Rally of the Indoctrinated and Obedient Youth

I watched the rally on the Mall on C-Span today going by the name of Restore the Sanity and/or Fear, while cooking and eating a meal.  I tell you that because I would not have spent my time doing that otherwise.  What I observed was a large crowd composed almost entirely of young white people under the age of 30.  The ratio of women to men was close to 2 to 1.

Now Stephen Colbert made a point of declaring the rally a demographic representation of America.  It was not.  It was even less a demographic representation of the Democrat Party with respect to race.  Unlike Tea Party rallies, families were not common in the crowd.  Unlike Tea Parties, there were few individual created signs.  They were brought to the Washington DC Mall with this injunction:

Think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we’ll be actively *not* throwing our feces at Tila Tequila.

There was really no political agenda put forth.  There was the usual Comedy Central caricature of conservative American viewpoints and the presumption was that if you were unhappy with their people, who were not clearly identified, then you were simply a fear-monger or an irrationally fearful person.  There was certainly no discussion of why unemployment is so high and has been so long.  There was no discussion of tax policy.  There was no discussion of the debt and deficits or of Social Security or Medicare problems.  There was no mention of ObamaCare.  There was no campaign to impugn business or to advocate a plethora of new regulations and mandates.  It was all light, at least if you were not someone being characterized as afraid of all Muslims or someone who finds Fox News to be a useful source of news.  It was not clear what the purpose was other than that Colbert stated that it was to show that they could draw a large crowd, which they did.

The crowd appeared to be mostly college students and relatively recent graduates of college, fresh from their many years of indoctrination in government-run schools and government controlled colleges.  When the MythBusters warmed them up prior to Stephen Colbert appearing, they literally jumped when told to.  They did waves for quite an extended time.  They cried on command and popped fingers from the inside of their mouths when told to do so.  The crowd proved they were the well-indoctrinated and authority pliable subjects ideal for socialist regimes.  Many of them had traveled long distances simply to be together with their kind.  Of course, many of the young women were single and looking for suitable socialist men, of whom there is a paucity, at least relative to the women.

Yes, men were in short supply.  First, when in the government-run schools, it becomes clear to many boys that they are set up and treated like the bogeymen of our society.  White males are the oppressor class in the socialist lexicon of group identities.  Many males become turned-off by education for this reason, either simply because they do not like being treated as though their race and sex make them evil or because they conclude that the educators have nothing useful to teach them.  So, women go on to college now in much larger numbers than men, where they wind up desperately looking for men with whom they can have real relationships.  There the women are further indoctrinated in socialism and in the idea that terrible social injustices characterize America and the only solution is to have ever-bigger government. 

Meanwhile, the men who did not go on to college are not their type and many fewer of them are socialists.  Overall, according to a Gallup poll of almost 150,000 interviews performed from January to May of 2009, 41% of women are Democrats, while only 32% of men are.  In the under 30 years of age group, about 34% of men are Democrats and 44% of women are.  We can get a better handle on the situation for Democrat women under 30 who dominated the "Restore the Sanity" rally.  College educated men are in the ratio of 43/57 = 0.75 and Democrat men to Democrat women are in the ratio of 34/44 = 0.77.  The product of these ratios is 0.58.  One can see why so many women might travel far to find a man of their kind at the Restore the Sanity rally, which really failed to develop any other purpose.  Comedy Central, with its parodies of non-Democrats as stupid, brutal, and fearful, can easily be watched at home.  The rally was really an effort of desperate women to restore their sanity with relationships with men they think, in their highly indoctrinated and elitist minds, are compatible.

Of course they could be Republicans or Independents and enjoy the fact that there are more men than women in both of those groups.  But, that would not be politically correct.  They would have to be more independent-minded to deny the school indoctrinators.

Proposed Republican Policy List for RNC Supported Candidates

It has been proposed that any candidate to be supported for election in 2010 by the Republican National Committee must support at least 8 of the following 10 policies:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;
(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care;
(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;
(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;
(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and
(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership.

 I am going to comment on those of these that I disagree with or have some reservations about.  Here goes:

5)  I do support legal immigration and I wish to make it much easier for those who wish to immigrate with larger quotas and lower fees.  I do believe that immigrants should be encouraged to learn English and citizens should be required to know English.  I favor guest worker status which is relatively easy to obtain, so large numbers of those who are now illegal will have future options which are legal.  Those who are now illegal, but have otherwise not been convicted of any crime, who can obtain the recommendations of past employers, who are willing to pay a reasonable fee to alter their status to a legal guest worker status, and who then work 5 years as a guest worker with a continued clean record and further employer recommendations, should be able to obtain legal resident status.  These terms are simply approximations to what I think is a reasonable policy which will benefit the United States and I am open to further discussions on this complex issue.  My views may not be considered consistent with the intent of the resolution enforcers, however.

8)  I flat out reject the Defense of Marriage Act as an infringement of the right of individuals to live in accordance with their own chosen values and their own conscience.  I reject it also because marriage is a spiritual state of union between people and government has no proper role in such a spiritual matter.  Spiritual matters are the realm of individuals, who may chose to make their spiritual values those of a religion or give them a different basis.  What government does have a legitimate role in is domestic partnerships or civil unions by means of enforcing a contract between the parties.  These contracts should no more limit the persons by number or gender than do small business partnerships.  The legal contracts should have multiple standard terms for the care and responsibility for children, for the sharing of property, and for the sharing of medical expenses and decision-making.  The sexual orientation of the partners should be of no concern to the government.  Those of a religious conviction are free to be guided by their convictions in their domestic partnership and are free to have it blessed as a marriage by their religious authorities, but such status will have no legal bearing at all.  Government for its part will refrain from attempting to make any definition of marriage and will leave that to the religions and to the sovereign People.

9)  If the denial of health care is done by government edict, I agree with this statement.  However, I do not agree with it in the context that medical providers are to be forced to provide medical care, if that is the intent of this ambiguously worded statement.  While I support a woman's right to an abortion if she chooses one, it is also clear that taxpayers, many of whom disagree with this, have the right not to play a role in paying for abortions.  They have the right to their convictions and any attempt to make them complicit in an abortion is morally wrong.  Furthermore, partial birth abortions are too marginal to birth to be allowed by law.  They should clearly be illegal.  Once a child is no longer a part of a woman's body, it has the rights of any individual not to be murdered.  I am therefore in agreement with this statement with respect to abortions.

These 10 required positions are simply a proposal at this point.  It will be interesting to watch what happens to this proposal and whether any of my concerns will be addressed.

A World with Many Fewer Women

Mark Steyn published a commentary in the Washington Times today about discrimination against women. He starts by discussing the claims of some that Hillary Clinton is losing the Democratic nomination as their Presidential candidate to a relative unknown with little experience because she is a woman. The best part of this discussion is how light-weight he describes Obama to be:

How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver's license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neo-segregationist racebaiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates. "On this Memorial Day," said Barack Obama last Monday, "as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes - and I see many of them in the audience here today."

Hey, why not? In Obama's Cook County, Ill., many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It's not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.

Then he notes that old-time sexism is common in much of the world. He relates some statistics about how people in many cultures are choosing to have male babies, while aborting female fetuses. In India there are 1000 boys for every 900 girls nationally. In some Punjabi cities there are only 300 girls for every 1000 boys. In China, the one child per couple requirement has couples also choosing boys over girls. The result is that the first generation born under this policy has 119 males for every 100 girls. One supposes that as couples can increasingly afford abortions, this ratio of males to females will grow.

Europe and Canada are dependent upon immigration not to lose population. Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every 100 girls between 2000 and 2005. Indians, Chinese, and Koreans living in America have 1.05 boys to every girl for the first child, 1.17 boys to every girl for the 2nd child if the first was a girl, and 1.51 to 1.00 for the third child if the first two children were girls! It looks as though a lot of Asian-Americans will have to use their relative wealth to import wives from their homelands if they wish to marry within their ethnic group. India and China had better continue their economic growth at a high rate, so their young men will be able to import wives from other parts of the world. It is not clear that these societies are open to allowing their men to marry women from other cultures, however. The only other solution would be an inversion of the old practice of one man having several wives.

Steyn assumes that this female feticide will lead to a return to a kind of patriarchy. Perhaps it will mean the men will have the majority of votes in some democratic societies, but the very important law of supply and demand will operate here. As societies become too rich in males, the perceived value of the rarer females will increase. This first wave of very high preference for male children will be moderated. Young men will be desperate to acquire desirable and even just acceptable wives. These wives will be able to name their price and with many societies starting to modernize, they will more and more be able to choose a husband and hold the power of divorce to ensure that their man will treat them with honor and respect, not to mention giving them considerable power over spending family money. This will likely transform some of these traditionally very patriarchial societies.

Early America had a huge imbalance of excess males to females. This empowered women in America compared to their situation in old Europe at the time. In time, that gender imbalance became much less in the East than it was in the West. In 1869, the Wyoming Territory constitution allowed women to vote and to hold public office. In 1870, the Utah Territory allowed full suffrage to women. In 1893, Colorado approved female suffrage. By 1912, Idaho, Washington, California, Michigan, Kansas, Oregon, and Arizona gave women the vote. There is a pattern here. Western states, which suffered from too few women, valued women enough to give them a vote before the Eastern states did. This is evidence of the ubiquity of the Law of Supply and Demand.

It will be very interesting to see how the shortage of women among Indians and the Chinese plays out.