Hey! Get out of their way
Hey! Of getway their out
They’re gonna want a union soon
Oil break that’s dead on noon
Hey! Their way out of get.
You won’t have to grease their palms
Shorter hours longer arms
Rise just watch them rise
The rise of the robots
Versatran Series F!

Hey! Get out of their way
Hey! Way their out of get
Metal fashioned into men
No ticker I could drop a tear
Hey! Out their way get of
Good workers they don’t get bored
Don’t get mad at bosses yet
Rise
Just watch them rise
The rise of the robots
Versatran Series F!

(The Stranglers, Hey (Rise of the Robots) from Black and White, 1978)

bah! it’s kinda near. but not atop. Strocchi always wrong. Leinad sleep now.

Oh and Jack, if yer gonna haul out hoary old Usenet flamewar chestnuts like “touched a nerve” and “oh, you’re obessesing about me”, do try to actually put them in a logical context. Otherwise it does so look like just more petulant shots fired off at random as another one of your grand theories of the line sinks beneath the waves, holed below the waterline by reality again.

Would it kill Nabakov to freely and generously admit this or does a concession to his blinkered world view in this case have to be yanked out light a rotten tooth?

While I agree Afghanistan remains a morass of fanatical terrorists, brutal warlords and epic drug harvests, this doesn’t disprove my point the WOT is going rather well there.

Talk about letting the perfect being the enemy of the pretty good! What I actually said was that the WoT was going BTE and quite good relative to the relevant comparisons. The comparative historical method is the proper way to make realistic historical evaluations, at least if one wants to maintain some kind of scientific credibility.

Nabakov implies that the US’s deposing the Taliban, smashing Al Quaeda’s bases, dampening down chronic civil war, establishing basic democratic institutions and promoting women’s civil rights in a nation that has known little else but sexist, fundamentalist and ethnic civil war and despotism does not represent a significant gain in the War on Islamist terrorism.

Compare the US’s results in Afghanistan to the USSR’s result when it attempted to achieve similar ideological and geo-political goals in that benighted nation. And compare all these to the default position of the Afghan “state”: the war of all against all in the state of nature ie reactionary barbarism.

This tells us all we need to know in this case about the abysmal historical ignorance and warped priorities of the Left’s own worst enemies: themselves.

Lebanon is a reactionary place because of uneducated middle-aged women.

Demography is destiny in populist societies. And the problem can be sourced to certain form of fertility, not “middle aged”-ness, amongst Lebanons tribal areas.

Keeping the elites breeding for the greater good of our Heimat is elementary logic. Family blood lines are important here.

Yes, at least until robots get to human-scale intelligence. At current rates of progress this milestone may be reached before the comparable achievement is made by a certain soggy species of political agents.

Do I practice what I preach? Well I know what you are but what am I?

Argumentum ad hominum again. Why the creepy obsession with my private life, I wonder?

While I agree Afghanistan remains a morass of fanatical terrorists, brutal warlords and epic drug harvests, this doesn’t disprove my point the WOT is going rather well there.

Lebanon is a reactionary place because of uneducated middle-aged women.

Keeping the elites breeding for the greater good of our Heimat is elementary logic. Family blood lines are important here.

Do I practice what I preach? Well I know what you are but what am I?

No, it’s not proved at all, Jack, unless you assume that IVF is only a treatment for “mature females� or that single and lesbian women “clamouring� for equal access to treatmet are all “mature femaies� and there’s no indication that’s the case.

I am willing to make this reckless assumption based on anecdote and observation. But if the average age of the many recent IVF applicants - whether married, single or lesbian - is much below ~35 years (ie “mature”) then I am pleased to stand corrected.

Does Mark Bahnisch have any hard data to back up his querulous skepticism or are we in for another bout of Fyodor-like frivolous and “directionless quibble”?

I wonder also why men don’t get regularly classified as “embittered� as women and particularly feminists do in the Strocchiverse.

For sure, the Wets show plenty of signs of long term embitterness and probably half of these are male. But the more strident feminists cant help drawing attention to that aspect of their being. I am thinking of the tragic case of Germanine Greer.

I have reasonably close personal experience with females suffering this tragic state. Believe me, barrenness is the last wish I would have fulfilled for any woman, whether feminist or femme.

Bravissimo! Such brio! Such passion! Such bathos!

Pity your words don’t match your intentions Jack. Love the way you manage to pack that dismissive “females” right next to the hyperbole of “suffering this tragic fate” in that second sentence - a deft combination of cheap point scoring and faux sympathy that. Now if you’d stuck with “women”, rather than going for the elegant variation (see Fowler’s MEU) maybe you could have stayed on message. As it is, it sounds like your really close personal experience didn’t touch you all that deeply. Save us the further details, please - not the sort of conversation we want while the port, cigars and Continental postcards are doing the rounds of the table.

And “barrenness”? Blimey, mate, take it easy on the biblical rhetoric. These days we call it infertility, in part because, thanks to feminism, whether hard-core or soft-core, we’ve learnt to value women as er, people, and not just a pair of child-bearing hips with lactatory facilities a little way upstairs.

Still, it’s good to see that you’re so generous in spirit towards the feminists and femmes. But it leaves me wondering - what about the butches?

Over the past fortnight or so, I’ve noticed a few people complaining about being censored / moderated on this weblog.

I have written a few exceptionally brilliant, truly enlightening comments (ones that should have brought me offers of my own ABC program and a regular 100-column-centimetre spot in The Australian) then sent them off to Larvatus Prodeo. But, to my horror, they did not appear on LP!! Censorship! Free Speech repressed! Bias! Bloody murder! And then I noticed something funny when I mouse-clicked on the SUBMIT button; sometimes a pre-publishing text appeared, sometimes it didn’t, so I checked further and guess what……..?

May I suggest that some who complained about censorship may, sometimes, merely have a mouse or keyboard problem.

Anyway, I’ve solved my own mouse problem by using a ball-pein hammer instead of my finger to click on SUBMIT ….. but the shop is starting to run out of mouses ….

This is proved by the outcry over the proposed restriction of public funding for repeated IVF cycles to mature women and the clamour to allow lesbians, single career women and other “socially infertile� classes of female to have eligibility for IVF.

No, it’s not proved at all, Jack, unless you assume that IVF is only a treatment for “mature females” or that single and lesbian women “clamouring” for equal access to treatmet are all “mature femaies” and there’s no indication that’s the case.

I wonder also why men don’t get regularly classified as “embittered” as women and particularly feminists do in the Strocchiverse.

The fact that Virginia Hausegger didn’t know in 2002 that a woman’s reproductive powers take a nose-dive around 35ish and just keep on diving thereafter says quite a lot about Virginia Hausegger and bugger-all about anybody else.

Perhaps. But Virginia has a fair few sisters brooding over the empty nest. The recent massive upsurge in IVF for mature females is surely proof that there is something to the notion that there are many women who slept through the ringing of their biological clock are now desperately trying to catch up with motherhood. This is proved by the outcry over the proposed restriction of public funding for repeated IVF cycles to mature women and the clamour to allow lesbians, single career women and other “socially infertile� classes of female to have eligibility for IVF.

Pavlov’s Cat says

The ‘embittered feminist spinster’ is just a wish-fulfillment fantasy of a certain kind of man. I know you’re enjoying using the word ’spinster’ because you think it’s an insult,

If I have put anyone’s nose out of joint with my constructions then I apologise. My intention is to deride hard-core feminism, not taunt childless women.

I have reasonably close personal experience with females suffering this tragic state. Believe me, barrenness is the last wish I would have fulfilled for any woman, whether feminist or femme.

Pavlov’s Cat says

I know a lot of embittered women, and every single one of them is married or divorced with children and no earning potential worth the name.

I expect that such women are embittered about poor or unfortunate spouse and job choices, rather than their maternal status. I am all for women to earn money proportionate to their productive contribution to society. Child production is still necessary for the reproduction of social and special systems so I support efforts to reward stay-at-home mothers.

You may well want to think so — but really, must you trot out this tired old turkey? The fact that Virginia Hausegger didn’t know in 2002 that a woman’s reproductive powers take a nose-dive around 35ish and just keep on diving thereafter says quite a lot about Virginia Hausegger and bugger-all about anybody else.

The ‘embittered feminist spinster’ is just a wish-fulfilment fantasy of a certain kind of man. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but actually very few feminists are embittered, except perhaps by the glacierlike pace of reform. I know a lot of embittered women, and every single one of them is married or divorced with children and no earning potential worth the name.

I know you’re enjoying using the word ’spinster’ because you think it’s an insult, but its etymology is ‘a woman who spins’, that is, earns her own living. Besides, it’s 2006 — the idea that the unmarried state bears any necessary relation to childlessness has very little traction in contemporary life.

Perhaps Jack, you’d like to check out some slightly more up to date reports.

Nabakov’s links only show that there is a deal of ruin in Afghanistan, what with drug croppers refusing to go straight, fundamentalists maintaining a foothold in their homeland and ethnic conflict still flaring up. So what, ‘twas ever thus. This is Afghanistan we are talking about. Its filled with Afghani tribesmen not Swiss burghers.

The remarkable thing about Afghanistan is what has gone right. A democracy has been established – the first proper one ever there? – women have more rights and a pro-Western government is in power. There’s plenty there to like and readers will not learn much from Nabakov’s cock-eyed perspective on this glass-more-than-half-full result.

Nabakov says:

Why since you put it like that, it all makes sense. It’s not six of one, it’s half a dozen of the other buns in the oven.

Nabakov misses the elementary logic behind my rather feeble pun. I am not especially keen to breed a race of super-men (although a species of super-computers might come in handy). I am keen to see intelligent women reproduce their genes and memes up to at least replacement values.

The alternative is what we see in South West Asia (eg Lebanon) where the influence of educated female spinsters is swamped by the issue of uneducated female matrons. This Darwinian sexual selection causes a reactionary turn in cultural values which is a major reason why Middle Easter politics are the way they are. Numbers, a wise man once said, are of the essence.

Nabakov says:

How would it work though?

Its already working. Howard has managed to
rev up the birthrate amongst working females, partly through the baby bonus and partly through the property boom. The baby boom is not huge, but it’s a start.

Nabakov says:

How will Jack’s beloved ordinary Australians react to being told they’re not fucking good for Australia.

Low marks for logic and comprehension. I did not say that the “ordinary Australians were not…good for Australia�. I merely suggested that it would be nice if elites did not unbreed themselves into extinction. This would not be good for everyone.

Obviously elites are better at what they are doing than the general populus – that’s why they are elites! And clearly elite capacities can be somewhat expressed in family blood lines. So the general level is kept high if elites keep reproducing, so long as there is circulation and mobility. Although Australian’s occasionally like to lop tall poppies they generally don’t like it when the tall poppies fail to grow or leave the patch.

I cant see anything particularly wrong with these truisms.

Nabakov says:

I’m making a wild guess here that you’d might class yourself as part of the elite.

Nabakov’s wild guess, like his educated ones, is off beam. Elites are indicated by their peer-group acceptance as such. I have not made the cut and am unwilling to entertain delusions about my status.
Nabakov says:

And how many kids do you have Jack?

None yet, but I have a defacto spouse which is a start. Have I touched a raw nerve here?

Though to be fair, he does link to a two and half year old column in an obscure online publication to prove the WOT is going well in Afghanistan.

Perhaps Jack, you’d like to check out some slightly more up to date reports.

“Not really a campaign to breed an elite, more a campaign to keep the elite breeding.�
Why since you put it like that, it all makes sense. It’s not six of one, it’s half a dozen of the other buns in the oven.

How would it work though? Could HECS payments be cut according to how many kids are spawned? Would breeding licenses be issued according to comparative educational attainments. Would a PhD at Melb University be worth four kids while a BA from Toowomba U be worth one? Will all expenses paid dirty weekends be offered for MENSA members? Will folks in the top tax bracket be offered free maternity and childcare support?

Will there be an attitudinal change campaign? “Think you’re smart? Then screw you.�

How will Jack’s beloved ordinary Australians react to being told they’re not fucking good for Australia.

And how many kids do you have Jack? I’m making a wild guess here that you’d might class yourself as part of the elite.

But lest folks think I’m drunk and getting maudlin (or even worse, soft and girly), I would like to draw your attention to these classic Strocchi clangers.

The only clangers that Nabakov will be hearing come from the sound of him shooting himself in his foot.

Oh yes, a campaign to breed an elite. The problem here is that many of the kinda men who think like this are no position to do anything about it.

Not really a campaign to breed an elite, more a campaign to keep the elite breeding. Its true that most eugenicists, like most uber-intellectuals, have not been overly virile men. Lee Kwan Yu has been the most ardent exponent of the eugenics perspective in modern times. He seems to have had no trouble in getting issue. But this is not an argument against their position. It tends to strengthen the urgency of the exhortation to elites to at least breed at replacement values.

But I am more concerned about the well-being of the sisters. There are a lot of embittered feminist spinsters who are mourning the children they never had. It would have been nice for them to have at least one trophy child to console them in their dotage.

Fitful and often token support for the US’s complete cockup in Central Asia are mighty blows in the “Terror Wars�? You’d frame a mousetrap as a cheese platter just to get attention and glory, wouldn’t you?

I have gone out of my way to say, Iraq-attack is a monumental cock-up and a conspiracy to boot. Still Howard has managed to finesse Australia’s involvement in this mess so that we get some brownie points from the US but have not so far suffered much blowback from the Islamists at home or abroad.

War Nerd persuasively argues that Afghanistan/Pakistan is mostly a success story, despite the constraints on this effort placed by the Iraq fiasco. Certainly, to make a scientific apples-to-apples comparison, the US has done much better there than the USSR.

East Timor, last time I checked, sits north of the Indian Ocean. John Howard is something of a cult figure amongst people of that nation that he liberated.

Howard’s management of the AUS-INDON relationship has been magnificent, perhaps the crowning foreign policy achievement of his premiership. Whereas under Keating we engaged in appeasement, cronyism and pandering now under Howard the relationship is on a sound footing based on mutual respect and interest.

Howard, more than any other foreign politician, has nursed Indonesia into democratic capitalist modernity, helping to steer it away from the Scylla of dictatorship and the Charybdis of anarchy. He has played a key part in putting Indonesia onto the moderate side of Islamic civilization and thereby denying the terrorists a breeding ground right on our doorstep.

The Wets and Doves are their own worst enemies for denying or ignoring this plain fact.