Vox Day, the reactionary fantasy author and pickup guru who was recently expelled from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America , has convinced himself that education for women leads to “demographic implosion” because uppity educated women don’t have enough babies.
Indeed, Vox — real name, Theodore Beale — is convinced that education for women is such a bad thing that he actually thinks that “the Taliban may not, in fact, be the stupid ones with regards to this particular matter.”
By this he means not only that they’re right to keep girls out of schools, but that they’re also probably justified in shooting teenage girls for the terrible crime of speaking up publicly in favor of education for girls like themselves.
No, really:
[I]n light of the strong correlation between female education and demographic decline, a purely empirical perspective on Malala Yousafzai, the poster girl for global female education, may indicate that the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational and scientifically justifiable.
It’s quite telling that it is the “shooting-girls-in-the-head” issue that turns Beale — a right-wing evangelical Christian — into something of a fan of the Taliban.
Teddy Beale being a fan of this thing the Taliban did is perfectly in keeping. He’s a totalitarian fantasist. That a group uses terror in futherence of it’s aims is perfectly fine with him, so long as he agrees with the aims.
If he doesn’t agree with the aims, the sign of, “uppity” is grounds for repressing them violently.
I know! He’s fucking awesome!!!
Bonelady, we’ve already been over the fact that calling people insane as an alternative way to say they have shitty views and are generally huge assholes is not okay. It’s been said in this very thread. Please try to accept that. It is not a point that is under contention or subject to compromise. Conflating insanity with immorality harms all the perfectly nice insane people in the world, some of whom hang out on this blog.
Cassandra: It’s Teddy Beale, the odds are he’s imagining things.
hellkell: Having dealt with him in other fora: he’s that evil.
augzillary: Oh, martial arts, I thought about starting one. I’m only 5′ 2″(like 64 or 65 cm) and weigh 120. I have really strong legs, but bad upper body strength, not that that can’t be fixed.
What would be a good martial art for me?
I am fond of aikido, as well as tai chi (assuming you are looking for a bare-handed art of practicle nature).
If you want a weapons art… that’s a whole ‘nother ball o’ wax.
Tae kwan do is good for balance and confidence, but has never (even in the most full-contact of Korean styles) been a great art against people who know another art. It’s basis is like capeoira, meant for a peasant people to use against armed opponents; in this case Japanese. A lot of the impressive kick-moves are designed to deal with armored combatants on horseback. They are devastating when they land, but somewhat slow and telegraphed (a dude on a moving horse is 1: more committed, 2: can’t deviate as easily, 3: will give you time to set up).
It’s also (esp. in more ‘western’ styles) very linear, which means someone who knows to step to the side can slip a lot of attacks.
A good krav maga studio will be very good (the basic attitiude is, “Balls out, ignore the other guy, get in close and clobber hard).
For a more refined sort of brutal there is la savatte; very good at taking an opponents attack and using it to devastate their joints.
Best thing is research; look at style, and give the various schools a test drive. Watch how class is run (attitudes can ruin an otherwise well-suited art).
Yeah, when I lay it out like that (and think about the various ways I gained that little list; and the things I left out {US Army Combatives are interesting, based on MMA/Brazilian Jiu-Jistu [now, not when I started. The older stuff was idiosyncratic, some of it was appalling effective at what it was designed to do… kill people, it also included knives, batons, etc; that leaves out the particular horror that is bayonet [not that the training is hard, per se, it’s not a finesse weapon, but taking a knife on a poorly balanced club and using it as a makeshift pike… it’s not for the faint of heart]} and I realise just how much time I spent doing various martial arts.
Question: since when do “right-wing evangelical Christian[s]” believe that the doctrine of the Trinity is false as Vox Day does?
Answer: they don’t. Vox Day is no more a “right-wing evangelical Christian” than he is a white supremacist.
I just did a Wikipedia search for nargun and no wonder it is a fierce half-human half-stone creature that lived in the Den of Nargun, a cave under a rock overhang behind a small waterfall in the Mitchell River National Park, Victoria, Australia.
Utterly randomly, idk wtf my father was drilling into this bayonet form but he borked it, cover don’t fit now.
That really is a weapon that I just…and they attach to guns, how fucked does shit have to be to need it in the first place?
On topic, the maternal mortality rate in Afghanistan is horrible. You don’t teach women, you don’t let them see male doctors, you end up with a lot of childbirth related deaths. So either he’s going to make OB/GYN into men’s work and allow women to use male OB/GYNs, or he’d only decrease the birth rate.
There is something to bayonet training. It improved my fencing a great deal (rapier, not foil/epee), because I lost a lot of my fear of steel. I stopped flinching at head cuts.
This is a really common thing, so common a lot of people use it as a gambit (get someone to flinch, move in; so they are crowded, and get them on the back foot). After I got out of basic the people who tried to do that to me got stuck… I’d parry and extend in riposte… they would impale themselves on the point.
I think it was a mindset issue. They see it as a game, I see it as an interaction with mortal stakes.
Bonelady: what dustydeste said.
Also, all humans have a degree of irrationality. We are not straw Vulcans. Irrationality is not a synonym for being a conspiracy theorist, nor for being an evil shitstain on the arse of the world, just as “insanity” is not.
Besides the insult to everyone not-a-shitstain, saying “X is insane/irrational” is a bloody handy way of giving X a pass on taking responsibility for what zie says or does. That’s just not good enough.
Forgot to say: LBT, as I said on another thread, all the virtual doggy cuddles you want and/or need! Virtual ones are good because there’s much less risk of being squished by 80 or so collective kilograms of labrador.
This fool is like a naughty toddler. He craves attention at any price. This is run of the mill stuff for him. What a loser.
Dude, I linked to a picture of David in the first comment. Coulda saved you all kinds of time if you’d read…
Well, I guess if you were into reading you wouldn’t be the kind of person you are.
Any dojo worth their salt is not going to just let some randomer walk in off the street and go for a full contact spar with the opposite sex. Like seriously they are just not going to let you do that. Seriously, for a start their insurance would be nul and void.
Anyone would be able to see that there was a creepy loser who wants to beat up a woman.
I’m calling cool story bro on that tale of wonder. Seriously, an untrained bloke is not going to be able to land punches on a trained female judoka or something. Maybe if they could actually land a punch they might do some damage, but they are not going to be able to land the punch.
I hate guys like this with such a gung-ho, macho-bullshit view of martial arts. They genuinely seem to think that the point of them is to be able to beat up other people and inflict as much damage as possible. No that is not what they are for, people do them for self-defence purposes, for fun and getting fit and because they respect and enjoy the philosophy and the mental training that go with them.
People who do martial arts because they want to beat people up, in my expereince, get shunted out pdq, because they are a danger to those around them.
Martial arts, counter intuitive as it might sound, are not a good thing for violent people.
Um… dude…
Wiki sez:
The evangelical tradition contains loads and loads of non-Trinitarians, loathe though most of them are to admit it. Don’t pretend they all agree on basic doctrine, because they don’t. My cult claimed to believe in the Trinity while being flat-out Modalists.
And you say he’s not a white supremacist?
Fuck you. Now you assume the rest of us have the poor reading comprehension you have.
Most Right-wing Christians are not actual trinitarians. But, since Theodore Beale is a self-proclaimed racist, and a self-proclaimed non-trinitarian, even if you were correct about this idea you present about Right-Wing Christians, you’d be wrong about Beale.
Since he is a racist, I wonder why you wish to whitewash that aspect of his philosophy.
Okay, folks, mea culpa. I read the opening paragraph of the wikipedia article on abortion in Japan, which apparently was written by someone who didn’t read the full article, either, and reported it.
Much egg on my face, here. The law is closer to “abortion is illegal here, unless you want it” (since they don’t require any proof, as far as I can tell, of economic necessity). So, yeah, way, way ahead of where the U.S. is.
That said, they DO still ban the use of oral contraception, which means that condoms are considered the only acceptable means of birth control. (Note: OCs are not permitted for family planning, but given how abortion is handled, I’m suspecting that more than one doctor is willing to prescribe them for various other conditions–my wife is actually on them to prevent severe menstrual cramping, for instance–with a nod and a wink.) Given that condoms are an ‘active’ method of birth control, I suspect that this does feed into the whole ‘can’t be bothered’ element of the sex-forgoing the article talked about.
Freemage
Okay, I’m glad you corrected yourself on that, than.
Nick,
You wrote,
——————————————————————————————————————–
This fool is like a naughty toddler. He craves attention at any price. This is run of the mill stuff for him. What a loser.
——————————————————————————————————————–
Unfortunately I don’t think he was kidding. It wasn’t just some sick joke that he told. From what I can see, I think he’s actually a big enough misogynist to actually believe what he wrote.
When it comes to killing women, a right-wing Christian and the Taliban are brothers in arms.
Whoops, I misread the Japan abortion article too.
“Um… dude… Wiki sez:”
Um… dude… Wiki is crap. In any case, everyone can describe themselves however they wish, but that doesn’t make it so. I could describe myself as a redhead, but my natural brown locks prove otherwise. I could describe myself as an old Asian woman, but my true age, ethnicity, and gender prove otherwise. I could describe myself as an atheist, but my belief in God proves otherwise. I could describe myself as a far-left liberal Democrat, but… well, you get the picture. Sorry, but someone who denies a core, non-negotiable doctrine of Christianity cannot be called an evangelical Christian any more than someone who says there are multiple gods can (due to Christianity being a monotheistic religion). For Vox Day to deny the Trinity and that Jesus is God the Son is for him to deny that he is a Christian, evangelical or otherwise. At best, he and anyone else like him are deists like Thomas Jefferson.
“The evangelical tradition contains loads and loads of non-Trinitarians, loathe though most of them are to admit it.”
Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it? Make an assertion about what people supposedly believe, but fail to provide any proof of it whatsoever with the excuse that they won’t admit it. So I guess you are a mind-reader. Amazing. I prove that the proclamation that Vox Day is an evangelical Christian to be false using logic and evidence, but your “proof” is apparently psychic powers.
“Don’t pretend they all agree on basic doctrine, because they don’t.”
More mind-reading, eh?
“My cult claimed to believe in the Trinity while being flat-out Modalists.”
Well, at least Modalism involves the three Persons of the Trinity, no matter that it’s wrong about how they are manifested.
“And you say he’s not a white supremacist?”
Oh, I see. He claims to be an evangelical Christian and that’s the undeniable truth to you, but contrarily he denies being a white supremacist (here: http://www.voxday.net/mart/SFWA_response.pdf, where he says he’s multiracial like President Obama and George Zimmerman) and you reject that.because… who the hell knows why.
“Fuck you.”
The typical puerile response of someone who’s position is utterly baseless.
“Now you assume the rest of us have the poor reading comprehension you have.”
I don’t have to assume. I just proved you do.