Blog — July, 2008

I've just finished reading Nicholas Wade's (2006) Before The Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. All kinds of stuff about Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA and the African diaspora, and hunter-gatherers. Plus, the accidental domestication of grains, pets and livestock, without knowing where that would lead; and sedentary villages forming before agriculture existed.

It's endorsed by James Watson, E. O. Wilson, and Lionel Tiger, but more than that, it's the rare nonfiction book that you just "can't put down." Do yourself a favor and read it, okay?

A willingness to kill members of one's own species is apparently correlated with high intelligence. It may be that chimps and people are the only species able to figure out that the extra effort required to exterminate an opponent will bring about a more permanent solution than letting him live to fight another day. (p. 148)

To minimize risk, primitive societies [such as the !Kung San, Eskimos, and Australian aborigines] chose tactics like the ambush and the dawn raid. Even so, their casualty rates were enormous, not least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent's society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death, and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before eating them. (p. 151)

Many readers who like the political implications of [Jared] Diamond's thesis—that Western dominance is an accident of geography and therefore no race is better than any other—may skip over his [white-guilt racist] premise of New Guinean genetic superiority. But if New Guineans adapted genetically by developing the intellectual skills to survive in their particular environment, as Diamond says is the case, why should not other populations have done exactly the same? (p. 199)

And a whole page (156) full of amazing, jaw-dropping stuff about widespread cannibalism in our species' past.

Not exactly what "Eros" was aiming for in evolving the relatively high intelligence of Homo sapiens, eh? Ah, well: If at first you don't succeed....

And then there's the African approach. As one commenter notes, of his own former shoestring-budget travels through Africa:

Few Africans would believe me when I declined to fund their plane ticket to Europe (I'm talking about complete strangers here, like taxi drivers) because I had barely enough money for my own. To them we're all rich and all it takes is to become as rich as we are is to reach the western Eldorado. Mind you they could be forgiven seeing as the vision they have of westerners a part from TV is essentially those on expensive package holidays, i.e. doing nothing and yet having bucketloads of money to spend, or aid workers in top of the range SUV's.

Just what I was saying a while back about the West being the "Promised Land" for unskilled, lowbrow immigrants, and about them not having the first clue about how much work is involved in doing the high-skilled and high-paying jobs here, eh?

And this is the other big critique, at Savage Minds, of Jared Diamond's notions, that I keep losing track of: I and II.

The thing with Diamond is that, like Wilber, he covers so much ground that unless you have a thorough background in each of the subjects he "integrates," he'll pull the wool over your eyes not merely by omitting facts which disagree with his Grand Thesis, but also grossly oversimplifying the things that can be made to "fit," to the point of caricature. And:

[I]t is noteworthy that Diamond does not always acknowledge the achievements of other scholars who have made arguments similar to his, while offering valuable insights of their own. In this regard, the work of Marvin Harris (1979), especially his development of the theory and method of cultural materialism, is glaringly absent. Harris was one of the main exponents of a materialist and environmentally focused tradition in anthropology despite, and often in the face of, the above noted resistance to biophysical explanations characteristic of 20th century social science. Similarly, Diamond ignores Alfred W. Crosby’s (1972, 1986) work, which focused on the fundamental roles biological and ecological factors played in human history, particularly in their connection with European imperialism.

Remind you of anyone?

Hmm, more of those idiot Catholics going off about the transubstantiated abuse of their wafer-thin Savior.

Jesus Never Existed. Who knew? ;)

Very, very poorly written (to put it mildly), but presumably there's some valid information in it....

P.S. Goat-fuckers. Just in case you were wonderin'....

If one commits the act of sodomy with a cow, a ewe, or a camel, their urine and their excrement become impure, and even their milk may no longer be consumed. The animal must then be killed and as quickly as possible and burned....

A man can have sex with sheep, cows and camels and so on. However, he should kill the animal after he has his orgasm. He should not sell the meat to the people in his own village; however, selling the meat to the next door village should be fine....

And Dubya:

No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.

Or, as McDonalds founder Ray "Chairman" Kroc put it:

The organization cannot trust the individual—the individual must trust the organization....

[W]e cannot trust some people who are non-conformists ... we will make conformists out of them in a hurry.

Which brings me to my recent conclusion that if our Western cracker-swallowing children-who-vote-and-reproduce ("no condoms allowed!") weren't currently being subjected to an "Inquisition" and suppression of free speech themselves (at the hands of a "less true" religion with an even more deplorable history of violence than their own witch-hunting one), they'd be the first to put others on the rack. Catholics excel in nothing so much as clumsily attempting to discredit unsaved "persons of science" for nothing more than following reason and evidence wherever those may lead, and not showing sufficient "respect" to the "sacred symbols" of their preferred set of fairy tales.

The only thing that has changed since the Middle Ages is that these otherwise-clueless, fairy-tale believers are now "powerless" instead of "powerful." Everything else (in terms of their infantile, up-the-Messianic-ass approach to reality) is the same as it was back in the days of Galileo. If it wasn't for them being persecuted now, for being heterosexual/homophobic Christian whites who want to impose their own fairy-tale-based values on everyone else, they wouldn't have any incentive at all to apply anything resembling rational thought to the subject of free speech. And, lacking such incentive, they would not have any intolerance at all for the idea of suppressing free speech in favor of a greater (e.g., Catholic) good. And in fact, within their fairy-tale worldview, that intolerance and the attempt to "convert the world" is perfectly logical: If you don't wind up with a position similar to that of Ann Coulter, you haven't followed the tenets of that (absurd) belief-system through to their logical conclusions. Like it or not, Ann is one of the most logical Christians around:

In a 2004 column, [Coulter] summarized her view of Christianity: "Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it." She then mocked "the message of Jesus ... according to liberals," summarizing it as "...something along the lines of 'be nice to people,'" which, in turn, she said "is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity."

Confronting some critics' views that her content and style of writing is un-Christian, Coulter has stated that "I'm a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it."

Whenever you're dealing with people who have found "the one true religion," their exposing of the foibles of other religions is never merely a "free speech" issue, any more than Intelligent Design is just an "alternative" to evolution. And either side (i.e., Catholic vs. Muslim) of that debate would happily drag us back into the Dark Ages, if they were given half a chance. These are people, after all, who genuinely believe that scientists on "their side" have been persecuted and "expelled" from the scientific academy, simply for having produced "evidence" (ha!) that doesn't fit into the materialistic worldview.

"And yet it moves"....

P.P.S. If you've ever doubted that Italian women are the hottest....

And regarding Howard Gardner's "multiple intelligences":

Beth Visser recently (gasp!) gathered data to test Gardner's theory. What did she find? Basically what John Carrol said she would find a decade ago: these multiple intelligence all positively correlate (sans kinesthetic intelligence) and a strong g factor can be extracted when the measures are factor analyzed.

13 Muslim Greeting Cards.

[Zakk] Wylde started playing the guitar at the age of 15 and worked at Silverton Music in Silverton, New Jersey. He grew up in Jackson, New Jersey, and went to Jackson Memorial High School there, where he graduated in 1985. Wylde has stated that he would practice playing the guitar as much as 12 hours per day and often would play the guitar almost non-stop between coming home from school and leaving for school the next morning, then sleeping through the school day. (Wikipedia)

I see now what I've been doing wrong....

[T]he brothers['] earlier split led to a divided town. From 1948, [Herzogenaurach, Bavaria] was really split in two like a sort of mini Berlin. Brand loyalty became paramount for many residents, and there were stores, bakers and bars which were unofficially known as either loyal to Rudolf's Puma, or to Adolf's Adidas. The town's two football teams were also divided: ASV Herzogenaurach club wore the three stripes, while 1 FC Herzogenaurach had the jumping cat on its footwear. Intermarriage was frowned upon. When handymen came to work at Rudolf's home, they would wear Adidas shoes on purpose so that when Rudolf would see their footwear, he'd tell them to go to the basement and pick out a pair of Puma shoes, which they could have for free. The two brothers never reconciled, and although both are buried in the same cemetery, they are spaced apart as far as possible. (Wikipedia)

And if, like me, you've never really trusted air fresheners, it turns out you were right to be suspicious:

In the laboratory, each product was placed in an isolated space at room temperature and the surrounding air was analyzed for volatile organic compounds, small molecules that evaporate from the product's surface into the air.

Results showed 58 different volatile organic compounds above a concentration of 300 micrograms per cubic meter, many of which were present in more than one of the six products. For instance, a plug-in air freshener contained more than 20 different volatile organic compounds. Of these, seven are regulated as toxic or hazardous under federal laws. The product label lists no ingredients. (LiveScience)

And if, like me, you haven't trusted feminists for a decade by now, it also turns out you were right to be suspicious:

[W]omen have always been able to use their sexuality as a means to upward mobility. Is closing this avenue down (assuming that this were even possible) what women necessarily want? All women? Obviously the answer depends on whether one is on the receiving end of such perks or is left out, an angry "third party"....

Many commentators have pointed out the initial feminist silence in response to Paula Jones's allegations against [President Clinton]. That silence is usually attributed to unwillingness on the part of feminists to denounce their best political hope in Washington. Legal scholars such as Susan Estrich have even gone to great lengths to explain why Paula Jones's allegations should not be treated as a case of sexual harassment; Estrich rather unabashedly admits it's all politics. More recently, Gloria Steinem wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times arguing that men are entitled to one grope and defending the president because he recognizes that "no" means "no." Steinem thereby confirmed the views of those denouncing the hypocrisy of feminists for abdicating their usual vigilance toward men's behavior when, opportunistically, it suited them to do so. Where was she until now, critics have asked, when charges of sexual harassment were running out of control? Presumably in the same support group as most feminists who were happy to see such charges play havoc with men's lives in the workplace and in schools—as long as their own allies weren't targeted. Thus, the perception of feminist double standards appears valid. (Daphne Patai, Heterophobia, p. 29, 54)

P.S. Church leader opposes lifting of Python film ban. Still, "Blessed are the cheesemakers." (Note: I distinctly recall a fellow elementary-school classmate in New Bothwell telling me, in the 1970s, that his older brother [who worked at the linked cheese factory] had pissed in the whatever-vat, just to ... well, just to prove himself a 70-IQ rural yokel, I suppose. There ain't much else to do in them thar parts. So enjoy the uniquely yellow color and flavor of that cheddar, my friend, especially now that you can order online. Egad, we must really be in the twenty-first century, no shit!)

Well, here's something you don't see every day: Christopher Hitchens getting waterboarded.

And another thing you don't see every day: The Blind Salamander.

And a note for the adults who still believe in fairy tales (e.g., Catholics): Red hot enlightenment led me to believe in one fewer god.

Kathy Shaidle once remarked that "The Catholic Church is the Hotel California of Christianity: You can check out any time you like, but — well, you know."

Well, yes. Cults are like that, you know. And taking your moral values from a set of fairy tales is just scary.

P.S. The Cheerio effect. And: July is National Bikini Month!

From Darwin's Surprise (via LGF):

Heidmann and others have suggested that without endogenous retroviruses mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature. That led to live birth, one of the hallmarks of our evolutionary success over birds, reptiles, and fish. Eggs cannot eliminate waste or draw the maternal nutrients required to develop the large brains that have made mammals so versatile. "These viruses made those changes possible," Heidmann told me. "It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs"....

The earliest mammals, ancestors of the spiny anteater and the duck-billed platypus, laid eggs. Then, at least a hundred million years ago, embryos, instead of growing in a shell, essentially became parasites. While only balls of cells, they began to implant themselves in the lining of the womb. The result was the placenta, which permits the embryos to take nourishment from the mother's blood, while preventing immune cells or bacteria from entering. The placenta is essentially a modified egg.

And:

Darwin's theory makes sense ... only if humans share most of [our endogenous retrovirus] fragments with relatives like chimpanzees and monkeys. And we do, in thousands of places throughout our genome. If that were a coincidence, humans and chimpanzees would have had to endure an incalculable number of identical viral infections in the course of millions of years, and then, somehow, those infections would have had to end up in exactly the same place within each genome. The rungs of the ladder of human DNA consist of three billion pairs of nucleotides spread across forty-six chromosomes. The sequences of those nucleotides determine how each person differs from another, and from all other living things. The only way that humans, in thousands of seemingly random locations, could possess the exact retroviral DNA found in another species is by inheriting it from a common ancestor.

P.S. Choosing A College: A Guide for Parents and Students.

TV personality Bill O'Reilly is nicknamed the Falafel Guy, after mistakenly referring to the loofah sponge as a "falafel" midway through an alleged phone conversation with Andrea Mackris. (Wikipedia)

The standard parody of Suzanne Vega's "Luka" is, of course:

My name is loofah
I live on the bathroom floor

As to what Bill "Falafel Guy" O'Reilly may have been doing on the bathroom floor ... "I venture no hypothesis."

On a more serious note:

[I]f hecklers are legally protected—and standups have to worry about facing legal expenses for having defended themselves verbally on stage from distracting drunks and drama queens—standup comedy will die like a fish out of water in Canada. Who would put in the brutal hours needed to master it under such a threat, or dare come to this country to perform? An entire art form will have been euthanized in the name of preventing "offensiveness," and what others can then regard themselves as safe?

Indeed. So: "A priest, a 117-IQ Ashkenazi rabbi, and a gay, 85-IQ Muslim walk into a bar...."

P.S. The gaffe machine is at it again: Now Obama is Promising to Get Rid of All Nuclear Weapons.

And then there's this creationist-sympathizing parody of the Four Horsemen and their scientific "machine":

As always with parody, when it's done too well it's hard to distinguish it from the "real thing," i.e., to figure out which "side" it's on. Especially when you get all tangled up in postmodernism, and start trying to figure out what's irony, and what's an ironic stance about irony, and what's serious, and whether the over-the-top puppet-attitude of RD & Co. is a send-up of their actual arrogance, or just a borrowing from the attitude of typical rappers, etc. (The anti-Newton "shoulders of midgets" line is a bit of a giveaway, though.)

So there's plenty of cracker-worshiping Catholics getting a good laugh over how a significant segment of the atheist/evolutionist community thought the video might be an homage to Dawkins & Co., rather than a creationist jibe. Um, but Mark Shea is pretty out of it too, in his own introductory remarks:

Long ago, I remember watching some film about human evolution narrated by Richard Leakey, Jr. It was interesting as such films go [!], but you got the sense as it went along that it explained everything at the cost of leaving everything out [um, how much detail do you expect in a, what, thirty- or sixty-minute show?]—like scientists in a Far Side cartoon analyzing humor.

The crowning moment of the film, for me, was when Leakey stood in front of the gorgeous twenty-thousand-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux, France and, with genuine puzzlement in his voice, wondered aloud "Why did they do this? What was the purpose?"

I had the distinct impression he would have expressed equal bafflement were he standing in the Louvre. There seemed to be a gene missing somewhere. He was a man who knew a great deal about human origins and yet, however smart he was, there was something about him that was radically out of touch with, well, what it meant to be human. You felt he needed tape on his glasses, a pocket protector, high water trousers and D&D dice in his pocket to complete the image he seemed to project with such earnest unconsciousness....

I discovered that, thanks to the same sort of bizarre lack of elementary social aptitude that Leakey displayed in the film I saw decades ago, the humor and satire are indeed lost on ... Richard Dawkins.

There is no shortage of controversy, even today, about what shamanic cave-paintings "mean," i.e., whether they were sympathetic-magical attempts to influence the hunt, or atonements (at-one-ments) with the spirits of the animals, or (in other cases) elaborations of form constants seen by the shamans in their "inner consciousness" (i.e., visual cortex) after much dancing and/or psychedelic drug-taking. No competent anthropologist or mythologist, even going back to before Joseph Campbell, would look at a cave painting and be confident that it was just "art," i.e., something comparable to that which hangs in the Louvre. That basic point of anthropology, however, is entirely lost on Shea.

Even social science and the like, you know, has more than a little bit to do with asking why people do the things they do, and approaching apparently "obvious" phenomena "with genuine puzzlement," as opposed to simply assuming that their reasons must be the same as yours, and then bowing your head in prayer to an Imaginary Friend, actually believing that your thoughts can affect the health of your near and dear ones.

And therein lies the Catholic rub. Because, you know, those cave paintings were created way before 4004 BC....

Still, science (as the best way we have for separating truth and reality from wishful-thinking) will have the last laugh. Because even if there is more to the universe than the physical world, whatever that Other Stuff is will assuredly have little if anything to do with the Catholic, cannibalistic-virginity-cult system of beliefs.

As a commenter on PZ Myers' blog notes:

The prelude and the use of the "Expelled" logo convince me that this was made by the creationist side, but I think it backfired. The (apparently ironic) refrain "he's smarter than you, he's got a [science degree|PhD]" reminds me of a redneck pastor saying, "don't let them sciencey types tell you that we evoluted from some rocks and monkeys!"

Anyway, I thought it was great—as other posters have remarked, the references to people like Democritus are solid, and pretty flattering to our side. Epic fail and whatnot for the creationists, as usual.

Yep. Because, you know, maybe the brilliant PR firm producing that video, while superficially satisfying their (creationist) clients, were too smart to not also include an implicit pro-scientific message, mocking the "You think you're smarter than we are" stance of the scientifically illiterates of the world, against scientists who really are smarter than they are, by orders of magnitude....

(Postmodernism is the death of straightforwardness and honesty; it really is. "Why can't you just take what I said literally?")

Separately, on an entirely different topic, Kathy "Reformed Katholic" Shaidle insightfully (really) notes:

Syed [Soharwardy] says he has two Master's degrees. He does work at IBM and they don't tend to hire morons. Likewise, the Sock Puppets who harassed Mark Steyn, not to mention Puppet Master Mohammed El-Sharpton, are all university grads.

Freedom[-]loving Canadians, listen to me know and believe me forever:

THESE ARE THE EDUCATED ONES our governments keep telling us we're supposed to want coming into our country and if we don't we are evil racist hicks.

So: imagine the fun we'll be having soon with the "uneducated" ones? What's French for "car-beque" again? Would you like your wife's hijab in "Black" or "Extra Black"? Your kid's puppy? Here's its furry little head.

I really enjoy Steve Sailer's blog. Except when it slips into chest-thumping and bitching (esp. in the Comments) about how "other" posters there can't get laid, and about how "feminine men" (e.g., hippies) can't understand how the high-testosterone majority lives—i.e., as "Ah-nolds," just thinking about eating, killing, and fucking all day long.

So I just stumbled on this pertinent quote, elsewhere:

What worries me the most is that most men are so weak. Because of that they act like they don't care and like machos—because they are too fragile inside.

They're scared of confrontation and afraid of so many things. And because of this they build up their life so they have to deal with their feelings as little as possible.

I find feminine men unbelievably sexy. But most men are completely incapable of getting in touch with their feminine side. What am I supposed to talk about with a man who doesn't know what it's like to be a woman?

You know who said that? Salma Hayek.

Oh, and the two things that annoy me the most about Little Green Footballs:

1. You have people laughing at the irrationality and the disconnected-from-reality perspective of one or another leftist idea ... and then the next Comment is someone posting a literal "prayer list," of people the other readers should pray for. If you enjoy irony.... (An astonishing percentage of the people and websites who recognize the danger which Islamism poses to Western civilization and its freedoms are Christians—Kathy Shaidle, Mark Steyn, Robert Spencer, Ann Coulter, etc. Yet it was Richard Dawkins, not these "good Christians" and their "non-secular values," who was raising money for Ayaan Hirsi Ali when she needed a hand.)

2. Commenters laughing at how foolish it is for environmentalists to encourage others to "buy locally," given that you can't grow rice in New York state, for example. I worked at a natural-foods store in Winnipeg for a year back in the late '90s, and no one I met in that environment ever suggested that you should purchase everything you eat locally. It's just that where there's a choice, you try to support your locally owned small businesses rather than the multinational supermarket chain (where the money not only goes out of the local community but even out of the country). Buying locally also reduces fuel usage (for transporting the goods), so it lessens our dependence on foreign oil. You'd think that might be something the supposed "non-moonbats" at LGF would find relevant, no? Yet, it's completely lost on them, having branded the "buy locally" issue as just a "leftist" one, and thus one without redeeming qualities. Same one-sided shit as always.

A similar thing shows up as comments on Sailer's blog: People authoritatively insist that wind and solar or tidal power can't be stored for later use, so we need to go nuclear ASAP ... and then someone who's actually put some real thought and research into the subject points out the obvious fact that you can very easily use wind and solar power to raise water against gravity, and then release that water to run downhill and turn turbines to produce electricity during calm/dark periods. (If that particular solution isn't practical, you can store the energy as compressed air instead, or as pressurized hydrogen from electrolyzed water, or someday as electricity itself in room-temperature superconducting loops.)

But isn't it always the case that as soon as you start talking about "green power" issues the conservative side tunes out, and doesn't even want to see how it can work?

please be philosophical
please be tapped into your femininity

—Alanis "Analingus" Morissette, "Princes Familiar"

P.S. The Hair Bible.

From Max Mosley case: bend over, free speech, this is going to hurt (via FFF):

The question [of how much the privacy of celebrities can be violated] was answered by a little-known Canadian folk singer called Loreena McKennitt. She chose a UK court to fight publication of a book by a former friend, with McKennitt claiming not that the contents of the book were untrue but that they infringed her privacy. With Eady once again in the hot seat, she won her case and the book was withdrawn. No matter if the content was true or not, the message was clear. The balance had tipped against freedom of expression.

Of course, there are two sides to every story.

First, that "little-known Canadian folk singer" (who my Uncle Peter taught to play the flute, back in high-school band class in Morden, Manitoba, once upon a time) has been awarded the Order of Canada—the most prestigious civilian honor in Canada—and been (2008) nominated for a Grammy.

Next, from McKennitt's Who Watches the Watchdog:

I know some media find it difficult to accept that everyone's business is not necessarily theirs, but out of respect for the legal process I did not feel it appropriate to enumerate and debate every lie or distortion contained in a 300+ page book, with anyone who was not integral to the case, media or otherwise. Additionally, it was a privacy case and it was not necessary to sift through every one of Ms. Ash's accusations to determine which were true or false if those communications fell within a reasonable zone of privacy....

In the end, as someone who signed a confidentiality agreement, she has been the architect of her own fate as she has written this book and lost this case.

McKennitt has also confronted journalist Roy "No Comment" Greenslade, at Press freedom the loser as McKennitt wins.

Again, two sides to the story. But, of course, to find that out, you have to do more than just open the paper (e.g., in a browser window) and believe whatever it tells you, eh? It's something called "research"....

From Bachelorhood And Its Discontents:

Some years ago a noted Japanese researcher analyzed the biographical data of some 280 famous mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists and discovered that all peaked professionally in their twenties, at which point their careers spiraled downward. Married scientists suffered the worst decline in productivity. However, those who never married remained highly productive well into their fifties. "Scientists tend to 'desist' from scientific research upon marriage," the researcher told an interviewer, "just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage." One theory suggests married men lack an evolutionary reason to continue working hard (i.e., to attract females). Though it [is] likely they similarly lack the prerequisite time and solitude.

Hmm. So I guess it's not "just me," then, who can't balance getting things done in research, with having anything resembling a social life.

Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That's my advice: never marry till you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of.... Marry when you are old and good for nothing—or all that is good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles.... [T]ie yourself up with a woman, and like a chained convict you lose all freedom!

Tolstoy. War and Peace.

P.S. Steven Tyler Laid Off From Aerosmith As Band's Jobless Rate Hits 20%. And Chris Osgood Gets To Third Base With Stanley Cup. And Bill Clinton Sadly Folds First Lady Dress Back Into Box. And Bush Says He Still Believes Iraq War Was The Fun Thing To Do.

From Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It:

Contemporary Canadian, British, Dutch, and Swedish nationality is to a large extent self-mocking. Alleged "conservatives" like the former prime minister Joe Clark spoke favorably of Canada being a "nation of nations," meaning Indian nations, Inuit nations, the Quebec nation, the Ukranian-Canadian nation, etc., with nary a thought for what other forces might set up shop in such a wasteland of a concept. The jihad is a functioning version of everything the multicultists have promoted for years.

There is no evidence that any Muslim woman anywhere ever wore the jilbab before the disco era, when it was taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the Arab world. (p. 74)

"Islamophobia" is not phony or even psychological but very literal—if you're a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified. (p. 85)

Today, lots of experts crank out analyses positing China as the unstoppable hegemon of the twenty-first century. Yet the real threat is not the strengths of your enemies but their weaknesses. China is a weak power: its demographic and other structural defects are already hobbling its long-term ambitions. (p. 135)

When Islam conquered infidel territory, it set in motion a massive transfer of wealth, enacting punitive taxation to transfer money from non-believers to Muslims—or from the productive part of the economy to the non-productive. It was in its way, a prototype welfare society. When admirers talk up Islam and the great innovations and rich culture of its heyday, they forget that even at its height Muslims were never more than a minority in the Muslim world, and they were in large part living off the energy of others. That's still a useful rule of thumb: if you take the least worst Muslim societies, the reason for their dynamism often lies with whichever group they share the turf with—the Chinese in Malaysia, for example.

But eventually almost all Muslim societies tend toward the economically moribund, if only because an ever-shrinking infidel base eventually wises up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills. In other parts of the world, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That's in part what drove Islamic expansion. Once Araby was all-Muslim, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe—in search of new infidels from which to extract the jizya. As engines of growth, the Muslim world and the European Union suffer a similar flaw: both encourage defections to the non-productive segment of the economy. (p. 164-5)

Britain was never an unrivaled colossus, even at its zenith. Yet today, in language, law, politics, business, and the wider culture, there is simply nothing comparable in scale or endurance to the Britannic inheritance. (p. 168)

In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee"—the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hand them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours...."

Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. (p. 193-4)

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests, at which the Grateful Dead got their start.

And the trail of disasters which follows the draft-dodging Dick Cheney around.

The (near) connection? John Perry Barlow, (secondary) lyricist for the Grateful Dead since 1971, was one of Cheney's campaign managers in the Dickster's run for Congress in 1978.

Ann Coulter would be proud.

P.S. Levant to Congress: put Canada on the watch list of human rights abusers.

From Dave Barry's Dave Barry Does Japan:

[T]he Japanese tend to toe the line. But not necessarily because they want to; they have to. As Kunio Kadowaki told me: "Japan is a no-choice society." This is essentially the point of a fascinating and disturbing book called The Enigma of Japanese Power, by Dutch journalist Karel van Wolferen, which I strongly recommend if you're interested in reading a book about Japan by somebody who actually knows what he's talking about. Van Wolferen argues that the standard Western view of the Japanese—that they naturally tend to be docile and group-oriented because they're so racially and culturally similar, and therefore lack individuality—is crap. He writes:

I believe that the Japanese are individuals, all 120 million of them. Not all may want to assert their individuality; most, having been so conditioned, do not. But I have met quite a few who want to be taken for distinct persons, rather than as indistinct members of a group. These independent thinkers are disturbed. In many cases they have withdrawn into the private world of their own mind. Japanese culture harbors a vast, unconnected and uncharted archipelago of such private worlds. Individualistic Japanese are generally non-political because they would constantly burn their fingers if they were to challenge the existing power arrangements.

Despite its alleged transformation to a modern society, van Wolferen argues, Japan remains a highly oppressive place, where democratic central government is mainly a facade, and real power is exercised, as it has been for centuries, by what he calls "the System"—a complex arrangement of semiautonomous, nonelected groups, each of which rigidly controls some aspect of Japanese life. Those in power argue that the System simply reflects the Japanese people's cultural preference for conformity; but nobody ever asks the people. They're expected to shut up and go along, and nonconformists are penalized harshly.

But then, what did you expect from a society that was literally feudal, with a Divine Emperor, until half a century ago? At any rate, they've handled having democracy and capitalism thrust upon them a lot better than the tribal, kinship-based Africans have.

Tibet, of course, is basically a feudal nation too ... not to mention a nationwide cult with unquestioning reverence for the Dalai Lama. I'd love to see them freed from Chinese control, but if/when that does finally happen, it's hardly going to turn the country into ... well, into anything resembling a Shangri-La.

And if that doesn't get you thinking, perhaps this will:

Every year, English teachers from across the USA can submit their collections of actual analogies, similes and metaphors found in high school essays in order to have them published and sent out for the amusement of other teachers across the country. Recent winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled around inside his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the kind of wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who goes blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like the sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't. [This is actually derivative of Douglas Adams: "The ships hung in the sky much the way that bricks don't."]

10. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

11. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

12. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling west at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. traveling east at a speed of 35 mph.

13. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

14. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

15. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

16. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

17. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

18. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

19. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

20. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

Most of the lines above strike me as being intentionally funny, so the above may just be a hoax, i.e., not really written by students. Still, whoever wrote it should be doing comedy for a living.

P.S. The People's Cube: Correct Opinions for Progressive Liberals. And Scott Adams on the value of a hard day's work. Oh, and black holes and devil's food cake are "racist". I almost called that one. (By parity of argument, angel food cake must be a white supremacist food? Well, that settles it: phallic, patriarchal tofu dogs for lunch!)

Actual Muslims think Islam is pretty messed up, but what do they know, huh?.

Oh, and "Today Barack Obama is going to vote for the FISA bill he swore to filibuster when he needed the support of the far left." And that surprises you? At least he (hopefully) won't be giving his speech at the Brandenburg Gate.

Ah, and there's also this, from Christina Hoff Sommers' The War Against Boys:

Commenting on the relationship between crime and one-parent families, [William Galston and Elaine Kamarck] say, "The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature"....

Fathers appear to be central in helping sons develop a conscience and a sense of responsible manhood. Fathers teach boys that being manly need not mean being predatory or aggressive. By contrast, when the father is absent, male children tend to get their ideas of what it means to be a man from their peers. Fathers plays an indispensable civilizing role in the social ecosystem; therefore, fewer fathers, more male violence.

And what, pray tell, is the (related) black illegitimacy/single-parent rate? From Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare (p. 53-4):

The breakdown of the black family that Senator Moynihan deplored a generation ago has sharply worsened for the underclass. Whereas 25 percent of black families were headed by a woman when Moynihan wrote, the proportion had soared to 43 percent by 1984 and to 48 percent in 1990. In 1960 three quarters of young black men said they'd never been married; 93 percent say so today.

Nevertheless, they go on making babies—so one can hardly argue that nonmarriage is a response to the economic impossibility of supporting a family. While around one black child in six was born in 1950, more than half—57 percent—were born illegitimate by 1982, and by 1989 the number had risen to about two thirds. Today, in ghettos like New York's central Harlem, four out of every five black babies are illegitimate.

Separately, back when the whole Don Imus kerfuffle was going on, you'd often see anonymous, online commenters claiming that Chris Rock regularly used the N-word, and then other commentators reasonably asking, "Where?"

Well, from the African-American Randall Kennedy's (2002) Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, here's where:

[T]he N-word has become a staple in the routine of many black comedians. Among these, the one who most jarringly deploys it is Chris Rock, whose signature skit begins with the declaration "I love black people, but I hate niggers." He goes on:

It's like our own personal civil war.

On the one side, there's black people.

On the other, you've got niggers.

The niggers have got to go. Every time black people want to have a good time, niggers mess it up. You can't do anything without some ignorant-ass niggers fucking it up.

Can't go to a movie the first week it opens. Why? Because niggers are shooting at the screen....

You can't have anything in your house. Why? Because the niggers who live next door will break in, take it all, and then come over the next day and go, "We heard you got robbed."

According to Rock, "niggers always want credit for some shit they're supposed to do. They'll say something like 'I took care of my kids.'" Exploding with impatience, Rock interjects:

You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker.

"I ain't never been to jail."

Whaddya want? A cookie? You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker.

Rock asserts that "the worst thing about niggers is that they love to not know." That's because, he says, "niggers don't read. Books are like Kryptonite to a nigger.

Aware that some may condemn his routine as latter-day minstrelsy, racial betrayal, or a false pandering to antiblack prejudice, Rock exclaims near the end of his performance,

I know what all you black [listeners] think.

"Man, why you got to say that?.... It isn't us, it's the media. The media has distorted our image to make us look bad. Why must you come down on us like that, brother? It's not us, it's the media."

Please cut the shit. When I go to the money machine at night, I'm not looking over my shoulder for the media.

I'm looking for niggers.

Ted Koppel never took anything from me. Niggers have. Do you think I've got three guns in my house because the media's outside my door trying to bust in?

Sorta difficult to miss it (13 times!) when you put it like that, eh? Or like this:

Richard Pryor of course famously used the same epithet in his routines:

Through live performances and a string of albums, he brought nigger to center stage in stand-up comedy, displaying with consummate artistry its multiple meanings....

Mel Watkins has rightly maintained that what made Richard Pryor a pathbreaking figure was that he "introduce[d] and popularize[d] that unique, previously concealed or rejected part of African-American humor that thrived in the lowest, most unassimilated portion of the black community."

None of that, of course, has any real bearing on whether there are contexts in which "whitey" can use the same word without that being a racist act. (Kennedy argues, quite reasonably, that there are.) The point is just that any commenters who expressed doubt about whether Rock used the word were just showing their own ignorance of his material. (The impression I got was that a lot of commenters were implying that Rock didn't use that word in his routines ... in which case they should have just kept their embarrassingly uninformed mouths shut.)

I've just finished reading Christina Hoff Sommer's excellent (1994) Who Stole Feminism? It's as clear-eyed as Ophelia Benson's Butterflies & Wheels, but focused just on feminism. "Equity feminism," that is, not the blatantly sexist "gender feminism" of Steinem and her paranoid, victim-mongering, scatterbrained ilk (Faludi, Dworkin, MacKinnon, etc.)—people who are the "Wilbers of feminism," i.e., a pack of dishonest and/or incompetent fools who will misquote, distort and outright misrepresent their sources, always to suit their above-criticism ideology.

At past [National Women's Studies Association] conferences, oppressed women had accused other women of oppressing them. Participants met in groups defined by their grievances and healing needs: Jewish women, Jewish lesbians, Asian-American women, African-American women, old women, disabled women, fat women, women whose sexuality is in transition. None of the groups proved stable. The fat group polarized into gay and straight factions, and the Jewish women discovered they were deeply divided: some accepted being Jewish; others were seeking to recover from it. (p. 29-30)

A "ouch" is when you experience racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, or lookism. One of Angela's biggest ouches came after her lesbian support group splintered into two factions, black and white. Tension then developed in her black group between those whose lovers were black and those whose lovers were white. "Those of us in the group who had white lovers were immediately targeted.... It turned into a horrible mess.... I ended up leaving that group for self-protection....

[My sister] Louise and I were frankly relieved to have the singing interrupted by a coffee break. Cream was available, but perhaps not for long. The ecofeminist caucus had been pushing to eliminate all meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products at NWSA events. As the break ended, Phyllis, the panelist from the Mohawk nation, came around with two little puppets, a dog and a teddy bear, to inform us, "Teddy and his friend say it's time to go back inside." Louise, who is a psychologist, was beginning to find the conference professionally intriguing. (p. 30-1)

Hoff Sommers goes on to describe the formation of victimized in-groups:

Having demarcated a victimized "us" with whom I now feel solidarity, I can point to one victim and say, "In wronging her, he has betrayed his contempt for us all," or "Anyone who harms a woman harms us all," or simply "What he did to her, he did to all of us." The next step is to regard the individual who wronged "us" as himself representative of a group, giving our animus a larger target. This I may do quite "reasonably" by adopting a position from which people like the perpetrator (male, rich, etc.) are regarded as "the kind of people" who exploit people like "us." My social reality has now been dichotomized into two groups politically at odds, one of whom dominates and exploits the other. (p. 42)

When McIntosh, Minnich, and their followers demanded that the oppressive European, white, male culture being taught in the schools be radically transformed, they had not imagined that anyone could look upon them as oppressors. The transformationist leaders are not men, but they are white, they are "European," they are middle-class. Minority women have begun to deny that the leaders of the women's movement have any right to speak for them. Most members of the women of color caucus boycotted the 1992 Austin National Women's Studies Conference I attended for its failure to recognize and respect their political identity. The slighted group sent the conferees an African-American women's quilt made from dashiki fabrics, as both a reprimand and a "healing gesture." The assembled white feminists sat before it in resentful but guilty silence. In the game of moral one-upmanship that gender feminists are so good at, they had been outquilted, as it were, by a more marginalized constituency. Clearly any number of minority groups can play the victimology game, and almost all could play it far more plausibly than the socially well-positioned Heilbruns, McIntoshes, and Minniches. (p. 79)

The well-educated, white, middle-class women who have for the past two decades been denouncing men for treating them as "the Other" now find themselves denounced for having marginalized and silenced Native American women, Hispanic women, disabled women, and other groups, all of whom claim to be victims in a complex ecology of domination and subjugation. (p. 80-1)

Annie Ballad, a 1988 graduate of Harvard, felt her private life to be intolerably incorrect, being in conflict with what she was learning in the feminist classroom. She had been persuaded that heterosexual lovemaking was basically a violation: "While taking women's studies (at Harvard) with a separatist teaching fellow there, I nearly had a nervous breakdown because I thought my boyfriend of five years was raping me every time he penetrated me." She set out to "deprogram" herself, using a technique of linguistic reversal that is known to be effective. Ms. Ballad had been trained to certain locutions, avoiding those that gender feminists deem condescending to women. She began to force herself to be "incorrect": "I insisted on calling women 'girls,' 'chicks,' and 'babes.'" After a short while she felt free to enjoy her sexually incorrect life.

Irreverence is both an antidote and an immunizer. At strongly feminist Vassar College, two juniors, Regina Peters and Jennifer Lewis, founded the "Future Housewives of America." At first the group took themselves in a tongue-in-cheek spirit. One of their earliest projects (foiled at the last minute) was to sneak into the messy women's center late at night and clean it up, leaving a note signed, "Compliments of the Future Housewives of America." Student groups are routinely given modest funds for running expenses: as a women's group, Future Housewives was entitled to apply for funds through the Feminist Alliance. Peters and Lewis showed up at an Alliance meeting and announced the formation of their group. They told about their first two planned activities: to publish their own cookbook and to host a Tupperware party. "I have never seen anything like it," said Peters later. "Fifty stunned women gaping in disbelief." (p. 112)

As a veteran equity feminist, [Mary] Lefkowitz fought long and hard against the old boy network that once discriminated against women scholars. She believes it is being replaced by a new network, an old girl network of feminist preferment. "Just like many revolutions," she points out, "It becomes as bad as what it replaced." (p. 132)

[M]ore than 84 percent of families are not violent, and among the 16 percent who are, nearly half the violence (though not half the injuries) is perpetrated by women. (p. 195)

It turns out that lesbians may be battering each other at the same rate as heterosexuals. (p. 199)

And that surprises you?

For the gender feminists, the answer [to the remaining 29% gap between male and female earnings, as of 1992] is simple: the wage gap is the result of discrimination against women. But in fact, serious economics scholars who are trained to interpret these data (including many eminent female economists) point out that most of the differences in earnings reflect such prosaic matters as shorter work weeks and lesser workplace experience. For example, the average work week for full-time, year-round females is shorter than for males.... One recent scholarly estimate shows that as of 1987, females who were currently working full-time and year-round had, on average, one-quarter fewer years of work experience than comparable males.... Obviously, the experience gap also reflects the fact that many women choose to move into and out of the work force during childbearing and child-rearing years. This reduces the amount of experience they acquire in the workplace and naturally results in lower earnings.... [T]he female-to-male ratio of hourly earnings for childless white workers aged twenty to forty-four was 86-91 percent, as of 1987.... June O'Neill finds that "differences in earnings attributable solely to gender are likely to be much smaller than is commonly believed, probably less than 10 percent." (p. 240-1)

Betty Friedan [who was actually David Bohm's first girlfriend, FYI] once told Simone de Beauvoir that she believed women should have the choice to stay home to raise their children if that is what they wish to do. Beauvoir answered: "No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one." (p. 256-7)

P.S. Jawdropper of the Day: Racist Babies. And Schoolboys punished with detention for refusing to kneel in class and pray to Allah. And The multi-cultural one way street. The end (of Western civilization) really is nigh, you know?

And Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. And The Obama Youth.

On a lighter note: The impotence of proofreading.

And, oh man, the Engrish.com site! With this being an "erection year" in the States, and all....

I've just finished reading Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge's (1994) Professing Feminism. Fantastic book. From which:

[A]t every juncture at which feminist bias emerged [in Women's Studies], it was justified by reference to the prior bias of men—as if emulation of the thing being rejected had, unconsciously, become the feminist agenda. (p. 10)

Yep. It's called "becoming the Evil Other which you had set out to eradicate."

[Anna:] I thought it was important for students to work through [the feminist literature] and to hone their critical skills on them, to be able to separate some of the texts from one another and to be able to ask themselves, "Now, what kind of world would we live in if this person got her way? Is it a world that would be more just, more equitable, or is it a world in which you'd sort of change one class of oppressors for another?"

And that started to get me into trouble. Some students were tremendously irate, and would run and tell tales out of class. You weren't supposed to criticize the feminist text. (p. 13-4)

Ja. Criticism ist verboten—versteh?

As long as gender was the key variable in defining identity, it was men and a few "male-identified" women who were seen as oppressors, while most women occupied the status of victims. In time, however, other stigmatized identities emerged, and soon nearly everyone could lay claim to some need for special treatment. The result has been a degrading struggle among members of identity groups for the recognition of each group's oppression, generating an atmosphere of condemnation directed at anyone who could be labeled a member of a more privileged group. Comparing types and degrees of oppression is a tough business, and, not surprisingly, it has led to much hostility as one group elbows another for pride of place in the contest for "most oppressed" status. (p. 51)

Black women activists were faced with a confusing array of identity niches. Some joined African-American studies programs, but others found those arenas too male-dominated and turned to Women's Studies. Black lesbians had even more decisions to make. For example, when they attended a NWSA meeting, should they work through the black caucus or the lesbian caucus? Or should they form a black lesbian caucus? (p. 60)

Yep. Called it.

A recent college graduate reported to us on how the focus of concern in the "Take Back the Night" marches in which she participates gradually changed from dealing with college jocks who harassed the marchers from the sidewalks to trying to maintain harmony among different groups of feminists:

Being on Internet gave me an opportunity to meet people and receive information—like a twelve-page list of activities, meetings, conferences, and receptions to be held prior to the march [sponsored by] Catholics, Jewish women, lesbians, bisexuals, polysexuals, African-American women, women of Spanish descent, Greek women-loving women, reformed Catholic lesbian women loving Greek women with tattoos. The list just went on and on. There seemed to be a little subgroup for every single person who categorized herself as "oppressed"—or maybe just a special interest. (p. 72-3)

Yep. Heh.

Which kind of faculty member is most needed as a role model for students: a Native American, a woman with disabilities, a lesbian, or someone from the "Third World"?....

Feminists regularly get themselves tied in knots dealing with such questions. In order to resolve them, it seems that one should have a clear hierarchy of oppressions so that the most oppressed always gets the nod. But no one can agree on how to rank competing oppressions. Black women are widely viewed as the most oppressed, but Hispanics and Native Americans are now putting forward their claims. People are starting to ask: "Is it really true these days that black women professors have a harder time than whites getting tenure, and that they draw lower salaries?

Meanwhile, some white women with limited financial resources are getting tired of being portrayed as paragons of privilege. A white woman who has worked for years as an activist and lobbyist for Indian causes in South Dakota told us how "a craze for labels" had disrupted collective efforts. The Native American women in her group began to refer to the white women members as "women of privilege." "For God's sake," the activist exclaimed, in recounting this development to us, "I've been a welfare mother most of my life!" She was also dismayed when a Native American employee of the organization began to reply to every criticism of her work with a shrug and, "You just don't understand how we Indians do things."

Despite their awareness of these difficulties, the primary response of feminists to this—as to any other problem—is to blame patriarchy. (p. 75)

Also known as men "stealing their wind."

Individuals must not only identify with a particular oppressed group but also, as far as possible, existentially participate in the sufferings and injustices of that group.... [U]ntil they can come up with the requisite sufferings, they had better mute their claim to status in the identity group.

One effect of these practices is to stretch the meaning of words such as harassment and racism, so that everyone in the group is able to qualify as a victim. Another is that it hypersensitizes all those who identify with the oppressed group. [Identity politics] team players learn to be on the lookout for instances of injustice—especially those directed at them personally—so they will have a show-and-tell for the next sharing session. (p. 77-8)

In a discussion of the "patriarchal assumptions of academia," one contributor offered her own list of just what these assumptions are, and explained the "patriarchal" thinking that lay behind them:

Grading? (hierarchic sorting of students' "worth" on performance measures)

Deadlines? (violence and confrontation implicit in the word)

Focus on performance as opposed to learning? (need for evidence of learning)

Terms? (time chopped up into blocks of arbitrary length)

Specialization vs. generalization? (the very idea of disciplines)

Seeming arbitrary rules of majors and/or graduation?

Focus on preparation for jobs vs. life?

Enculturation to values of rigor, rationality, objectivity, Aristotelian logic?

Enforcement of rules of language and grammar?

Enculturation of rules of citation and promoting "future research"?

The correspondent ended with the question: "Which if any of these are patriarchal in nature, and does it matter?" The fact that it is impossible to tell whether this list is intended as parody or as genuine feminist insight is itself an indication of something deeply amiss within feminism. (p. 111-2)

Feminist insight = oxymoron.

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have long argued that in a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not in a strong enough social position to give meaningful consent—an assault on individual female autonomy uncannily reminiscent of old arguments for why women should not have political rights. (p. 129)

Actually, all heterosexual intercourse is "grape." And banana. And sausages and tacos and melons and peaches.

Is it lunchtime yet? Anyway:

[Angela:] We were reading a work of fiction, and one of the students—a white woman—said, "Well, look, a white woman and a black woman are never going to be equal." And so my colleague with whom I was teaching the course, who's a philosopher, said, "What white woman, or what black woman?" And the student said, with real anger, "Well, a white woman is privileged in this society." Then she repeated that white women always felt superior to black women. I said, "Are you kidding? You mean you can't imagine being in a room with a black woman who was more talented, more beautiful, more elegant, articulate, and whatever, and would make you feel less that way?" And there was complete silence. Then two Indian students who were there started laughing hysterically, and they said, "Yes, we're just so tired of hearing this in the United States. We feel very superior to all of you." (p. 203)

Of course they do. After all, to orthodox Hindus even a dog born in India is more holy than any human born outside of that sacred land could ever be.

It's "their culture," you know?

From Christina Hoff Sommers' The War Against Boys:

The Haight-Ashbury hippies had collectively decided that hygiene was a middle-class hang-up. So they determined to live without it. For example, baths and showers, while not actually banned, were frowned upon as retrograde. [Tom] Wolfe was intrigued by these hippies who, he said, "sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out at zero." After a while their principled aversion to modern hygiene had consequences that were as unpleasant as they were unforeseen. Wolfe describes them thus: "At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot." The itching and the manginess eventually began to vex the hippies, leading them individually to seek help from the local free clinics. Step by step, they had to rediscover for themselves the rudiments of modern hygiene. That rueful process of rediscovery is Wolfe's Great Relearning. A Great Relearning is what has to happen whenever reformers go too far—whenever, in order to start over "from zero," they jettison basic values, well-proven social practices, and plain common sense.

Wolfe's story is both true and amusing. We are, however, familiar with more consequential, less amusing twentieth century experiments with rebuilding humankind from zero: Marxism-Leninism, fascism, Maoism. Each had its share of zealots and social engineers who believed in the plasticity of human nature and their own recipes for improving it.

Chapters Four and Five of the same book completely dismantle Carol Gilligan's utterly fallacious and unsupported-by-evidence ("the plural of anecdote is not 'evidence'") ideas on "women's ways of knowing." Susan "Backlash" Faludi is just as incompetent and untrustworthy (see esp. p. 234-40). So is Naomi Wolf.

What we should be fighting for this July 4.

And another good reminder:

Ten Great American Flag Bikini Moments.

Muslim Photo Op.

Via Iran's First [Bag] Lady.

And Suzanne Vega on the story behind Luka. Which, of course, is radically more interesting and worthy of respect and attention than anything in the integral/paranormal/woo-woo community.

P.S. You've heard about the "Mini-Me" sex tape, right? Boy, did I call that one!

From A Superhighway to Bliss:

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe—the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context—began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries—about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job—untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

"My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air," she has written in her memoir, "My Stroke of Insight," which was just published by Viking.

After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. "I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle," she wrote in her book. "The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria"....

Although her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. "Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain," she said.

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