Peenie Wallie

There's been a lot of talk about repealing the 22nd Amendment, so that Bush can run again,

There was similar talk during the Clinton and Reagan presidencies. In a nation of 290 million people, you are always going to find some people who think something is a good idea. I wouldn't read to much into this, or worry about it too much.

Unless acting Senator Binks can be convinced to grant unlimited emergency powers to the President...

words to make a mother proud

In Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers, the right to vote must be earned by serving a two year term of Federal Service (usually interpreted to mean serving in the military, although the exact meaning has been debated , since Heinlein later claimed otherwise). After its publication, Heinlein was denounced by critics as a right-wing fascist. In his 1980 anthology Expanded Universe, Heinlein wrote more about the idea of earning a right to vote, making it very clear that the system of Starship Troopers wasn't the only way things could be done.

Heinlein came to the exact opposite conclusion that PeenieWallie does:

I think I know what offends most of my critics the most about STARSHIP TROOPERS: It is the dismaying idea that a voice in governing the state should be earned instead of being handed to anyone who is 18 years old and has a body temperature near 37 degrees C.

But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Democracies usually collapse not too long after the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses...for a while. Either read history or watch the daily papers; it is now happening here. Let's stipulate for discussion that some stabilizing qualification is needed (in addition to the body being warm) for a voter to vote responsibly with proper consideration for the future of his children and grandchildren - and yours. The Founding Fathers never intended to extend the franchise to everyone; their debates and the early laws show it. A man had to be a stable figure in the community through owning land or employing others or engaged in a journeyman trade or something.

But few pay attention to the Founding Fathers today - those ignorant, uneducated men - they didn't even have television (have you looked at Monticello lately?) - so let's try some other "poll taxes" to insure a responsible electorate.

a) Mark Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondor" - if you have not read it, do so.

b) A state where anyone can buy for cash (or lay-away installment plan) one or more franchises, and this is the government's sole source of income other than services sold competitively and non-monopolistically. This would produce a new type of government with several rabbits tucked away in the hat. Rich people would take over the government? Would they, now? Is a wealthy man going to impoverish himself for the privilege of casting a couple of hundred votes? Buying an election today under the warm-body (and tombstone) system is much cheaper than buying a controlling number of franchises would be. The arithmetic on this one becomes unsolvable...but I suspect that paying a stiff price (call it 20,000 Swiss francs) for a franchise would be even less popular than serving two years.

c) A state that required a bare minimum of intelligence and education - e.g., step into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on over the booth - and you slink out, face red, you having just proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system - smart 12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers - and fathers - decline to be humiliated twice.

There are endless variations on this one. Here are two: Improving the Breed -- No red light, no bell...but the booth opens automatically - empty. Revenue -- You don't risk your life, just some gelt. It costs you 1/4 oz. troy of gold in local currency to enter the booth. Solve your quadratic and vote, and you get your money back. Flunk - and the state keeps it. With this one I guarantee that no one would vote who was not interested and would be most unlikely to vote if unsure of his ability to get that hundred bucks back.

I concede that I set the standards on both I.Q. and schooling too low in calling only for the solution of a quadratic since (if the programming limits the machine to integer roots) a person who deals with figures at all can solve that one with both hands behind him (her) and her-his eyes closed. But I recently discovered that a person can graduate from high school in Santa Cruz with a straight-A record, be about to enter the University of California on a scholarship...but be totally unable to do simple arithmetic. Let's not make things too difficult at the transition.

d) I don't insist on any particular method of achieving a responsible electorate; I just think that we need to tighten up the present warm-body criterion before it destroys us. How about this? For almost a century and a half women were not allowed to vote. For the past sixty years they have voted...but we have not seen the enormous improvement in government that the suffragettes promised us.

Perhaps we did not go far enough. Perhaps men are still corrupting the government... so let's try the next century and a half with males disenfranchised. (Fair is fair. My mother was past forty before she was permitted to vote.) But let's not stop there; at present men outnumber women in elective offices, on the bench, and in the legal profession by a proportion that is scandalous.

Make males ineligible to hold elective office, or to serve in the judiciary, elective or appointed, and also reserve the profession of law for women.

Impossible? That was exactly the situation the year I was born, but male instead of female, even in the few states that had female suffrage before the XIXth Amendment, with so few exceptions as to be unnoticed. As for rooting male lawyers out of their cozy niches, this would give us a pool of unskilled manual laborers - and laborers are very hard to hire this days; I've been trying to hire one at any wages he wants for the past three months, with no success.

The really good ones could stay on as law clerks to our present female lawyers, who will be overworked for a while. But not for long. Can you imagine female judges (with no male judges to reverse them) permitting attorneys to take six weeks to pick a jury? Or allowing a trial to ramble along for months?

Women are more practical than men. Biology forces it on them.

Speaking of that, let's go the whole hog. Until a female bears a child her socio-economic function is male no matter how orthodox her sexual preference. But a woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future. So let's limit the franchise and eligibility for office and the practice of law to mothers.

The phasing over should be made gentle. Let males serve out their terms but not succeed themselves. Male lawyers might be given as long as four years to retire or find other jobs while not admitting any more males into law schools. I don't have a candidate for President but the events of the past fifty years prove that anybody can sit in the Oval Office; it's just that some are more impressive in appearance than others.

Brethren and Sistern, have you ever stopped to think that there has not been one rational decision out of the Oval Office for fifty years?

An all-female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been enduring. Let's try it!

Robert seems to be on the right track, if only it weren't too late.

Save our country, save our culture!!!!

Time has shown that the female thought process is not conducive to running an effective country or society.

We MUST save ourselves and the females from themselves.

Please, repeal the amendment.

Since, as we all know, it was women who spilled their blood at Valley Forge, Yorktown and every other battlefield fighting and dying to create these United States, why should men have the vote merely because they are 48% of the population? Contrary to some of your correspondents the real way to settle the issue is this: Require women to fight all the wars of the United States until the number of female casualties becomes equal to all the preceding male casualties. Then we shall see if the hard fighting feminists think that the combat exempt male suffragettes should have the vote.

As for those who think that women should run things because that will eliminate wars, tell it to Hillary Clinton salivating to bomb Iran, to Queen Elizabeth raiding Spanish galleons or to Indira Gandhi attacking Pakistan (she obviously learned the lessons of non-violence from her pacifist father).

Anyone who thinks that women will improve society should remember what women did to America with Alcohol Prohibition. The shit-for-brains made the country into a loony bin-and organizwd crime made zillions. A sex sufficiently stupid to crusade for a law like that should have no voice in public affairs.

Who here rembers the "1/4 rape" statistic? It's a pile of BS that feminists like to shout out-"1/4 of all women will be raped in their lifetime. Has anyone even seen the definition of rape these days? It's unbelievable. If a girl is drunk, but says yes, then you cna be thrown in prison because you "took advantage" of her. Society's-and America's-decline began when women were allowed to vote, and we need to face facts-women have no capacity for higher reasoning, they are vain, petty, and stupid. Women should stay at home and serve men, as nature intended. Our society is so screwed up, that within the next few years, I fully expect that gender-specific speech (like congressman) and dresses will be outlawed as "sexist". There's a reason women have only even been granted a voice until recently-their inherent inferiority! For them, it is a privilige, not a right.

If I were advising John Lott, I would say he should ask Regnery to publish a "Politically Incorrect Guide to Women's Suffrage". For one thing, his research was done when that series began and I actually imagine that Thomas Woods or Carrie Lukas actually thought someone would cover women's suffrage in another PIG.

When you say "Granting women the right to vote has been the single greatest contributing factor to the rise of the welfare state in our country", it seems to contradict countless biographies of people born in the quarter-century before women's suffrage was granted. From Simone de Beauvoir to Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I) to Frida Kahlo one sees an extremely consistent pattern of pious, ultraconservative mothers and atheistic radical fathers everywhere.

In fact, women's emotionalism I think ought at least in theory to make them oppose welfare and favour limited government. Quite probably this was true before women's suffrage when women could (and maybe did) politically deter male relatives from voting for socialist parties.

What seems more likely to me is that suffrage masculinised women to an extent far greater than predicted 100 years ago by its most vehement opponents like the Catholic and Orthodox hierarchies. It is logical that women's suffrage has made women extremely jealous of the money they don't possess (I recall a poster saying "womyn own 1% of the world's wealth)" and feeling that justice means they have the wealth men once had.

This is absurd. So, you're suggesting that women are ultra-conservative Republicans. Obviously, this is not true. Most women are liberal tree-hugging democrats. Look it up, genius.

Instapundit.com has a link this morning to a new book, Why Mommy Loves the State.

"Mommy didn't always love the state. First she had to learn about what it was and what it could do for her. Read all about Mommy's fun adventures with government and how, no matter how bad it gets, Mommy never gives up on the power of the state to fix everything!"

Rob Kiser, it might not be true today that women are conservative, but in the era immediately before women’s suffrage, one can read from biographies of countless people no conclusion except that women were, even if it was not explicit, generally exceedingly conservative compared to men in views and practices.

Some writers, such as Richard D.E. Burton, indeed argue that the major cultural divide before female suffrage was by gender rather than by class or region. Many writers have indeed effectively if not explicitly argued that women saved Europe from a complete Marxist takeover in the early part of the twentieth century.

What I would be interested to see in light of such extreme contrast between the political positions of women before and after female suffrage is a look at whether being granted such rights as suffrage had a major psychological effect on women. It has already been argued by many psychologists that over the twentieth century more women have become “thinking� as opposed to “feeling� types. Thinking types’ reliance on justice as opposed to mercy leads them to favour redistribution - a trait which would be greatly exaggerated as I said by women’s lack of property.

If women have via suffrage lost much of their traditional virtues of empathy and compassion, Conservatives need to have a look at such results and the theory behind them, then see if they could have been predicted beforehand.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lolnwWba9Ko

Male Privilege is a Myth | Change My Mind (3rd Edition) | Louder with Crowder

StevenCrowder
January 29, 2020

Steven Crowder takes to the streets of the Dallas Women's March to have real conversations with real people. In this installment, we discuss 'male privilege'.

Today is Susan B Anthony's 200th birthday.