about their faith. He’s also highly readable, as such things go. _The Stripping of the Altars_ is his main book about popular religion, but the others are good, too.

    1. One thing I heard is that when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he destroyed some of the best local “hospitals” available for the common man. England’s monasteries provided good (for the time) medical care for the commoners and were located all over England (not just the major towns).

      1. Also centers of agricultural knowledge. Yes, there WERE corrupt/decadent monasteries. Humans, you know? BUT most of them were also centers of healing and other knowledge.

        1. Not to mention that destroying the convents of the women’s orders, and driving the nuns out of England or into lonely poverty, destroyed the whole system of women’s education for most women (since most girls with schooling outside the home went to convent schools). The only exception seems to have been the nuns who reinvented themselves as hedge schoolmistresses, running grammar schools for boys and girls.

          The strange thing is how many of the clever, well-educated Protestant women had daughters or granddaughters who never learned more than to sew a fine seam and run a household. Education seems to have been more valued among Puritan women, but a lot of those families eventually emigrated to America.

  21. I recommend Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation Of The Wives Of Henry VIII by Karen Lindsey

    Yes, despite the subtitle. There are a couple points where she lets it go to her head, but only for a graph or two, and the rest is very good.

  22. These people need to really step back and analyze their claims. Yes, yes, I know they’re not going to, but if they actually convince enough people of this claim that all men are rapists, and their fellow travelers continue to destroy the culture as they have been doing, isn’t that going to turn into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Aren’t there going to be men (well, males of physically adult age) who look at the climate thus enumerated and say, “Well, that’s what they say I am, why shouldn’t I act that way?” Get enough who start thinking that way, and every woman will live in fear of being raped any time they see a man.

      1. It might turn into something of a victory for the ZPG folks if you can get women too scared of men and sex to ever reproduce.

        1. I wish I was more confident that there was a genetic basis for the behavior. We could get past this in a few generations with the self-sterilization of the male haters.

          1. Mind you, I always expected a backlash against the “Free-love, if it feels good do it” hippy lifestyle. But _this_ is not what I expected. I mean, I expected a return to common sense and responsible behavior, not a descent into insanity. Maybe we can blame all the estrogen mimics in the environment?

            1. There will be a backlash. In fact there is. Tons of people who decide to stay home and raise their own kids — but it doesn’t fit the “narrative” so they do it quietly.

            3. Humanity is like a drunk trying to ride a horse. First he falls off on the left. Then he gets back on — and falls off on the right.

      2. Well, there’s ME culture and then there’s radical Islamic culture. One has hope, the other…

        1. Gender relations-wise, Islam is everything this nut job fears. You can judge the severity of her disconnect from reality by how she excuses that “equally valid culture” and projects her fears on the culture least likely to harm her.

          1. Oh, agreed. I suspect she really has no concept of how horrifyingly bad Islam can be from a gender-relations stand-point. And, generally, it’s nowhere near as bad as things can get.

            That she believes as she does in this culture? Laugh (hysterically) or cry, it’s all I’ve got.

            Our wealth and security allow this sort of blinkered nonsense. I fervently hope she doesn’t have to learn the error of her philosophy.

              1. The real problem is that they themselves are historically ignorant, and know nothing of the realities in Islamic culture.

                It’s a trap that they aren’t going to recognize until it’s too late to get out of.

      3. One of my fears is that some astute Islamic figure is going to realize that he’s got a perfect tool to use to popularize his faith. And, then, use it.

        If you ever sit down and talk to some of the conversos, you realize what a wonderfully, insidiously attractive thing Islam can be, for both the male and female who are dissociated from current society, and unhappy. She trades the uncertainty and challenges of her roles in modern society for the certainty and position in the family life that Islam claims to offer, and he gets to wear the big boy pants again.

        I don’t think people realize how vulnerable we’ve managed to make our population to this. De-faithification, if you will, has left a lot of people looking for answers. People who really aren’t that introspective, or thoughtful, and who will be vulnerable to the first charismatic charlatan who comes along, be he Islamic, Christian, or something we’ve never thought of. People will do a lot for a sense of certainty, purpose, and position.

        1. The modern worship of “FREEDOM!” misses the obvious problem that freedom is all form, no content. If all choices are equal and nothing matters but what you happen to choose — why then, it doesn’t matter. Any of it. All choices are morally equivalent to choosing a cherry yogurt over a strawberry one and equally void.

            1. Nonsense. “Consequences” are male-formulated stuff designed to push women for their independence!

              (Not from this particular feminist. This is in fact a common feminist attitude.)

                1. You know, in my time wandering around various wooded areas I’ve been quite thankful that it would require drugs for me to talk to plants. Trees, talk about a limited perspective — and let’s not even mention the underbrush, underthings are unmentionables for a reason.

                  As an aside: apparently she doesn’t realize that plants are sexed, because she keeps referring to them as she. I guess plants are polite, or that could get awkward…

                  1. Can you imagine the snit or more properly the frenzy she’d get into if she knew that there were male plants?

                  3. Trees, talk about a limited perspective — and let’s not even mention the underbrush, underthings are unmentionables for a reason.

                    I hear that there’s unrest in the forest. Trouble in the trees. Apparently the Maples want more sunlight, but the Oaks ignore their pleas.

                    2. Will the Maples ally themselves with Humans against the Oaks? Sap for Oak cutting?

                      There’s a book by Don Sakers Leaves of October which has a sentient tree as its POV character.

              2. “Consequences” are male-formulated stuff designed to push women for their independence! …is in fact a common feminist attitude.

                Truth in labeling requirements mandate that we properly identify such “feminists” as what they actually are: Female Supremacists, or Fescists for short.

                1. That’s downright insidious. And I like it.

                  Though I feel like I have a strange accent when I say it out loud…

  24. Let’s also not forget, 2013 was supposed to be the year of the “ice-free Arctic”. One of the reasons I’m no longer an environmentalist is because I remembered all these doomsday predictions that never came even close to being true. Don’t let them get away with it. Because you know they’ll be raving about an ice-free Arctic in 2018 any day now.

    1. Christopher,
      Same here. I was already having doubts in the early nineties when a near-future SF story involving (I SWEAR) reincarnation and the apocalypse won the local writing contest. In the first chapter everyone is wearing nose filters, for the pollution (in CO Springs!) the world is overpopulated, and you can only go outside at night, it’s so hot. I had given that piece of crap the lowest possible points (I was one of the judges, having sold a few short stories) for being… an a-scientific judgy piece of crap. But all the other judges maxed it out. Sigh.

      1. Been a few like that in my writing group. I bite my tongue, grit my teeth and try not to roll my eyes.

      2. There was a series I read in the late 80’s or 90’s involving an ice prophet and giant sailing battleships running on ice runners instead of in water, the entire future earth frozen over.

        1. The way you describe it sounds like the Escapades did “DUNE ON ICE!” Didn’t it have mutated whales that adapted to the ice also, sorta like sandworms?
          I read the AD Foster one instead.

        2. You must remember that in the 1970s, the New Ice Age was the hysteria.

          Though you might enjoy Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders by Richard Ellis Preston Jr. which takes place in a cold, post-apocalyptic world. (Aliens were involved, not climate change, so it doesn’t interfere with the Adventure!)

          1. But… but… on the News, they said that this past November was the 37th consecutive November with higher than average global temperatures! And my friend says Global Warming has been settled science for 40 years!

      1. Nothing dates like the future. I wouldn’t mind an Alderson drive, but I’m happy not to be living under the heel of the CoDominium.

    3. The new response to that is semantic parsing: The person (or persons) who said that didn’t say the arctic would be ice-free by this year, he (or they) said it could be ice-free by this year. My Lunatic Lefty (former co-worker) friend came up with that one recently.

      He also recently made claim that JFK was far to the Left of Obama, so there you have his critical thinking skills in a nutshell.

    5. I’m actually working on an idea where the biggest problem is a population implosion and a returning ice age…

      I kinda fear I’m actually predicting the future.

        1. I’d caught that, and when I saw it, I was like “Damn… Someone’s already done this…”.

          Thankfully, you missed out on doing the same snarky things I did with it.

        2. But, of course. I am but an addict of the printed word, I fear.

          I think Ringo is more than a little off, though–It’s not going to happen near-term, and if it does happen, it’s not going to happen quite as cleanly as he’s imagined in the Last Centurion, either. I think he let Mary Sue get just a little too close to the soup, and he failed at “scale” and “timeline-liness”, to coin a term. Social and climate dislocations like he describes haven’t really happened that quickly–While they’re going on, you hardly even notice. I’m quite sure that right up until the tipping point was reached, the Icelandic settlers in Greenland had no idea how bad things were going to get.

      3. You notice that SF is catching up to reality with population implosion. I suspect that what the SF writers so fond of overpopulation really liked was the kind of dictatorial powers they could invest in their governments for it.

        1. Don’t worry. Just like the “warmists” and the “ice age-ists” prescribed a dictatorship of the intelligentsia as a solution, they’ll do the exact same thing. The solution is always force, applied liberally to ensure the rest of us do as they say.

          Like as not, you’ll see tales with the diametric opposite of the Chinese “One-Child” policy. Want to go to college, young lady? Not so fast… Pump out your 3 kids, first. Not wanting kids? Oh, hey… Here are these confiscatory taxes, to pay for your care in your old age, since you didn’t bother to contribute members for the follow-on generation…

          I hate to say it, but I see some likelihood that policies like these will be put into effect in the real world quite soon.

            1. Never forget… These bastards think they own your ovaries, and your kids.

              The regime that enables abortion on demand can just as easily enable the criminalization of the same, and hijacking your body to produce the tax serfs they want. We never should have granted them power in that area, but we did.

              1. They actually argue that without abortion on demand, the state is entitled to enforce abortions.

                  1. Yep. The Government should never be allowed to have control over some things. Who can, or cannot marry, and when an abortion should or should not be preformed are the most obvious.

                    1. In some fictional universes the government decides how many kids you can have. That’s way too totalitarian for me. I’d rather leave.

                    3. As long as the government is recognizing marriage for legal purposes, then they, acting as our agents, *do* get to decide who qualifies and who doesn’t. Given that marriage is not just about the people who want the legal benefits, but also about the children the rest of us can reasonably expect them to produce (else why bother rewarding the relationship?), restricting those legal benefits to those couples that actually *can* and *will* have children is in everyone’s best interest. The pertinent question isn’t “what harm comes from rewarding same-sex relationships?”, but rather “what good does it do the rest of us to reward same-sex relationships?”. If they just want the *pragmatic* benefits of marriage, they can get that by living together, and AFAIK, there are no laws preventing them from doing so. Likewise polyamorites, or incestuous adults.

                      A case can be made that government *shouldn’t* offer any legal benefits to married couples, but that doesn’t appear to be a case anyone is trying to make. I suspect that were the Feds and the States to strike the word “marriage” and all related laws from the books, the demand for non-traditional “marriage” would evaporate overnight.

                      As for abortion, punishing murder has long been considered a legitimate government function. Why it shouldn’t be so simply because the victim hasn’t been born yet doesn’t appear obvious to me.

                    4. Regarding marriage: the concerns of legally recognized marriages are not solely about government granted benefits. For some, it’s not about those benefits at all. It’s about the recognition of the relationship in various private transactions such as insurance, mortgages, medical concerns, legal proceedings, etc. There are all sorts of private benefits that accrue to legally married individuals that are not readily available to the non-married.

                      Reducing the societally derived benefit to children actually opens up polygamy (though not polyandry) because these marriages typically produce a large number of children. It also raises the question of why we are rewarding heterosexual couples for marrying and never producing children. Do adoptive couples deserve the benefit? Where does the benefit to society originate? In reproduction? Or in the raising of the child?

                      Leaving aside any societal benefit of children, there are cultural and societal benefits to promoting stable monogamous relationships among adults. There are personal benefits that accrue to the partners by formally recognizing the relationship that have nothing to do with anybody else rewarding them.

                      Marriage is not solely a government (or religious) construct in our modern civilization, and framing the question of whether or not one interest gains access to legal marriage in such narrow terms ignores a great deal of the argument.

                      While I do recognize there is no organized movement to remove government sanction from marriage, it is a position I advocate. Primarily so we can get our collective selves out of trying to decide the merits of all of the myriad arguments for and against. Let private contracts establish the details, let private organizations (such as religious institutions) decide how or whether they’ll perform ceremonies, and let private businesses decide how they wish to do business with various contractual agreements on a case by case basis. Drama evaporated.

                    5. It’s about the recognition of the relationship in various private transactions such as insurance, mortgages, medical concerns, legal proceedings, etc. There are all sorts of private benefits that accrue to legally married individuals that are not readily available to the non-married.

                      How many of those benefits exist largely or solely because the government, at some level, has mandated that they must? From a purely actuarial perspective I don’t see why a business would care about the sexual arrangements of any given couple or group of people absent coercive mandates from On High. Admittedly, I don’t work in any of those industries, so possibly they’re just being old-fashioned about who they choose to do business with, but I rather doubt that as such an attitude would encourage competitors to cater to the un-served customers.

                      Reducing the societally derived benefit to children actually opens up polygamy (though not polyandry) because these marriages typically produce a large number of children.

                      Polygamy also carries various secondary social problems that make it sub-optimal. Monopolization of young women, internal politics, un-related and half-related children and adults sharing too much intimacy leading to conflicting loyalties (among other things). And then the questions of divorce and custody arise. On the whole, I think poly-anything is not something that the state has any interest in rewarding.

                      It also raises the question of why we are rewarding heterosexual couples for marrying and never producing children.

                      That’s likely a holdover from the pre-reliable-birth-control days. Once upon a time you got married and had kids. They were largely inseparable. The legal benefits and the legally-mandated benefits related to marriage all rest on the assumption that children will be produced and involved, otherwise what’s the point? As with the “get government out altogether” argument, I don’t see anyone arguing for “no legal benefits for married couples until they’ve borne fruit”, though I think a case could be made. Infertility used to be grounds for divorce, when one needed grounds to violate the marriage compact. Or so I understand it.

                      Do adoptive couples deserve the benefit? Where does the benefit to society originate? In reproduction? Or in the raising of the child?

                      In both of course. Which raises the question of gay adoption of course, but then one can counter with A) that’s a separate issue and B) kids need role models of both sexes. I’ll go with A for the purposes of this particular sub-thread:-).

                      Leaving aside any societal benefit of children, there are cultural and societal benefits to promoting stable monogamous relationships among adults. There are personal benefits that accrue to the partners by formally recognizing the relationship that have nothing to do with anybody else rewarding them.

                      This gets into murky waters IMO. Do these personal benefits derive from formal (who constitutes “formal”? A church? Uncle Sam?) recognition, or from the commitment of the parties involved? Why should society care, to the point of legally re-defining one of civilization’s fundamental relationships, about the personal benefits that accrue to the partners in the relationship? And in the age of no-fault divorce, the stabilizing virtue of non-legally binding “formal” relationships is questionable, IMO.

                      Marriage is not solely a government (or religious) construct in our modern civilization, and framing the question of whether or not one interest gains access to legal marriage in such narrow terms ignores a great deal of the argument.

                      Given that the topic under discussion is *legal* marriage, and the approach taken by the pro-gay-marriage side is a legalistic one, the legal frame for the question seems to be the only legitimate one. As to the arguments that are allegedly being ignored, while I’ve seen some vague references in the popular media to “respect” (as if that could be mandated by government fiat), most of the arguments I’ve seen are about benefits. Which makes this less about idealism and inclusiveness, and more about wanting to be rewarded for doing self-gratifying activities that do not merit any social reward. IMO. YMMV. Etc and so forth.

                      Anyway, I’ve said all that I think is relevant to this topic (and taken way too much space to do so), so I’ll drop the issue now. Having convinced no one most likely:-P.

                    6. ‘Tis why I think social utility arguments in governance are thorny. Defining utility is a question of perspective. Anyroad.

                      As a personal caveat, I don’t argue in support of the activists, I think they’ve gotten a bit loopy on their goals. (As activist are wont to do) I just argue in favor of a philosophy of government.

                      I don’t know about too much space, not my place to say. But I certainly appreciate you taking the time to lay out your position. I think we’re all better for understanding the various points of view bouncing around in the wild.

                      I’ll forgo a detailed response in deference to the thread wall, and our host. Maybe we’ll get to hash it around later with more room. Or not.

                      Well met, and thanks!

                    8. Jabrwok wrote:
                      “As for abortion, punishing murder has long been considered a legitimate government function. Why it shouldn’t be so simply because the victim hasn’t been born yet doesn’t appear obvious to me.”

                      According to some killing an unborn or a just born child isn’t murder.

                      I agree with you Jabrwok.

                    10. “when an abortion should or should not be preformed are the most obvious.”

                      Why stop there? why not when a newborn baby should or should not be exposed? Or physically disciplined as the parent wishes?

                    11. I wish the trees went deeper here, because I’m trying to respond to Jabrwok and Eamon, with this…

                      My contention is that the government ought to entirely remove itself from marriage, parent/child relationships, and a whole host of other things. All that ought to be enforced by the government are the civil contracts entered into by the people involved.

                      Want to marry? Fine. Government has no incentives, no benefits to offer you, whether you’re married or single. Supporting someone else in a marriage or other contractual relationship? Fine, we’ll take that into account with the taxes you pay.

                      Have kids? Well, guess what, honey–At birth, you’re going to sign a contract with the rest of society saying that you’re responsible for that kid, and that you’re going to raise them to the age of agency, which I’d set at around 15-16. After that, you can do what you like with the kid–Contract to support them through college, or boot them to the street. Don’t want to take responsibility for the product of your sweaty loins? Straight to foster care, and you’re going to pay for supporting that kid, whether you like it or not.

                      Fail to uphold the contract, by not taking care of the kid? Bang, zoom–You lose the kid, and they become state wards, while you pay the costs of their care. Let the kid run wild? Oh, sweetheart, you’re screwed: Because you’re going to pay the costs for everything that’s not a capital crime. And, if little boo-boo commits a capital crime while under your care and authority? Sweetie, you’re on the docks as a co-defendent.

                      I’d also make it possible to end the contract for the kid in question failing to keep up their end of things: Committing crimes, juvenile delinquency, etc. . Although, I suspect that some folks would likely use “bad grades” as a threat.

                      See, what I’d like is for all the unwritten, unspoken, assumed things we have in society to be spelled out for everyone, out in the open. Have a kid? You’ve got an obligation to that kid, and to the rest of us. Be a kid? Young man, you’ve got responsibilities, as well as rights. Sure, you didn’t enter into the contract, but you’re going to get a choice when you’re competent to understand it, and you’ll be responsible for holding up your end of it, anyway–Until you do. Mommy and Daddy don’t have to feed your sorry ass if you decide to be a non-functional member of society.

                      Just like you’ve got an obligation to Mommy and Daddy, in their dotage. Want a cut of the pie, inheritance-wise? Better have that spelled out in the family contract, kiddies. As well as, who the f*** is responsible for helping care for mom and dad.

                      I’d sever the whole assumption behind inheritance. You’re on your own, with no more rights than the ones you were granted in the contract. Want to abandon Grampa, and then come back at the reading of his will? Bubbiyeh, you’d better have had something in writing, because the state ain’t gonna do squat for you. No will? Well, gee.. Who can show they contributed to the care of this fine older gentleman? Family members? No? Oh, well… Who did? The neighbor who lived next door, and who helped him every day? That’s the inheritor, right there…

                      What I want is for everything to be laid out, in writing, so that none of this BS is arguable. Anywhere, by anyone. You want to be a dad to your kid? Fine, lay it out contractually, with the mother. Don’t want daddy in the kid’s life? Sweetie, that’s fine too–Just don’t think you’re going to get squat from him without allowing his parental involvement. Want the right to abortion, ladies? Fine: Daddy gets the right to terminate his parental involvement, too. What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander, I always say.

                      I do think I’d stop at saying a woman had to carry a fetus to term, if the father didn’t want her to abort. That’s asking a bit much, and I hope and pray that technology is going to come to the rescue for these cases in the form of an artificial womb. Guy gets you pregnant, you don’t want the kid, and he does? Something ought to change about that situation, when it’s technically feasible.

                      I’d also change citizenship, big-time. Just being born here ought to earn you something like a residency permit, irrevocable. Citizenship ought to be a contractual relationship, one where you acknowledge the laws of the land and agree to abide and uphold them. I don’t think the Heinlein idea of military or civil service as a requirement would fly, but I do think that there ought to be a moment when you acknowledge and agree to live by the rules we have governing us–Especially, before you vote. Don’t want to participate? Fine. You will be taxed the same as a citizen, but you’re free to leave whenever you like. The door is over there…

                    12. The problem with giving the government control of abortion, is that you have given the government control of abortion. You may trust that power in the hands of George Bush (either) but what about President Hilary Clinton? Will _that_ administration pay for, say, a repeat of Sarah’s first perilous pregnancy, or decide–in her best interests–to save her life? To say that a woman is obviously not mentally competent if she wishes to risk her own life to carry to term?

                      I do not “approve” of abortion, and I certainly think third trimester abortions need to be closely regulated. But the government should not have the power to require a rape victim to carry to term–although a reasonable promptness in the decision might to be urged by medical personnel and family. The government should not be empowered to _require_ a family to continue a pregnancy of a seriously damaged fetus, but nor should the government be able to _force_ a woman to abort.

                      Some issues need to be addressed socially, culturally, and medically. Not with the brute force of government.

                    13. So you want the government to have the power to decide which member of the human species get legal protection from being killed, and which don’t, in order to keep power out of government hands?

                    14. “So you want the government to have the power to decide which member of the human species get legal protection from being killed, and which don’t, in order to keep power out of government hands?”

                      You just explained much better than I ever could why, although I think abortion is wrong, it is not a real hot button issue to me. Because ANY decision the government makes is going to be wrong and a power grab.

                    15. Do you want to have to prove to the government that every menstrual period is not an abortion? Do you want the government to decide when _your_ daughter in a coma should be removed from life support? Or should you and your husband have control of that action? Do you want the government to decide when it’s “kinder” to not try to save _your_ premature baby, or should you have the controlling hand in that decision?

                      The majority of abortions are performed before there is brain activity above the “brain dead” level, so while I think the number of unwanted abortions is appalling, and a strong indication of irresponsible behavior, I don’t think there’s a “person” there–yet–to be given the protection of government.

                      The tragedy comes after that, when the mother of a badly damaged fetus does or does carry to term. While I think our society, as a whole, is rich enough to carry the badly damaged, there is a huge cost in time, emotion and money to the immediate family, and they are the ones who should make the decision, one way or the other. And again, when there are maternal health crises, pre-eclapsia, cancer, whatever, it is the woman whose health and life is at risk and she should have the right to chose, one way or the other.

                      The horror comes with third trimester elective abortions. Yeah, go ahead and turn loose the government. Let them decide. After all, they’ll do what’s best, right?

                    16. Do you want to have to prove to the government that every menstrual period is not an abortion?

                      False notion; we don’t even go to that level for fully-recognized persons who die– the adult version would be requiring everyone to do a monthy gov’t check-in with a full medical exam.

                    17. “The horror comes with third trimester elective abortions. Yeah, go ahead and turn loose the government. Let them decide. After all, they’ll do what’s best, right?”

                      Straw man. How about fourth trimester ones? Or one hundred-sixtyth? You are perfectly happy with the government prohibiting murder, because you know it’s not something they get to decide — it’s their DUTY.

                    18. Worse than a straw man, that argument essentially advocates anarchy, because the “turn loose the government. Let them decide. After all, they’ll do what’s best, right?” snark applies to ALL government policy.

          2. You must remember that evolution in action is occurring. It’s already selecting for wanting those kids. Indeed, for wanting them a whole lot.

    7. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history should never have been taken in by the whole global warming thing. Unfortunately, we started setting conditions for this to happen to us back about the time we de-emphasized history and real critical thinking in the schools.

      My disbelief in the theory always stemmed from my knowledge of the Viking experience in Greenland. Greenland wasn’t named what it was because Eric the Red was running a real estate scam on his peers–He’d have been killed by them if he’d tried it. Blood-Eagle, anyone?

      Greenland was named Greenland because when the Vikings first saw it, that’s what it was. Green. They were able to transplant full-blown Scandinavian agriculture there, without too much trouble. Hell, they were growing oats and barley, right up until the Little Ice Age hit, and the golden times ended.

      When I point that out to people blathering about “Global Warmenining”, I always make a point of asking when was the last time they bought a box of Greenland Oatie-Os. Oh? We don’t grow oats and barley on Greenland, and the Vikings did? Hmmmm…

      What’s really scary is how many times I’ve had to point the obvious out to people. Which is, to wit, that it still ain’t as warm as it once was, back when.

      Next question for the historically iggerant? Gee, Sally… Do you remember how they got the cannons down to Boston, from Ticonderoga? Slid them down there on the frozen streams, dint they?

      When was the last time the rivers in New England reliably froze solid every year? Gee, wasn’t that back before we started burning all this nasty carbon, sometime in the 1830s?

      How about Hans Brinker, and the Silver Skates? Don’t you think that the stories about skating on frozen canals might indicate that that was routine, and happened enough that everyone counted on it? When did that quit happening, again? Oh… Again, back before the SUV roamed the land, eh?

      It’s been colder, it’s been warmer, and it will be, again. Only the historically ignorant could hear the arguments of the warmists, and think that they had one damn clue what the climate is doing. Their arguments are specious, to anyone who’s actually read enough history to have half a clue. Unfortunately, that’s only a vanishingly small percentage of the population, these days.

      1. Greenland wasn’t named what it was because Eric the Red was running a real estate scam on his peers

        And yet, I’ve heard exactly that, in recent years. Can’t remember where, unfortunately.

        1. IIRC after the trouble getting people to settle Iceland, which wasn’t that icy, Eric named his second discovery Greenland to get more settlers. Mind you, the historical evidence shows that Greenland had more “green” then than today.

        2. That’s been a common assertion made by many historians. Only thing is, it’s not based on anything other than their own imaginations. I’ve gone looking for something that would support it, but there’s nothing there to find. At least, so far.

          If you can remember where you heard it, I’d love to know. Maybe someone has found something buried in a saga, or something…

          1. Yep. Actually it’s everywhere,and no, it’s just based on “but it’s not green” — actually we have records from when it turned nasty and of people dying.

            1. I’ve always wondered how the theories of Eric being a real-estate scammer squared with the fact that he lived with his purported victims. How’s that work, again? He calls the place Greenland, apparently sends out all these prospectuses claiming it’s warm and fertile when it isn’t, and then lives there with the victims he lured there under false pretenses?

              I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to try swindling people who came up with ideas like the blood eagle. Common sense would dictate that would be survival-contraindicated, ya know?

  25. It appears that there are Women’s Studies Majors on the moon! In C. S. Lewis’ novel “That Hideous Strength” when Merlin tests Ransom with riddles. The 2nd riddle Ransom answers thusly: “On this side [of the moon], the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”

  26. Dare I open another can of worms and suggest this Patriarchy talk is another form of the same brain parasite that invented “White Privilege”….

  27. Moreover, it’d be fun to expose a modern wymyn’s studies major to this passage, particularly Merlin’s advice that Jane’s head be lopped off for not bearing a child.

  28. Hmm. I didn’t dare read the original, the linked commentary was enough for me. That nut probably thinks I’m a gender traitor because I want to marry and have babies.

    2. Oh no. You’re severely colonized, that’s the problem

      “Traitor” gives you too much agency. It doesn’t make allowances for the violence you have be subjugated by.

        1. of course

          All women’s “attraction” to men is 100% eroticised trauma bonding / stockholm syndrome. There is no other form of attraction to men possible than that. None. Any woman “sexually” or “sentimentally” attached to a man is ONLY trauma-bonded to him. This is a universal rule under patriarchy.

          she goes on to explain:

          To trauma-bond, on top of everything D.G said, there needs to be actual violence or threat of violence, not just the perception of it. Our perceptions and responses never trick us, we only trauma-bond to people who represent a real threat or within an unequal, unsafe setting. Being around any man constitutes a threat to us, because they are our oppressors. Being wanted by a man and him treating you as if you were his is inherently violent. That’s anything from him showing he wants you, “dating” with you, being in a relationship or married to him. In either case, it consists in some kind of physical or mental violation from his part, on top of the constant threat of PIV/rape he represents as a man, whether he decides to enforce it or not.

          1. I’m not sure I want to hear her explanation for the bond between male child and mother…

            1. I’ve managed to miss that. She does, however, think that women are natural shamans, without drugs, and the drugs taken by male shamans to induce visions were what the women, pityingly, told them to use, having figured it out through their natural connection to the plant.

              1. If PIV is the creation of the Patriarchy, how did people breed in the time of the Matriarchy? After all this type almost always believes in the past paradise of the Matriarchy.

                2. Oh, it’s impressive.

                  What is interesting is to see that the drug-taking is primarily a male practice. Female seers, by contrast, do not traditionally need or take such drugs. I’m certain that men need these external drugs to access parts of their brain that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to access, because of their cerebral deficiency. Besides drugs always have a physical cost, they aren’t without negative consequences to the body and brain, and men often have almost as little regard to their own bodies as they have for the external world. I have always deeply distrusted drugs, saw it as a tool of control and dislike the way it shifts your consciousness in an artificial and coercive way, that makes it unsafe and unpredictable. I don’t see the need for an external product when we can simply learn to connect ourselves naturally, which is a far healthier way of doing it because it’s something that comes from you, in your own time.

                  . . . .

                  But here’s the thing, if men aren’t as endowed with seeing as women are and aren’t naturally connected to the elements it seems very unlikely to me that men themselves discovered the powers of that specific plant and how exactly to prepare it in the first place. To do that without the aid of ayahuasca you would have to be already connected to plants or that plant in particular would have to tell you herself, or other spirits or beings around you. And to do that you would have to be a woman, I’m sure.

                  In my opinion, here’s the background or truth of the story: either men coerced or tricked women into giving them the recipe for the potion, or women felt so sorry for men’s pitiable, unconnected state that they gave men this potion in the hope that would understand what it feels like to be connected.

                  . . . .

                  I know as a matter of fact that some women do have the capacity to communicate with plants and trees and living beings in different ways, they ask the plant what kind of healing powers she has and the plant may reply, if she wants to.

                  She is, BTW, an essentialist in her own words. Men are like this BY NATURE

                  1. So, she is saying female seers are full of themselves, while men have to have their good sense artificially disrupted in order to believe such twaddle?

                    1. Ah! Thank you! I needed a rationality life preserver…

                      I don’t know how Mary does it, wading through that, but my hat’s off.

                    3. It was Research, Eamon.

                      Though perhaps not productive. A character as monumentally full of herself as this, who is not only in the grip of affected ignorance but parades how she protects in public — would not be a convincing villain. So I stuck to reading the posts on the first page.

                    6. Okay, but — consider me impressed. My patience and my temper would likely have worn quite thin.

                      And that was only the first page? *sigh*

        2. The phrase is “angry militant lesbian feminist”, from Kevin Gilbert’s goofy little love song “When You Give Your Love To Me.” (It starts out reasonably enough, but eventually gets to things like “There will be a perfect cosmic harmonic convergence/When you give your love to me.”)

  29. One more thought to share on climate, temperatures, and ice, and I’m putting on my paleontologist’s brat hat here.
    I’m hearing around the house that this antarctic ice that the ships are stuck in is likely ice that has come off the land. Ice, of course, reflects more heat back into space than water does. Which reminds me of discussions we had around the dinner table a few years back about how we get ice over the northern hemisphere land masses. (The articles on the modeling, for those of you with access to Science archives from the, IIRC, 1960s, were by Ewing and Dorn.) To get enough moisture into the air to get the required precipitation to form continental ice sheets, it’s necessary to have an open arctic ocean.
    So we’ve got, potentially, a nice little feedback loop, where heating is the cause of cooling. (Sounds like something I’d design if I were doing the designing, you know: keep the system within parameters my creatures can survive in.)

    1. My paleontologist’s brat hat has me look at the whole thing about global warming and saying, Where’s your baseline? And when people say, We have 100 years of accurate measurements, I want to reply, No, really, you need at least 1,000 years of highly accurate measurements for a baseline, and I’d much prefer ten or one hundred times that.

      I mean, yes, the world may be getting warmer. And we’re definitely acidifying the oceans—that’s some nasty stuff. It’s a good idea to clean up whenever possible. BUT… don’t overestimate our effect on the environment, and don’t assume that the best way out is *backwards.* Did you know there are fewer bad air days in Los Angeles today than there were in the 60s? That’s including far more cars and people, for the record. So obviously something else changed, and that was our technology… as it improves, we get better at not polluting. So push *through* for healthier air and water, rather than trying to take us back…

      1. But…but….technology/evul!

        Environmental alarmists have made great strides in reducing the attention on actual pollution and garbage control measures. Frustrates me.

    2. “To get enough moisture into the air to get the required precipitation to form continental ice sheets, it’s necessary to have an open arctic ocean.”

      There’s something really counter-intuitive about that one, to my mind. The feedback loop would tend to make that a self-correcting feature, if there were enough cold temperatures to form the ice on the continents in the first place, no?

      The only way I can see an open Arctic ocean happening to contribute to the ice would be if there was something like vulcanism keeping the water warm enough to prevent freezing, and I’ve never heard of anything like that.

      I don’t think we have anywhere near enough data to be trying to predict or understand the climate. Even a thousand years of accurately recorded daily temperatures wouldn’t do it. Mainly because those are symptoms, not causative factors. How much of our climate stems from things that aren’t even on this planet, like the suns behavior, and dust in the interstellar environment that we’re moving through? What good are weather records going to do, when those factors need to be weighed in?

      1. We don’t know a lot of what we don’t know, and we’re only now starting to realize it. Well, that is, some people are starting to realize it. The others get large sums of research money to develop models that confirm what they think they know. Twenty-five years ago, if you tried to link the El Niño/La Niña cycle to the Nile floods, you’d have been laughed out of the conference. Now we can see that there is a probable pattern of teleconnections, but we don’t know exactly how, of even if it is pure coincidence parading around in the guise of connection. Five years ago, to suggest that atmospheric CO2 concentrations lagged behind temperature change, instead of leading and possibly causing temp changes, was heresy. Now . . . OK, so that one will still get you chased out of some conferences, but the data are starting to trump the models.

        Now if we can just get the feds to quit changing the numbers on the historic temperature data!

        1. When contemplating the accuracy of science, it’s useful to remember how the guys who came up with plate tectonics were initially treated. Not to mention the guy who figured out about the huge floods that accompanied the end of the last ice age, out here in Washington. They virtually burned all these folks at the stake, as heretics.

          Now, it’s the accepted science. Gee, who should I listen to, again? The anointed ones, or the heretics?

          Anybody arrogant enough to tell me they know exactly what happened or is happening with a process that has as many variables as the climate has is full of s**t.

  30. I doubt NYC will become Detroit– it’ll take more than a few years to accomplish that. While the smart money has already left, there’s still enough of a tourist trade, and enough cops, to keep it afloat for a good long while. Instead, it’ll be Vegas Island surrounded by some of the most abject misery we’re likely to see in our lifetimes– the four boroughs of Detroit.

  31. Larger than life Henry the 8th and global warming schemes are of a piece, as decidedly unhot outsized frauds, promising lots of money and position but no future.

    Worse, though, we’re currently stuck with Al Gore the 2nd.

  32. Pingback: Henry VIII and His Desperate Dynasty | Andrew J. Patrick

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