Do Not Vex Me Or I Shall Turn on You

Reality check! I think this is the first time I've done two posts in the same day.

• So a lot of idiots compare the marriage age in the Middle Ages—12 for girls, 14 for boys—to those cases where 50-year-old men marry 13-year-old girls, sometimes several of them. Only, first off, a 12-year-old girl would, in the vast majority of cases, be marrying a 14-year-old boy (those old-young marriages were mostly arranged, mainly only nobles did arranged marriage, and nobles tended to marry slightly older—think a 16-year-old girl with a 30-year-old husband, which can happen in several US states now).
  
  And second off, 12/14 weren't just the age for marriage; they were the age of adulthood. A 12-year-old girl was considered an adult for all purposes, including property ownership, contracts, filing lawsuits, and, again, voting. I really don't see where countries that retained traces of women being legal wards of their husband well into the post-World War II era get off criticizing.
  
  Again, women being their husbands' wards is a product of your precious Renaissance, a resurrection of Roman law.


• Similarly, that old canard that "rule of thumb" meant you were allowed to beat your wife as long as the stick you used was thinner than your thumb. This is just you admitting you don't speak any Romance languages, right? 'Cause in those, the word for "thumb" also means "inch"—"rule (or 'measure') of thumb" means to measure something with your actual thumbs instead of a ruler.
  
  Actually medieval laws allowed civil divorces in cases of physical abuse—including, in some jurisdictions, taking one's "conjugal rights" by force. Yeah, the medievals had laws against what we call spousal rape, when exactly did your country get around to addressing that?


• So the trope of the crazy veteran becoming a spree or serial killer? Yeah, turns out, most of the serial killers with military experience never saw combat. Dahmer was a nurse, the BTK guy installed radio antennas, the DC sniper was a mechanic. Timothy McVeigh (an agnostic by the way, not a Christian as is often asserted) was a gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle. He had no demolitions training, though.
  
  Personally, knowing as I do that humans are fundamentally lazy and hate their jobs, I'd guess actual combat personnel are the least likely to go on a killing spree. It's too much like work.


• An example of how America's left-wing media are a bunch of idiots is, they decided the Tea Party was racist before they'd ever looked at them, resulting in a risibly, demonstrably false narrative. If I'd wanted to discredit the Tea Parties, I'd have focused on the (minority of) signs that express Ayn Rand/Gordon Gekko "Greed is good", "Selfishness is commanded in the Nicomachean Ethics" sentiments. I know that'd work, because I thought those signs were typical, and frankly the average voter should be my pet.
  
  It's fascinating how often people's prejudices are unrelated to what's actually unlikeable about someone or something, huh? Like, you know that Anti-Semitic idea that Jews are over-educated and too cosmopolitan? Yeah, funny, every time I can remember that a Jewish writer has rubbed me the wrong way, it's been because of his provincial ignorance.
  
  So yeah, mostly just Dennis Prager, really.


• I was reading this article about race politics in this country, about the implosion of black America, and one of the commenters insisted that it was still due to "200 years of slavery". And yet nobody has pointed out A) those problems didn't exist in the nearly full century between the 13th Amendment and the War on Poverty, and B), how come nobody in the former Roman Empire exhibited those problems as a legacy of 4500 years of slavery, at least? And, while slavery in America was the worst in all the colonies—France, Spain, and Portugal only had slavery in the economic sense (forced labor), while only the English and Dutch had it in the human-rights sense (chattel slavery)—it wasn't as bad as Roman slavery could get. How do I know?
  
  How about the forward-thinking, progressive legislation by Caesar Augustus forbidding feeding your slaves to eels? Somehow I don't think that even came up in the New World.