Dave Sim's blogandmail #432 (November 17th, 2007)

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Fifteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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Oh, hey! Mark Steyn! Bonus! High Fives.


The NATIONAL POST is very weird on the subject of Steyn. He was far and away their best columnist and then he was gone. But to this day, when they run a piece about him or a piece quoting him, they'll (obviously) get a bunch of letters wondering when he's coming back and they'll print one or two of them. And then he doesn't come back. Which always makes me wonder, Why are you running these letters asking when he's coming back if he isn't coming back? I mean, there must've been a reason that he split, so instead of just repeating this charade every couple of months, wouldn't it make sense to just say, "Here's what happened. This is what we did or said to tick off Mark Steyn and this is why he isn't coming back" and then stop referring to him or say, "This is what we did or said to tick off Mark Steyn and this is what we've offered him to come back and it just isn't enough" or say, "This is the REALLY PHENOMENALLY STUPID thing we did to tick off Mark Steyn so he's already told us he's never coming back and he's a man of his word and we really just can't cope with that, so we continue to pretend that at some point he'll prove to be just as venal and two-faced as most of the world and succumb to our overtures and we run these letters just to keep our hopes up and delude our readers that there's a snowball's chance in hell that they'll ever read his columns in here again."


Check out "Thinking Globally" from the NATIONAL REVIEW (http://www.steynonline.come/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=566&pop). Since I promised that I would just do interesting paragraphs this time around, how about the beginning and end of the article?


"My little grade school in New Hampshire recently introduced an exciting new fun project for its pupils: it will be tracking its carbon footprint!


"Sorry, let me make that even more exclamatory: It will be tracking its carbon footprint!!!!!!!


"Do even impressionable seven-year-olds still get excited about this racket? The easiest way to reduce the school district's carbon footprint would be to return to the one-room schoolhouses my older neighbors attended and which are still standing around town, with their blackboards and even the desks mostly intact. Aside from cleaning out the woodstove, you'd need nothing more than a fresh box of chalk and some new slates – and, although those 19th century Grade Four history exercises are a bit daunting for those weaned on the graphics-enhanced pabulum of "Social Sciences", it if shrivels our carbon footprint, I say let's do it!


"But I don't expect that's what the school has in mind. Instead there'll be some marginal going-through-the-motions-type stuff that'll make everyone feel virtuous and Gore-compliant, and that'll be that."


That's the beginning. Then he finishes off with


"NEW YORK TIMES readers must have choked on their brunch the other day when confronted with a Sunday magazine devoted to the return of `The Politics of God': `Our problems again resemble those of the 16th century,' says Mark Lilla, arguing that the two centuries between the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall were a mere interlude of Reason, and that traditional politics of `competing revelations' is reasserting itself. The careless presumption that our moment – the social democratic `civilized society' – is permanent and inevitable is a delusion. The obsolescent boomer pieties that are now the core curriculum of our grade schools will be a laughingstock by the time those children graduate high school."


Then there's a few really good paragraphs from a discussion with Steyn (http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Common/Print.aspx):


(On the trial balloon being floated of an invitation for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Ground Zero when he was in New York) "If he wants to see the results of Islamist terrorism, there are a lot of places he can visit much nearer to home. In fact, [then-Massachusetts governor] Mitt Romney, one of the best things he ever did was to deny the state troopers protection facility to Ahmadinejad's predecessor when he was invited to speak at Harvard. And Mitt Romney had the right line on this. If Harvard wanted to issue these idiotic invitations, that's up to them. But the taxpayers of Massachusetts are not going to fund the visit by providing protection for these guys. And in the end, the event was cancelled. And that's exactly the line that the state of New York should be taking, too.


(On Senate Democratic majority leader Harry Reid's claim that a million Iraqis had been killed since the invasion) "The fact of the matter is that there are no million dead in Iraq. He has essentially flown the coop. He has now embraced the nuttiest of nutso theories, that in effect, his country's troops have been responsible for mass murder on an industrial scale throughout Iraq. And it's disgusting. This is the man who is Senate majority leader, and he's doing more damage to the image of his nation at a time of war than the wackiest kook writing in the most hostile anti-American newspaper on the planet. This is simply something that is beyond any reasonable policy difference, and I do think it's not a question of questioning his patriotism. God forbid we should do that, because they're so touchy about it. I would question his sanity making statements like that…You know, the American people are not defeatist. They're not where the Democrats are, but they'll end up where the Democrats are if they don't understand the game the Democrats are playing. The Democrats are relying on the kind of, what Niall Ferguson, the British historian, calls America's attention deficit disorder, that, in effect, the `talking down' of the mission in Iraq will develop its own momentum, and people will end up embracing Harry Reid defeatism just out of sheer exhaustion. And if [they do] that, it's going to be Vietnam to the Nth degree in terms of its domestic consequences."


(On the mysterious "work accident" in Syria) "You mentioned that second incident, the so-called Syrian work accident in which, according to reports, some Syrians and Iranians were trying to strap a chemical weapon onto a scud or something, and wound up getting the nasty chemical stuff all over themselves and dying. The fact of the matter is that Iran and Syria both make explicit what they plan to do, and we should take them at their word."


Mark Steyn, always available to you on-line, au courant hipsters at www.steynonline.com.





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