I can only say that this is so sick it leaves me speechless. However I hope she keeps speaking out loud and clear. It’s people like her who will keep Congress and the Presidency in Republican hands for years to come.

“It’s people like her who will keep Congress and the Presidency in Republican hands for years to come.” — Shawn

Don’t bet on it, as long as women have the vote. Lots of women view/viewed bin Laden, Bill Clinton, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Hitler, Juan Peron, Josef Stalin, Mao, and and many of history’s similar characters as saintly and, yes, highly sexy Robin Hood figures who selflessly devote their lives to helping the poor and downtrodden against the oppressor. We saw the same thing with Senator Murray. Yes, yes, of course many men love/loved these characters too. But women actually get romantic feelings and frank sexual attraction to them. Hitler apparently was quite the heart throb among the ladies during his rise to power in the 1930s. Same with Che Guevara, Juan Peron, Clinton of course (the mesmerizing effect he had on woman was practically all we ever heard about), and others who illustrate this strange phenomenon.

It’s not just the woman thing. There is a major rise of cultural leftism going on—call it transnational radicalism or one-worldism or whatever—that involves half the U.S. and most of Europe, and that is becoming more and more radicalized and alienated from existing societies. The tranzis are against the nation, against religion, against the use of force for self-defense, and all their other beliefs, including their moral relativism, flow from and serve to advance these primary beliefs. The forces of Western suicide are not, as some of us had hoped, losing credibility and energy in the wake of September 11th, they are gaining force.

“There is a major rise of cultural leftism going on—call it transnational radicalism or one-worldism or whatever—that involves half the U.S. and most of Europe, and that is becoming more and more radicalized and alienated from existing societies.”

Agreed. I just read a letter to the editor in the local newspaper from a women in Australia who said, “The United Nations should force America to do what it is told, when it is told, at all times”. The concept of national soveriegnty and democratic representation is cleally lost on this women, and I am constantly surprised at how many people I meet who share her view that the U.N should be a totalitarian liberal global government. Of course, I am currently living in New Zealand (does that make me a tranzi? ;)), and this country has a very left wing culture, but the view is common throughout the West. I would have to say though that I am optimistic about the future in the long run. Liberalism is a self defeating ideology, and even in left wing New Zealand, a backlash against mass immigration is growing, leading many to question the U.N’s mandated asylum policies which are responsible for an influx of hundreds of Somalians recently. I am also not entirely convinced about Unadorned’s view of women as a gender. I know too many who support the Republican party, and if the party can moderate it’s excessively pro-corporate global free trade policies, and swing in behind immigration reform, which I suspect large numbers of “soccer moms” support, then there is every chance the Republican’s can dominate Congress and the Presidency for the near future at least.

I share Shawn’s skepticism about Unadorned’s hypothesis, although Shawn’s personal acquaintanceship doesn’t prove anything except his good taste in friends.

Women have sometimes been blamed for just the opposite tendency. Some have said that they’re too local-centered, showing interest only in the home and neighborhood and friendship circles, whereas men are more interested in politics and war, where machismo and aggressiveness are motivating factors. We note that these are emotional urges; women are, on the contrary, too rational to be influenced by them.

Now, I don’t buy the above hypothesis either. I mention it just to show that neither has, so far as I am aware, sufficient empirical backing. And if neither has sufficient empirical backing, whence comes the conviction that this one or the other one is true? Perhaps from an emotional predisposition?

“I am also not entirely convinced about Unadorned’s view of women as a gender. I know too many who support the Republican party, and if the party can moderate its excessively pro-corporate global free trade policies, and swing in behind immigration reform, which I suspect large numbers of ‘soccer moms’ support,…” — Shawn

I don’t mean to keep beating this more or less dead horse, and I’ll shut up about it after this comment, but I’d like to see one soccer mom who seriously questions excessive incompatible immigration … just one. Ain’t gonna happen. It don’t exist.

What women do is take what everybody SHOULD do — namely, judge every individual according to his own qualities without regard to race, color, religion, ethnicity, sex — and take it to an extreme, such that they cannot “see” the existence of different races as such, different ethnic groups, different countries, nations, civilizations. They can’t see it except in some personalized way, as they see everything else.

Women will never vote for the preservation of countries/distinct nations because they can’t *see* them, and even if they could see them, they’d see no particular value in them or any reason whatsoever to preserve them. At the same time, of course, they rail against the high rates of street crime which excessive incompatible immmigration brings and its other disastrous commuinity-destroying effects, but they can’t see the connection and you can try to explain it to them until you’re blue in the face — they haven’t got the synapses for understanding it.

Yes, I know the statistic that it’s *only* single women who vote the totally left-wing-Clintonian-way-out-wacko-destructive-of-everything-normal-people-hold-dear-and-even-lethal-for-what-single-women-themselves-hold-dear-but-are-too-stupid-to-see-it-as-they-cast-their-Dem-vote-dreaming-that-Bill-Clinton’s-or-Hitler’s-or-Che-Guevara’s-“woman-and-child-friendly”-feds-will-take-care-of-all-their-needs-including-Bill-himself-or-Adolph-or-Fidel-or-Che-who-will-come-into-their-bed-and-take-care-of-*those-needs*-too way. I know it’s only single women who vote that way.

I know that wives vote more like men do. I don’t think wives actually *see* the wisdom of voting like their husbands, but by instinct just follow along, sensing that their true interest must take into account those institutions which allow men and women to function together in society.

And how do their husbands vote? I know, I know, I know — many men are way-out-wacko-Dem-Party fanatics. But from 1946 until the present moment white men as a group have not given the majority of their vote to a single Dem candidate for president. That means that if women hadn’t gotten the franchise and we didn’t have significant proportions of non-whites, not a single Dem would have been elected president since Roosevelt-Truman administration.

What can societies that want to preserve themselves do about this even if it’s true? No one is going to take away women’s right to vote; neither should anyone. I support the franchise for women, and for every group where it has been questioned (except for Democrat voters — I don’t support the franchise for them**), such as the propertyless, because otherwise they really have no hope of defending their rights. But destroying their own nation is not a right that any group ought to have. Dismantling it if need be, in a reasoned, deliberate way, with the aim of replacing it with something better, yes — THAT right everyone has, but not the wanton, blind, ignorant destruction of nations and civilizations — that’s not anyone’s right. So, to allow women the vote AND have some chance of preserving society and civilization as we know it, ironclad protections must be incorporated into the system which simply put certain things off the electoral table, protecting them from the pure demagoguery of criminals like the Clintons whom women will always foolishly, destructively swoon over.

And yes, I know about all the exceptions. I know about the article Ilana Mercer just had pubished in WorldNetDaily.com. I’m talking about the overall voting trends of women, not the exceptions.

(** for those in Rio Linda, calm down — this was an attempt at a joke)

Frieda, I didn’t mean to ignore your post — I posted mine in answer to Shawn’s before seeing yours.

As always without exception, Frieda, you make excellent, intelligent, level-headed points and I agree with you that such claims as I am making do need some sort of cold, unemotional examination and back-up, lacking which no one not inclined to believe them should lend them any credence. This is one hundred percent clear, I totally agree.

Shawn may be right because Congresswoman Kaptur is another example of the Democratic Party’s refusal to take the crisis we are in seriously. In the 1930’s the Republican Party refuse to face up to the Depression and the rise of National Socialism and was marginalized in Congress for the next 60 years. Voters who suffered through the Depression had long memories (my mother who was in the first decade of her marriage in the ’30s voted Democratic all her life until 1996 when she realized that Clinton was a jerk and Dole was a farm boy/war hero). The behaviour of the Democratic Party over the past two years has begun the process of marginalization. It cost them Max Cleland’s seat in the last election and I suspect will cost them more vulnerable Senate seats in 2004. Murry and Daschel are obvous targets, but even Chuck Schumer may be in trouble, especially if the Party disses Sharpton as they dissed McCall in the last New York election.

Thank you, Unadorned, for your gracious comment. I guess I owe you a concession, if not halfway, then a couple of millimeters. Let me start with an incident. Years ago, a TV journalist named Judy Muller reported that a girl had won a math contest. Muller’s comment was: “This blows sky high” the idea that girls are inferior to boys in math. Of course, all it blew sky high was the notion, if anyone had ever entertained it, that Judy Muller was capable of logical reasoning. Even she would not endorse the generalization that the existence of one 7’ woman and one 5’ man blew sky high the notion that men are taller.

The question is: why did her reasoning powers, such as they were, disappear in the case of the math test? Answer: Because in that case her ideology replaced her reasoning. The function of ideology is to stand between the mind and reality. That’s why a million disproofs won’t convert a true-believer (unless something inside has begun to undermine the belief). But ignorance can distort reality too, and in that case education can change minds.

Women have indeed voted to the left of men, and I suspect that the explanation is a combination of ignorance and the innate nurturing instinct. (No, I can’t cite empirical surveys to support that hunch.) That instinct leads many to say: “I want to help the unfortunate and the poor,” and ignorance adds: “I’ll support this candidate because he says I can help by voting for him and his proposed legislation”; of course, the premise doesn’t entail the conclusion.

The most-effective female conservative activists target that combination of ignorance and nurturance to devise their programs. A fine example is Elaine Donnelly, who has worked tirelessly to stop the feminization of our armed forces; she appeals to women’s instinctive shrinking from combat and equally instinctive preference to have men protect them, and she also addresses the monumental ignorance prevalent among both men and women about what feminists have done to our army, navy, and air force (not Marines). Another propagandist (in the good sense) who has targeted that combination is Phyllis Schlafly, about whom I needn’t say anything to this site’s posters.

What is particularly alarming in the present situation, I think, is that the “tranzi” ideology, described above by Mr. Auster, has married the nurturance-ignorance syndrome so common among women.

The overall vibes I get at first glance from Mr. Rostkowski’s post are that it was written by an ally. But something about it leaves me feeling uneasy. “The behaviour of the Democratic Party over the past two years has begun the process of marginalization.” The past TWO years, Charles? Gee — what about the preceding fifty or so? Were those OK, then???

Also, I don’t know about the GOP having become marginalized for 60 years because it didn’t take the Great Depression or the rise of fascism in Europe sufficiently seriously. (I’m no big fan of the GOP, BTW.)

You sure about all that?

Frieda, again thank you for another valuable contribution to the debate. I’ll be brief this time.

Look — at the Founding, our forefathers saw fit to incorporate certain protections into the system they were setting up, protections chosen on the basis of what the threats were at the time, as amply demonstrated by English history. Thus, the Bill of Rights, along with the other protections that were incorporated right into the text of the Constitution itself, were agreed by all to be necessary.

Those men knew from English history and Hobbes and Locke (and of course from their extensive knowedge of commentators of the Classical World, as well as European thinkers from France and elsewhere) that governments were apt to conduct unreasonable searches and seizures, apt to try to compel witnesses to testify against themselves, apt to deny to counsel of a criminal defendant the opportunity to cross-examine an adverse witness, etc.

The reason for writing such protections down and making them permanent was so that each succeeding generation wouldn’t have to waste time and energy re-debating them over and over again to the exclusion of more useful business. Every Framer agreed these were protections they wanted for all posterity. (They were bequeathing, in effect, a head-start on making even further improvements, to all succeeding generations of Americans — which is exactly what a “foundation” is. A foundation is not a completed, entire, above-ground building, but the basis on which the future building will stand, like a rock. Thus their name, The Founding Fathers.)

In those days neither women, nor the propertyless, nor Negro slaves, nor in some places non-Christians, etc., could vote, so THERE WAS NO ATTENTION GIVEN TO POTENTIAL ELECTORAL THREATS TO THE ACTUAL FUNDAMENTAL ORDER OF THINGS, FROM ANY OF THOSE QUARTERS.

With the granting of the vote to the propertyless and to women (which I think was the right thing to do, as was the granting of the vote to the ex-Negro slaves), perhaps it was time to take into account new potential electoral threats to the order of things, and to add additional protections — to take certain things off the electoral table, so to speak.

But adequate account was never taken by the generations which succeeded the Founders’ generation.

Is it too late to take them now? I don’t see why, where the will can be translated into reasonable democratic action.

(Oh — Did I say brief?? Ooooops!! Sorry! I’ll do better next time!)

Unadorned: If your last sentence (before the parens) implies that the cure for our ills might lie in the political arena, I must disagree. Perhaps you’ll clarify your meaning by semi-seriously drafting the Constitutional amendment that might plug that hole in the Founders’ work—i.e., the threat to the order that they were founding, coming from certain groups that they couldn’t foresee having the vote. I can’t imagine what it might say.

I think that the cure, if there is any, must come from outside politics, as I believe the illness itself does.

Consider Britain. We hear horror stories about the police abandoning any effort to keep order in certain neighborhoods in cities in the north of England, giving them over to gangs of Pakistani hoodlums. Of course the UK’s immigration policy is insane. But the way was prepared for this insanity by the English people’s abandonment of traditional morality and truths. Read, for example, one of the great books of recent years: Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Ivan R. Dee, 2001). The people whom Dalrymple (pseud.) describes are whites, of white English ancestry—ruined by welfarism. If welfarism, which is accompanied by “nonjudgmentalism” and therefore moral relativism, hadn’t created endemic dependency and amoralism, presided over by an elite that inculcated the corresponding “truths” in the schools, that nation could and would have dealt with the Pakistani gangs the week after they started terrorizing the north of England. The English now have no principles to invoke, to do anything. In fact, we’re still hearing of good people being jailed for defending their homes and shops against burglars. That’s what happens when tradition (which is the distilled essence of hard-earned experience) and religious truth and morality are abandoned. Americans are a generation behind, but on the same path of voluntary softening-up.

By all means, we should use what political weapons we have, including drastically limiting immigration, but isn’t it clear that a Constitutional amendment, even if it could be ratified, isn’t the answer, and that the campaign for it might even distract us from looking in the right direction for a cure (to repeat: if there is any)? Well, maybe such a campaign might offer an opportunity to propagandize. In that case, I repeat, what would your proposed amendment say?

Frieda, thanks for that question, and my answer is I don’t yet know what it would say — have to give it more thought. But I hope my underlying point got across — the Founders thought up protections against the shenanigans white Euro Christian males were likely to pull, they being the only “players” at the time. How did they know what those likely shenanigans were? They observed men in and out of government over their own lifetimes and understood their pettinesses and their vices, and they read history and also commentaries by authors writing specifically about that topic. They did a good job at heading off lots of shenanigans. BUT — times have changed, and women, to take one example, now have the vote too, and are “players,” and women’s psychology must now also be taken into account, and their performance politically, etc., and measures must be instituted to head off harmful shenanigans peculiar to women, just as the Founders were as prescient as they could be concerning those likely to come from the only political players of their day, namely white men. And so on, as regards the propertyless, the non-white groups (who, for example, together with women and effeminate men will want to push for unlimited non-white immigration, against which a rule forbidding that could be considered, etc.). We better do it quick, otherwise as sure as God made green apples it’s soon going to be demographically too late and we’ll have become an Afro-Asian-Mexican nation predominantly, perhaps also a Muslim one. The time for kidding around really and truly is over, guys.

“but I’d like to see one soccer mom who seriously questions excessive incompatible immigration … just one. Ain’t gonna happen. It don’t exist.”

I honestly think your wrong. I’m only going on my personal experience here ( although I have in the past read some articles on the issue that I’m trying to find), but I have met significant numbers of “working class” and “middle class” women who are center left on economic issues, and as a result tend to vote Democrat, but who are also very much opposed to both mass immigration and illegal immigration, especially illegal Hispanic immigration that has resulted in a vast army of violent drug dealing Hispanic gangs. Many of these women are concerned with the safety of their children naturally, and the rise in violence and drugs in our cities and streets that has accompanied the mass influx of Hispanics is one of the primary causes of concern. As I said, I’m convinced that if the Republican party moderates it’s economic policies from it’s current excessivley pro-corporate and pro-rich bias, and backs serious long term immigration reform, there is a real chance they could hold power for decades to come.

“Women will never vote for the preservation of countries/distinct nations because they can’t *see* them, and even if they could see them, they’d see no particular value in them or any reason whatsoever to preserve them.”

I’m sorry, but with all due respect I find this theory difficult to take seriously. How would this explain Joan of Arc or Boadicia, or the Roman mothers who told their sons to come home with their shields or on them. There are simply far too many examples of patriotic women, including many of those who in one way or another helped during the War of Independence, for this argument to hold water.

The “right” to women to vote is a liberal notion, founded on three falsehoods, notions of the universal legitimacy of individual rights prescribed by the state; democracy which implies that all people are equal and are worthy decision makers; and that men and women must have the same roles and where not this is a discriminatory transgression of “individual rights”. You cannot resurrect traditional family values or society overall without having different sex roles based not on rationality or on the individual case. Men are on average more rational, less emotional, and have greater general knowledge; as such female suffrage degrades the collective wisdom of the electorate, as has the lowering of minimum voting age from 21 to 18, inclusion of the propertyless and non-taxpayers. If we are to have a democracy then, yes it would be preferable for women not to vote, but more importantly nor should most men.

Some of the restrictions - and not the only ones that I would support would be restricting the vote to over 30 year old, married Fathers who own property - which would disqualify me on four counts although as an individual case I consider myself well qualified.

Shawn, “seeing” and “feeling” countryness or nationness in the sense we are talking about is partly, maybe even decisively, a testosterone effect. Men feel, “We’re on this side and they’re on that side.” Women don’t — not in the “nation” or “country” sense. Women see countries, and the first thing they instinctively want to do is make friends with all the women there and view those women and the ones in their own country as one big happy united group with nothing dividing them. Men of course want everyone to be friends too, but they can see that different countries exist. In a way, it’s a “competition” thing, which women lack. Women compete, but for men. Men can compete in the sense of nations (I’m excluding Alan-Alda-type effeminate men here, of course), which women can’t see. Women don’t have the us-them thing on the nation-scale, which comes to a significant degree from testosterone. Yes, women have us-them and can even fight quite nastily using it, and hurt one another badly by means of it, but it’s the catty us-them of the high-school ingroup or the college sorority or the community gossips. Women are sort of internal and local; men are external and wide-ranging instead of local. Yes, yes, yes, men can be “catty” (ie, act like petty, unfair bastards) to each other too, on the college fraternity level. But women are “personal” and cannot be “impersonal.” Men can. Women’s nervous systems can’t “span” the impersonal “dimensions” of country and nation and therefore, never having had any need to perceive those entities, women never developed the faculty to perceive them. Men’s nervous systems can. It’s sort of like seeing and feeling sports-teamness. Women don’t because they lack testosterone and the hard-wired central-nervous-system circuits that developed along with greater testosterone. In many ways the left’s undertakings since the 60s are a war on testosterone, a hormone which is a bastion of anti-Eloiness. (Estrogen of course is also anti-Eloi and is also under attack as seen in the attempt to turn women away from their natural inclination to get pregnant and love and nurture babies and children, and their natural inclination to love men and want to marry them. That’s a whole other subject.) Men see sports teams and countries and think, “us-them” in some fashion or other. Women don’t. They see countries and think, “there are women here who will help me take care of my baby,” or, “I wonder what the differences are between the ways the women here will help me take care of my baby and the ways women back home will.” When Hillary’s handlers came up with the “It takes a village” slogan, which warmly resonates with women but is as intelligible as Chinese to masculine men, they didn’t intend that as a means to attract testosterone-secreting individuals, on whom it is completely lost as a political slogan. They were shoring up their base among husbandless women and a portion (not a majority) of wives. (Wives have their husbands and their whole situation of wifedom and motherhood to counteract leftist propaganda.) It’s no accident that women like the Norwegian, Gro Harlem Brundtland (spelling?), and the Irishwoman, Mary Robinson, are always in the forefront of calls for one-world government and accusations that those white Europeans who question the turning of white countries there into non-white ones are racists. They don’t see racial differences or nation-differences. One-world government is an anti-testosterone policy (as well as anti- lots of other normal things, of course — it’s ultimately anti-estrogen too, since estrogen goes hand-in-glove with testosterone and women would be profoundly unhappy in a fully-left-wing world), and the inability to see races, countries, and nations is to an extent inevitable in those lacking this hormone and its concomitant neuronal connections evolved over æons. And yes, I am aware of the exceptions — the women wise enough to not follow leftist propaganda blindly in this regard (while still very much remaining extremely feminine women, not masculinized in the least) such as Ilana Mercer, Oriana Falacci, Phyllis Schlafly, and so many others.

I’m only saying this: Should women have the vote? Yes, they should. But once they get the vote, protections must be written into the rules to make sure countries don’t get destroyed. Take certain things “off the table” of potential alteration via the electoral process, just as the Bill of Rights took certain things off that table. Otherwise, be prepared to wave bye-bye forever to countries (and probably to races and ethnic groups as well) because women united with unscrupulous men like Clinton will destroy all that.

In the abstract what Unadorned is asserting is the height of common sense. It makes no practical sense to attempt to disenfanchise anyone who already has the franchise. Furthermore, there is some value in every constituency having some measure of political power as protection from tyranny, since it leaves options other than violent rebellion open in the case of radical abuse of power (though I think there is too much willingness in American culture to see things like a 2% tax on tea as a radical abuse of power). So what is left is that the political power *of the franchise itself* needs to be reduced by counterbalancing it with other powers.

My last post shouldn’t be construed as an endorsement of Unadorned’s specific recommendation, though. The practical reality is that nothing is ever categorically “off the table”. There is always some interpretive authority. In our current case the Supreme Court is the interpretive oligarch — that could be changed, but interpretive authority cannot *in principle* be eliminated.

In general the notion of draining power away from the franchise and moving it to other parties/institutions is a good idea. I don’t know that I would specifically recommend the Supreme Court as a recipient of additional powers, though, and as a practical matter that is the effect of any constitutional amendment.

I am probably going to get crucified for this but I am very much in favour of restricting franchise (and possibly even citzenship) solely to those prepared to peform some form of national service, service which could be either military or non-military in nature.

According to NewsMax, Rep. Kaptur has received no criticism over her remarks equating the American Revolution with Islamism, either from her own party or from the mainstream media (NewsMax fails to note whether any Republican members of Congress criticized her). Kaptur herself has refused to apologize: “There is absolutely no regret because I want the American people to understand the nature of the enemy.”
http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2003/3/10/180329

I just read the NewsMax article linked in Mr. Auster’s comment in veritable disbelief. All the way through it, I kept trying to understand what must be going through her mind to say what she said and not only once but to insolently (the article’s perfect adverb) repeat it when given the chance to clarify and perhaps amend her original remarks. There just isn’t any way to understand it, and in the effort, one finds oneself wondering, “Does she have Muslim family somewhere? A Muslim son- or daughter-in-law? Anything at all in the way of a Muslim connection? A Muslim boyfriend? Is she on some kind of Muslim payroll? Is she being paid by them?”

Rep. Kaptur’s performance coming so soon on the heels of Sen. Murray’s, and without any visible reprimand of either individual by the party higher-ups, is a sign of something dreadfully wrong in the bowels of the Dem Party. I would imagine there must be seething behind-the-scenes discontent with this Kaptur-Murray crap, and I suspect Pelosi will not remain long in her leadership position.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur apologizes for equating al Qaeda with America’s Founders—but it’s the sneaky, non-apology apology that dishonorable people routinely give in this age of feelings. Rather than admitting that what she had said was objectionable, she says she’s sorry “if anyone was hurt” by what she said. Here’s an excerpt from the Toledo Blade:

U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur—speaking to a packed room at an East Toledo VFW post last night—apologized to anyone hurt by comments she made comparing Osama bin Laden to American Revolutionary War figures.

Miss Kaptur (D., Toledo), who went to Post 4906 on Consaul Street to attend its Friday fish fry dinner, briefly addressed the crowd of 45 people before sitting down to eat.

“You have heard much about my earlier statements on terrorism, and I just wanted you all to know that due to the political nature of what happened with my original statements, if my remarks have hurt anyone, I’m sorry,” Miss Kaptur said. “Let me also say to each of you tonight [that] I am one member of Congress who will never make politics of war. It is too deadly serious.”