This bolded part is wrong, both in it's intended meaning and in it's more proper understanding.

First, science. Beautiful women invoke powerful biological effects in men, much as women's sexual preferences change over the ovulatory cycle.

The effects are not fully understood, but they are in regions of the brain associated with drugs. Most men will tel you that these feelings are very powerful, enough to cause cognitive impairment. Again, much like a drug.

Meen feel this, even if they do not assent to it.

Second, history. Prudent parents have always exhorted their daughters to modesty in dress and comportment, and caution in travelling alone.

Third, common sense. A man has a right to travel through downtown Detroit at night with a thousand dollars hanging out his back pocket - but he'd be stupid to do it. Likewise for immodestly dressed women.

This doesn't blame the victim, it educates her.

Denise McAllister wrote:

The argument that women should not serve in the military because they might be sexually assaulted assumes that men in our military have no self-control. This is an unfair assumption—about men in general. It has been my experience that good men behave themselves no matter how a woman acts or dresses or how intimate their working conditions are. And he especially behaves himself when she is simply a co-worker and not doing anything to “tempt” him other than being a woman.

The bolded part is untrue. Crime increases in war zones. Along with massacre and plunder, rape has historically been an inevitable part of the practice of war.

American forces are amazingly disciplined. US troops raped 3,191 women in 2011. US forces contain 2,280,875 people. Women represent 383,998 of them. That's a rape rate of about 0.8% of females.

The US Department of Justice says that 14.8% of women were victims of rape in the US as a whole. (FYI, 2.1% of men are rape victims not counting prison rape.)

As more women enter combat positions, rape will become a bigger problem. It isn't now.

We should be very careful not to blame the victim. We should also be very careful not to believe rape accusers until we have objective evidence. We must also be very careful about rape statistics. The false reporting rate is unknown, but hundreds of men have been exonerated of rape by DNA tests after lengthy prison terms. Many of these innocent men were convicted in my city, Dallas. It's chilling to remember that Texas once executed men for rape.

In all of the cases I know, and I know many, the female accusers swore in court that these innocent men raped.

The Kanin study, although not conclusive, shows a false reporting rate of 41%. CP McDowell, studied false rape accusations in the US Air Force. 27% of women recanted their allegations, and 60% were classified by objective evidence criteria to be highly likely to be false allegations.

Sadly, the FBI and state law enforcement agencies resist tracking false rape allegations. So, we dont' know for sure. We need comprehensive fact gathering about rape allegations.

This is true of the Church of Rome but not of the Church. The Orthodox have never had a hierarchy like that of Rome.

Half of Catholic christians are not organized like a Roman army. They practice the traditional teachings of the church: each bishop is equal to every other. They are in apostolic succession and practice in the full authority of the traditions of the Church.

There is no single, temporal head of the Church as the Patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Rome, claims. The Patriarch of Constantinople is a spokesman for the  autocephalous churches, and he is primate of one of them. He is elected for his penitence, piety, and prudence. He is not supreme but primary.

Not all Catholics are Roman. The Church is not the Latin church.

While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. A new, invisible and at times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules.

The Patriarch of the West is most definitely talking about systems as causes of indignity. He opposes systems with autonomous markets and speculators. He claims that states have the right to control markets. All of this is wrong.

On the other hand, the Patriarch of the West properly criticizes the invisible tyranny of crony capitalist economic policies. He seems, bless him, unable to distinguish between free-markets and cronyism.

CSCOPE is awful. Every parent should be concerned about it.

Chomsky is fascinating. I have just about every one of his books, and I've read them more than once.

He is a master of sophistry. Truly, a master. He makes Georgias look like an amateur. If you want to really, really, really understand how liberals convincingly (not just plausibly) lie - you must study Chomsky.

I dont' agree with Larry Koler above when he writes:

[Chomsky] lives in a world where facts are not welcome

On the contrary, this misses the genius of Chomsky's method. Chomsky's facts are typically well documented and true. It's his inferences from the facts that are faulty. He has a genius for crafting crazy, but highly plausible, conclusions from real facts.

When people check the facts, shock!, they are true. Many people then assume his inferences are also true. It's a method that really works and not just in politics.

Chomsky's sophistry is devilishly brilliant.

The whole point of the Progressive administrative state was to separate administration functions from politics.

How's that working out?

I recommend one of my former professor's books, American Progressivism: A Reader. It has short, readable sections from original progressive texts in the progressive's own words. It is designed as a textbook for just such a class as yours.

Echoing Crows Nest on Heidegger, I'd also recommend Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought.

Few realize that the arguments - and more importantly untested assumptions - of Marx, Progressivism, and other leftist social movements often rest on arguments about technology. The theme of alienation appears in a variety of forms, usually linked with the development of modern technology as an autonomous social force undesigned and unmanaged by any person. Free market economists call this phenomena an 'emergent systems'. Where free market types praise emergence, leftists greatly fear it.

On the leftist account., the modern is conceived as a social experience which molds man to machines rather than the other way around. A man doesn't make his own worldhood - and this is understood as a major cause of distress and alienation, something to be fixed. Such are the themes in Autonomous Technology.

This stuff really does keep me up at night. Infanticide. Plain and simple and evil.

I, for one, welcome more Thomas Sowell episodes.

I was a raging liberal in my early 20's until I read Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality. I'm a Sowell fan.

Careful now, when I've criticized women's claims to privilege, the place erupts in histrionics  One thing is for sure, some of the these mothers were culpable in a conspiracy to child murder. Another fairly sure thing, they will get away with it.

A mother cannot birth a baby into a toilet, hear it screaming and writhing to get out, and then claim to be mere a victim of the abortion industry. This is true even if she consented to prescription drugs to dull her senses of the murder. Women are no less in dignity to men - and no less morally responsible for their actions.

I am also floored by the law. A perfectly viable baby - PERFECTLY VIABLE -  is partially birthed and killed in the vagina (not the womb). This is called abortion. Had the baby travelled a mere eight inches farther, the killing would be murder. That's insane, and that's the law.

Properly conceived, all rights are equal.

The positive conception of rights inconsistent with liberty and dangerous in practice.

On a negative theory of rights, we do not face such contradictions.

That never happens to me.

Yeah, I meant "Happiness is a form of knowing". My bad.

Television and movie images affect and effect people's behavior. There's a multi-billion dollar industry based upon this assumption. It's called advertising.

It seems either advertising doesn't really work, or that violent images affect us.

It's interesting to note that movie and television companies try to have it both ways: "commercials will affect people's behavior, but our movies won't."

That's nonsense.