Politics and Culture

**update**

As California judges decide the same-sex marriage issue based on who tells the weepiest story; it's important to realize that when traditionalists say that making marriage a financial extension of an emotion will harm it, they're right. Conservatives are always right on social issues: from abortion to Rock music to crime to sex education: everything they've predicted has come to pass (yes, we all like Rock and there may be countervailing goods for some stuff. More on this later).

I previously noticed that blurring the line between the sexes and types of sex ("skin is skin," somebody told me) will lead to more bisexual behavior. I saw this statement by Katy Perry:

“I have a soft spot for women--I’m not afraid of it. Some women walk into the room, and they’re so beautiful and you’re like, I wanna smell you,’ you know? I have certain girlfriends who I just think are the most angelic, beautiful creatures. And if any of my boyfriends ever fail me, I’ll turn to them!”

You might not care or think it's a good idea, but you can't deny that many predicted this state of affairs.

In case you're not aware of the significance of the statement, it's the difference between sexuality being to one degree or another, a malleable, chosen behavior and one that's fixed, impervious to any policy or societal attitude.

The latter must be true in order for homosexuality to be somewhat analogous to race.

**update**

This report shows that human sexuality isn't merely a matter of biology; culture has a lot to do with it, unless you're saying that Afghan men consume large quantities of soy milk.

An unclassified study from a military research unit in southern Afghanistan details how homosexual behavior is unusually common among men in the large ethnic group known as Pashtuns -- though they seem to be in complete denial about it.

The study, obtained by Fox News, found that Pashtun men commonly have sex with other men, admire other men physically, have sexual relationships with boys and shun women both socially and sexually -- yet they completely reject the label of "homosexual." The research was conducted as part of a longstanding effort to better understand Afghan culture and improve Western interaction with the local people.

The research unit, which was attached to a Marine battalion in southern Afghanistan, acknowledged that the behavior of some Afghan men has left Western forces "frequently confused."

The report details the bizarre interactions a U.S. Army medic and her colleagues had with Afghan men in the southern province of Kandahar.

In one instance, a group of local male interpreters had contracted gonorrhea anally but refused to believe they could have contracted it sexually -- "because they were not homosexuals."

Apparently, according to the report, Pashtun men interpret the Islamic prohibition on homosexuality to mean they cannot "love" another man -- but that doesn't mean they can't use men for "sexual gratification."

The group of interpreters who had contracted gonorrhea joked in the camp that they actually got the disease by "mixing green and black tea." But since they refused to heed the medics' warnings, many of them re-contracted the disease after receiving treatment.

The U.S. army medic also told members of the research unit that she and her colleagues had to explain to a local man how to get his wife pregnant.

The report said: "When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked, 'How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.'" ...

...The report also detailed a disturbing practice in which older "men of status" keep young boys on hand for sexual relationships. One of the country's favorite sayings, the report said, is "women are for children, boys are for pleasure."

The report concluded that the widespread homosexual behavior stems from several factors, including the "severe segregation" of women in the society and the "prohibitive" cost of marriage.

Though U.S. troops are commonly taught in training for Afghanistan that the "effeminate characteristics" of Pashtun men are "normal" and not an indicator of homosexuality, the report said U.S. forces should not "dismiss" the unique version of homosexuality that is actually practiced in the region "out of desire to avoid western discomfort."

Of course, pedophilia was common before Christianity.

Here's a video of Paulina Rubio's "Y Yo Sigo Aqui." I like the song. You can see that Latino culture isn't immune to the new "skin is skin" paradigm.

Michael does a pretty good job, but I'd like to add a few things:

1. There's no ideal population number. It's only because no-growth liberals see people as mouths to feed instead of as inherently valuable. Combine this with liberals' need to take care of everybody and you can see how getting rid of people or, better yet, never having them come into being, would be a priority with them.

2. Lifting the income cap on Medicare and Social Security would change them from government-run insurance to welfare programs. Increasing taxes on income would be...an increase in taxes with all of the bad economic consequences.

3. What's wrong with patriarchy? The most advanced nations in the world did most of their advancing during times of patriarchy, the Japanese being the latest. The Western world has declined in power, relatively, not grown. Some blame the increase of social and emotional problems on the lack of strong father figures.

4. Both agreed that before the reformation, literacy was illegal. I'm almost certain that they're wrong. Perhaps unauthorized translations of the Bible were illegal and the expense of books before the printing press made literacy nearly impossible, but I don't think reading was actually against the law anywhere in Europe.

5. The "literacy before 7 equals war" idea is so stupid that I almost choked on my cafeteria food when he said it. Europe was more peaceful when people didn't know how to read? Vikings? Let's just take the Vikings. Hartman says that a law passed in the seventies made Swedes more passive. Err, the time when the Vikings terrorized Europe was at the turn of the first millennium. Were they very literate then? If the program started in the seventies, then why did the Swedes fight neither the Nazis or the Communists?

6. And Mary? It's true that the Catholic Church was a positive development for women, but Europe was still pretty darn patriarchal up until, well, still if you define "patriarchal" as men and women having different roles within the family.

7. Hartman claims that public power generation is cheaper and more reliable than private power. I found this from Detroit. It's hard to find articles that compare true costs, after subsidies.

8. Thom Hartman said that Iroquois women had very few babies. Assuming that they didn't use buckskin condoms and that they hadn't quite figured out the rhythm method, does that mean that Iroquois women had a lot of abortions?

Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture by Thom Hartmann

Communism alone killed about 100,000,000 people in the twentieth century, a record I hope remains unbroken, and I'm not even counting Hitler, a socialist.

Last century, one single chemical invention from a capitalist country, DDT, saved 500,000,000 people. Add the medical advances (that we'll continue to produce until Obama socializes drug companies), charities, etc., and you easily get billions of people saved by America.

Will this deter leftists from pushing their programs? No. Dedicated Leftists (not you, moderate Democrat and liberal. I'm talking about that guy with the Chomsky book behind you) care about Leftism. That is, they won't let anything- facts, death, poverty, nothing- get in their way of establishing their ideal society (here).

You've heard the "Don't waste a good crisis" quote. That's nothing. Get a load of this:

The fact that DDT saves lives might account for part of the hostility toward it. Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in a biographical essay in 1990:

"My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem."

Dr. Charles Wurster, one of the major opponents of DDT, is reported to have said,

"People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this (referring to malaria deaths) is as good a way as any."

Part one, here.

The main problem with post-freedom, Marxist oriented, secular liberal thinking is its fundamentally flawed view of human nature. It's not that liberals are wrong sometimes and right other times; it's that this flaw will always cause error- they can't be right, even if the negative affects are absorbed into the greater social economy. It's why liberals are always wrong on crime, education, welfare, and, now mass condom use to reduce AIDS.

On AIDS, the liberal thinks: X amount of cases of AIDS. Condoms reduce the chances of getting AIDS by 90%. Therefore, ubiquitous use of condoms cause the AIDS rate to fall to (X*0.1).

As the evidence below suggests, the Pope is right, that the only hope for AIDS in Africa is spiritual renewal. AIDS is a 100% preventable disease, with the right attitude.

Here.

Read more »

Well-intentioned, mostly. I'll use the car companies as an example:

1. Problem: Desire for higher wages and "equality," things that supposedly need regulating (some things do). Solution: Side with labor, regulation, taxes. Force compliance.

2. Problem: Car companies are uncompetitive, failing. Solution: Subsidize with tax-payer money. Force compliance.

3. Problem: Taxpayers want something in return for their investment. Solution: Require companies to have minimum and maximum (executive salary caps) wages. Require from the car company products that meet some sort of arbitrary or calculated public interest (fuel efficient cars, etc.) that probably wouldn't sell otherwise (or else they'd be made anyways, right?). Force compliance.

Voila! Liberal fascism!

Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

I don't know if anyone's noticed, but I haven't done many postings in the last week or so, and it finally occurred to me why. I'm not blogging right.

What do I mean? Well, I've written my share of columns and editorials, and I've blogged before and the process is very different.

When you write an article or a column for print or online publication, you usually rewrite it a few times before you send it in. With me, sometimes more.

But blogging just doesn't work well that way. Because if you're constantly re-writing, you can't do enough posts. And besides, I think my good blog postings are often much more... I don't know, less planned more spur of the moment. Not that I'm an expert. I'm not. But I just think I've been too.... lame probably.

So, just in case someone cares, I'll try to be more impromptu.

M. Lipeles

OK. Here's another clarifying one- the last of the day.

Wikipedia

The discussion is also interesting.