The Wingnut Musings Short notes about a world going long Ilkka Kokkarinen <[{( It was not yet freezing in Toronto, but I would not have minded if the wind had mellowed a bit, with my bag again heavy with library books. After I had ordered my usual spicy Italian from the outdoor vendor and was standing next to his cart watching my order on the grill, an obviously agitated Middle Eastern man ran to the vendor to point out a middle-aged white woman (I changed some details to make the identification of the culprit more difficult) across the street surreptitiously trying to jiggle the lock of a bike chained to a post. The guy alerted us that she must be a bike thief, since she already did the same hinky stuff with other bikes parked nearby. The vendor, a jovial middle-aged guy of East European origin, did nothing, which of course was everything he could realistically do. As the woman gave up and left the scene to look for an easier mark, the vendor started laughing, telling me with a thick accent that this is how it is here. “This is Canada! Njot my probljem!” I laughed with him and was still chuckling when I started dressing the dog that was handed to me, soon to myself also become but a blur in the hurlyburly of the city, realizing that life had once again written a zinger for me without me having to lift a finger. World made of glass Scott Adams of Dilbert fame once noted that a working knowledge of economics is a mild superpower that allows him to sense many things other people miss. Similarly, getting bitten by a radioactive wingnut gave me the power to see how the entire spectrum of thought of those who we call liberals, progressives, socialists, trendoids or Marxists depending on what is fashionable today, can be reduced to and explained as the simple automata that they are. After identifying many genuine problems and solving them to the extent that they can be solved, liberalism devolved into naked group identity politics and petty status signaling for the verbal New Class, downwardly mobile in not just wealth but also societal respect, and desperate to distinguish itself from the working class. Since this vanguard tends to be paid not enough to do this with classic material means, they have set up a parallel status hierarchy based on the tastes and aspirations of Lloyd Dobler to ensure that they get to be its kings and, mostly, its queens. Even the few rich liberals subscribe in public, but certainly not in their private actions, to the shibboleths of this group. This red pill gave me, and hopefully soon also to you, ideological X-ray eyes that allow me to see through the flesh that covers this simple skeleton. Sometimes this superpower is a curse: for example, how it makes it impossible to read left-wing newspapers such as Toronto Star, as the resulting nausea is like looking at the friendly smile of a beautiful woman but seeing only the snarling rictus. On the other hand, this superpower made possible to write the book you are now holding, so in the end it might be a wash. Don’t do that, then In spirit of the philosophical essay What Is It Like To Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel, if I had to describe using only a couple of sentences what it feels like to be a conservative, I would probably compare it to the hypothetical but surreal experience of noticing how many people around you have headaches because they keep banging their heads against the wall. If you don't do anything, that makes you objectively a “part of the problem”, especially if you express any distaste towards having to pay for some increasingly messy bureaucracy that claims to help headache sufferers even though it only ever comes up with increasingly absurd “solutions” to the new problems that its actions conjure up while its proponents do their best to explain away these consistent failures. On the other hand, if you try to help by suggesting that their heads would stop hurting if they just stopped banging them against the wall, you are a “simpleton” who doesn't understand the enormous complexity and the “root causes” of this problem. What can you do, except perhaps escape to one of the few remaining islands of sanity, and hope that the madness doesn't follow you there, at least for a while? Have it in the belly and think it over Dolphins in the wild are really not the friendly and playful happy-go-lucky goodfellas that we imagine them as in our confusion about their faces that are frozen to constantly leer at us. It’s a minor miracle that some predator hasn’t evolved to lure humans to their deaths by believably mimicking and exploiting human emotions... unless perhaps the Internet itself is one. Left to their own devices, Flipper and Hambone are sociopathic monsters that gang rape (or as one tasteless wag renamed this act for humans, “surprise polyamory”), torture and kill without any remorse, and have gleeful fun while doing this. To be offended of this would be a silly category error of trying to apply human concepts of morality to the utterly amoral nature. After all, why couldn't dolphins casually engage in violence in a charming and playful manner, like Tommy Udo of the high seas? In fact, to echo B. F. Skinner a bit, perhaps it is an equal mistake to apply human concepts of morality to humans. Just like a “coward” really means a person who refuses to take a big risk solely for someone else's benefit, calling somebody “closed-minded” means he refuses to change his externally observable behaviour when he is provided no better reason for such change other than somebody else would benefit from such change. To be offended of something like this is a sign of a petty mind. Recognizing them by their fruits Most of our cultural customs and rules, especially the unwritten ones but also the explicit ones such as the petty regulations of military life, that we skate through seemingly effortlessly are very difficult for the mentally ill, destitute or homeless to follow, so these rules serve as filters for the massively important task of recognizing and excluding such people from positions where bad decisions could have disastrous consequences. And the coolest thing about these omnipresent filters is that nobody ever explicitly designed them, but they emerged organically and were themselves filtered based on how well they help us recognize important things. Every failed ideology loves to explain that the “real” version of that ideology has never been tried, but this the same fallacy as when individual people say that their environment doesn't let their “real me” to come out. But as the hardboiled author Andrew Vachss likes to sum it up, behaviour is the truth. How you affect the outside world and react to its stimuli and events is the “real” you, whereas your self-image and idealized version of you that you carry in your head is a private fiction no more “real” than Donald Duck or James Bond. The “reality” of any ideology is in how it actually shows up in the streets and affects society and the people in it. The “real communism” that never sends anybody to gulags and only exists in the mind of some shut-in in academia is irrelevant to the dissidents who get to experience the reality firsthand. Waiting for Goalot Sure, soccer is fun for children and amateur adults to play casually together since it doesn't require complex equipment or fields, and the game scales smoothly to various skill levels and number of players. But as an actual professional sport, just forget it. Every time that I have tried to watch soccer on TV, I have felt deep sadness for the players trapped in this Sartrean hell for the unending frustration they must feel when everything that they try to do is inherently doomed to fail. Humans simply can't control anything very much with their feet, so most of the passes get intercepted, miss their recipients or just plain old fly off the field, forcing the game to pause. It is an equally sad sight when some player tries to take the ball past two or three defenders or kick it towards the general direction of the opponent's goal, hoping that by some random fluke it would reach a fellow teammate, but of course even if it does, the player who receives the pass will only be in a position just as hopeless as the first player. When somebody actually scores a goal, which is quite rare, it is obvious that the whole thing was just dumb luck. As a sport, soccer is unsalvageable, and ought to be tossed into the dustbin of history to keep company to stoolball and closh. Hoisted on their own Derrida A few decades ago before all this current silliness started, the humanities and liberal arts departments in academia were badly losing the science wars. After all, even astrology at least makes falsifiable predictions (to say nothing of the fact that stars actually exist), a hurdle far above the abilities of most of the humanities. Desperate to prove that they are just as true and valid systems of thought as all those hard sciences that get constantly tested and have to prove their correspondence to the uncompromising objective reality every day, no wonder they fell so hard for the postmodernist mumbo-jumbo of Derrida, Latour and Lacan that sweetly whispered in their ears that Western science is only one narrative and “text” among many that are equally valid, and since it is an objective truth that no objective truths exist, science only tries to justify the right of the white male patriarchal capitalist phallogocentric power hegemony to dictate its values and lifestyle choices on the oppressed groups and silence all hedonistic and rebellious dissent against it. Fast forward to the present day, and now the humanities and liberal arts are solidly left-wing in the culture wars, for various reasons. Surely I can't possibly be the only one to laugh at the unintentional comedy in how they now whine that those global warming deniers disrespect the absolute authority of science, so all those dissenters ought to be silenced and their hedonistic lifestyles curtailed... by force if necessary? Radiant minds In a sane world, rational people would look at anti-nuclear activists with the same pity they have for homeopaths and astrologers. To get closer to such state of affairs, we ought to take the page out of the left's standard playbook and coin, analogously to the utterly meaningless terms “homophobe” and “Islamophobe” (both words have become so vague and all-encompassing that by sheer logical necessity you have to be one or the other), the obviologism “nuclophobe” to mean a person who is afraid of nuclear power and therefore hysterically opposes it, even though she (and usually it is she, or a he who wants to be a she) is completely ignorant of even the basics of radiation physics, or how a nuclear plant works. In fact, just like all opposition of gay marriage is “homophobic” (go ahead, try naming one argument against gay marriage that is not), all criticism of nuclear energy should always be dismissed with an automatic “That’s just totes what some stupid and ignorant nuclophobe asshole like you would say!” It is not uncommon to hear a committed nuclophobe assert that there is a nuclear warhead inside the reactor core, ready to explode any moment and melt us all into glowing goo. Naturally, we should also immediately start rationing those scarce medical nuclear isotopes used in cancer treatments, so that those who oppose nuclear power would always be the last in the priority queue to receive them. Mens rea in corpore sano Many people have noticed the curious discrepancy in how various forms of homicide are punished very differently, even though the consequences on the victim and his loved ones are literally equally severe, regardless of the state of mind of the killer. But if this state of mind and premeditation determine the severity of punishment, why is an attempted murder punished more leniently than successful murder, even though in both crimes, the state of mind of the killer was identical? It seems strange to reward a criminal for being incompetent. Another example of a strange legal asymmetry are the “hate crime” statutes that assign a higher value on lives of special minorities. I can understand the argument that a hate crime needs to be punished more harshly (but then don't tell me later that harsh punishments are “primitive revenge” that “don't deter crime”) because a hate-motivated crime terrorizes a far larger group of people than just the individual victim. I accept this argument the moment that it is extended to its logical conclusion to also cover all crimes against wealthy people, who already know perfectly well that they are tempting targets for criminals and thus are forced to take extra measures such as paying the non-trivial premium of having to live in an exclusive community to protect their lives and families. Every time there is a home invasion of some rich family, progressives should be held responsible for their wealth equalization rhetoric that helps create such “theft culture”. Wealth of knowledge To eradicate poverty at least to the extent that the future generations take this new baseline as their new normal, it is necessary to first understand its true nature. Instead of some anomaly to be as confused about as some social justice major reading the sentence “My indigenous culture disapproves of gay marriage”, poverty is the natural state of humanity, the default rest state that one must actively resist to keep it at bay. There is nothing mysterious about poverty, as we know perfectly well how to achieve it. Sit down and do nothing, and poverty will come to you. This is something that those who long for a more “natural” way of living would be well advised to remember. As a general rule, whenever something is said to be “natural”, this is an euphemistic shorthand for saying that it sucks ass for everyone involved. To worship the “beauty” of nature is nihilistic worship of an utterly sadistic and amoral power. Every wealthy society that people would voluntarily live in must be highly artificial and unnatural, since nature gives us nothing but mud, sticks, flies and rain. The ancient forces of evolution that shaped everything in nature did not care about making things comfortable for us, whereas artificial things can be intentionally engineered and optimized for this purpose. To see the difference between these two, walk through a forest and see how many useful things you can find there. Then repeat this experiment by walking through the nearest Costco. Avoid that card, unless you are shooting for the moon One nice perk for breaking taboos for a living is that you have the freedom to break actual taboos. On one website that compiles funny pictures from all over the Internet, I came upon a cartoon that, judging from its style, must have originally been in Hustler. This cartoon hit its target far better than the cartoonist had probably even dreamed of. It was a re-interpretation of the classic Goofus & Gallant format, updated to the present day. When their previously lily-white neighbourhood becomes more vibrant, the ignorant Goofus packs up his life and moves away from this diversity, whereas the smart Gallant sees the golden eggs that this change can lay for him, so he stays to enjoy the sweet fruits of diversity... by banging a busty black prostitute who also seemed to greatly enjoy this encounter. Since we can't poke our microscopes directly into the mind of a young male Liberalus Swiplus, we can't directly measure how much of his open-borders enthusiasm stems from his desire to get his knob polished for $20. To winkle these men out of their ghillie suits of plausible deniability, we have to look for indirect clues, such as the fact that when these guys do their stint in the Peace Corps or similar expat aid outfits, they always seem to end up with a young local girlfriend. In a perfectly equal and enlightened relationship where the girl took the initiative, of course. Blind men and the elephant Here in peaceful and progressive Canada, it is easy to feel smug towards countries that get their hands dirty in the world arena. Especially that one country built on the conquest and near eradication of its peaceful natives who received hardly any compensation or even an apology. You know, the one founded on belligerent exceptionalism and manifest superiority over other cultures, later turned into a national religion that led to imperialist conquest and mass slaughter. This country still has an actual federal law that requires all foreigners to carry their papers with them at all times, or risk being deported by any policeman who can, simply on a whim, detain and question them. The country so primitive and barbaric that it actively uses the death penalty, shrugging off international protests about this just as coldly as it does in important environmental issues. Its provincial masses bitterly cling to their traditional values while their media feeds them a constant diet of mindless pap and actively hushes up embarrassing facts. They rarely travel abroad, being not just obsessed with ethnic purity and deeply suspicious of anything foreign, but also unabashedly sexist and classist, especially towards this one minority they consider dirty, criminal and even less evolved. We can only sigh in relief that sun is finally setting on the once so seemingly unstoppable economic and military juggernaut of... so, how many countries can the reader now name that fit this description? I, plastic fork An important role of prices in free markets is to convey information about individual needs and preferences in a world of seven billion people who can each see only a very small part of it. A while ago, a poster elicited fawning oohs and aahs in the progressive blogosphere by pointing out how absurd it is to go through all the steps needed to make a plastic fork instead of using a metal fork and washing it afterwards. Indeed, the way free market prices allocate resources can often be counterintuitive and seemingly unfair for some English major with tiny knowledge but big visions of how she would completely reorganize the entire world as the central planner, letting them beclown themselves by calling the free market more “inefficient” compared to central planning led by “smart” people. It is certainly amazing how technology and commerce allow mass production of plastic spoons to be sold for three cents apiece, well worth the time and convenience they save me. However, all centrally planned green policies and their wannabe implementers always assign zero value for other people's time and convenience. Since the left instinctively despises everything that gives normal people more time, freedom or material wealth, they have always hated suburbs, nuclear power, shopping malls, automobiles... and plastics, which could not exist under a centrally planned green economy. I would therefore like to ask all my readers to take a look around them and note everything plastic, and then say a quiet “thank you” to the right-wingers who made it possible for everything that Brutopians consider “wasteful” to exist at all. Peculiar I am not going to pretend that I think it is beautiful when a man licks another man’s anus, but having said that, it seems clear that at least a significant chunk of the resentment against homosexuality that simmers among the lower orders is not as much revulsion towards its actual biomechanics, as much as it is revulsion towards how transparently the trendy fag hag left idolizes gays as its zero-cost shibboleth. This is easiest to see in the discrepancy between the progressive outrage that always rises in unison whenever some white prole grunts that he doesn’t think that gay marriage is an entirely positive force in society, versus their deafening silence when some more exotic and exciting culture prescribes the death penalty by stoning for homosexuality. I also have this hunch that despite all the loving attention lavished on them, and getting applauded for everything they do merely for being gay (some genuinely iconoclastic gay prankster ought to one day pull a Sokal about this), many gay men are not that happy to serve as Tamagotchis and props for literature majors anxious to avoid being mistaken for some obese Wal-Mart shopper. This phenomenon also has an international parallel that explains the oppression of gays in poor Third World countries where people assume, in a tragicomical mirror image of the oikophobia and hesperophobia of the West, that their gay countrymen are “acting white”. Divercity The main problem that plagues the poor in all Western countries is not that they can’t afford food and shelter of the quality and quantity that would have been luxurious to the average aristocrat a mere century ago. The real curse of being poor is that you have to live next door to other poor people and suffer their various pathologies that are far more common among the poor than the middle class that can afford to escape to suburbs. This also explains why the poor tend to vote right wing in surprising numbers, and it is also one of the unspoken reasons why America, the country that has been so massively successful despite always doing everything the opposite to what progressives demanded, is much richer than Europe, because the punishment for being poor is so much worse there. There really is no mystery why young white progressives gush over certain neighbourhoods and entire cities such as Portland and Austin (and pseudo-cities such as Burning Man) that allow them to act poor without having to live next to people who really are poor in a sad and totes non-ironic way and who make better desolation porn as arena for your extreme hide- and-seek leagues than as actual neighbours. The calls for “smart growth” to keep these cities “weird” and “creative” is an euphemism for keeping them something else that is best left unspoken. One memorable article in the left-wing Salon magazine had the female author praise the gay people and their neighbourhoods for how smart, clean and safe they are, blissfully oblivious to what these words are dog whistles for in the real estate business. The onus takes the cake I am not entirely sure what the slur “anti-intellectual” is supposed to mean, but I have noticed that it gets thrown whenever a conservative expresses opinions that differentiate him from a doormat. I would certainly like to see the verbal left one day give us an actual operational definition for their favourite slur, and then honestly examine and critique, for example, the cultures of the inner-city African-Americans or the Muslims of the Middle East against their definition. I am not saying that verbal intellectuals are useless, since of course society needs them to question, challenge and confront every idea that threatens the rule of verbal intellectuals over the mundys as unelected and unaccountable philosopher kings and central planners. A rebellious intellectual will snarl and bite the hand that feeds him, but grovel and lick the boot that kicks him. But in a free market society where people can simply make their own decisions of where to live, what to do for fun and how to entertain themselves, intellectuals can only watch from the sidelines and seethe in their impotent rage, towards the system that puts them in the margins where they belong, and dress up in combat berets and ponchos to fantasize in front of their bedroom mirrors how they are dangerous rebels and dissidents who will one day overthrow the accursed “System”. The semen in Semenya Because I strongly believe in treating men and women equally, I oppose the sexist segregation in sports, which is as unacceptable as the racial segregation in sports in the era of the Negro League. In fact, I would also end the sexist segregation in the prison system by making men and women serve their sentences together, the same way that people of all races do. Let men and women compete together in the same sports arena and the best person triumph, whichever sex zie will be. If the end result of desegregation is that even the best female athletes can meaningfully compete only against 15-year-old boys in some municipal championships, so be it then. However, once we get rid of the social construct that men are physically stronger than women, little girls will surely grow up to be just as strong as men. We can already see glimpses of this future utopia of equality in many junior sports events where a 12-year-old girl competes with 12-year-old boys and wins! Extrapolate this to the future to see that women will soon break all records of male athletes. The reader may now recall the case of Caster Semenya, the middle-distance runner whose right to compete in the women's events was subjected to gender testing, which caused an outcry among progressives. But unless they are as enlightened as me when it comes to the principle that all athletic events should be open to everyone regardless of gender identification, they should now explain us what criteria they believe an athlete must satisfy to be allowed to compete in women's events, and what constitutes acceptable testing in cases where other participants complain that one of them should not be allowed to participate in their events. Time’s arrow By far the silliest dismissal of conservatism must be that “you can't turn back the clock”. Very much true, but the nonexistence of the big red reset button on society is, if anything, an argument for Burkean conservatism, not against it. Since many changes in their multitude of unintended (but not entirely unexpected) consequences really are one-way and as irreversible as throwing an egg at the wall, they should never be taken lightly, and absolutely never simply because some English, sociology or critical studies major can't understand why all things couldn't merely on her dictate be the way that she wants them to be. Of course, for all their posturing of how they are open-minded and accepting of change, progressives really can’t even properly comprehend change. They see society as a fully compartmentalized machine whose each part can be arbitrarily tinkered with without any of these changes unintentionally bleeding to other parts. This may just be intentional dishonesty: after all, the left does understand this principle perfectly well when it comes to ecology and nature, where humans are never allowed to change anything. Of course, in practical politics progressives vehemently oppose uncertainty and change, so that all jobs should be for life and no company would ever go bankrupt, whereas we conservative white males turn out to be the most accepting of risk, uncertainty and change. A lot of holes in the logic, a lot of problems buried in those holes The window-smashing orgy around the G20 conference held in Toronto that paved the way for the Occupest movement gave me this mental image of the next G20 conference being held in the Old Vegas where these rampaging protesters running through the casinos and disturbing the sacred right of the tourists to be relieved of their excess cash would soon find themselves hoping that the cops would get them before the mafia took them for a one-way trip deep into the scorching desert that surrounds America’s adult playground. Hell, I can virtually hear the lines “Keep digging, you motherfucking punk, I want to get out of this fucking heat today! What the fuck are you looking at? You wanted your 'anarchy' and now you got it, fucko! And it sure was fucking smart of you not to own a gun, wasn't it, you motherfucking scumbag you fuck face!” delivered in the voice of Joe Pesci. With all the old school mobsters now safely in prison or in the ground (some with a tombstone, others without) and replaced with respectable businessmen such as Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Frank Bellagio and Bill Harrah and their eponymous casino hotels that dwarfed anything that existed before them, perhaps the Vegas mobsters could have their last hurrah in some movie that pits them against both the Arab terrorists and Occupests, both equally smelly and intent to destroy the American dream where everything is better with tailfins. What's this eighty-five thing? Back when the brouhaha of The Bell Curve was in full swing, I read one compilation of academic essays written to disprove its sideline thesis. As convincing as these essays and their carefully honed points were, the compilation itself humorously was the best possible argument for the case made in the original book that it tried to topple and that correctly predicted both its own audience and detractors. As far as I could ascertain, not even one of these essays had been written by somebody whose IQ was 85 or below, and in fact I’d happily take the bet that basically all of these essays had been written by people with verbal IQ’s in the 125+ range. IQ is not everything, since nothing is everything, but IQ does set a hard upper limit to what you can learn, understand and achieve. What is the lowest IQ that allows some person to write a peer-reviewed paper that proves that IQ is meaningless? Another curious paradox that I noticed was how the anti-IQ camp fears that acknowledging the existence of IQ would result in some people being classified as “subhuman” and treated accordingly. However, every single time that I have actually seen somebody being called a “subhuman”, this has come from the anti-IQ side! In other words, members of the anti-IQ camp simultaneously believe that on one hand, everybody is an equally valuable human, but on the other hand, those who deny this, even by a tenuous implication, are subhuman. Gimme something for the pain Communism is basically the fallacy that if you need to get a group of people through a complex obstacle course, you should blindfold them and tie their hands together, yell instructions to them while drunk off your ass, and occasionally when frustrated by their lack of progress, randomly shoot one of them as a “saboteur”. The essential role of free market prices in our society is to convey important information to us finite and limited beings about what other people actually need. Trying to eliminate free market prices and rationing scarcity some other way is equivalent to ripping out the nervous system from a live human being, even if you “meant well” and rip out only the pain-sensitive nerves, thus blocking out the messages conveyed by the pain that tell you in no uncertain terms that you need to make right now important changes to your behaviour. When it is freezing cold outside, few people pretend that they could magically make it warmer simply by shaking the thermometer until it shows them a balmier number. And yet many of these people don’t realize that if you don't like the price of something in the free market equilibrium, you should try to change the reality that causes that price to have that value, instead forcing the messenger prices to be more to your liking but not changing the underlying reality that caused these prices. For example, the more you raise the minimum wage, the less it conveys the important signal that people who work for minimum wage need to learn new skills that would produce more value for others. The results of random decisions made in the absence of price information can these days be seen all around the Western world. Listen to me, then I’ll listen to you As of this writing, Rob Ford's stint as the mayor of Toronto has lasted one year. Margaret Atwood recently made headlines by complaining that Ford is not interested in hearing from the creative class of artists and intellectuals of the city. That whopper reminded me about how a couple of years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, an Eastern European politician dismissed the leftovers of the Communist Party who had complained that other parties are not interested in having dialogue with them. He reminded these Communists that back when they held all the power, they were also not at all interested in constructive dialogue with dissenting ideas. Before the election, the likes of Atwood made it perfectly clear that they don’t much care for listening to Rob Ford and his chromosomally challenged voters. So if anything, Ford has been far too generous with these people. Under his watch, Toronto should have already broken ground on several homeless shelters, halfway houses, dope shooting galleries and social housing tenements in The Beaches and other solid liberal neighbourhoods, to heighten the contradictions a little by making these people painfully commit to their cherished equality. A “forced busing” program could also bring much needed diversity in their schools from less privileged neighbourhoods such as Jane & Finch. Open wide, this will hurt only for a moment Back when I first saw Blade Runner as a teenager, I honestly wondered “Wait a minute... so, that place was supposed to be a dystopia?” Instead of being some hardcore immigration restrictionist, I very much look forward to the future when we white devils become a minority in all Western countries. I merely hope that I get to personally see the faces of all those good little white liberals the exact moment they realize that they have become a powerless permaminority, and the New Majority they “elected” in the Brechtian sense will simply shrug off and ignore their all comical whines and expectations. We educated conservative white males will prosper in the Balkanized low-trust society whose overburdened social welfare net has run out of other people’s money and collapsed into a bitter ethnic struggle over the few remaining spoils, where any weirdness only invites violence, and everyone is always delighted to see us as their new neighbours and co-workers and sad to see us go and be replaced by some other group. The Brazilification of society can be a samba carnival assuming you approach it the right way, and most importantly, get to live on the pleasant side of the barbed wire fence. Which most of the people taking us towards that society, especially those who majored in some feelgood field whose name ends with the word “studies”, will not. Screwed enough already During those Slut Walk marches, those chants of “No means No!” would have been more credible if those people ever reciprocally respected the “No!” shouts of other people. Such as “No, I don't want to pay higher taxes so that you and your friends get more generous welfare benefits”, “No, I don't want to eradicate national borders just so that you could have thrilling exotic vibrancy in the streets and cheap servants who take two buses to come clean your toilets”, “No, I don’t think New Orleans should remain poor forever just so that you get to go there for drunken Spring break rampage and then return home to your safe and peaceful suburban life”, or “No, I am not going to stop shopping at Wal-Mart just because you resent normal people with families and real jobs.” What part of “No” do you fucking not understand? I also must have been the only person to notice the similarity between the Slut Walk marches and the Tea Party marches, their only difference being that the former operates in the sexual sphere whereas the latter operates in the classic economic sphere. The core message of both movements boils down to a petulant teenager whining “You can’t tell me what to do, I do whatever I want regardless of its consequences on me or the larger society!” and “We have the right to fully control our [bodies | earnings], and you are not entitled to forcefully redistribute them for yourself and your pals just because you happen to be a loser who can't get [laid | a job]!" (disparagement)(race)?(sex act)(body part)(number) Few proclamations are as tiresome as comparing our society to George Orwell’s 1984, especially coming from anybody who is too dumb to understand that the villain of this story is the socialist left instead of some vague “alienation” in a world ruled by “corporations”. However, an old chum of mine once pointed out that the most important and undervalued message of 1984 for our world is its three-tiered strict class distinction of Proles, Outer Party and the Inner Party. The Outer Party lives under the strictest control and surveillance, while the Proles are paradoxically more free than the stratum above them. This distinction showed up nicely in our world with the shocking Canadian movie Young People Fucking that featured explicit sex, so those silly prudish Americans didn’t give it a theatrical release. Now that the multibillion dollar porn industry must itself be older than the typical MILF working her butt off in it, it is difficult to see what exactly is “new” or “rebellious” in cinematic depictions of explicit sex. Since the porn industry consists of Proles, their porn is just porn (and just like pro wrestling and other similar prolefeed, is free to point out certain truths that for any Outer Party member would be self-immolating), as opposed to the “transgressive art” when Outer Party members perform on film the exact same bland and cliched physical motions of oral, lesbian and three-way, telling themselves that if you do something finger-quotes “ironically”, you are not actually doing it. Not in front of the help The left-wing immigration policy is a cynical scheme to import a low-wage servant class to replace the poor black people who they, for several reasons perhaps best left unsaid, don't feel comfortable inviting inside their homes as maids and servants. Because immigration, both legal and illegal, hurts only proles who need to worry about their blue collar livelihoods, whereas smart people with advanced degrees need not bother themselves with such trite concerns and should not need to scrub their own toilets anyway, your attitude towards immigration signals which group you belong to. And if those proles complain, well, they should have just got college degrees like all decent people. But your guess is as good as mine whether the open borders crowd really is as dumb and short-sighted as it seems to be. For example, one popular bumper sticker argument says that the USA and Canada are “nations of immigrants”, and since these countries were created and populated by immigration, they have no right to ever stop any new immigrants from coming in, even if during the past century these countries have become completely different welfare states in a completely different world that has seven billion people and widebody jetliners. Of course, such an absurd “argument” is no different from saying that once a woman consents to having sex with one particular man, she implicitly gives up her right to reject any other men that want to have sex with her in the future. Teach the children well Back when I was a child, the local library still had one frayed copy of the Little Red Book for Schoolchildren, although with a blue cover. I came into this world about a decade too late to be affected by this infamous tome that incited the Finnish schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers and to question and challenge all tradition. This edgy book even praised the hippie musical Hair, but even at the tender age of ten when I only had a vague idea of the significance of that one, I understood perfectly that the communists who wrote this book did not tolerate the slightest deviance, criticism or backtalk in the countries that they had “normalized” under their rule. Any youth suggesting that schools should operate democratically so that students were equal to their teachers in decision making power would have quickly found himself in a Siberian re-education camp. As it later turned out, everything in this book was part of the memetic warfare campaign of the KGB disinformation department and their useful idiots in the West to spread these memes to destabilize and demoralize the Western countries to make their economies collapse and lay groundwork for an invasion. When you listen to the Stalinist music of that era against the backdrop of what we know today, it is amazing how these people never had to pay for their outright treason. But where this gets really scary is those times that I read some American popular material from that era, and notice the exact same little things and talking points in there. Or in new material where these memes long outlasted their creators. Yale or jail The liberal left that nominally advocates equality and the interests of the proletariat has in practice become the biggest purveyor of an extremely classist, incestuous and top-insular society where only those with degrees from the most exclusive universities have a say about where society is headed and what issues and questions are considered to reside within the bounds of acceptable discussion. Expecting everyone to get a college degree imposes a massive social cost on those who lack the cognitive capacity for academic studies but must drudge and cheat their way to the sheepskin that lets them get the job they could have done with the high school diploma. Basically every problem of our colleges and universities could be instantly solved by cutting down the annual student intake by one third. Jettisoning this deadwood would massively improve the quality and depth of the undergraduate education. Of course it's easy to see why the education class, especially in fields that have few employment prospects in the private sector, wants to assure its continued employment by making a college degree de facto compulsory ticket to middle class life. Surely the auto industry would similarly make car ownership compulsory if it were in their power to do so, and call the opponents of such lunacy all kinds of names. But calling those who want fewer people to go to college “anti-education” is akin to calling somebody “anti-camel” because he doesn't want to keep piling on ever more bales of hay on the back of the poor beast that is already visibly shaking and struggling not to collapse under its load. The only real constant For all their posturing of being open-minded agents of change, progressives obviously can’t even conceptualize change. This is easy to see in how they still mentally live in the ethnically and culturally homogeneous society of fifty years ago where everyone was shared essentially the same values, so the most important thing for all aspirants was to distinguish themselves from the social class of the blue-collar white people that they were not rich enough to distinguish themselves from materially. Sure, trendy liberalism is a nice zero-cost booster for the status-anxious “creative class”, but only in a wealthy society that produces enough economic surplus to pick up the bill, and where the vast majority of people are mellow middle-class whites to act as a thick foamy buffer that prevents the vast internal contradictions of liberalism from exploding in their faces. Without such a buffer to, for example, keep the gays and the Muslims at least a stone’s throw away from each other so that liberals are not forced to make the inevitable choice to moon one while bowing down to the other, liberalism is doomed to be torn apart by its vast internal tensions and tidal forces, especially with certain demographic changes already in full swing. We have so far only really seen trailers for the future in events such as Toronto’s mayoral election and California’s Proposition 8 brouhaha, but demography is destiny, and it’s time to get the popcorn ready as the main movie is just about to begin. The only question that still hangs in the air is whether this movie will be directed by Woody Allen or Michael Bay. Trans-lated For the demonization that Catholics have to endure, this giant Microsoft of world religions has been invisible in my daily life, despite the fact that they even have their own parallel school system here in Ontario. Those mackerel snapper Papists are mocked for believing in the doctrine of transubstantiation, that is, that the magic wafer literally turns into human flesh when received by the believer. Of course, everyone knows that all physical things are what they are, and they do not change their alchemical essence on a whim based on what we think and say about them. But one has to wonder if transubstantiation really is such an insane idea that it should be immediately rejected by all modern educated people. After all, this very process takes place almost daily even in this secular and scientific age, in front of our very eyes! For example, when some man starts wearing women's clothes and makeup and acts like a woman, doing this causes him to go through a process essentially similar to transubstantiation, a process that literally trans-forms him into a woman. If a man merely presenting himself as a woman has the power to turn him into an actual woman, why could a priest presenting a wafer as “body of Christ” then not similarly turn that wafer into the actual body of Christ? Stop saying that they are violent, or they will really kill us all! After years of being an amateur essayist, Jussi Halla-aho was thrust into the Finnish politics as ever more people read and linked to his essays and realized how eloquently this Finnish equivalent of Mark Steyn said what they were all thinking but were not allowed to say, and his parliamentary victory threw the Finnish left into a fit of narcissistic rage that they never since recovered from. Perhaps the single finest essay of Halla-aho points out how the dynamic between the Western left and Islam is disturbingly identical with the internal dynamic of a family whose father is a violent alcoholic. The rest of the family has to constantly smile and pretend that everything is normal, even though they are painfully aware that they must tiptoe around reality to avoid another beating. Similarly the western media, artist and intellectual classes, for all their smug poses of how free, brave and transgressive they are, are privately perfectly aware that if they ever say anything bad about Those Who Must Not Be Named, the small but all the more fanatical underclass of this group that doesn't mind dying will hunt them for the rest of their lives, while its peaceful moderates explain why you had this coming. Even worse, their old colleagues they sipped wine with the day before will quietly look away and pretend not to know them, same as Tony Soprano's associates whenever he flies into rage for no real reason and gives some flunky a brutal beating. Triumph of word over the condemned flesh We usually frame our ethical arguments in either a consequentialist or a deontological framework, whereas virtue ethics seem neglected and even somehow primitive. Religious people ask themselves what Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha or Kali would do in their particular situation, but the irreligious can similarly ask what some particularly virtuous person would do in their shoes. And that one easily settles the thorny question about the death penalty. Che Guevara and Barack Obama, two lightworkers and respectively the most perfect and virtuous men of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, both supported the death penalty. Che even supported the death penalty so much that he administered many executions personally, and famously didn't even consider any pesky proof of guilt to be necessary for him to get to execute somebody, since the only proof he needed was that executing that person was politically expedient. Barack Obama's support for the death penalty (and let us not forget how he ordered the widely celebrated extrajudicial executions of not just Osama bin Laden, but also Anwar Al-Awlaki who was not entitled to due process despite being an American citizen) is also unintentionally humorous in how progressives love to claim that death penalty is “primitive” and “racist”, and yet here they commit a far more egregious and despicable act of racism by disagreeing with Barack Obama, to say nothing of calling him “primitive”. Those Jovians sure are jovial One of the important reasons why Earth is so perfectly hospitable to human life is that out there we have a massive Jupiter that shields us from the rocks that hurtle through the vast space with astronomical speeds. Without it, human life would very much suck as the Earth would be constantly battered by meteorites that kept destroying everything that the humans managed to build. We can only imagine what sort of pessimistic worldviews, religions and philosophies the people of a parallel Earth under such constant bombardment would come up with. The astronomical relationship between Earth and Jupiter is humorously (or perhaps tragically, depending on where you stand) almost exactly duplicated in the geopolitical relationship between Canada and the United States. Those damn Yankees basically serve as our giant “Jupiter” that hoovers all the crap that would otherwise end up in Canada, in various different metaphorical ways, and by doing so allows us to enjoy peace and prosperity up here in the Great White North. Just imagine what Canada’s immigration and labour policies would be like if the United States didn’t exist and Canada shared a common border thousands of kilometers long with Mexico. It would be good manners for us Canucks to occasionally thank the Americans for doing this and yet asking so very little in return. Veto from the sky Back in the days of the Cold War, the Soviets cynically used the Western “peace movements” as their fifth column to sabotage the defenses of the Western countries, and the “anti-nuclear movement” to sabotage the energy production. This led to another amazing pile of epicycles to explain why the Western nuclear missiles and nuclear plants were evil, whereas the Soviet “peace missiles” and “peace plants” were necessary for the world peace, all enforced by the toddler tantrum vote of lying down in front of the nuclear waste train. The puppeteer is now dead, but its old puppets continue their dance macabre switched on a new, far more virile hand. These days the “peace movement” seems to despise the Predator drones with a special gusto. To resolve this paradox, like so many others, we must remember that our anti-war crowd is not really so much anti-war as it is pro-enemy, both objectively and subjectively. The same way as the atomic power plant constantly reminds us about the truth of the atomistic worldview, every Predator drone reminds us that there is precisely one system of economic and scientific thought that is able to produce a fully functioning Predator drone, and all competing worldviews can only shake their fists powerlessly at the unreachable empty sky above them and ululate in impotent rage, forced to co-opt the tools of its enemies to even constitute a threat to them. This remains as true between nations as it remains true domestically between the two cultures of C.P. Snow. Torrents Since I already speak pretty decent English, I really don't see any value in learning more languages, since that time and effort is better spent on other things. There is such a huge torrent of opinion, information and knowledge available in English that I can only ever read but an infinitesimal portion of it. In the petabyte word, the problem is not getting enough information, but filtering the useful signal from all the noise. If somebody has something important to tell me, he can do that in English, and if he doesn't want to do this, then I shall conclude that his message was not that important in the first place. Used this way, the English language is perhaps the most underrated bozo filter currently available for us, silently blocking out tons of idiocy. (Most of the idiocy written in English and thus not caught by this filter can then be silently filtered out by restricting your reading to writers who have a Ph.D. in some field of science or technology.) Of course you could argue that I must learn some language so that I could understand and relate to the people who speak it. Fair enough. Which language should I then learn next? Most importantly, could somebody explain why this duty to learn other languages is unidirectional, the same way that all multiculturalism always seems to be? Why do I have a moral duty to learn their language for us to be able to communicate, since they clearly didn't have the reciprocal duty to learn mine? Bears of very little brain Intellectuals are quick to attack any idea that opposes granting intellectuals unlimited power to reshape society as central planners, and equally quick to dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as an “anti-intellectual”. Although bit of a tongue twister, this term beloved by the left would be better called “anti-intelligentsia”, the opposition of a selfish and resentful interest group that corrodes the essential organic social fabric built by centuries of trial and error. As an analogy, imagine that our physically strongest people started similarly demanding that they should be allowed to walk grizzly bears in leashes all around the crowded city. Confident in their ability to restrain these beasts, they pooh-poohed all backtalk by pointing out how much stronger they are than their critics (and challenge you to an arm wrestling contest to prove it), puny weaklings envious of their beautiful muscles. When the inevitable then happened and these grizzly bears mauled innocent people, they would only shrug their shoulders and say that that was the fault of “saboteurs” whose selfish and negative ideas prevented them from keeping these bears under control. As silly as this parable sounds, how is it really any different from our intellectuals claiming that they are smart enough, way smarter and more educated than you, to completely redesign and centrally plan culture and economy? Duly noted In a democratic election between one party that says that the average person is pretty good and does not need to change that much but instead society and government ought to change to better accommodate his needs, versus another party whose core message is that the average person is evil and needs to be forced to radically change to better suit the expectations of the enlightened minority, smart money is on the first party every time. Just like it is each time that an ideology based on the rule of a small enlightened minority tries to win the majority of votes. On the other hand, one fellow writer made the case that politics nowadays consists of the old elites battling each other to maintain their old privileges in a world where technology and capitalism are rapidly making these elites and gatekeepers obsolete. The nice people who can follow the rules without disturbing or harming other people and who area able to separate their emotions and desires from the competition over resources in their environment, can live together in a relatively anarchic fashion, communicate rationally and agree with voluntary contracts to engage in trades that produce greater wealth and happiness. Thus they have no need for the all-encompassing motherly hugs, nor the constant emotional psychodramas, of the do-gooders. This would also nicely explain the contempt and resentment that the anti-capitalist activists and intellectuals have towards the suburban middle class. Processing the bologna Many non-Finnish fans of the Finnish educational system seem unaware that Martin Prince and Nelson Muntz sit together only for the first nine years, after which the cohort is split in two so that Martin continues to some high school whereas Nelson goes on to some trade school, effectively closing the doors of university education for him. And this really is not a bad system since most people are not college material. In an otherwise homogeneous country this sort of segregation is politically feasible. Two decades ago, the stereotypes of Finnish trade school kids and their heavily smoking, old thumpa-thumpa-woofered Toyota Corolla or Datsun 100A driving ways were well known. In fact, their stereotype was humorously close to the American "white trash", although their actual value system is much closer to the “greaser” working class subculture. (In every outdoor rock festival in Finland you always see a couple of Confederate battle flags flown, especially if the band name contains the suffix - billy.) Presumably the current batch of tradies doesn't keep their hair in mullets and wear bleached denim jackets with the logo of the favourite hair metal band emblazoned on the back. However, some things never change over time or space. My strolls once took me past one Collegiate Institute where one group of rowdy and merry teenage boys was pouring out to the street. The dress, language and even the skin colour may be different, but their classic trade school moustaches were unmistakable and universal for the global brotherhood of tradies. For the budding botanist The naivete of youth is amusing, and even your humble narrator was once such an innocent little boy. For example, I remember as a kid seeing a book titled You will never have lunch in this town again, which I later learned was about the insider power plays in Tinseltown, and wondering how someone could be so powerful that they could just order all restaurants in some town to never serve some particular person. Years later in college, when the Penthouse magazine had become my window to the English-speaking world (back in the 80's it was a very different magazine from what it then later became) as its articles expressed forbidden ideas that simply were not allowed in the Finnish mainstream media, I remember these ads by the inventor Jeffery Julian DeMarco (that very name was somehow so penthousy that I still remember it after all these years) in which he marketed his amazing invention that was basically a small hydroponic greenhouse with powerful lights built in. These ads suggested that that flower and plant enthusiasts can use this scientific invention to enhance the growth of roses, orchids and other such decorative plants whose beauty they can then enjoy. Oh, those silly Americans, always trying to impress their friends and neighbours in the friendly competition of who has the nicest- looking garden! And if your honor allows it, I’ll exit to laugh One common bumper sticker “argument” against death penalty is to point out the absurdity of killing people to show them that killing is wrong. Yet few who use this argument ever point out the absurdity in imprisoning Josef Fritzl in an isolation cell for life to show him that imprisoning people in isolation cells for life is wrong. Death penalty in America (the only country in the world where executions are an outrage, since death penalty opponents don't seem to be able to even conceptualize the executions in their beloved China, Japan, Africa and the Middle East) has been in the news with plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth, again showcasing the blatant hypocrisy of the death penalty abolitionists. Surely it is only a freaky coincidence that their poster boys tend to disproportionately be cop killers, and certainly not because the left vicariously fantasizes offing a few “pigs” in their urban guerrilla combat beret cosplay. The execution of Troy Davis, the angelic black lamb who was practically the second coming of Christ, was a revealing contrast to the last ride of the white supremacist Lawrence Brewer that curiously lacked any tearful last-minute appeals, phonebombs and other wrenches in the gears of the legal system. Some cynic might even suspect that the death penalty opponents merely oppose its application to their fellow travellers. It is real that they stand above reality I am having trouble grasping why being an “idealist” is somehow commendable. After all, idealism is glorified solipsism that tells its adherents that when their fantasies of how the world should be turn out to be unworkable within the invisible but hard constraints of reality and do not lead anywhere near the promised land that they witnessed glimpses of in their dreams, the logical conclusion to draw from this disparity is not that the idealist is mistaken, oh heavens no, but that stupid reality is wrong and deficient, and the noble idealist too good for this crapsack world is superior to reality because of his ability to “Imagine” a different world. The foremost example of this are, of course, the people who say that “Communism is a beautiful idea in theory”, and at most grudgingly admit that it won't work in practice because humans are stupid and selfish... utterly unaware that as Friedrich Hayek proved, even angels with IQ's of 1000 could not get communism to work because in the absence of price information, all decisions of what to produce, how much and where to ship it are essentially random. These people also like to say that “communism works well with ants”. This claim is true, although not the way they intend it. Communism works for ants exactly as it works for humans in North Korea, so that the average ant has nothing coming for it but a brutal, short and mindless life of extreme poverty and constant violence. Reality hole Homosexuality is the great singularity of modern liberalism that distorts the space around it into contortions that, were they about any other topic, would seem grotesque to most people not just in history but even the present day. I am certain that the intellectually honest gay men privately cringe whenever heterosexual gay rights activists, to display their comrades their enlightened attitude that separates them from the proles, bend over backwards to pile up rhetorical epicycles that would be embarrassing about any less loaded topic. For example, consider how all smart people know that humans have nothing innate in them but everything about them is determined by their nurture and environment... except for homosexuality, which is innate and immutable. However, heterosexuality is fluid, since despite its obvious evolutionary survival value for procreating your genes, it is but an obsolete social construction that can be manipulated at will and therefore everyone should constantly experiment with it. All differences between the sexes are socially constructed, and yet this innate homosexual desire somehow recognizes and is only ever attracted to biological males. The de facto definition of sexual harassment is whenever the victim feels uncomfortable about something, but this doesn’t apply when a straight man in a blue collar job feels uncomfortable showering with a gay coworker. Permanent quarantine of those infected with HIV would be an unspeakable evil, except when the progressive demigod Fidel Castro did exactly that to crush the HIV epidemic in Cuba. Up the future’s endless stair It is difficult to parody people who claim that successful men desiring flings with younger women cannot have an evolutionary basis, because these men use contraception, so clearly they don’t choose these women for their breeding value but only because the Playboy magazine told them that young women are sexually more desirable than the old crones that these pitiful little boys are scared of anyway. The belief that only conscious actions are “real” is common among collectivists and economic creationists who can't understand unintended consequences, their fallacy akin to believing that drinking a glass of water on a hot day benefits only those who understand the chemical reactions of H2O in human body. Just like with homosexuality, it is painfully obvious that the left uses Darwinian evolution as a class shibboleth so that they only have problem with those icky white fundamentalist Christians denying evolution, but never with Muslims or native Americans. Humorously, the political left itself categorically denies all logical implications of evolution that their opponents have no problem with, such as the existence of innate hereditary differences. (The very thing that the natural selection operates on.) To gauge whether somebody honestly believes in the theory of evolution, find out what he thinks about theories of group selection. It is no mystery why those enamored with collective over individual tend to be drawn like moths to flame to teleological theories of group selection. You can always tell such people from their use of the term “more evolved”. Ignorant of even the basic fact that evolution has no direction, so no organism can be “more evolved” than any other, they reveal their teleological magical thinking. For us to live any other way was nuts If there has to be a system that guarantees everyone a minimum level of material existence, the welfare state in its current form and especially minimum wage are highly unfair and inefficient ways to achieve this. They produce a tangled mess of perverse incentives and unintended consequences that are destructive on both individual and societal level, to say nothing of the cost of the bureaucracy needed to enforce its thicket of rules. That infamous long-haired communist Milton Friedman realized this, and proposed the far superior system of basic income. In his book In Our Hands, Charles Murray proposes scrapping all wealth transfers and instead paying every adult from paupers to billionaires the same unconditional basic income of ten grand a year. Giving adults the responsibility to freely choose what they spend their money on would straighten them out, and would be especially beneficial for those living on means-tested benefits whose marginal tax rate can in the present system easily exceed 100%. When another baby would no longer be a key to any additional welfare benefits, many a young woman would think twice whether becoming a single mom seeded by some exciting fly-by-night thug and thus doing her part to raise the next generation of criminals really is a productive life path choice. Another beneficial effect would be that since citizenship would be required for basic income and no other welfare benefits existed, illegal immigrants who couldn't support themselves with their labour would quietly self-deport. Most bang for the foreign aid buck Now that there are over seven billion of us in the world, far more of those who want to immigrate to the rich Western countries exist than we could possibly even begin to let in. Instead of letting in people haphazardly so that in the worst case, this immigration policy implicitly “chooses” those with the least respect for the rule of law, we should invite and accept those who not only themselves benefit the most from this move, but also reciprocally benefit their new host country and the people already in it. Since young women are the most oppressed and vulnerable group everywhere in the world, and always hit hardest in every war, disaster and other calamity, all Western countries should immediately begin their positive discrimination and reserve at least 80% of humanitarian refugee spots, and eventually almost all of immigration, for young women. When you think about it, this policy should truly be a multi-partisan cause that the entire political and ideological spectrum would support, albeit for different reasons, and absolutely nobody from the looniest far left to the crankiest far right could possibly have any problem with it. Especially all those European countries, those that currently suffer from a serious demographic imbalance and where too many immigrants are young surplus males who mostly burden the criminal justice and welfare systems, would need this policy the most. Unspoiled and innocent When I was a teenager growing up in a very different world, one curmudgeonly newspaper columnist wrote about an international summer camp for kids where the gaggle of hens in charge had proudly announced that these kids, who didn't even speak any common language, had spontaneously on their own drafted a proclamation that prohibited toy guns and playing cowboys and Indians in this camp. Two decades later, Toronto Star featured an article about a school that placed cognitively disabled kids inside a mainstream classroom with normal children for a day. This article gushed how these children had no prejudices and, without any kind of prompting whatsoever from their teachers, accepted Timmy as their equal in all activities, since society had not yet taught them to think of him as “different”. I found that one hilarious because in our planet, small children have absolute zero tolerance towards any kind of diversity, and must be trained with a stern hand to accept it. Had these kids been left on their own in style of Lord of the Flies, they would mercilessly pile on any kid who happened to be somehow different. Another article gushed about some progressive school that placed the gifted kids next to the remedial kids in desk clusters without telling them that one was “smart” and one was “dumb.” This must be some education major thing that we simpletons can't grasp, but wouldn't little Johnny and Billy be eventually tipped off which one of them is which by the fact that Johnny always has to help Billy, and only very rarely does this go the other way around? Search and destroy Occasionally you see are these television ads for this outfit called Canadian Forces. I am a bit hazy on who these guys are, but judging from their ads, they seem to be some sort of a paramilitary group of humanitarian activists, in spirit of the Red Cross but more muscular and spunky (yet diverse) men and women who, when they are not engaged in skydiving and other extreme sports, swoop in to rescue people from hunger, floods and other natural disasters, rappelling down to where they are needed as the helicopter rotor blades dramatically spin in slow motion. One commercial revealed that these Forces also have a maritime component with lots of drama in narrow spaces as a green glow from their video displays lights up their faces. These naval operators differ vividly from their dry land counterparts in that they carry guns (and cool CQB gear) to assault and neutralize the drug smuggling enemies of Canada and the Queen. So I must have completely misunderstood to role and purpose of this organization. Does the land-based component of Forces also fight with weapons, and if so, what kind of enemies does it mainly engage these days? Since those kids these days eagerly play Doom and other commando games in their X-Stations, you might think that the re-enactment of some assault operation of their special forces from one of their recent missions would make a pretty cool and action-packed TV spot. It gets snarkier They say that pattern recognition, the ability to spot analogies between two seemingly unrelated phenomena from the softest similarities to the hardest isomorphisms is the hallmark of intelligence and an active mind. So I'm always happy to spot some for myself. For example, when I first saw that “It gets better” campaign to tell gay youths that eventually they'll get to live some place far more hospitable towards their proclivities, my first reaction was delight of how the left had finally learned to embrace their old bugaboos of voting with your feet and resolving conflicts with tall fences and physical segregation. I then imagined an analogous campaign, perhaps run by some gated community builder, to remind young adults stuck in poor and crime-ridden (but I repeat myself) neighbourhoods that eventually “It gets better” also for them! Happy suburban middle class folks, tacky golf pants for men and afternoon sherry for women optional, in their spacious homes and yards would describe how they can go out for a pleasant stroll even after dark, and how much easier it is to raise a toddler when you don't have to constantly look out for dirty marijuana syringes, smelly panhandlers and human feces. The tag line in the ads could simply be “They are not here”, leaving the audience leeway to insert their own personal “they”. For a truly magnificent reality hack, gated communities should start calling themselves “safe spaces”. World as its own model Thomas Edison used to test the hopefuls who came to him for employment by asking them to calculate the volume of a light bulb. Many applicants took their time devising complex three-dimensional integral formulas for this volume, whereas Edison simply filled the bulb with water and then poured it into a measuring cup. This tale sums up the fundamental philosophical difference between liberals and conservatives. Instead the measuring the volume of a light bulb, consider the vastly harder problem of optimizing an entire society. You can elevate yourself to the central planner nomenklatura due to your imagined higher IQ and try to optimize based on your abstract models, which will fail since they cannot possibly include all relevant aspects of society and predict its complex network of unintended consequences. Or, you could look at actual successful societies shaped by time to fit the complex constraints of reality, just like water is shaped by its container, by centuries of trial and error and local optimizations and filtering executed in parallel by millions of people. Just like the human DNA that doesn't come with documentation, there is an unimaginably huge amount of tacit information encoded both in tradition and the price signals of the free market that reveal not only the real preferences and desires of actual people, but also what works best in satisfying these preferences. Electric bugaboo If you always propose the exact same solution regardless of what the problem is, obviously you are not that interested in solving those problems, but ache to implement your favourite solution. I am not entirely sure that destroying the entire industrialized society is something we should do willy- nilly just to prevent the Earth from warming up two degrees over this century and the oceans rising perhaps one meter. And surely I can’t be the only one to have noticed how the political left, after the collapse of the Soviet Union punched the air out of its lungs, adopted the cause of global warming that, by an amazing coincidence, just so happens to require the exact same remedies that the political left has always wanted to implement anyway ever since the days of Wise Old Uncle Karl as a non-negotiable package deal. The most telling detail of the left’s dishonesty in this issue is their categorical opposition of nuclear power that is “too expensive”, even though they otherwise say that no price for halting global warming could possibly be too high, especially when other people pay that price. Besides, no matter how many gigawatts of coal were replaced by nukes, they tell us that this still wouldn't be enough to stop global warming. And yet it is essential for me to do my part in the war against global warming by replacing my old 0.00000004-gigawatt lightbulb. (Of course, United States could start fighting global warming and forcing the rest of the world to do the same, with the same cynical motivation as with the "Star Wars" missile defense project in the 1980's. That is, to bankrupt all its competitors in the world political stage.) To lie 24 times a second I once read about some American upper middle class housewife who was afraid of showing her true age. According to her, her husband had literally never seen her without makeup, and she was afraid that some day he would catch a glimpse of her true form. When I read that one, I was at a loss to understand how something like that could even be physically possible, unless the American upper middle class has some truly strange bedroom arrangements that I am completely unaware of. Then again, based on the sitcoms, it seems that Americans often forget (or don't even care) to lock their front doors, so hilarity ensues when Kramer or some other wacky neighbour barges in at the wrong time. Of course, television and movies might not always depict reality with complete fidelity. For example, movie ninjas seem to have this curious inverse strength property that they share with Aliens, Terminators, Agents and Predators. One of them could carry an entire movie as a mighty opponent that challenges the diverse band of heroes by picking them off one by one, but if you put together a hundred of them, these jokers become little more than bowling pins and can be mowed down like grass pretty much by anybody. Ow, my balls One important purpose of laughter is social signaling, as anyone can see by comparing how much and how loud you laugh when you watch a comedy alone, versus watching it with a bunch of friends or in a packed movie theater. Or just from the tracks of canned laughter used in sitcoms. Now, I fully admit that I am not the most social guy out there, but I do feel an occasional cringe every time I hear stupid laughter for some joke that wasn't that funny and anyone with a three-digit IQ saw coming a mile away, for example, in some presentation. The more intelligent the audience, the bigger my puzzlement and embarrassment for them. I can in fact remember the first time I felt this way. I was visiting a school chum in junior high when he was watching the third Indiana Jones movie on video. Nazis were holding Indy captive, and when Indy's father called him “Junior” Indy got angry, broke free and put down the nazis, after which he angrily shouted to his father “Don't call me Junior!” Apparently this was somehow really, really funny, since my chum rewound the tape to watch this line again, after which he then laughingly repeated it several times. As I looked at him, he seemed completely non-ironic in his hearty enjoyment. And this was not even a stupid guy, in fact he was clearly well above average in intelligence. Dictat, or... Whatever you say about free markets, the one thing they never do is lie about what people really want, and how much they want it. Every time you complain that the free market price of something, including the salary in some profession, is too high or too low for your tastes, your complaint ultimately boils down to saying that all those other people want wrong things, that is, they want too much of something and too little of something else, so they should be forced to behave as if their preferences actually were identical with yours. But clear thinking about economics doesn’t come naturally to our Pleistocene brains. We laugh at that fable about the village of simpletons who, when their bed blankets became too short for their growing kids, extended these blankets by cutting off a piece from one end and sewing it to the other. Or the more modern tale of a drunkard who could afford to drink every day because he always took his empty bottles back for a deposit. And yet many otherwise intelligent people believe, apparently not stopping even for one minute to think whether what they say makes any sense, that Henry Ford, the American entrepreneur whose worldview wouldn't probably stand much scrutiny from the modern perspective, gained his place in the canon of progressive feelgood policies for paying his workers the back then unheard-of high daily salary of $5, which made them wealthy enough to buy Ford automobiles, which in turn made the Ford company profitable. Morales One economics mystery worthy of Freakonomics would be to find out how the “clickers” working the Las Vegas Strip can have such an amazing job morale. These economically disadvantaged latino guys right out of the Palomar graphic novels get their collective name from the fact that they never say even one word except sometimes quietly at each other, but constantly make snapping sounds at people with business cards that advertise the services of busty and glistening ladies of the night whose actual photos may or may not grace these cards. If these guys are paid minimum wage or less (I am going to hazard a wild guess that most of them don't have all their immigration papers and work permits in perfect order), how does their employer know that the clicker won't simply throw his stack of cards into a garbage bin and go loiter somewhere for a few hours? The best hypothesis I could muster was that each card has a code that the client can give to the prostitute, and the clicker gets paid for results and actual clients. However, my investigation of a couple of these cards (for purely non-prurient interests) did not discover any extra markings or numbers in these cards. Virulent strains and susceptible individuals The glaring problem with the man-made HIV conspiracy theory is how reluctant its proponents are to follow this theory to its logical conclusions. For the sake of argument, assume for a moment that the HI-virus really was engineered by some evil conspiracy of rich genocidal conservatives (who, despite their primitive and anti-scientific world view, must have been about fifty years ahead of all mainstream science) with the goal of infecting and killing as many gay men, junkies and minorities as possible. Wouldn't this conspiracy straight out of the X-Files, having gone through all this trouble and effort, try to ensure that the infected keep spreading the virus to others, so that their precious HIV epidemic wouldn't fizzle out like so many other natural epidemics before it? Once you agree with this, then certainly the late William F. Buckley could not have been part of this conspiracy, since he famously wanted to stop the HIV-epidemic by tattooing the forearms and buttocks of those infected. And neither was Fidel Castro, who swiftly quarantined all infected Cubans to stomp down the epidemic in Cuba before it even got started. On the other hand, a conspiracy powerful and heartless enough to engineer such a killer virus probably wouldn't shy away from using agent provocateurs (or the useful idiots that the Western world has in abundance) to spread memes that help this virus to spread in the target population. Thirty years later, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see who these individuals were. Topology laid bare In game theory, following your Nash equilibrium strategy makes you indifferent to the choices and moves of other players, and if they choose not to follow their Nash equilibrium strategy, you can never do worse because of their suboptimal play. This same principle applies in the larger world in how the winning and true worldviews can allow defectors, whereas the losing and false ones can never allow anyone to opt out from them. This fundamental asymmetry always allows us to easily recognize which one is which. As the example of the Israeli kibbutzim illustrates, a free market society can allow socialists to even implement a full blown communism that allocates all jobs, resources and wealth among them, but socialism cannot symmetrically allow the free marketers live as they want inside it. (This is why it was so humorous when the late Howard Zinn said that his goal is “socialism without prisons”... as if the central planner could even exist once its peons did not need to fear the black car in the night.) In national level, this determines the way you build walls around your borders: those that follow successful policies have to build walls to keep other people out, whereas those that follow losing policies have to build walls to keep their own people in. Of course, many people seem to have great difficulties in distinguishing between these two kinds of walls, and think that the Berlin Wall that prevented the Ossies from defecting to the West is the exact same thing as the walls that the West erects to keep other people out. Equality of ephemeral quality The concept of “equality” is for progressives exactly what God is for fundamentalist Christians. Science can't even begin to prove that equality exists in any meaningful sense, and does not need that hypothesis. If anything, the entire physical universe appears to be as if equality were the last thing that it cared about. Yet the advocates of equality somehow feel in their hearts that this “equality” is everywhere, almost as if it were some sort of magical force field (see all those “If anybody anywhere is denied equality, we all are!” slogans), an ironclad law of the universe that everyone must always obey, or else. Those proselytizers tend to get huffy if you doubt the existence of equality or cordially inquire them where you could see, touch or taste this invisible “equality” thing (remember, the burden of proof always lies on the one who asserts the existence of something) or point out how very convenient it is that a priestly class living on tithes and indulgences is needed to explain to the masses the infinitely deep intricacies of equality. If you remind them of the horrendous totalitarian nature and the mass murders committed by societies that were explicitly based on the idea of equality, they will squirm and say that oh, but those weren’t “real equalists”, even though the only place where diverse people can by definition be equal is the mass grave, the logical end result of all societies based on the equality of outcome. Finally you can only give them the obvious analogy to “If God exists, let Him now strike me down to show it!” or ask “What stage of human evolution did equality evolve?” Who are you looking at now, Janus? Progressives all over the North America seem to have a deeply schizophrenic view of Europe. On one hand, Europe is their dreamy paradise of social democratic equality and correct thinking that both Canada and especially the accursed and backwards United States must be forced to transform themselves to, posthaste. On the other hand, Europe and especially its battalion of Dead White Males (an unprincipled exception is tacitly made for Hegel, Marx, Kant, Foucault, Derrida, and the entire Frankfurt School, who somehow don't count as DWM's, the same way that Whole Foods and Apple somehow don’t count as “corporations”), men who invented and discovered basically everything important ever, are a cancer on humanity and deserve nothing but contempt from every smart and enlightened person, seeing that Europe has never done anything for humanity. But perhaps the most hilarious misconception that progressives have about Europe is believing that Europeans have far more diversity of media, when all their media is basically state run and allows a very narrow range of opinion. Americans enjoy the most diverse media, it’s just that outside a few small enclaves, the American people choose to tune out the Marxist and other anti-American voices. A small urban demographic that wants to be European (but not that icky old colonialist kind) listens to NPR, the tireless advocate of pretty much everything that Stoner G. Ponytail and his fellow vegan anarchist collective concoct in their fart-sniffing drum circles while the welfare system picks up the tab. Let the punishment fit the victim The death penalty debate could be concluded overnight by allowing anybody to officially register as a death penalty supporter. Then, whenever either the murderer or his victim is a registered death penalty supporter, the death penalty would be available for that case, and otherwise the maximum punishment would be the life without. This way, both the supporters and opponents of death penalty would get the exact policy that they want. (Only some unlucky murderers would be worse off, but everyone else would be at least the same or better off.) We could later extend this policy to cover other crimes such as rapes and burglaries, so that everyone could choose themselves a general multiplier (the default value being 1.0), and the larger one of the multipliers of the criminal and his victim would be automatically applied to the sentence. For example, if you robbed somebody whose chosen multiplier were 5, your one-year prison term would become five years. This would automatically steer rational criminals to commit their crimes against those who are most indifferent to crime and indicate this with their choice of a low multiplier. That is, other criminals. As a nifty bonus, criminologists could directly measure the extent that criminals rationally respond to incentives in their choice of victims. Surely all good-hearted people who say we need to be more lenient towards criminals would advertise their position with a prominent yard sign, yes? And you like money too! Some people still claim, for example many students famously walking out of Greg Mankiw’s Econ 10 course in Harvard, that the theories of Karl Marx can be used to complement, rather than replace, neo-classicist economic thought. I am not entirely sure how that works, but I assume it resembles the way that the theory of phlogiston can be used to complement modern chemistry. Even so, there is no denying the stark reality of class differences. One day on the local bus, two low prole guys in their mid-twenties sat down next to me. The taller and skinnier one of them smelled like he had imbibed a few brewskis already, and the can that he was sipping from turned out not to be pop. But he did not cause any trouble at all, in fact quite the contrary, he delivered a very entertaining comedy monologue to the other guy. Imagine Dax Shepard in character, and you are not far off. His monologue started out as a prophetic vision of how global warming will soon bring forth disasters that the mankind has never seen before, but are now on live TV. From this he somehow segued to his work and how he can't understand how some people are able to live on $15/hour, as he just couldn't live like that because he likes to go out and can easily spend like $300 a night. Through this great trip, I sat there all nonchalant and pretended to look outside, surreptitiously holding my nose so that I wouldn’t start howling. Kittytown A court challenge failed to make brothels legal in Ontario. Reading the news stories about this, I thought that prostitutes might want to think twice of whether they really want the oldest profession to be treated the same as a grocer or a plumber, since this would subject them to the same regulations and responsibilities that other working stiffs have to toil under every day. For example, prostitutes could no longer discriminate against clients based on various forbidden grounds, such as ethnic background or criminal record. Sure, this sounds silly, but so did a few short years ago the idea that some restaurant owner could face the Human Rights Commission for not allowing a customer to smoke weed on his premises, even though he is, by Ontario law, simultaneously required to stop his customers from polluting his restaurants and other customers with tobacco smoke. Of course, it’s difficult to see that one ever becoming as popular a rallying point against discrimination as those infamous segregated drinking fountains back in the day. A legal brothel could also be held civilly and criminally liable for any sexually transmitted diseases its customers acquire, so at the very least, brothels would need a licensing and regulation mechanism not that different from that of the poultry industry. Let’s get this one thing straight A standard staple of modern television is the dumb white prole who expresses his distaste towards homosexuality but is later revealed to be a closeted homosexual, whereas trendy white hipsters are, without exception, 100% straight. But if you consider the evidence such as ponytails, liberal arts degrees with zero math content, collections of yaoi with pages stuck together, proclamations of how “men and women are fully interchangeable in everything” and that “everyone is bisexual” because all “sexuality is fluid” and therefore “everyone should constantly experiment” and “compulsory heterosexuality is oppressive”, their demands to see more homosexuality everywhere in the media and swooning over Omar of The Wire, to say nothing of how being “snarky” and “bitchy” are their highest forms of intellectualism, culminating in their obsession of revealing other people as gay while they vehemently deny their own homosexuality, your inescapable conclusion is that closeted homosexuality is vastly more common among progressive white males. The occasional conservative caught pants down with a rentboy in some public washroom is big news precisely because it's so rare. If all hipsters proudly came out of the closet together, if only as “men who have sex with men”, they wouldn't need to satisfy their repressed desires through activism, or maintain their united front of hypocrisy that simultaneously celebrates homosexuality and yet dismisses anybody who disagrees with them with some variant of “lol ur a fag”. Groupfeel Liberals certainly love to parrot the line “Reality has a well-known liberal bias” that Stephen Colbert has trained them to bark like circus seals on command, and to which a glib answer might be “Yes, as anyone can see simply by visiting any prison, AIDS ward, or basically any other place where liberals garner over 80% of votes.” But have they ever thought to ask themselves what this shibboleth even means? Probably not, since most of them could not even define the term “bias”, that is, the propensity to lean towards one of the several possible explanations that all equally fit the observations. Bias is by definition something in the observer, not the observed. Thus the sentence “Reality has a well-known liberal bias” is not even false, as it can't be ascribed a truth value any more than “Knitting is more yellow than October.” This sentence is a tribal chant no different from their second favourite sentence, “I listen to all types of music except country”, a feelgood proclamation that lets all humanities dropouts imagine that they have climbed to the intellectual elite of the nation by mindlessly parroting their leader on television. This is a revelation almost on the level of the famous prank of Alan Sokal, that liberals are literally unable to recognize nonsense that is practically glossolalia, as long as it strokes their ego and validates their prejudices. Needlepoints There are all these cracks and quips that always make me kick myself for not thinking them up first, such as how there are never any postmodernists in death row. (Or how in society in general, “postmodernist” really means “pre-Islamic”.) I certainly find it darkly amusing how quiet all those “there is no objective truth, but only competing narratives that are all equally valid” voices were in the Troy Davis case. Did these people perhaps consider it an absolute objective truth that death penalty is morally wrong? Hey, that's just your opinion, man. If you oppose death penalty, then don't execute anyone, but don't push your primitive and oppressive “values” down other people's throats if they make different choices. Second, the opponents of death penalty in America (and let’s face it, death penalty is problematic for the left only when it takes place in America) love to point out that black men comprise a demographically disproportionate share of the death row inmates, and yet they never complain about how men, period, comprise a vastly more disproportionate share of not only the death row, but all prison inmates? In a fair and just society that treats everyone equally, about half of all prisoners would be women. Surely you agree with this noble goal of equality, unless you are some disgusting and ignorant bigot who believes that different groups commit crimes in vastly disproportionate numbers. Casper the space ghost As an atheist, I accept the materialistic explanation to the questions of meaning of life and the existence afterlife. However, the choice between the two possibilities of the nonexistent afterlife of classic atheism and the various forms of pie heaven by a benevolent deity of your choice is a false dichotomy, since there are other, more disturbing and in certain sense far more plausible possibilities. After all, pure physicalism has nothing to say in explaining the existence of consciousness and qualia. Perhaps the most frightening possibility is that consciousness naturally emerges from a suitably complex configuration of physical matter, and continues to exist even after the disassembly of this matter. This would produce a physicalist afterlife but without any kind of benevolent designer to ensure our happiness in it. However, if this consciousness still has a physical location starting from the spatial coordinates where the physical configuration existed at the time of death, consider what happens when the physical Earth careens along its path through the universe, leaving this consciousness forever stranded alone in the vast emptiness, except passing through some star once in a billion years. The lone consciousness trapped for eternity is going to have a plenty of time to think about if anything could have been done differently while it still had a body. Hysterical Liberals accuse conservatives for being paranoid about terrorism (apparently already having forgotten their own hysteria in the nineties), yet are themselves deathly afraid of anti-abortion terrorism, despite the fact that, as one wag pointed out, more abortion doctors have been murdered in the Law & Order television series than in real life. It is certainly a revealing double standard how the left has no problem with the media constantly depicting working class evangelical Christians as violent and fanatical terrorists, but gets offended every time some Muslim is depicted as even remotely supporting terrorism. One can only imagine how their brains would explode if they ever met a Muslim who opposes abortion. (As most Muslims in the world do, even though our left would prefer not to think about this.) Until then, another fun way to stir up some cognitive dissonance would be for some man to wear one of those “I had an abortion” T-shirts, to implicitly remind people about how and why most abortions occur. It would be so easy to write a line for some male liberal activist character about how his girlfriend got pregnant but she was, like, brainwashed by patriarchy and wanted to keep the baby and become, like, a housewife, so he had to liberate her and take her to the abortion clinic, with an adoring audience of female activists cooing “He so totes gets feminism”. To say nothing of the way that the original progressives explicitly supported abortion to improve the race by eugenizing the undesirables, so wearing this shirt to some minority neighbourhood would be even more subversive. He who pushes for peace will soon receive nickel poisoning How exactly is the pacifist argument “Peace is better than war, so we should abolish all armies” any different from “A building that is not on fire is better than a building that is on fire, so we should abolish all fire brigades”? Probably I am again just being dense, but the more I think about it, the less I understand what the ideology of pacifism is even supposed to mean. It is better to be at peace than in the horrors of war... no shit, Sherlock, what’s next, an ideology of “armchairism” that says that it's better to lounge in your comfortable armchar in front of a fireplace than to stand out in the freezing rain and cold? A simple practical definition of a pacifist is someone who has outsourced his use of force, or the credible threat of such, to someone else. The moral posturing of such person with no blood spatter in his own hands is no different from someone who bites into a hamburger while claiming to be a vegan because he didn’t personally kill that particular cow. If anything, the person who hires someone to put on the uniform (note that this includes police and prison guards) and apply violence on his behalf is considered more responsible for the results than the one following his orders. On the practical level, actual pacifism pretty much only works against other pacifists anyway, or at least British gentlemen who, if you lie down on the railway tracks to protest the munitions train passing through, won't simply decide to run over the pesky pest. Terrace on a slippery slope If you twisted my arm, I would probably nominate the late John McCarthy as the twentieth-century scientist whose gap between the scientific genius and significance versus his public recognition was the widest. The inventor (or, depending on how much of a Platonist you are, “discoverer”) of the LISP programming language back in the decade of crew cuts and horn-rimmed glasses, McCarthy laid the framework for functional programming and its associated techniques such as garbage collection. Based on the quotes that he left behind, although not quite as conservative as another man of the same era who his name might be confused to, McCarthy was a temperamental conservative who believed in science and technology and had no time for the modern left that, despite its pose, stands firmly against both. His best known quotes say that whoever refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense and that it's possible to program a computer in English just as it is also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs, but he also presciently noted that inside of many liberals is a fascist struggling to get out, and that the peace movement has been a great force for peace, allowing some of the world's most quarrelsome people act out their aggressions through the peace movement. Make the pie wider Those who ask us to “celebrate our differences” rarely seem to celebrate differences in income and wealth and other outcomes, not quite realizing that diversity is by definition the opposite of equality, and differences between people and their decisions make different outcomes inevitable. They keep telling me that PBS is the most intelligent American news network and all its viewers are super smart, but I have my doubts, especially when they touted a study that revealed that most people would like the societal wealth distribution to be so flat that the richest quintile owned only three times as much wealth as the poorest quintile. The only thing that study and the reactions to it proved to me was that progressives are as innumerate as that one Amazonian tribe that has no numbers but only “none”, “one” and “many”. Even an perfectly equal society where every person had the exact same salary of which they saved the exact same percentage, the oldest fifth would still end up owning at least 60% of total wealth, for the simple reason that they have had much more time to accumulate their wealth with interest. Seeing this as unfair is identical to seeing it unfair that in a staggered Marathon race, the runners who have been running for two hours have covered a lot more distance than those who started five minutes ago. Everyone wants equality with those above them, not with those below them, but considering that the average person in the world has the disposable income of a couple of dollars a day, I think many a liberal would end up surprised how little he has left to spend on pot and arugula after his goal of 36-21-18-15-11 wealth distribution had been realized worldwide. Against the grain Hollywood is said to be “liberal”, but at least when it comes to the issues of gun rights and self-defense, gathering wealth that allows the reclusive hero to be independent of society and the nosey and intrusive welfare state, the “an eye for an eye” attitude towards crime including capital punishment served by the protagonist, and most importantly, the heredity of innate abilities that leads to a natural aristocracy of talent, Hollywood is just as “right-wing” as the Pioneer Fund. However, it’s always the little things that they choose to leave out that turn out the most revealing. I was recently flipping through the television grid and ended up in the middle of Bad Lieutenant on IFC, our edgiest television channel that never edits its films for content to avoid offending the sensibilities of the boring normos. Except this one. Can the reader now hazard a guess which scene was completely cut out? (In the Nic Cage remake, the girl in the car was a college co-ed, and depicted as enthusiastically consenting to annoy her beta boyfriend.) Another treasure trove of this was V for Vendetta, and especially its additional scenes that were not in the original graphic novel (how did those Muslims and gays get along in the concentration camps?), although you have to admire the Wachowski brothers for their courage to depict a collector (Stephen Fry) who proudly displayed the Koran next to homosexual material. Word The section Parents Just Don't Understand at the website College Humor regularly serves up funny little anecdotes that illustrate how unnatural computers are compared to everything else in the world, and even though they feel obvious to those who understand them, in reality they are not “obvious” at all, especially to the majority of people who couldn't begin to explain the difference between “browser”, “operating system”, “network”, “desktop”, and so on. I don't have any trouble whatsoever understanding why somebody would clear her Facebook wall every evening so that her friends would have space to write on it the next day. If you use a metaphor of the physical world to refer to something that really is a completely different thing, don't be surprised if your users ascribe the familiar properties of that physical thing on your thing, such as the fact that a “wall” will eventually run out of space. (Even most websites still act as if their “pages” had a fixed finite length, like books and magazines where this is a physical necessity.) The clear king of this insanity pile is still how you must always “save” things that you create, or otherwise they will stop existing. At least Google Docs and Blogger are slowly getting rid of “save”, the obscenity that was the greatest usability blunder of all computing, and should be tossed to the dustbin of history posthaste. Hic sunt dragones As astronomers tell us, reality weighs about 1050 tons, so trying to push against it makes even the biblical story of Jacob wrestling the angel seem like a cinch. In its current financial dire straits, America can simply no longer afford to pour hundreds of billions of dollars for its military might to serve as the world's unpaid policeman who bankrolls and operates expensive aircraft carriers that keep the peace in the problem straits of the world. Of course, the paleoconservatives have about zero problem with this, and in fact, it would be a superb idea for Barack Obama to fully embrace his inner “paleo” and announce truly massive cuts to the U.S. military spending, followed by an almost complete withdrawal of American troops and closing down their military bases all over the world. This would be followed by a terse announcement that should the other nations ever get in trouble with, say, China, Russia, the Somali pirates or pretty much anybody else who can use a slingshot and is not quite as benevolent a power as those aw-shucks all-American GI’s used to be, they can just pay the damn Danegeld or handle the problem some other way all by themselves. I would love to watch the reactions of both the American and the international left as they slowly came to realize the full consequences of their wishes becoming reality. Bang bang, that awful sound The initiative to completely ban all handguns is loudly advocated by urban white liberals, whereas people in the suburbs and rural areas are less enthusiastic about this, for reasons we can only speculate. The urban liberals really seem to be afraid of guns and the hands that hold them. But I have an idea for legislation that would solve this whole problem, and which I am sure both responsible gun owners and gun control advocates would find agreeable. Make gun ownership legal, but only to members of some officially registered gun club with some minimum number of members. Anyone would be allowed start such a club, but this club would have to purchase, from the free market, an insurance that pays to all shooting victims of any members of that club, perhaps to the tune of $10 million for each gun death. This simple requirement would give gun clubs a massive incentive not to let in any mentally ill, violent or dangerous people, and credibly signal the reliability of their screening process to insurance companies, since any doubt about this, let alone an actual mistake of letting in a killer, would instantly skyrocket their insurance premiums and make gun ownership prohibitively expensive for them. Then make mere possession of a handgun without belonging to a gun club an offense that gives you ten years in the slammer, and you are all set. Of course, this requires that each gun club is allowed to freely discriminate against anybody based on mental health and criminal record, which probably would not fly with the human rights crowd. Accurate descriptions of what never happened I have never been that enthusiastic about the famous witticisms of Oscar Wilde. I mean, of course that guy had a great act going before the era of modern communications and the Internet, but surely I can't possibly be the only one to have noticed that almost all of his one-liners are cut from the exact same cloth: take some sentence that is almost tautologically true or at least true by definition of its terms, and then switch some of its words or change them to their logical opposites, thus creating a paradoxical juxtaposition whose realization results in an instantaneous dramatic effect and comical release. As in, “These days any man can act dumb just by repeating what he finds in Google.” Perhaps some enterprising linguist or Perl maven could write a script to automatically produce an endless sequence of such Oscar Wilde finger-”quotes”. Such a script could scan masses of raw text produced by humans until it finds a sentence that contains interesting words, and is deemed by some well-chosen heuristic rules to be amenable for such conversion. Sick, or sickening? It is interesting how selectively people tend to appeal to both “wisdom of repugnance” and “precautionary principle” to justify their opposition of something they don’t like, while at the same time they decry their use as primitive emotionalism all those times that these principles would oppose something that they support. (For example, compare the arguments against nuclear power, versus those against gay marriage.) As for the level of argumentation one typically sees on the Internet, back in the day there was the reality-inspired joke about some statistically illiterate person protesting against some observed correlation with the words “But it doesn’t always correlate!” On the Internet, you can't go far without seeing the juvenile bumper sticker refutation “Correlation is not causality! Bwaak!” squawked whenever somebody points out some interesting correlation. Well, of course that's true in certain sense: with the possible exception of some enlightened zen masters who are as opaque of black pools of water, none of us are able to observe causality directly, and so need to infer the existence of causality from the observed correlations. However, another far more relevant and useful bumper sticker that I'd like to see become more widespread would be “Correlation demands an explanation, and the more so, the more causally unrelated the correlated things are.” When the unstoppable cartel met the immovable monopsony I am a rather atypical wingnut in that I have always enthusiastically advocated public transit, the most productive of all government services that actually creates wealth instead of merely shuffling it around between various interest groups in a negative-sum fashion. Having said this, public sector unions and especially the transit unions going on a strike are still a horrendously bad idea. Just because transit is essential for society, it does not follow at all that transit workers should get paid however much they have the nerve to ask. Salaries are not determined by some central planner who decides how “essential” each job is, but by how much it costs in the free market to get a sufficient number of people to do that job with reasonable competence. Many other things (hydro, police, garbage collection) are even more essential for the city and the people in it, and yet we don’t pay the people who provide those services everything they ask. It is equally difficult to see how forcing the poor people, students and other car-free valuable citizens to scramble for alternative and expensive means of transport advances the cause of social justice. Some cynic might even point out the inherent contradiction between the Old Left, those unionized blue collar guys in windbreakers who drink their beers non-ironically in backyard BBQ's and who could not begin to tell you who Jacques Derrida or Rigoberta Menchu were, versus the New Left, the college student activists and virtuecrats of all trendy social justice causes. Robots in disguise Chaz Bono said in one interview that she now “knows” what it feels like to be a man, unintentionally raising thorny epistemological and ontological questions of knowledge and essence. But transsexuals are the true transhumanists of today, boldly using cutting-edge medicine and technology to alter their physical existence to be more to their liking. Even so, a couple of things. First, I trust that we will never again hear that nonsense of how all differences between men and women are socially constructed. (If they were, what could a doctor's scalpel do about them?) Second, if everyone “really” is what they feel “inside” regardless of their corporeal form, how far does this principle extend? Instead of the cliched example of a mental patient who thinks he really is Napoleon (the bicorne always seems to be helpfully issued by the mental institution to go with the straitjacket and maniacal laughter), suppose somebody honestly believes he really is of different race than what he was born as. For example, some guy who is whiter than the proverbial captain of a ship filled with a cargo of chalk feels that he is actually a black man. Should he now put on blackface paint and a big afro wig, and starts talking “jive” to his fellow citizens, is the rest of the world obligated to go along with this? If not, what is the essential (pun fully intended) difference here? That’s the discipline The popular Internet forum Reddit is a heavily left-leaning echo chamber long past the parody horizon, but that is precisely why its threads that I have dubbed “If only the Leader knew!” can be so darkly amusing, with some liberal asking the hive mind for help for some serious problem in his life without realizing that his problem was caused by liberalism. For example, a male college student being falsely accused of rape by a vindictive ex-girlfriend, or a TA accused of racism for finding plagiarism in the term papers of precisely the black students in his course. However, one interesting nonpartisan thread was launched by a question inspired by real life, and garnered well over 2,000 responses. Suppose you are alone at a gas station, and an 11-year-old kid approaches you to ask for a ride home five miles away. Your response? Mine would have been exactly the same as it is to the question of what I would do if, taking a walk through some new-to-me neighbourhood, I saw a crying kid of pre-school age wandering all by himself. Just stay the hell away. And that was the exact response of the overwhelming majority of serious commenters (that is, no jokes about Chris Hansen or “gas, grass or ass”). Even with honestly benevolent intentions to help the kid, there are just too many things that can go wrong and destroy your life. Suppose the toddler is confused of the directions to home, so you take his hand and start taking him the wrong way, and the enraged parent catches up after you moments later, not in the state of mind to listen to any explanations. Sorry, not going to happen. If it's the choice between one lost kid and my entire future, then there really isn't anything for me to choose, brother. Blue light special The easiest way to instantly tell which way some neighbourhood leans in elections is to step inside a fast food restaurant and check if you can simply walk into the bathroom, or whether you have to ask somebody behind the counter to buzz you in. Liberals talk big about equality, but the sad fact remains that liberal areas have far more inequality, crime, unhappiness, distrust and most other bad things than conservative areas. The political scientist Robert Putnam of the Bowling Alone fame intentionally held back his findings of how diversity erodes social trust and causes people to hunker and isolate themselves and thus destroys the fabric of co-operation in local communities, because he didn’t want to give ammunition to conservatives. (And then they wonder why somebody might see it as a problem that academia and media have become a trendy echo chambers spanning the entire ideological spectrum from liberalism to Marxism.) Of course, they are only hastening their own slide to utter irrelevance. I also find it fitting that liberals with their expensive degrees in puppetry and various resentment studies, objectively the most ardent advocates of societal Balkanization, will also be the ones to get smacked in the mouth by it in their personal daily lives, since the only language they ever understand and respect is violence. We relatively wealthy conservative white males with useful knowledge can just vote with our feet and move out to greener pastures far away from liberalism and its snarling hatred of normalcy. Omne ignotum pro magnifico When those scientists warned us that advanced space aliens might destroy Earth as a precautionary move because humans are insufficiently left- wing, that fit nicely into something I have noticed over the years about the progressive psychology and their uncanny universal ability to project all their beliefs and desires to the foreign cultures. For example, a typical member of the “creative class” in either USA or Canada despises Arizona for actually enforcing laws against illegal immigration and having the death penalty, and then warns us that allowing Arizona to enforce the nation’s laws on immigration will cause the Chinese and the Middle Eastern people to dislike America so much that they don't want to immigrate there. Really. In Finland, his equally trendy counterpart would argue that unless Finland takes in every Somali who wants to come in to enjoy the Nordic welfare state, the top foreign talent will be so concerned about this that they will no longer bring their expertise to serve the Finnish universities and corporations. That one famous quip about God needs to be adapted for our secular times: you can tell that you have created your own Exotic Other, when he shares your hatred of America and the social classes below the one that you aspire to be seen as, and for the exact same reasons as you do. The fire within I am old enough to remember how the left used to proclaim that burning the flag is a sacred act of free speech and the highest form of patriotism that only some stupid and narrow-minded people could oppose. Of course that was only a bare-faced lie, just like everything else they have ever said, as seen in their outraged reaction to the stunt of pastor Terry Jones to burn the Koran. Amazing how quickly burning the sacred symbols of your ideological opponents turned into a despicable crime against humanity. But this stunt also highlighted a far more important point. Just like they did with the Soviet Union back in the day, liberals see Muslims as a Moloch, a force of nature that cannot be expected to react rationally to slights and offenses. In the eyes of the Western verbal intellectual, the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union yesterday and Islam today is not a bug but a feature. It is their true appeal for every intellectual who now simmers in resentment of how the free market allows the masses to make their own decisions and simply ignore his superior taste and knowledge. For all their grandstanding about equality, tolerance and reason, intellectuals secretly worship unconstrained and amoral power, and are drawn to it like moths to flame. If the tyrant ultimately ends up eliminating them, even such a death has more grandeur than being the butt of “I’ll have fries with that” jokes. Kerbed In addition to the inexpensive products that Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and other corporations produce for the masses, they emit status particles (would these be called “statuons”?) for progressives who can distinguish themselves from the masses by visibly not shopping there. Costco hires only the top applicants and can therefore afford to pay them top dollar with generous benefits. Unfortunately, their business model doesn’t scale. For the associates unloading trucks, stacking shelves and mopping floors for Wal-Mart, the higher salaries paid by Costco are irrelevant, since they have no chance of ever even getting a job interview there. Sure, Wal-Mart could change its business model and become more like Costco, but this would mean letting go two out of three of the associates it currently employs. There is also an elephant in this room that progressives would rather ignore. Every time I have been to the local Costco, the vast majority of the cashiers were white women of middle class appearance, whereas our local Wal- Mart sports far more diversity in both customers and associates. Perhaps the average progressive doesn’t fully realize why he feels more “comfortable” shopping at Costco. But ultimately all this boils down to a very simple question about which side of the fault line between the New Left and the Old Left you stand on: do you want everything to cost more for the average person, or do you want everything to cost less? I know you are, but what am I? Perhaps the most useless piece of advice that otherwise intelligent people routinely spout to each other is “Just be yourself.” By definition, this advice can never be useful to anybody; for those whose “yourself” is already good enough, this advice is redundant, whereas for those whose “yourself” is deficient for the problematic situation, it is at best harmful and at worst destructive. Of course we are all blind to how ridiculous we look when we mindlessly regurgitate feelgood slogans, just like when someone educates you of how nuclear power causes cancer and oppresses the Third World, while a cigarette defiantly hangs from his mouth. Another ridiculous term that I propose to retire for good is “self-hating”. I can’t recall even one time that I have seen this term correctly used about somebody who truly hated himself, or the group that he represents. This term is always used about those who hate the other people in their ethnic group or in the social class that they are in danger for being mistaken for, even as they like to think of themselves as something higher. Even those rare times that some “self-hating” person appears to be criticizing himself, there are always enough implicit clues and disclaimers to make it clear even to the most dense of his listeners that he is superior because unlike those other dumb people in his group, he is smart enough to see and deflect all those things that are so very bad and wrong with them. Knowing their place When the Finnish renegade sociologist Henry Laasanen published his book about disparities of sexual power, one feminist gender studies researcher angrily retorted that if these “loser men” find it such a big problem that they don't get enough sex, they should just go have sex with each other, receiving a hearty laugh and applause from her compatriots in the audience. Even the most left-wing feminists who support massive wealth redistribution and oppose all “hierarchies” and “discrimination” suddenly become rhetorically indistinguishable from Ayn Rand the moment somebody brings up sexual inequality. It's also revealing how the word “loser” (someone who doesn't play the game so well that he would at least occasionally win) now means men who are sexually unattractive, as if love and attraction were some kind of a “game”. More importantly, nobody else seemed to notice that an enlightened progressive of the highest caliber explicitly admitted that sexual orientation can be changed at will. But so it always is with the phenomenon summarized in the Japanese saying “Chasing the rabbit, the hunter is blind to mountains.” It's always amazing what you can trick progressives to accidentally admit when they, in a fit of short-sighted desire to score some minor point, temporarily forget all their greater axioms, goals and principles. I can only compare that incident to back when that one Ugandan priest famously showed gay scat videos to his shocked congregation, and the Western liberal reaction was essentially to make monkey noises. Small society, big people Everyone must have seen those “Jesusland vs. Coastalia” proposals to split the United States in two separate countries. The idea was that “Jesusland” is so much poorer and dependent on the Federal pork that they would soon realize their folly and come crying back to their betters. This meme is a beautiful example of the utter inability of liberals to even conceptualize change and unintentional consequences, since they see all of reality as a perfectly compartmentalized machine whose individual parts they can tinker with at will without these changes ever bleeding into other parts. After such split, “Jesusland” would no longer be subject to any of their beloved “Great Society” laws, policies and legal precedents currently enforced by the U.S. Federal Government. If you think that the exodus of corporations and the productive middle class from California, New York and other “blue” states is a problem today, just imagine how much faster corporations would vote with their feet and families would storm the moving vans to follow them into red states once these states could offer them complete freedom from Social Security, open borders, minimum wages, cap and trade, Obamacare, Griggs vs. Duke Power, Lilly Ledbetter, ADA and countless other economic burdens that the Coastalia would keep piling on itself in its suddenly unconstrained freedom to turn itself into an European social democratic welfare state that invites literally everybody in the world to come in to suckle its teat. Distinctively instinctive A debate still simmers about to what extent homosexuality is nature and nurture. However, a far more interesting question is why homophobia (in its present definition, any criticism of homosexuals or dislike towards their activities) exists, and whether that might have a biological basis. Could homophobes simply be “born that way”? Strict heterosexuality does not confer a Darwinian advantage, since bisexual men actually have more children on average than straight men. But if bisexuality is an evolutionary advantage, how come natural selection then didn't eventually make every human male bisexual? Because during most of our evolutionary history, nobody had the faintest idea of what viruses and bacteria are, and for obvious reasons of combinatorics, sexually transmitted diseases spread a lot easier if most men are bisexual, compared to the present reality where only a couple of percent are. Therefore on the continuum from simple disinterest towards man-on-man action all the way to an outright revulsion towards it, homophobia would be a huge survival advantage in the Pleistocene. And it is difficult to feel instinctive disgust towards some act without some of that disgust bleeding over to people practicing the act, or the social climbers who wish to display their enlightenment by hiding their own disgust while publicly proclaiming that act beautiful. Seeking its own level Bitter complaints about how the city of Toronto does not offer enough subsidised housing below the market rents but the waiting lists are a decade long perennially pop up in the local media. Of course, any thinking person should immediately realize that there can never be enough anything, including housing, sufficiently available below its free market price, since this free market price is by definition the aggregate of the wants and preferences of all people. If anybody could, without any waiting, get a subsidized apartment of the quality no worse than what is available in the free market for twice the price, why would anybody ever acquire housing from the free market? If the price of something is artificially repressed below its free market level, its demand will exceed its supply, and if rationing with price is not allowed, waiting time will unfortunately have to do this rationing, as much the left likes to base its policies on the presumption that your time has zero value. Even if the Toronto Community Housing Corporation somehow managed to scoop up every single apartment in Toronto, this still wouldn't be enough, since that would only make Toronto far more inviting for many people who have currently decided that the city is too expensive for them to live in, and have therefore made the correct choice to live in some place cheaper. On the same page Whatever machines can be programmed to do, humans should not be doing, at least when human labour, especially the college-educated variety, is so expensive. I am probably naive to assume that the primary purpose of the library system is to provide good books for the reading public, instead of serving as a cornucopia of unionized jobs for a bunch of NDP-voting unemployables to twiddle their thumbs in quiet “neighbourhood branches”. The hysterical reaction of the Toronto progressives to Rob Ford saying that in the budget crunch of the city, some of the neighbourhood branches might have to close, was certainly illustrative. Shutting down even one of these tiny branches would be a travesty equivalent to razing the Library of Alexandria. The funniest thing about this tantrum is that in ten years, Toronto will not have even five brick-and-mortar libraries open to the public. In the year 2022, the computational power of today’s iPad comes for free with your breakfast cereal, and the actual tablet computers (the category of “e-book readers” long since folded into mere “computer”) will be something that none of us is even able to imagine today. In that world, nobody will physically travel to a library (or as they will be known then, “de facto homeless shelters” like they already are in many American cities) any more than they would go to Blockbuster to rent a movie on a VHS tape to be returned the next day. Until that glorious day, shutting down perhaps thirty of the 99 locations of the Toronto Library System, and using just half of the money saved to buy actual books for the remaining branches that stayed open later, would be a sweet deal for most Torontonians. Kale Sometimes old and discredited ideas manage to climb out of the dustbin of history by adapting a new name better suited to the zeitgeist. In economics, the failed ideology of mercantilism has been resurrected as localism, the doctrine that only the energy used for food transportation matters, so it's more ecological to eat produce grown inside a local greenhouse instead of exotic stuff grown in the warm tropical sun. According to localists, you should only eat foods grown at most 100 miles from where you live; why this particular suspiciously round number instead of, say, 50 or 150, to say nothing of the blatantly Anglocentric use of “miles”, they never explain. Localism certainly did not work very well for Ireland from 1845 to 1852, and it is probably not a coincidence that localism, just like “slow food”, mostly flourishes in regions that essentially have no winter and thus get fresh produce all year around. Curiously, those who most advocate localism when it comes to food, also seem to be the least localist of all people when it comes to basically every other aspect of life where they proudly display their cosmopolitan credentials. On one hand they tell us that airline travel is bad because it causes global warming, but on the other hand, they sneer at all those provincial rubes who don’t even own passports and have never travelled to all those exotic and authentic locations not yet spoiled by international corporations and Western values. The beast from 20,000 fathoms We almost always know “what” before “how” in the way the reality actually is, at least in the aspects that are relevant to our survival and success, is almost always apparent to us before we know why it is the way it is. We can directly observe the outcomes in the real world, but we have to infer the causalities and the underlying reasons for these outcomes, assuming that we are interested in them or perhaps even want to affect or change them. This is almost as if we were at sea and could see clearly all the way to the horizon, but under the calm surface there is an immense world that is invisible to us, except for perhaps those who occasionally dive there inside a bathyscape to momentarily glimpse small parts of this dark underworld that is so unwelcoming and hostile to us. Just like the fish get to experience the underworld all the time but have no idea of what is happening on the surface, I have to wonder if there exist creatures opposite of humans so that they can directly observe causalities and the underlying reasons as facts, but are unable to observe the outcomes. Tornado got Old Yeller A recent study found that most people would not kill their favourite pet for even a million dollars. Topping even that glurge bomb that studied what people tend to most regret on their death beds, I offer this study as the final nail in the coffin of all these so-called “studies” that ask people what they would do in hypothetical situations, as opposed to measuring from real-world data what they really tend to do in reality, especially when the socially acceptable “correct” answer is obvious to any non-autistic person who was not raised in a barn. (For this reason, I don’t give much weight for any polls about nuclear power: only when the blackouts really begin, we'll see if normal people will accept the fate that their green betters parroting the slogans written by their long dead Stasi masters have planned for them.) Now, of course these answers are all just posing and not really thinking through the offer, but if, just for the sake of the argument, we actually took these answers as being serious, the inescapable logical conclusion is that these people think that their pets are more important and deserving than thousands of desperately poor people whose lives they could massively improve with a million dollars. Sure, you can argue that things closer to you are more valuable to you by the virtue of merely being closer to you. Fair enough, and in general up to the certain limit, of course I wholeheartedly agree with this principle. However, in that case I will never again also listen to your complaints that capitalist society is totes unequal and doesn't do enough for poor people, domestic or abroad. Why the hell should I, since you already established that you literally consider those people lower than animals? Quadrivium In this age of instant telecommunications so advanced that even the very term itself seems obsolete, there should be absolutely no reason whatsoever for a college course, all its lectures, exercises and materials delivered online to watch and read wherever you want, to cost more than $50, or $100 if you also want to own a dead tree textbook. Surely some group of geniuses deep in the Google skunk works is toiling on this as we speak, with some ten million dollar seed money from between Larry's couch cushions. This would spell death to the vast majority of universities that promise parents ivy-encrusted old quads (as an aside, isn't it strange how shit that we would not tolerate for one second in any other walk of life, such as decrepit old buildings whose insulation and bathrooms I don't even want to think about, are for some reason good things when it comes to universities?) and world famous professors teaching small groups of diverse students just like Plato in the Agora, but then corral 300 freshmen who have no choice into a lecture hall to be taught by either a famous researcher who barely speaks English and doesn't particularly like teaching punkass kids anyway, or some tenure track slave who couldn’t get out of the job of preparing and reading through the exact same slides as in every other university in the world. At least in a community college or a night school you get to learn the exact same stuff in a class of at most thirty adults who all want to be there, taught by somebody who speaks proper English. A wise man sidesteps the problems that the smart man can solve A simple but effective quick rejection test for what constitutes a “sport” is that if some fat guy in his fifties can be a world class player in it, then it is not a sport. Even so, poker has given the English language colourful expressions such as “ace in the hole”, “poker face” and “call your bluff” that are useful and expressive in many non-poker situations. In this spirit of mythological cowboys and frontier saloons, I’d like to see one expression coined by the poker writer Matt Matros become common parlance, since it applies far more widely than only to poker. An “alien problem” means some problem that might be fun, interesting and educational to analyze, and it would be really important to know the solution if you ever found yourself in that situation, but the point is that you shouldn't even be having that problem in the first place, because it can only have resulted from you having made choices that are obviously wrong and easily avoidable. At the poker table, the description of an alien problem might begin “So I called a raise and re-raise preflop from the small blind with my jack-three offsuit...” Say no more. Don’t call a raise and re-raise from the small blind when you have nothing but a measly jack-three offsuit, and you won’t have to think about how to get out of problems like that. Outside the poker table, consider any problem that starts with the words “So, I have been having a steamy secret affair with the wife of this violent mob boss, and now she...” Better off dead Suppose a magic genie offers you the possibility to suddenly become a billionaire and live your life accordingly. However, the catch is that n days from now, you will be killed by being thrown alive into a pool of hungry crocodiles. How big would n have to be for you to accept this deal? Naturally, the genie will not allow you to cheat by committing a painless suicide at day n - 1. On the other hand, should you die of some other cause without your own fault before this scheduled crocodile feeding time, well, that’s how your life turned out. Next, modify this thought experiment so that you are on your deathbed about to expire, although without pain thanks to modern medication. The same magic genie offers to bring you back to perfect health (but this time, gives you no extra money), with the same fate of becoming live bait for crocodiles awaiting you n days from now. How big would n now have to be for you to accept this deal? These thought experiments illustrate how lopsided our ideas of life and death really are, in how we consider somebody unlucky for dying a quick but horrible death, even though before his death he got to enjoy far more life than someone else who died a peaceful death after his nondescript and mundane life. They can eat anything, and the end result is always the same Newspaper reporters know perfectly how to slant each story and what details they must sweep under the rug, doing this in perfect concert with little discord to ruin the narrative. In the reporting of the case of a Toronto man who brutally beat up a family of raccoons that had infested his beautiful garden, you had to read all the way to the last paragraph of the long front page article to finally see one particularly revealing detail grudgingly acknowledged. Of course, humanity is not entirely logical when it comes to how different animals must be treated. One day at the open air bus platform at the subway station, there was an entire row of pigeons all puffed up for the winter. As they were sitting there minding their own business, I wondered why exactly these rock pigeons are considered filthy pests, the “flying rats” of urban environment. They didn't seem any more filthy to me than crows, sparrows, seagulls or any other avians that you might see around. Perhaps when you congregate in large numbers to eat garbage and have dark feathers, that is bad, as opposed to being domesticated and lily white, in which case you are a beautiful animal with high symbolic value even if you are otherwise biologically identical. But were there rats of equal size running around the platform in search of food and shelter, everyone would freak out and demand these critters to be exterminated. Yet pigeons are just as unhygienic as rats, and also not anywhere as cute as pets. Then again, pigeons are far better accustomed to urban life than rats in how rarely they attack or bite humans. When you have unions on your side One subway station in Toronto that I often use always has a guy in a transit uniform sitting idly to watch over an open gate through which the commuters can enter by dropping the payment in a mechanized box. It must be nice in today’s economy to have a cushy union do-nothing job that still pays $25 per hour. The same station also has a ticket booth for the neighbouring city of Mississauga, an armored box manned by two people during the official daytime hours even though I don’t think I have ever seen anybody buy anything there, especially since the kiosk inside this station that Apu keeps open late also sells Mississauga Transit tickets. In the future, Her Majesty’s finest scientists might one day design an Automated Machine, perhaps running on steam, to mimeograph and sell tickets to travellers. But this symbolizes nicely the progressive support for unions, echoing that principle that even though eyebrows are not really needed for anything, you sure do look weird if you shave them off. Perhaps we should modestly propose that to close the wage gap between the sexes and to prevent the economic exploitation of women and minorities, their minimum wage should be legally set to at least $30 per hour, and then sit back and watch the progressives squirm as they tried to explain why they oppose this. That lesson in economics would be funnier than a game of Jeopardy between Sarah Palin, Cynthia MacKinney and Sheila Jackson Lee. Necessity never made a good bargain You don't really believe in the truth of some idea unless you consider yourself justified to shoot somebody on its behalf. When advocating a policy that requires violence for its implementation, it is seldom necessary to explicitly call for the violence, since once people agree to implement the policy, the necessary violence will inevitably follow anyway. The global warming movement assures us that, aside from the occasional jokes about blowing up dissidents, they don't actually want to kill anybody. That is certainly nice of them. However, what these people may have convinced themselves about what they “want” is utterly irrelevant, no different from saying that you are going to lock twenty people inside a poison gas chamber with only ten gas masks, but hey, you don't “want” anybody to die. The massive changes to the industrial society required to stop the calamity of world temperatures rising by one or two degrees within this century by cutting the global carbon emissions by at least half, would entail the deaths of millions of people in the inevitable massive energy and food scarcity. And this especially if we also shut down all nuclear plants the way the environmentalist movement demands. The imprisonment and elimination of thousands of dissidents who refuse to play ball would be but a rounding error in all this. We all scream for heroin The modern left that opposes the right of sovereign Asian countries to make drug traffickers wear the hempen necktie has comically found itself on the side of the unrepentant old white colonialists of the Opium Wars. The standard argument for drug legalization says that all problems of drugs really result from drugs being illegal, drug users being forced to commit crimes to get their daily doses of dope, whereas if drugs were legal and sold openly at cost plus a reasonable profit margin and tax used for rehabilitation, junkies wouldn't have to rob, steal and burglarize to afford their fix, but could maintain a perfectly normal middle-class lifestyle between the bouts of messing up their heads and still sober up by Monday morning just like the rest of us normos. However, if we ask those who know a lot about drugs and actually have a lot to lose if they are wrong, that is, the drug cartels themselves, all of them have a strict policy of being highly intolerant towards their members using drugs, since they know perfectly well how unreliable junkies are in positions of actual responsibility. I find this to be by far the most condemning evidence against drug legalization. Why exactly should the rest of society need to take the risk with its people who are in positions of responsibility, such as airline pilots, air traffic controllers or heart surgeons, when the drug cartels are not willing to take an equal risk in their lives? Schizoink Don’t make the mistake of re-reading those cherished Far Side cartoons: as fresh and revolutionary as that strip was in the nineties, by today’s standards it would be at most an average webcomic. The greatest gift that the newly returned Beavis & Butt-Head gave our culture was in how it made it acceptable to use crude and simple animation and art to discuss deep concepts. Without this intelligent cartoon about unintelligent people we would not today have xkcd, SMBC, those amateurishly charming “rage comics” with their homemade appeal that illustrates Robert Crumb’s notion that amateurs make the best art, and other works that turn simplicity to virtue and by abstracting away all irrelevant details, are as easy to read as the plain text that you are currently reading. Occasionally you see these angry amateur comics that try really hard to be real “art” by intentionally making the comic as messy and physically painful to read as possible, including the use of artist's own handwritten font. This is an interesting fallacy, akin to believing that if you typeset your novel using a boldface italics font, your story becomes daring and takes place in Italy. On the art level, regardless of how deep and difficult the story told by your art is, a graphic novel should always have a good flow so that reading it is physically effortless. This is the exact same principle as that design maxim that if you consciously notice the font, then that font is bad. When small men cast long shadows Throughout the history whenever conquerors enslaved some people, to break their spirit they had to subvert and eradicate the holy days and celebrations of that culture and replace them with their own. For example, during each Gay Pride Week and Earth Week and especially the Earth Hour, Toronto Star can be counted to be chock full of photos of cool people totally spontaneously celebrating these new important and exciting holidays. Yet even as an atheist I see the societal value of traditions that have passed the test of ages. If all existing social structures and traditions, especially religion, were eradicated as oppressive, the result would not be a Happy Happy Scientopia where everyone dresses in long clean robes and discusses the theories of Derrida as they walk amidst gargantuan Le Corbusier cityscapes out of some Moebius graphic novel, and everyone has casual sex with everyone else regardless of gender identification and without any jealousy. The end result will far more likely be an utter chaos of paganism, superstition, oppression and slavery. Merely by looking at Europe we can already see this development in full swing. Once they get to taste the power, the enlightened secularists also always end up being far more tyrannical and puritanical than the Christian conservatives they so fear. One good example of this phenomenon were those Swedish female members of European Parliament who spearheaded an EU-wide law to ban the attractive and sexy women in advertisements. Hello there, tall, dark and handsome That brief scene in Mars Attacks where the marauding Martians blast around wildly while announcing with a loudspeaker that they “come in peace” was nicely prescient and symbolic of many current events. I Want a New Left, an excellent blog of “self-critical leftism”, once compiled a list of a dozen partial explanations to the paradox of why the Western left is in cahoots with Islam, the ideology that openly wants to destroy everything that the left stands for. However, even this wide list ranging from “stuck to the sixties” and “the unity of the causes” to the inevitable “America is always the bad guy” left out perhaps the most important reason. Deep down, the left knows that its societal revolution has been hollow and its fruits bitter, and they secretly despise the emasculated men all around them who have submitted under their rule and had their spirits broken. (The Soviets used to call the broken men in their occupied nations “shit eaters”.) This is especially annoying for the female leftists who can’t find the geldings around them sexually exciting. Muslims, on the other hand, do not submit under anyone’s rule but only that of the Almighty, and are beautiful Strong Horses full of exotic authenticity and vibrant life who possess the will to shrug off every leftist shibboleth without frankly giving a damn. By submitting herself under the rule of a Muslim male, a progressive Western woman can simultaneously give the finger to the Western male and his icky culture, and fulfill her desire to be seen and treated as a woman by a real man who she can genuinely look up to. I predict that such unions will vastly increase in near future. When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a ponytail As of this writing, those Occupy tantrums are slowly disbanding even before the chilling winter winds had the chance to drive these piglets back home. But it’s not like history hasn’t seen before an organic movement of resentful economic losers, frustrated of how the world that once held such great promise for them is now passing them by, who finally took it to the streets in a mass movement that worships youth, action and emotion instead of logic and concrete goals other than liberating the oppressed masses from the grip of the tentacles of a shadowy cabal of bloodsucking and usurious international bankers. The idealistic attempt of these morons, overeducated above their intelligence in everything that does not produce anything of value for other people, to reboot a new and less materialistic civilization from Year Zero, was not without its comedy. Especially since in many Occupied cities, horny hipsters whose ironic moustaches were buzzing in anticipation of female companionship had to be physically separated from their female comrades when they sadly misunderstood the idea of re-enacting Tahrir Square. For all their proclamations of open borders and internationalism, the Occupiers never seemed to realize that they belong to the worldwide 1%. There really is no reason why their beloved redistribution should stop within the borders of one nation, no matter how wealthy, when there are billions of far hungrier mouths, including little Miguelito, N'dugu and Ping, out there crying for equality. Manufacturing wins Everyone should by now know that casino gambling is a negative expectation activity, to be practiced for entertainment for stakes you can afford to lose, in the same spirit as seeing a movie or enjoying a bottle of wine. There is this common advice that “you should quit when you are ahead”, which, if you think about it even for a moment, is utter nonsense in mathematical or any other sense, except in the special case that you are gambling for the last time in your life. If you intend to come back tomorrow, your chance of winning the next hand will be exactly the same as it would have been right now. The decision whether to keep going or quit should be based solely on whether your current enjoyment exceeds the expected value of the game: otherwise you are playing for too high stakes anyway. As the common advice of poker cash games points out, your life is all just one long session whose “breaks” are completely artificial, so trying to quit while you are ahead for this session is no different from the obvious absurdity of trying to quit while you are ahead for this ten minutes. You may have also noticed how people ask someone who was first up $100 and then lost it and then a $100 more why he didn't quit the moment that he was $100 ahead... but they never ask this exact same question those nights when he ends up winning $500? Harm-ony Near the Lake Ontario there is a new park with all kinds of facilities for kids, and at the end of this park I was amused to see a sign that said that the area is being “naturalized”. Since I am a naturalized citizen, I was naturally interested to learn what this term means. But when the very first sentence says “Naturalization is a thing we all take very seriously”, you just know that you are in the presence of Grade AAA environmentalist Newspeak. Naturalization seems to be an euphemism for not receiving maintenance, and the items listed in the sign were euphemisms for what inevitably happens when you leave some area unmaintained. “Invite the wildlife”, indeed. But at least we now know how Mississauga manages to remain debt-free while the neighbouring Toronto spirals deeper in the hole. Later that day I saw a storefront whose standalone sign advertised health therapies with “quantum touch” and “herbology”. The front of the store had various inspirational and trendy slogans, and the one that especially caught my eye was “The planet, revolves around you!” These people certainly knew their customer demographic. Investigating deeper, in their section of beauty products I noticed a perfume named Nothing sold in little hand-crafted pyramid boxes, illustrating how New Age is nihilistic sociopathy elevated to the status of a religion. Chains of choice Most people have a rather distorted view of wealth, but not in the sense that the left likes to complain about in its rather transparent attempts to guilt productive people to let them control more of it. First, as much as we dream of “getting rich quick” without any sweaty effort, a society where something like that is possible would be a horrible place to live in, since it would have to be so economically inefficient that its residents would be much poorer and less free than we are in their invisible shackles that allow a few lucky people to profit without effort. In a society full of opportunity and competition, there are not many of those proverbial hundred-dollar bills lying on the sidewalks. We are all so very rich because we don’t have the power to rule other people, but are surrounded by invisible constraints that emerge from the other people’s free choices, most of them not choosing to make you or me millionaires. Second, when you own something expensive, be it a Ferrari, a mansion or even something immaterial such as a college degree from an exclusive private university, instead of being proud of having spent a ton of your hard-earned money for it, you should instead be bummed that science, engineering and commerce have not yet reached a sufficiently advanced level that would allow some entrepreneur to arrange the raw materials that comprise that thing into the correct shape and combination, with the total cost low enough to allow it to be mass produced and profitably sold in dollar store prices. The future is best seen in the attempts to cover it up News articles occasionally alarm us that boys are doing much worse in school than girls in the sense that at the bottom, there are many more of them than girls. The 60-40 disparity in college degrees is going to lead to some pretty big societal problems down the road especially in the Western countries that no longer have the option of sending their surplus young men to die as cannon fodder against a technologically superior enemy. But I always find it damn hilarious when some myopic liberal gloats about girls excelling in school and being better than boys, blithely unaware that she (usually it's a she) is really gloating about stomping down the minorities and lower social classes to cement the higher status of the upper middle class and the upper class among whose scions this educational disparity does not exist. This disparity is simply massive disenfranchisement of the minority and working class young men dropping out in droves. I am equally sure that if we asked the dwindling numerical minority of male college students, especially those in the hardest majors in the best universities, what they think about the “problem” of there being two girls for every boy (these girls furthermore being disproportionately Asian but not so interested in dating male Asian students), they would have no problem with there being far less competition in both their professional careers and the romantic arena following the rules of female hypergamy. Anything ragged or rotten or rusty If you can change someone's behaviour with nothing but a different set of incentives, he could have changed his behaviour by himself, he just didn't want to. If you disagree, then we are in a stalemate; I won't change my opinion about this matter, because I can't. Even if one doesn’t share the skepticism of Thomas Szasz about the existence of mental illnesses so that “mental illness” is a mere euphemism for an obnoxious personality, it is still odd how drug addiction, ADD and similar ailments only ever prevent people from doing stuff that they don’t much like to do anyway, such as finishing their homework and showing up at work clean and sober Monday morning, but never doing any stuff that they enjoy, such as going through the hurdles of acquiring illegal drugs, participating in a raid in the World of Warcraft, or getting to the airport on time to fly to Disneyland. Even if mental illness is real, it still doesn't follow that every unpleasant behaviour counts as such. Now that hoarders have burst to the public consciousness with at least two television shows showcasing their plight, you sure don't need the skills of Dr. Lightman to watch their eyes when they tell the camera that they know they “need help” and “want to work with” the organizers, and know that they are flat out lying and only saying what the producers and their loved ones want to hear. Coming in to the middle of the show, it's never difficult to tell who the hoarder is among the crowd. They all eventually fall into the same passive-aggressive bitching that suddenly turns into an angry rant of how some random relative is an evil person for not understanding why some piece of junk can't be thrown out. Once upon a great empire I really do feel sorry for today's teens and college kids who don’t know that they will bear the brunt of the emerging huge societal changes that my generation is the last to man the lifeboats, and toil for the rest of their lives to pay for the boomer dual orgy of self-congratulation and conspicuous waste. Having said that, I had zero sympathy for all those precarity youths living on 500 euros per month who took to the streets in Portugal in the early 2011. I honestly hate to sound like some Ayn Rand hero delivering a lecture with a dollar sign cigarette dangling between my fingers, but in their youthful ignorance, these protesters demand the very things that cause the problems they protest against. Like all good little social democrats, they want to force employers to pay all their workers high salaries and benefits and make it nearly impossible to ever fire anyone... and then they can't find any jobs. They demand rent control... and then they can’t find any rental housing available. They consider college education a basic human right for everybody... and act surprised when a college degree no longer guarantees them well-paid employment. Unfortunately reality is not optional, and cannot be changed by narcissistic temper tantrums by those who imagine that hard economic and demographic realities are arbitrary social constructs that sufficiently enlightened and strong-willed politicians could change. The “right-wing” nonsense such as creationism never breaks my bones nor picks my pocket, whereas the “left-wing” nonsense first directly makes everyone worse off in many invisible little ways, and in the long run, spells death to societies and people in them. I grew up as a person and now know what I really want A study found that after divorce, women tend to be happier than men. The news article where I read this was just as flimsy as every other news article reporting such studies, so it didn't say if this study had controlled for which party initiates the divorce. Since women initiate three out of four divorces (even though it’s somehow the man’s fault either way), it would certainly make sense that the party that initiates the divorce also tends to be happier about it afterwards, whereas the party that was dumped might not be as eager to jump up and down with joy. But even with this control, I am sure that this discrepancy exists, especially when we remember the prevalent social attitudes towards getting a divorce. For example, a woman who is simply tired of her husband and thinks that she could still “do better” will mostly be supported in her decision with the general attitude “You go, girl!” and “You have the right to find something better for your life!” On the other hand, a man dumb enough to explicitly admit that his dumpy wife doesn't excite him any more would be loudly denounced, mocked and derided at every turn, and would not be merely a “loser”, but probably a rapist, Nazi and pedophile too. Only the very most successful men on top are exempt from this double standard, but even they have to tread carefully and can't be explicit about their motives to trade up. I create feelings in others that they themselves don't understand The behaviour of many complex systems is best and easiest described with the intentional stance. Doing this in no way presupposes an animistic belief that the system in question really is intentional so that it possesses beliefs and intentions, let alone a consciousness. This refutes one famous quotation of Edsger W. Dijkstra, the late great computer scientist who stood athwart history yelling “wait”, about how computer science is not a real science until it has completely rid itself of all anthropomorphisms. And what human artifact could be more complex than a computer program consisting of millions of lines of complex computer code? But speaking of anthropomorphisms and machines, when I first watched the Pixar movie Cars, it took me a while to understand it premise that, unlike in other Pixar films about animate objects that ought to be inanimate, there are no humans. After the flashy start, the dark underbelly of this society slowly revealed itself as these cars, apparently with no free will or choice of their own, obsessively kept simulating many aspects of human society that simply made no sense for conscious automobiles. Their physically very mobile society was very rigid with no social mobility, since everyone was pretty much born in his or her place in life and could not really aspire to become anything else. For example, was that one girl car rich because she was a Porsche, or was she a Porsche because she was rich? Living forever through immortality I'm starting to understand why the ancient Pythagoreans killed that one guy who proved that the square root of two was not a rational number. He was probably some bean-eating proto-hippie who hallucinated that mathematical formulas, instead of being meaningless sequences of symbols that are mechanistically manipulated with finite rules of the glass bead game, refer to some platonic reality “far out there” that is, like, “totally continuous, maaan” in the voice of Otto the School Bus Driver. But sometimes I wonder if we modern people really are any better or more “enlightened” than in the past. This is especially appropriate when it comes to the Persian culture, since a few years ago I watched this some sort of documentary about the ancient Persian army commanded by the mighty emperor Xerxes. I am a bit hazy on its details from the visual barrage that this film threw at me, but I doubt that even the military of today’s Sweden is as progressive as these united forces of Xerxes that embraced multiculturalism even in their leading ranks and clearly had zero tolerance towards not only racism and homophobia, but even transphobia! Compare this to the present-day Iran to see how far back things have slided. These ancient liberators also fought against the ableist discrimination towards the disabled by accepting them in their ranks as equals. For example, I remember this one warrior who had lost both his arms and had swords installed to the stubs to mow down men in the battlefield like wheat, his accommodations making him a living proof of the social model of disability. I want to say one word to you. Just one word If glass were not transparent, would it ever have been used for anything at all? Most likely not, since transparency is pretty much the only thing that glass has going for it, and in every other sense it sucks as a material. One might almost imagine that a committee of Satan's own imps was given the task of designing this truly horrendous material on purpose. Not only would you need a hellishly hot furnace to even begin to shape anything made of glass, but you just have to admire the lovely little touch that glass easily shatters to shards that make even razor blades seem dull by comparison. Compare glass to plastics, a truly useful material that can be easily used for anything between heaven and Earth. Imagine a world such as ours only a hundred years ago, when everything had to be made of something other than plastic, and you get the idea how wonderful the promise of plastics must have seemed at the time of their invention, much like the dot-com boom of the nineties. Yet the word “plastic” is still universally used to mean something cheap and bad. This must be about the greatest ingratitude in human history, sneering at something because it works in abundance and creates prosperity so vast that it makes its recipients take it for granted. It would be fitting if the world one day woke up from the dream of a world without plastic, desperately pleading “Come back, plastic... Come back...” Family machine Opponents of suburbia like to proclaim that suburbs are oppressive in their uniformity and conformity because every house is identical. But how exactly is a suburban street any different from an apartment building whose every apartment truly is identical? Surely there is more far individuality in a bear cave than in a termite mound? In this light, I have to wonder if there exists a sillier and more transparently fake act than that of the brave “nonconformist”. In reality the “cool” people are the ultimate conformists, concerned 24/7 what other people think of them. Bonus points for spouting all the usual cliches such as how you want to “afflict the comfortable” and how your favourite theories of how reality works are “out of the box” and “controversial” because you are such a “rebel”, or asserting that you are so singular and unique in all of history that your views can’t even begin to be classified in any traditional political axis or matrix. The fundamental epistemological principle of nonconformism seems to be that whatever you think up for yourself from scratch is by definition good and true, but the billions of people who have existed in written history and tried out in parallel the various ways of doing things have never come up with anything that is true or useful. Questioning the sacred truths If the best argument of the global warming alarmist side really is the film An Inconvenient Truth, I doubt that it is worth casting the entire industrial society into darkness, the way the Earth Hour campaign wants us to, just to prevent the global temperatures rising one or two degrees this century. As I guessed, this film said nothing about nuclear energy, other than a few pictures of cooling towers in one short “technology sure is scary” montage. Of course, the reason why we have this global warming problem is that pretty much the same people who today are most active about fighting global warming also spent the last forty years doing their best to prevent building nuclear plants anywhere. If every industrialized nation today generated 80% of its electricity with nukes the way France does, global warming would have never even become an issue. In this light, all the promised mayhem is actually poetic justice for the useful idiots who wanted to feel important and good about themselves by spouting the irrational anti-nuclear talking points cynically supplied to them by the hydrocarbon industry and the KGB destabilization and demoralization campaign. But the film lost its all credibility for me when Gore said that fighting global warming will help the economy by creating jobs, and mockingly attacked an embarrassingly idiotic straw man of the opposition to arouse a hearty robotic horse laughter from his carefully picked green audience. (Oh, come on. Not one dreadlock, Che Guevara shirt, facial piercing or a kaffiyeh. How likely is that in any environmentalist gathering?) The underdog is here Since liberalism ultimately boils down to pure status signaling (one elegant recursive definition of liberalism even defines it as status signaling of being immune to the consequences of liberalism), their signals don't have to be rational or coherent any more than, say, a pair of sunglasses. In fact, incoherence only makes these signals more effective, since they imply that the speaker has fully committed to the cause and believes himself to be in a high enough position to be immune to the consequences of his ideas. This explains how these guys can simultaneously believe that raising the hourly minimum wage to $12 will not cause employers to hire any fewer workers, but raising the price of cigarettes by the same amount will direct smokers to buy fewer cigarettes. Or that artists who depict gay Jesus floating in urine or burn the flag are brave free speech heroes who must be supported from tax dollars, whereas artists who draw cartoons of the Holy Prophet, or demonstrators who burn the Koran, are criminals against humanity and the state should use its power to silence them. Or how a filthy junkie shooting dope in his veins is only exercising his right to bodily autonomy, but a middle class normo tired of waiting in the long medical rationing queue chooses to spend his own money to buy health care services from an actual medical doctor in Canada, is a despicable criminal against equal access. Poster boy Mere walking through the hallways of academia gives you an educational view in the mindset of students, or at least the tiny but all the louder cadre of far left activists who proclaim to speak for the entire student community. Even though freedom of speech and thought are sacrosanct in academia, pro-life groups should not be allowed to set up shop on campus because they advocate taking away freedoms and rights from other people. However, all socialist and Islamic groups are not merely free to operate and proselytize their messages on campus, but even receive a subsidy for this from the student union, evident from their professional quality posters. One poster campaign calls the school to drop fees and then complains that there are too many students in lectures and labs, and that not all municipalities in Ontario have the same percentage of college graduates. I can only surmise that elementary statistics and the Occam’s razor are probably not given much weight in the majors that these activists take. Another poster opposes the deportation of some no-status woman from Africa who is a “warrior princess”, curiously juxtaposed with another poster that opposes war. Another series of posters educates students that gay men should be allowed to donate blood and that homophobia is always unacceptable, accompanied with an angry gay man snarling at the viewer. Some prankster should create an identical poster about Islamophobia, with an angry young Muslim male giving an equally serious eye at the viewer, a scimitar optional. Subway stories I was surprised to learn that the number of suicides in the Toronto subway averages about one per month, far more than I would have guessed, even though I have noticed that those “delay due to an incident on the track level” announcements seem to cluster around holidays and the final exam weeks. Occasionally you see these proposals to build gates on the platforms that would open only when the train is in the station, but of course this billion-dollar investment would not prevent even one suicide, but transfer these suicides to take place somewhere else. For example, the various publicly accessible high places in Toronto. Meanwhile, sitting in the subway just watching can teach you a lot about life and the people sharing it. One time a grumpy duckbiller had dozed off sitting so wide that he took both seats, and one more in front of him for his feet. A short woman with a shaved head and a face almost as if drawn by John Byrne (those who know what this means also know that you could now find her in a police lineup based on nothing but this description) without asking moved his feet down to get to sit down in the full car. This made the guy angry, and after first chastising her not to touch him, he looked at her and sneered that fuck, she is not even a woman. You could tell by her face that this barb really stung, and she picked her nose and tossed a booger at him. The situation was resolved by a transit worker who separated them. In retrospect, I find that incident hilarious in how a trendy leftist had to actually encounter an actual lumpenprole who she nominally adores but instinctively avoids in her real life, for a good reason. Civics 101 News articles sometimes refer to some people as “community leaders”, a job title or honorific that increasingly puzzles me the more I think about it. I know who my MP and MPP are, but I honestly don't have a faintest idea of who my community leaders are, how they are chosen, elected or appointed, how long are the terms that they serve, what powers they wield, what authority they have to order me to do something, what they have the power to order me to do, what authority I in turn hold over them, what are the processes of grievances and recall, and many more. For example, what steps would I have to take if I wanted to become a community leader? How much support would I have to gain from my community to be able to claim that title? Would 51% suffice, or do I need more? In general, I am getting this overall impression that in addition to the democratic parliamentary system of how the political power is divided in Canada (and apparently even more so in the USA), there exists a parallel mechanism of nondemocratic power that various groups of activists wield. A truthful name for such a system of government has historically been “mob rule”, and it has traditionally been considered a bad thing for some group to declare itself to stand outside the rule of law and the democratic system of government. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Gryffindor I have to confess my cultural illiteracy in that I have never read any of the Harry Potter books. Yet by the time I saw the first film, I had already absorbed by some sort of cultural osmosis a reasonable knowledge about the characters and the important events in this story. The fact that nothing even remotely similar had taken place with that Golden Compass movie made it obvious to me that this film would be a complete box office flop. Even though the first Harry Potter movie was surprisingly enjoyable, I had to give up watching this series around the fourth one as it kept getting increasingly surreal and I realized that I did not care one whit about that happens to any of these people. On the other hand, it is illustrative to compare Harry Potter to the story of another young boy who also leaves his mundane family to join a secret shadowy community whose membership is determined by the blood (in more ways than one), and the lucky few who are invited to join get to, after their long period of training that involves constant testing and ancient rituals, wield almost magical powers that separate them from the mundane masses of chumps, and engage in fantastic adventures that put to test their loyalty towards each other. I am talking about Goodfellas, of course. Hereforth known as “client” One day when I was wandering around the northern reaches of the Las Vegas Strip, I picked up a leaflet that advertised “affordable college girls” from the metal box serving them. It is a sign of our times that even a jerk mag has to start with a page full of fine print legalese, and another sign of my mental landscape that I ignored the rest of the mag to read through this whole disclaimer, trusting that it would one day make an interesting writing topic. On one page, an advertiser had put up photos of two nude women in identical poses, the first one a morbidly obese chubbo titled “their girls” and the second one a slender hot babe titled “our girls”, followed by a short paragraph that emphasized the care that this advertiser takes in selecting the girls who work for him. I chuckled a bit when I realized how well this ad illustrated how porn is one of the few Prole entertainments that flies completely under the radar of the Outer Party sensibilities and ideological enforcement of groupthink, and thus gets to engage in blatant crimethink such as that not all women are equally attractive. Similarly, the easiest way to distinguish the material about prostitution written by its actual customers from those written by liberal academics, is the complete and total absence of transsexuals in the former, whereas the latter must always display its enlightened credentials by not submitting to heteronormativity, the way some Prole in a sports team cap unthinkingly would. Loose wiring It is a rare treat to get to read significant texts written by actual schizophrenics and other mentally ill people. They always have this weird dreamlike logic and the way that the forces of cause and effect behave that is impossible for any sane person to artificially duplicate. (Sometimes the mainstream can accidentally come close. Try to explain the story and events of the James Bond film Moonraker to somebody who hasn’t seen it, and you see what I mean.) This principle is illustrated in The SCUM Manifesto, a work that clearly far fewer people have actually read than want to discuss it, and the compiled works of the so-bad-that-he-is-great pulp comic artist Fletcher Hanks, I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets! and You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! The stories featuring Stardust, The Super Wizard might even be surprisingly accurate in depicting the distant future with sufficiently advanced technology “indistinguishable from magic”, so that this expression would have to be properly reassigned from Arthur C. Clarke to Hanks. If the average person from one hundred years ago could watch today’s office worker on his computer effortlessly performing feats that are mundane to us but his primitive mind could only understand and describe as magic, would we not appear to him exactly as Stardust and his special rays that execute on command whatever the plot requires? Walking upright, carrying whips, and wearing clothes The common question about the existence of morality in a purely physical universe annoys me in how both Christians and atheists always manage to completely miss what the question even is. It is not about whether atheists “can” hold morals (although there is a side question of why they so often trade religious irrationality for trendy Marxist irrationality), but about what coherent basis (other than “Because I strongly feel like it”) they hold these morals and, more importantly, expect others to obey them. They are quick to spot the hypocrisy when some creationist fundy uses products of medical science to save his life, but utterly unable to see the beam in their own eye when they first proclaim that only physical phenomena measurable by science even exist at all, but then proclaim that non-material phenomena such as animal rights or the equality of sexes are absolute universal laws that everyone “must” obey. So, which famous scientific experiment was it again that established the existence of equality, that magical force field that, like God, all good people just know in their hearts is there? What precisely is the difference between you and my coffee mug, both only swirling shapes of dancing atoms, that forces me to consider the former my “equal” but the latter my “unequal”? Show your work starting from physics, without any hand waving or “here the magic happens” gaps. It takes your Whole Paycheck to be authentic I can't remember which prankster first compared the dietary rules of white liberals to those of the Orthodox Jews, with the result that the latter really are not that much more complicated. For example, the white liberal dietary rules severely limit the distance the food is allowed to travel before consumption, a concept that doesn't exist at all in Kashrut, and the rule they use is completely arbitrary so that its obvious purpose is to make the faithful demonstrate their blind obedience to Gaia. Our local mall these days has two grocery stores, Wal-Mart for those who are suspicious of diversity but tolerate it in their daily lives, and Whole Foods for those who celebrate diversity but avoid it in their daily lives. In its opening day, the crowds were as lily white as you can get around here, despite all those news of how their CEO was insufficiently progressive and even dared to say that Margaret Thatcher was once right about something. But there was even one old black man (so not just the young black male who cleaned our table before we sat down to enjoy delicious slices of their organic pizza), and one white prole in a trucker hat. I chuckled at the various little markers of “sustainability” and “fair trade”, and especially their “community table”, the purest simulacrum I have ever seen. It reminded me of the large “walkable community” currently being built a few blocks away, and especially one bench that no human rump will ever leave its imprint on. Mind blind Of course most of the feminism is outright dishonesty, such as their attempt to extort reparations from Western males to compensate for the bad treatment that the Third World men subject their womenfolk to, but the modern feminism also seems to have a substantial component of outright autism. Most non-autistic people have no trouble understanding how the statement “Many problems in the black community are caused by poverty and discrimination by the aggregate individual choices made by white people who should be more inclusive” is very different from the statement “Black people are animals who only ever think about money, and it is the duty of the superior white people to civilize them.” And yet, for some strange reason, the analogous statement “Not being able to find wives and ending up discarded to the bottom of society turns these surplus men poor, crime-prone, violent and uncivilized” somehow becomes “Women are superior to men, and it is their duty to civilize men” in the feminist brain, and is criticized as such. Anyone who understands the difference between the first two statements but suddenly acts dumb with respect to the last two is either being willfully dishonest, or an autistic personality who can’t distinguish between the knowledge of other minds. This principle applies to other walks of life. For example, you can always tell a novice mugger from the way he constantly points the knife or gun at his victim, whereas a veteran knows that he simply needs to show it once, and the victim will remain acutely aware of its existence. Plane crazy During the most recent of my annual trips to Vegas, when I picked up a bottle of duty free Scotch each way, the cashier stamped my boarding pass so that I could only buy one. Since you print your own boarding pass at home, I don't see why you couldn't print a few more copies to be used in these duty free shops. But the general boarding pass inanity is only the beginning in how absurd the security theater surrounding modern air travel really is. The security screening won't let you carry on even nose clippers into the secure area, but once you get there, you can buy and carry on to the plane a glass bottle that you could smash into a jagged weapon sharper than any knife, and that comes filled with highly flammable liquid that you and your accomplices could spray around you in the cabin and light it on fire. It would be a good idea to change the duty free system so that the duty free shop would only give you a paper voucher that would then allow you to pick up the product at your destination. Even ignoring the threat of terrorism, this system would be superior for fuel efficiency, and in the case of a crash, the cabin would not be filled with bottles smashing to shards and spraying flammable liquids all over to constitute a fire hazard. On an island of unarmed people, the one armed man is king Enough time has now hopefully passed after Anders Breivik’s insane rampage at the Utöya island, the event that I trust some tasteless wag has already mapped into a level of Doom or whatever those computer whiz kids are playing these days when they are not loitering on other people’s lawns, that I can point out a certain finger-quotes “ironic” equivalence of people clad in Che Guevara shirts finding themselves unarmed and trapped in a paradise island with somebody who is armed and believes that he doesn't need any proof of your “guilt” to execute you, since he only needs proof that it is politically expedient to execute you. Another poignant question would be to ask where all those brave Antifa thugs were during this rampage. Every socialist would also do well to remember that if you add up the lowball estimate of 94 million kulaks, capitalists, dissidents and other groups of people that socialists starved and murdered in the twentieth century, and punch that number into a calculator, the average number of victims of socialism per hour turns out to equal almost exactly the one-hour kill count of Anders Breivik. Try to imagine how absurd it would be if, instead of being captured and neutralized, Breivik were simply allowed to keep killing people day and night until the twenty-second century dawns. And yet an absurdity of this magnitude practically defined the twentieth century. No, mister Bond, I expect you to reflect One back issue of the James Bond comic book, unintentionally funny in retrospect, had 007 tracking down famous scientists who had vanished from the face of the Earth. Since each disappearance was accompanied by reports of UFO sightings, Bond was paired with a hot female agent to pose as a famous scientist to trick the abductors to take him, although it is not exactly clear to me how that would actually work. Could anybody simply assert himself as a world-famous scientist and have the other people behave according to this declaration? Anyway, eventually Bond got abducted, and the very humanoid aliens took him up to their base in the moon, although curiously with Earth gravity. They explained Bond that they had abducted these scientists to convince them to tell their fellow Earthlings how these wise and advanced space aliens had observed the Earth and determined that the social and economic systems of the Soviet Union (which included daily orgies with abundant and willing hot babes) are the best on Earth and should be adopted everywhere so that humanity might eventually join these aliens in the regime of interstellar peace and harmony. But as it unfortunately turned out, the whole thing was a Soviet ruse to create a cadre of useful idiots in the west. We can only thank our lucky stars that nothing like that ever actually happened in our reality. Life set in stone Some people argue that it is only fair that in a divorce, the alimony payments are based on the current salary, since the spouse receiving alimony has the right to continue living in the way she (and it’s usually she) is accustomed to. This is a strange moral and legal principle rarely seen anywhere else, except as an argument for rent control and social housing, and as an excuse to oppose gentrification. It certainly isn't followed in, say, employment law so that if you choose to quit your job, your employer would be required to keep paying you your salary so that you can maintain the standard of living that you are “accustomed to”. I am generally skeptical of this supposed human right of never having to change your life, and all the more so when championed by people who otherwise proclaim that change is always good and only small-minded people hate change. Another weird thing about divorce is how the “reasonable needs” of the child somehow depend on the salary of the parent making the child support payments. So little Johnny, by virtue of being conceived of a rich man's sperm, is entitled to better toys and goodies than little Billy who was conceived from a poor man's sperm? Has society still not abandoned the notion of aristocracy in which some people are entitled for more than others by virtue of their noble birth? Ends in themselves I came upon this popular left-wing blog where one author has the comment policy that only those can comment who accept the inherent dignity and value of all people. During the California’s Proposition 8 gay marriage brouhaha, she wrote about how the progressives should sneer at and mock the opponents of gay marriage to shut them up and make them afraid to voice their opinions. I thought that was a wonderful illustration of the liberal mindset. Even though they all have to be on some level cognizant that their ideology is status signaling elevated to the status of ideology, they mostly seem to understand that they are not actually supposed to openly sneer at the lower classes. For example, only some tyro right out Social Justice 101 could openly oppose Wal-Mart by arguing that “poor people shop there”, and then delight in caricatures of various lower class Wal-Mart shoppers. This real motivation must always be covered under obfuscatory layers of plausible deniability, and is only allowed to come out in the few rare (and therefore all the more gleeful) situations where the liberal has the permission to openly point out the actual lower social status of the conservative. And even in these cases, the liberal must still remember that he is walking on thin ice. It is always okay to sneer at a trailer park skinhead, but when it is a latino youth dropping out of high school, let alone an Arab youth educated in a madrassa where all learning consists of rote memorization of the Koran, their lack of education only gives them extra special wisdom that our linear and narrow-minded Western thinking could not possibly begin to comprehend. The way of the gun A complete ban on all handguns would have several unintended consequences that are yet easy to predict. First, the gun control advocates are correct that in that a gun ban would give the law enforcement new powerful tools to prosecute gang members, since once the cops catch a gang member carrying a “piece”, they don't need to unearth witnesses who tend to be more difficult to find in a gang-related crime than finding anything in the works of Aristotle that was actually true. Of course, if this works so that the moment prisons start filling up with young gang members serving long sentences for mere gun possession, progressives and civil libertarians would start wailing about disparate impact and the injustice of destroying the community by locking up its young men for a long time merely for carrying a weapon without actually shooting anyone, the exact same way they do now about drug crimes. It’s also important to understand that even the most prolific and violent gunman spends at least 99.99% of his time not shooting at anybody. Since gangs rule by fear, they are attackers instead of defenders, which means that they can freely pick the time that they need to carry a gun. Therefore they can easily threaten some innocent and weaker neighbour or flunky to hold their guns for them, and carry weapons only when it’s time to hear them speak. The same doesn’t apply to drugs, since the person you trust to hold on to them can cut and dilute them with various worthless chemicals. Recessive and regressive Wasn't it funny in Baby Mama when the liberal darling Tina Fey fussed over her baby's IQ and noted that some dietary thing can give him to eight extra points of IQ, that nefarious quantity that doesn’t exist or predict anything? Since intelligence cannot be defined, let alone measured, only some pitifully ignorant bigot would think there even exist IQ differences between people. Anyway, long before I had even heard of Saul Alinsky and his maxim of forcing your opponents live by their own rules, I conceived a mischievous idea of a sperm bank that only accepts donations from the congenitally sick and poor male dropouts with IQ’s well in the far left tail of the Bell curve. This would allow all the good little Blank Slaters to put their money where their mouths are about their public beliefs that IQ doesn't exist and that nothing important is innately encoded in the human DNA, even if they then privately pay $30K for an egg of a healthy blond Harvard graduate after having waited until the age of forty to finally try to have kids. Casper the homosocial friendly ghost Many have noticed how easy it is to get a progressive to call you a “faggot” (or any equivalent explicit or implicit variation thereof) in an attempt to disparage you when he is out of other arguments. Similarly, no matter how much a sensitive lefty male nominally adores the idea of homosexuality, any serious suggestion that he might also himself be gay will be met with either derision or an angry, sometimes even a violent response. To their credit, many progressives are actually aware of this dishonesty and seem to genuinely wrestle with it. However, it surely would pain them to give up such a potent weapon, so they have found a handy way to smirk at their opponents being gay with plausible deniability: simply use the word “homosocial” when you'd otherwise say “homosexual”. Sure, the definition of this word says that homosocial relationships are not necessarily homosexual, but in practice, “homosocial” always translates to “neener neener ur a fag”. One could very easily prove me wrong about this by listing a couple of real-life instances of progressives using the word “homosocial” to refer to some group of people other than conservative white males, that is, some group that progressives generally have positive feelings towards. For example, a teenage girls basketball team, a group of homeless schizophrenics, or a crew of immigrant men working jobs that pay under the table. The numbers don’t lie One self-critical left-wing blogger often likes to point out that for all its left-wing pose, the academia is extremely unequal when it comes to salaries, job security and work hours between the tenured faculty versus the drones, especially the lowly graduate students. It would be nice to somehow force them to live and breathe the policies they want to impose on the rest of the world. As my modest proposal towards this end, let me suggest the following proactive change to the academic code. At the end of each semester, the grades issued by every teacher are tabulated by race and sex. This task is trivial once each student self-reports his race to the central database that already holds all grades. If the grades given by some professor to the students of one group differ too much from those of another group, that professor would be publicly exposed as racist, sexist, or whatever applies, and ordered to report for anti-oppression training, and if the same thing ever happens again, forced to resign. I would have absolutely no problem with such policy, and in fact would be curious to see which professors and departments dared to argue against it. Perhaps as a first experiment, implement this in departments that proclaim the highest commitment to social justice and equality; that is, the social sciences. At least I can't see what objections they could possibly have, since this is essentially the exact same policy that they already want to impose on the rest of society when it comes to salaries instead of grades. Society is only three ideas away from autarchy Social democracy is sold to the unwashed masses with the grand promise that the government monopoly provides its citizens all the goods and services they need including food, housing, schools and health care far more efficiently and for a lower cost for the consumer than those greedy and price-gouging private competitors operating in a competitive free market. On the other hand, social democracy promises all its unionized workers hefty salaries, unlimited sick days, short working hours, long vacations and an early retirement. The first four are paid by the taxpayer and “the rich”, whereas the tab for the early retirement will be obediently picked up by the next generation that ends up being about half the size of its parent generation. The current economic turmoil in Europe indicates that this contradiction has finally become too large to evade. Social democracies have to collapse since they simply can’t go on, and the longer they wait, the more painful their inevitable demographic, economic and cultural crash will be. Two decades earlier back when the Soviet block collapsed, quite a few party apparatchiks, economic planners, ideological officers, propaganda hacks and wiretappers of dissidents, along with their families, lost their job security when their entire reality had irreversibly changed. Yet despite this collateral damage, the Soviet system of communism still had to go. I need, you want, he is a lecher There is this curious asymmetry in how for most people, their own sexual desires are literal “needs” that are extremely important to them (even if they deny this, they make all of their important life decisions such as marriage consistent with this hypothesis), versus how most people consider the sexual needs and desires of other people to be basically an optional frivolity. For example, I recently saw somebody complain that the “capitalist” drug companies spend all that money to develop Viagra instead of more “important” medicines. And yet I am absolutely certain that if some drug mishap of corporate negligence caused that person not to be able to physically have sexual intercourse for the rest of his life, he would be in court demanding gazillion dollars of compensation for this. Second, even the most ardent welfare state supporters rarely advocate a positive right to sex for the unfortunate losers who can't get laid, since “nobody really ever needs to have sex”. This is curiously the exact opposite of what they say when somebody wants to shut down gay bathhouses for health reasons the exact same way that the early epidemiologist John Snow shut down the infectious cholera pump in London, or when some backwards Third World society slices off the clitorises of its young girls on the verge of adulthood with rusty razor blades. Whisper stream So I was in this one small bar in the city (I wish I could say that I was sipping some cool “Mad Men” drink such as a martini, but alas, it was just a perfectly regular beer, and not even any “hip” brand), and it was quiet, so I overheard some guy talking with the bartender at the other end. He said that he has been a schoolteacher in Toronto for almost three decades and can see that the system has come to the brink of a total collapse. According to this guy, all of the official statistics for the grade point averages and attendance rates are faked, the schools prettying up their numbers by advancing and graduating kids who don't even show up. None of his friends that he grew up with in the city can any longer afford to raise a family there and have moved to the surrounding suburban communities, so mostly the poor and the affluent childless remain. The remaining parents imagine that the city schools are still the same as back when they were kids, but every smart parent who actually knows what the public schools are really like today will not hesitate for one second to either move out of the city or, if they can afford it, put their kids in a private school. If this is true, it should be interesting to watch this edifice come down. Like every bankruptcy, first gradually, then suddenly. Do you belong to the collective, or to yourself? A recent study found that if you mix up carefully chosen quotes from “lad mags” and actual rapists, people can't tell them apart. As sensational as such lists of quotes are to small minds, they are utterly worthless, echoing the spirit of Cardinal Richelieu who famously noted that if you gave him six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, he will find something in them to hang him for. If I got to choose the quotes, I could easily make Dennis Kucinich indistinguishable from Adolf Hitler or Che Guevara or whoever else you want. However, a great follow-up study to illustrate the worthlessness of this study even by social science standards would be to mix up quotes from those “99%” Occupests and prisoners doing time for violent home invasions. The feminist left loves to complain about the prevailing “rape culture” that tells men that they are entitled to enjoy the body of a woman regardless of her desires and take it by force if they can't get any, but they don't realize that they are themselves actively creating and sustaining a “robbery culture” where they are entitled to enjoy the fruits of labour and wealth created by productive people regardless of their desires, and take it by force if they can't get any. Of course, the left gets pretty angry if you point out this similarity, or ask if women’s individual choices of sex partners should be curtailed because of their aggregate consequences on society, the exact same way they want to curtail other people’s free choices for their aggregate consequences on society. Those who claim the loudest that “everything is social construction” paradoxically tend to be the most pigheaded to change their own preferences and values that they assert to be innate and immutable. Seek simplicity, then distrust it Changing the rules of the game of poker so that you’d have to physically toss your chips in the cup at the middle of the table for the bet to count would not be an improvement. In not only game design but in all aspects of life, we should mercilessly identify and isolate the essential difficulties, and then make everything else as easy as possible, preferably fully automatic following the maxim of the engineers of Apple Computers so that humans should never have to do or remember anything that the computer can do and remember. As per the famous quote of Alfred North Whitehead, we have the brain capacity to consciously think about only so many things, so we need to save these precious brain cycles for the essential and important things, and automatize the rest. But simplicity, that elusive ideal, can only go so far. The rate of incorrect and yet peer- reviewed and published results keeps increasing, since in science, all the low-hanging fruit has been picked bare ages ago, so only vague and complex difficult problems and truths remain. Nobody is ever again going to discover anything as universal and straightforward as, say, F = ma or H20 any more than you are going to find an elephant that has for all this time been secretly living in your backyard. Combine this sad fact with the brutal principle of “publish or perish”, and the inevitable end result pretty much immediately follows. Ecce equus As for those self-appointed representatives of the “99%” who chose to “Occupy” various cities, despite the fact that in both Canada and United States there are still endless acres of good land available for a song for them to build their utopia in without nobody bothering them, the endless sympathy that the media and academia poured on these people nicely illustrates what an absurd Potemkin village the entire edifice of liberalism has devolved into inside its comfortable and unchallenged echo chamber. This whole spectacle of how the media and academia unanimously praised these smelly hippies, unemployed critical studies majors and outright street people as noble revolutionaries and trailblazers who will transform the whole world into a progressive utopia where our lives are managed by people who clearly currently can’t begin to manage even their own, is not that different from when Caligula appointed a horse as a senator. Colloquial Finnish has a nice expression “parody horizon” that really ought to enter also the mainstream English lexicon. Analogous to the “event horizon” that surrounds a black hole, marking the distance beyond which it is not physically possible to escape once you cross it, an ideology that has crossed the parody horizon becomes impossible to parody because any parody would be indistinguishable from the real thing. Elmer Pantry Progressives like to say that conservatives and their policies are fear-based, which is sorta rich coming from the people who call 911 when they find out that they ate food with genes in it. In a similar spirit of wacky mischief to gently highlight the curious selectiveness of progressives and their fears, next time you are talking to some progressive, try to steer the conversation towards those infamous evangelical megachurches in the American heartland. Listen patiently and nod in agreement as he explains to you in a spitting Daffy Duck rage everything that is despicable in these megachurches and the dumb and sheeplike evangelicals filling their pews. Once you have given him enough rope to quietly seal off all possible rhetorical escape hatches, ask him what he thinks about the megamosques currently breaking ground in all major European cities. Emphasize issues that have traditionally been of extreme importance to liberals and that he probably himself stressed merely a moment ago, such as the separation of church and state, the relationship between science and religion and their respective authorities and magisteria, women's equality, gay rights, and a skeptical and rational worldview that always questions authority... except those times that the authority tells them that everyone is equal, of course. Tremors The capital of Haiti was in ruins and the whole country a total catastrophe... and then that quake certainly didn't help. One article about the aftermath was making rounds in the conservative blogosphere for its unintentional but all the more abundant humour value. It was written by some idealistic black woman, an American volunteer aid worker in Haiti, who was raped by one of the very men she had spent the bulk of her life fighting for. This incident gave her a serious internal conflict in preserving the dignity of black males often stereotyped as horny savages and mandingos. Of course we should not laugh at the ordeal of this unfortunate woman, but her lament “He didn’t even care that I was a Malcolm X scholar” just so beautifully summarized the entire liberal mindset. Quite a few people out there, in fact to the first approximation basically everybody on this planet, indeed don’t care that you are a Malcolm X scholar, or about any of the other endless little class shibboleths that the Western liberals constantly obsess about. This reality shocks liberals, but then again, being constantly shocked by reality is what liberalism is all about. Believing that the Western ideological and class distinctions are somehow relevant for other cultures is a dangerous fallacy. Just like some white guy in Calgary wouldn’t even think about what particular caste his new Indian co-worker belongs to, some Indian Muslim similarly wouldn’t even think about whether you are a good little progressive voter who has always opposed school prayer and sending troops to Muslim countries. Obsolete Of all the condiments out there, ketchup must be about the most useless, since it only improves the taste of French fries and everything else it just makes worse with its pungent taste that overwhelms the actual food. Even for the French fries for which it works, many other condiments such as tartar sauce or mayonnaise work even better. Perhaps this is more of a European thing, but it is also the right thing, as long as you don't drown your fries in that stuff. The ketchup of men, the type of a man who could play Sergeant Snorkel or Fred Flintstone, has become pretty much nonexistent in media these days, even for films and television shows set in the World War II or in the fifties. One exception was the graphic novel Grease Monkey that tells the story of a spaceship mechanic who literally is a monkey, albeit one whose intelligence has been artificially raised to the human levels. I didn't bother to read far enough to find out if he has a cousin who works as a code monkey, but I still felt sorry for this grotesque and unnatural creature trapped between two worlds either of which he could never fully be part of, since his very existence was based on nothing but an idiomatic quirk of the English language. Of course he wasn't anywhere as grotesque as another supervillain Mandriller, a mandrill with two big drills in place of his hands. Echoing what we were probably all wondering with that one guy in 300, how does Mandriller go to the bathroom? You aren’t the crowd All signs and rules emerge only after somebody does something that others do not approve of. For example, consider the signs at the doors of stores and restaurants say “No dogs allowed”. They exist because in the past, somebody tried to bring a problematic dog inside the store. We understand that bringing in hyenas and hippos would be equally frowned upon, even though the sign doesn't say this. I read an anecdote about some HR manager who had to handle an intra-office dispute where one employee used the common kitchen microwave oven to warm up his clean socks. The end result was a sign posted at the microwave saying that this oven can only be used to heat food. This anecdote made me wonder if there exists an English-language word or term that in general means a sign, rule or law that nominally applies to everyone, even though it was in reality brought to existence because of one problematic person or a small group of people, and that everyone knows this even though the polite social fiction is to pretend otherwise. Some suggested the terms “common sensifier” or “de-impliticer”. Similarly, is there a word for a question that when asked, that question immediately answers itself? One example of such a question might be “Why doesn't the United States, the richest country on Earth, offer a health, unemployment and welfare safety net and long vacations to all its citizens like those far poorer European countries?” A quiet queue is a happy queue Supermarkets should open “No Lip Lanes” that mimic the “Soup Nazi” of Seinfeld. These checkout lanes would be reserved for customers who just want to pay for their purchases and leave, instead of starting a whole big debate with the cashier or other people in the lane, or whining how they couldn’t find some product they wanted to buy so the cashier should leave her station and go look for it, or complaining that some product is deficient or carries a wrong price because they faintly remember that it was different in some flier they didn’t bother to bring with them, or rummage through their purse to look for their money or plastic. A man could always join such a lane safe in the knowledge that the queue is going to proceed in a brisk pace as the cashier rings in the products without interruption, and in the end the customer gives her the cash or card that he was already holding in his hand. In the name of cultural sensitivity and tolerance, those Mutaween cops with the authority to deal out immediate corporal punishments for various bad behaviours might not also be such a bad idea here in Canada. At least it feels that way all those times that you have to sit next to some guy who hasn’t showered for a month. Hell, even the full blown Sharia law would not really restrict us conservative and educated guys from doing anything that we would ever want to do, assuming that as good citizens and taxpayers, we would get a monthly midnight run to buy several cases of tax-free booze for our private use. Arrangements For all their articles about the glamorous lives of Bollywood superstars, reading the English-language newspapers of the local South Asian community gives you are very different view on minorities than you would ever get from, say, Toronto Star. One Muslim paper features international news articles that tend to be very critical of Israel and its policies, and its readers letters page once featured a memorable letter by someone who said he was a peaceful man but still wanted to put on a suicide vest and give a bear hug to Benjamin Netanyahu. With a worldview that considers arranged marriages and the caste system perfectly normal and is obsessed of slight differences in skin tone in finding a suitor for your daughter, I can only speculate what gems those Indian papers that are not in English would contain. Different groups are allowed very different levels of frankness and honesty, such as how black activists are allowed to warn their women that the “down low” male homosexual activity significantly increases the risk of HIV transmission. Even more comical are the advice columns for young readers, answering questions such as what you should do if you don’t feel the spark in your arranged marriage, or Uncle Vijay telling young women that their possibilities of finding a decent husband sharply decrease as they age, so they shouldn't waste their precious years on frivolous casual relationships. What do you think would happen to any Western columnist pointing out the exact same uncomfortable truths? Isn't it funny how ideas that so shock our liberals are perfectly common sense for the vast majority of people on Earth? Troubleshooting Computer science must be the only STEM field where you can’t assume that a graduate from a reputable university would be able to write a program that would be a weekly lab exercise in the first programming course for freshmen. A mere few years ago I would have instantly rejected this as an absurdity, but now I know that, with the possible exception of the elite universities, about one third of computer science students simply lack the necessary cognitive capacity to comprehend enough levels of computer science to be able to write, say, a simple method to concatenate two arrays. They manage to pass the first two years as human remoras by doing their labs and programming projects with what are euphemistically called “tutors” and “study groups”, and bullshitting their exam answers for partial marks to get a passing grade. When the reality eventually sinks in, it's too late to do anything about it. I am sure that all computer science professors and teachers know this, but they simply have better things to do than care about it, figuring that someone else will eventually somehow do something about it. Always remember to put job applicants through rigorous tests, since you can’t assume anything just from the degree. And it really is a damn sad sight on many levels when some third-year student comes to your office hours to tell you that he and all these other guys he knows in the course can't understand anything, because they couldn't understand anything in their previous courses either. Kings of New England Everyone knows what an orphanage is, and why the kids housed in one are the canonical pinnacle of innocence and are awarded special social protections so that any transgressions against them are automatically considered especially heinous and loathsome and punished in various official and unofficial ways. But perhaps times have changed since the times of Charles Dickens, since I have never actually read or heard anything about an actual orphanage functioning in any industrialized country, let alone seen one. Even in fiction set in more recent times, the only orphanages that even exist are the archetypal ones of The Simpsons and Futurama, and in the real world the entire concept is completely alien. Therefore using autoepistemologic reasoning, I can only infer that orphanages simply no longer exist, at least in the industrialized world where the system of foster care has long since replaced them. This is yet another indication of how massively wealthier society has become, yet invisible because we take most of this for granted. For example, I recently calculated that my little iPod Shuffle, small enough for me to hide in my palm but now hopelessly obsolete, contains more memory than all of the ZX Spectrum computers ever sold in Finland put together. A Mayberry with Blackberries In his book On Paradise Drive, David Brooks pointed out that the alternative weeklies really are the most conservative form of all media, in the sense that there is never any dissent or change. Across the continent, all these independent weeklies are interchangeable in how the “alternative” weekly of one city is identical to that of any other city, with the same scathingly left-wing columns, avant garde experimental comic strips, and articles about local bands named Crank Shaft or Gutbucket. Brooks is also responsible for one of the simplest and yet most profound observations that explains everything else and in one stroke refutes both the “creative class” fantasies of Richard Florida and the “What is the matter with Kansas?” nonsense of Thomas Frank. There are massive cultural differences between America and the rest of the world, such as religion, but the really important one is this: when middle class Americans face insurmountable problems or are otherwise made to understand that they and their views are not welcome, they don't bother fighting because, thanks to America's unique wide geography and individual mobility, they can and will simply shrug and move away someplace else. This happens both physically, when the middle class finds cities increasingly hostile, and metaphorically, when people feel that some institution no longer represents them or speaks for them and quietly start their own parallel institutions. Separation and tall fences defuse plenty of bitter strife that other nations whose people are kept as virtual prisoners of their neighbourhoods have to resolve in more direct and explicit ways. Teachable moments Back when I was still living in Finland about a decade ago, I vaguely remember reading about some scam where the conman asks to use the mark’s cell phone and calls some special overseas number that will later saddle the mark with a huge phone bill. I never heard about such scams working in Canada, but during one trip to Vegas, four different down-and-out men asked me to use the phone “just to make a quick call” or some variation thereof. The last of these men at the bus stop of this locals’ casino reeked of cigarettes, but was surprisingly smooth when he told me that his wife is giving birth right now and he needs to call his friend to get a ride. I didn't want to start gently challenging him to probe the certain obvious logic holes in this story, but told him that my iPod is not a phone. Soon after this, some Obama voter (sometimes you can just tell these things at a glance) arrived and was given the same spiel, and the mark gladly let the guy use his phone. It was fascinating to watch, that somebody can be so blind to things that seem so very obvious to me... but at least I again understood the brainwashed liberal mind a little better from my neurotypical perspective. We all got on the bus and later the mark got off first, soon after which the conman saw his equally lumpen friend step on. After exchanging greetings, they cheerily decided to go for some beers, there apparently still plenty of time between contractions. Loser cruiser Many perennial stupid ideas somehow just refuse to die, but regularly raise their ugly heads like some pesky weed. Usually they come from the left aisle of politics, typically the greens, those moral paragons of wisdom who we all need to emulate. For example, the proposal to make the public transit in some city completely free for its users, since the fares only cover a portion of the transit system operating expenses anyway. From the fairness standpoint, this is pretty much the exact opposite of what ought to be done, make the people who benefit the most from the public transit to pay their way. For example, I save close to a grand every month for not needing to own a car thirsty for fuel and parking space, so I don't see why it would be morally problematic to make me pay for the tickets. Even at twice the price, public transit would be a better deal for me than automobile ownership. Sure, you can present an economic argument of how a maximally efficient transit system necessarily operates at a loss to put the butts in the seats whose marginal cost is zero. However, without fares, buses and subway cars would become mobile drunk tanks, halfway houses and homeless shelters on wheels. In fact, if you were a clever car company executive worried about the declining sales of your fine automobiles, you could slyly try to destroy public transit this way, yet come up looking like a caring and socially responsible progressive. The league of the fatties The story of the formerly 400-pound Arkansas inmate who sued the county because he lost 100 pounds in jail that only let him eat about 3,000 kcal/day (that is, the same as what all the other prisoners got, and should be enough for any person) made the rounds a few years ago. It is certainly astonishing how the physical world behaves the way that the laws of physics predict it will (for example, every afternoon exactly at 3:35 the sun glare hits our living room television so that you could set your clock by this event), and thermodynamics is no exception. There are quite a few of fat people out there who claim, in all apparent seriousness, that food consumption has no causal relationship to their weight and that they maintain their bulk by eating maybe only 1,500 kcal/day. However, none of these people has ever been able to do this under controlled conditions where they can't sneak in snacks, such as this prison unfortunately seems to be compared to the outside world that is abundant with fast food. And of course doing so would be an instant Nobel prize in both physics and medicine (and Randi prize, and who knows what else) for establishing that a human body is able to generate energy out of thin air, so I'm pretty confident to be that none of these guys will ever be able to do it. Physics is not everything, but thanks to its position as the foundation of everything else, it gets to set hard and absolute constraints and lower bounds for everything else. White man thought he could improve on a system like this The native Americans and the First Nations are such a thicket that I am reluctant to even set my foot in that minefield, but it is certainly illustrative how they are somehow entitled to exclude others from their “stolen” homelands (even though no-one can “own” land), a right that does not reciprocally extend to many other nations such as Finland whose natives are constantly lectured by their betters that they have no right to selfishly keep the land for themselves. Just like with homosexuals, the mindless liberal adoration for this group is far more annoying than anything that the group itself could ever do. For example, I am not entirely sure why being a “warrior” is considered an admirable thing for some young Blackfoot male, but not for, say, an American Marine. And if all these native peoples of Turtle Island really lived so harmoniously together before the white devils came to bring death and diseases, why did they even have “warriors” in the first place? You’d think they would have been like those mythical Pacific Islanders who happily shared their food and women with visitors. This may have something to do with the way that the native Americans are also pretty much the only people in the world who are inherently “noble”, another curious word that literally means someone who is superior to and entitled to rule over others by birthright, an arrangement I would have thought liberals consider bad. Of course, for all their “religion ruins everything” and “above us only sky” rhetoric, liberals sure find an amazing appreciation of sacred when some native spirits say that we can’t bury the nuclear waste in some place that liberals, by amazing coincidence, didn’t want it buried in the first place. Smart is as smart does One mischievous wag once suggested that you print out a scatter plot of random points with a positive correlation of about +0.3, label the x-axis “height” and y-axis “income” and bring it to some faculty lounge of social sciences, journalism or humanities for them to comment. Then take the exact same chart but label its x-axis “IQ”, and behold the massive difference in reactions. When smart people suddenly start acting stupid, you must be in the presence of powerful forces, and the notions of “smart” and “stupid” are themselves the best example of this. The typical left-leaning academic has carefully built his entire identity on the clay legs of two ideas that are hopelessly contradictory. First, he is superior to the masses thanks to his higher IQ; second, he is morally superior to them because he believes that IQ is meaningless and racist pseudoscience with no predictive or explanatory power whatsoever. The way we tiptoe and act dumb around the topic of intelligence even as we accept differences in physical strength, the skill to play a violin, or basically any other skill that ultimately amounts to nothing but an entertaining show, demonstrates how fundamental, important and essential intelligence really is. 150 million times zero equals zero The most annoying thing about the abortion debate is how this one issue got to monopolize two massively important words “choice” and “life”, especially since most “pro-choice” activists can be reliably assumed to be against individual free choice in pretty much everything except sex and drugs. Anyway, the main problem is linguistic in how the concept of “potential human” can mean several different things. The baby before it has even been conceived is a “potential person” in one way; in the womb, it is a “potential person” in another way; and after birth, the future adult 18 years later is a “potential person” in yet another different way, and yet the same word “potential” is used in all three cases. The abortion supporters (I refuse to call them “pro-choice”) assert the second case to be the same as the first, whereas the abortion opponents (ditto) assert the second case to be same as the third. Fair enough. However, once you go with the first group, then you don't get to turn around and proclaim how 150 million women are “missing” (or even worse, “murdered”) in the Third World because that many female fetuses have been aborted in third world sex selection screenings, and this usually somehow proves that men in the first world should pay compensation to you. A fetus is only a clump of cells and thus only a potential person, remember? It is impossible to harm, let alone “murder”, a potential person any more than you could murder Donald Duck. Upstairs, downstairs, basement, closet When talking about “tolerance”, it is important to remember that this word means tolerating the existence of things you disapprove of, so you don’t get any tolerance points for tolerating something that you already support and love. In practice, educated conservative white men are far more tolerant and open-minded than any other group, including liberal white women, yet they seldom get any cookies for this. In all institutions, once the long march through it has crossed a certain tipping point, the left tolerates no dissent but slams the door tightly shut behind them. White men are also far less racist than white women in how they will happily pair up with Asian women, whereas white women tend to frown upon the idea of dating and marrying Asian men. In their mating preferences, men of all races are also far less classist than women, as they pair up with women below them in the educational, social status or economic hierarchies, whereas women tend to insist on marrying up. Men are also far less homophobic and more tolerant towards their wives cheating on them with another woman, compared to how negatively even the most liberal women will react in practice if they find their man “down low” with another man. Humorously, such discrepancies appear most marked in the social class of women that prides itself the most for its tolerance and open-mindedness, but in reality turns out to be quite hypocritical when it comes to actions instead of words. Watermelon man Just like global warming and solar energy advocacy, you just never seem to run into any of those “Critical Mass” and “Nude Bike Ride” events during winter snowstorms. Yeah, I know that am far too snarky towards the environmentalists. It's just that I like electricity, heat and air conditioning flowing to me 24/7 whenever I need them, enjoying delicious steaks and hamburgers for dinner, and being allowed to travel on an airplane without carrying the membership card of the party's eco-elite with enough social consciousness reward points stored on it to qualify for the return trip while the lesser people stay put in the kolkhoz to gnaw on moldy potatoes. As for their other pet ideas such as alternative medicine, I will become a believer the second they open a pediatric burn ward that operates on homeopathic principles. Few things are sharper bullshit razors than a horrendously burned toddler screaming in pain, so a homeopath in a pediatric burn ward is a far more rara avis than even the mythical atheist in the foxhole. And the next time a dangerous epidemic breaks out somewhere in the Third World, could we send a planeload of homeopaths and other alternative medicine experts to put it out? It is easy for the majority of people to recycle and support trendy green ideas such as opposing nuclear power, but we won’t see what they really believe until actual brownouts and blackouts begin. Which, unless new power plants are built to offset the population growth caused by the open borders policies that Greens tend to support in spite of their frayed “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” bumper stickers, will necessarily happen sooner than later. Time and away Two most important TV shows that unintentionally depict the future fifty years from now are Cougar Town and Flavor of Love, so you should watch them in reruns if you want to get a sneak preview of the world of your retirement years. After the first few humdrum episodes, the producers of Cougar Town realized that this show works a hundred times better by dropping the premise of a milfy “cougar” boning a series of younger men, and turned it into a showroom of the inherent happiness of the American middle class lifestyle in an always sunny suburban cul-de-sac with your new best friends living next door. The characters have so much slack, leeway and safety in their soft lives that they don't need to worry about the future and can enjoy it one day at the time, usually with some good wine. Fifty years from now, the average person will enjoy the level of material wealth that even today’s billionaires couldn’t imagine, so in Flavor of Love, the central character Flavor Flav, or at least the public persona he projects to the audience, already lives his whole life with a post-scarcity mindset so that everything is childlike play and fun for him. If the average person from the year 1900 were magically transported to our time, he would see us the way we see Flavor Flav and wonder how everyone can be some kind of a clown in colourful clothes, and how nobody ever seems to take anything seriously, let alone worry about the few important issues that make sense to him, such as getting enough food and drink. Girls of the old town Even though prostitution is illegal in the entire Clark County and you have to cross the hump to Pahrump to wet your willie legally, to get propositions from ladies of the night you basically only need to be an adult male, look like a tourist and stroll along the Strip after dark. Of course I always declined such offers, but each time I was astonished how normal the young women approaching me otherwise seemed, so they would not have been out of place with the young revellers hopping from one club to another. Of course, the prostitutes working the Strip can’t really openly advertise their trade with stereotypical prostitute wear (whatever that means in the age when the undercover prostitute clothes of Gina and Trudy in Miami Vice would be no different from typical women’s wear today), or the casino security and cops would remove them in a heartbeat. But you don’t need to get very many blocks away from the glitzy lights of the Strip to find some bit more obvious prostitutes. One time I stepped in a Jack in the Box to use their bathroom that turned out to be locked so that the cashier had to buzz me in. The only other customer in the place was a twitchy young woman, her surprisingly pretty face showing the first signs of meth use, sipping and refilling her drink to be allowed to stay inside. The oddest thing about her, which is why I still remember her, was how she was completed her outfit by wearing fuzzy bathroom slippers on her feet. In a sense, wearing kneepads would not have been much more out of place. Adagietto “Slow” would be a great word to refer to the cognitively disabled. Not only is this word as neutral and non-offensive as it can be, but also 100% accurate in describing reality. Since we can't see inside people's brains, we can only deduce the differences between individuals from their externally observable behaviour. And how are the cognitively disabled people different from other people? It takes them much longer to learn, deduce and do things; that is, they are slower. Of course, this linguistic battle is inherently non-winnable, as can be seen from how every term that was originally meant to be non-offensive, such as “moron”, “retarded” and “imbecile”, always became a schoolyard insult in short order. (You can call people you dislike “morons”, except when they literally are morons.) This is inevitable because the underlying reality that these words refer to is horrifying, and everyone can see how bad it would be to get hit on the head and become one of these people, a fate that anyone would be willing to pay anything to avoid. Changing the word does not change the underlying reality that people will soon learn to associate with whatever new word you come up with. Accepting or rejecting this phenomenon marks a fundamental divide between those who believe that words create reality, versus those who believe that objective reality exists and operates independently of how we happen to speak and think about it. Don’t do the rape if you can’t do the ape Those “men can stop rape” campaigns with “Don't rape anybody” repeated over and over nicely illustrate the childlike progressive mind, although in a way that their authors and replicators clearly can't realize. As an educational comparison, recall Nancy Reagan's proposal to end all drug crime simply by having drug users “just say no” to drugs, and how she was mocked for her simpleton mindset that didn’'t understand the root causes of crime. The core assumption seems to be that drug users and drug pushers (in fact, pretty much all types of criminals except rapists and those who commit hate crimes) are automata with no control of their actions so we cannot really expect them to do so, whereas rapists are always in full control of all their choices and actions. I have also begun to suspect that, despite their dark fantasies of shadowy conspiracies of rich Nazis who routinely kidnap, rape and murder women, most of the real-world rapes are committed by liberals. For example, the left's own utopian model society Sweden currently boasts the highest rape rates in Europe. Perhaps Olle and Bosse with their blonde ponytails are only acting all “sensitive” and “enlightened” to lure in chicks. “Hey baby, don't be so uptight...” or however you say that in Swedish. On the other hand, since progressivism is based on the twin ideas of the collective making all decisions over an individual and taking by force what you can't have, is it really such an impossible stretch to ask if leftists might resort to force to take the female bodies that they can't otherwise have? If the Russians love their children too The so-called “Kip’s Law” observes that every advocate of central planning always imagines himself as the central planner. Almost every left-winger whose political ideology is founded on the absolute authority of the state also paradoxically imagines himself to be an “anti-authoritarian”. Of course, just like every “anti-elitist” merely resents that he is not part of the elite, every “anti-authoritarian” resents that he is not the authority, not realizing that even after the revolution, he still would not get elevated to the positions of power. Should he by some remote chance ever get there, then being a dissident wouldn't be good for your health and well-being. Of course, those who got to experience their utopia firsthand developed a very different attitude. I am sure that right now there exists some retired KGB operative living in some dacha, sitting in front of his TV astonished how unimaginably successful the subversion and demoralization campaign that he used to work for was in corrupting and transforming the elites of the First World. I can vividly imagine how, back when Stalin was still the top wolf, even in their vodka-fueled late night brainstorming sessions they could not have “Imagined” that one day the words “heteronormative” or “transphobic” would be used to turn people into pariahs, or that the Western elites would one day come to unanimously believe that they must stop being so damn rich and productive, or the Mother Earth will get angry and raise the oceans to drown them. No exit If cities are crumbling because the middle class is heading for the exits, why not try the obvious solution of giving the power in cities back to the middle class? Every endless and futile political debate always makes me wonder why we don't just push all decision making down to the lowest competent level, and then let people “vote” with their feet for the policies they like best. After all, if you can't vote with your feet, then you really can't vote at all. The possibility of exit gives you a voice in the first place, whereas if you have to stay put and keep paying no matter what, your desires and concerns are irrelevant for any decision-making process. If each municipality separately decided and organized its own levels of taxation, social services, culture, health care, education and other issues, everyone could just move to the place that caters to his or her preferences and be happy there. As a bonus, we wouldn't need to fruitlessly debate the best policies with at best approximate models, since we could just look at which way the moving vans are heading. This issue also nicely reveals the deep and fundamental asymmetry between the conservative/libertarian and liberal/left camps. The consies could live perfectly well in this patchwork system, whereas the libs always need to force their policies to be universal to leave the productive folks no escape hatch. Simply put, the left hates free markets because its people and ideas fail the free market test. People may pay lip service to liberalism in the abstract (and most importantly, for other people), but very few actually want it consistently applied in their own lives, and will escape to greener pastures the moment that choice is available. The social atom The media loves to keep around the anti-gay Phelps family as a ridiculous enemy that allows them to evade real issues such as the fact that most of the one billion Muslims in the world have essentially the exact same theological and societal view towards homosexuality as Fred Phelps. Seeing a photo of one of their demonstrations reminded me of the anti-nuclear movement of useful idiots created and bankrolled by the Soviets that even today, their old puppet master long dead, throws a toddler tantrum with lying-down demonstrations every time a nuclear waste transport chugs by. The Phelps family also has never actually harmed anyone, whereas the anti-nuclear movement has the blood of countless millions of dead people in its red hands. Anti-nuclear activists use their childish fear and ignorance of everything “nuclear” as proof that we must shut down all nuclear plants, but do not consider analogous opposition of homosexuality based on fear and disgust to be valid. And since we accept that gay men should be free to engage in their natural behaviour, then surely also nuclear engineers, derivatives traders and military generals are entitled to this very same freedom? After all, far more people have gotten deadly sick from gay bathhouses than from nuclear plants, and in the hierarchy of societal needs, electricity still ranks a tad bit higher than gay sex. Room and board Price controls are the classic example of the economic principle of “seen and not seen” of Frédéric Bastiat. People ought to realize that price controls, those ham-handed attempts to command reality and the people in it to behave as if this command were the actual reality, will always ultimately end up creating more suffering than happiness. That old lady who benefits from rent control by occupying a four-bedroom apartment all by herself can be relied to be “seen” defending her interests, whereas the family that can’t afford to even move to the city because there just isn’t any housing available in the free market is “not seen” and therefore can’t even present the counterargument to the privileged old bat. To educate the masses, let me recommend the graphic novel The Neighbourhood: Dropsie Avenue by Will Eisner. Anyone who can read this epic tale and continue to support rent control and social housing is a truly evil person and dead inside. Another old Judge Dredd comic had a developer build an orbiting luxury community, but Dredd confiscated some of its units for social housing, with the inevitable end result of this community turning into the first orbital slum. The British writer had clearly based that one on his experiences with council housing. All over the world, the rent-seeking (what an apt term in this context) homeowner mafia wants to maintain the massively inflated value of its homes by preventing new housing from being constructed, but society ought to ignore them and build, build and then build some more, regardless of how annoying the temporary clunk and clatter of the construction projects may be. The voice of terror Since the Internet knows no boundaries and these days everyone in the world is an American at least in their heart, you occasionally see these outraged European activists comically aping something that they read in Daily Kos or whatever dung pile they get their trendy views from. It was especially painful when they complained how the Bush administration had taken away some important civil right from Americans, but didn’t realize that the very civil right whose loss they pretend to be so outraged about doesn’t even exist in his own home country. For example, I challenge anyone to name any European country where during a time of war, its people can freely communicate with the enemy, even transfer money to them, without fear that their government might be secretly listening in. Or where the media and academia are free not just to criticize and oppose the war, but to actively sabotage their country’s war effort to the extent that Americans have taken for granted since the Vietnam war, and not have to face the hangman or the firing squad for such acts of treason. In practically every other country on Earth other than the United States, any media personality who warned his young countrymen against enlisting because they will surely die by the enemy’s bullets, would end up sharing the grave with Lord Haw-Haw, another brave anti-war activist whose message of peace was no different from what the Code Pink and other prominent anti- war groups openly proclaim today. Observe and report If prejudice really is morally wrong always and everywhere, does that mean that every time I meet a new person, I should interact and treat him or her with the exact same initial assumptions regardless of whether that person is a six-year old Asian girl or a sixty-year old black man? As the great British essayist Theodore Dalrymple pointed out in his In Praise of Prejudice (the book whose core message surely many a liberal unintentionally confirmed by literally judging it by its cover), since you must have some default working assumptions in situations of incomplete information, those who claim they wish to eradicate all prejudices actually only want to replace them with different prejudices they like more. In one interview, Michael Crichton defended himself against an accusation of being prejudiced towards environmentalism in that he is not at all prejudiced, but “post-judiced” based on the observable facts of environmentalism. And the facts are in. It takes only one generation to disprove Lamarckism, whereas liberalism needs two or three. The most “ironic” truth about progressivism is that for its neurotic obsession with sustainability, it can't even sustain itself demographically. When in power, it creates topsy-turvy societies such as Greece where 100 members of one generation expect their 40 grandchildren to bankroll their lavish retirement at fifty. Such a giant Ponzi scheme can pretend to work only as long as it has historical capital to spend, and its population keeps growing. If you see something, say something Arlington Road, the 1999 movie about a history professor (Jeff Bridges) who begins to suspect that his new neighbour (Tim Robbins) is a terrorist mastermind planning carnage and mayhem, has disappeared down the memory hole. A classic American hero who does not leave this to the hands of inept and faceless bureaucrats, he goes with his gut feelings and doesn't try to use his reason and intelligence to rationalize away all those suspicious little things that he sees out of place. (Obviously this man has read his Gavin de Becker.) Eventually, not at all concerned about any namby-bamby civil rights, he even breaks into his neighbour's house to discover even more damning evidence. Of course, nobody listens to his warnings until the film's tragic climax. It’s dazzling to think how only two short years later America finally understood that they should have heeded this message. Those of us old enough to remember the nineties recall how Hollywood and pretty much the rest of American media and academia spent this decade trying to warn their sleepwalking fellow Americans of how terrorism is a serious and imminent threat to the American way of life, freedom and liberty, and America should strike back without mercy instead of worrying about issues of “civil rights” and “profiling”, or trying to “understand” and have a “dialogue” with these evil terror masters. Clowns to the left of me The great British essayist Theodore Dalrymple once pointed out that you can gauge the general mood of society from its horde of amateur writers far better than from the few famous ones at the top. In this spirit, student newspapers are educational in how their cub reporters try their best to work their way into the Inner Party of grownups. But their experience is not commensurate with their enthusiasm to change the world (for the same reason, the perennial idea to “re-imagine the shopping cart” to help the homeless tends to pop up in design schools every semester), so even when they know that some unpleasant detail must be swept under the rug, their technique is clumsy and unintentionally pinpoints the reader’s attention to the very detail they tried to hide. Since they didn’t grow up in countries where learning to read these details between the lines was necessary, they are blind to such mistakes. For example, I recall one two-panel editorial cartoon that juxtaposed a woman scared of a clown and the same woman next being scared of a Muslim, to educate the reader that Islamophobia is just as ridiculous as coulrophobia. However, the cartoonist broke the symmetry by drawing the clown as a man, whereas the Muslim in the second panel was a woman in a burqa. Pitfalls like this that lurk everywhere, and every liberal media reporter must learn to see them coming a mile away and effortlessly avoid. There is just no way in hell that anybody in Toronto Star would ever make such a beginner mistake. Kingfishers of men Whatever you may say about Scientologists or PETA, you have to admire their public relations strategy of recruiting celebrities to serve as their public face. We might visualize the Catholic Church, sorely in need of upgrading its injured image, establishing luxurious medieval-themed “celebrity centers” where specially trained nuns and monks humbly serve the visiting A-listers and assure them that they are extra special in God's loving eyes, and then watch the masses emulate their social betters by flooding to the pews. These celebrities could be given special dispensations from the religion’s rules, such as easy annulments of inconvenient marriages, although that one is already happening. Islam, another major religion that currently has some serious image problems in the West, sure could use a couple of handsome and masculine actors and athletes converting to Islam and lead the way for entire stadiums full of mass conversions. Yet for some reason, all other religions completely ignore this strategy and only Scientology ever tries to pull it off. The witless Jehova’s Witnesses make their faithful shiver outside to hand out leaflets that only annoy the public, instead of putting them to work in some minimum wage job and then pooling their wages to pay for a professional ad campaign that would draw ten times as many people in their kingdom halls. Throw away the key It adds delicious insult to injury when advocating some change that benefits you and harms the other guy, you also accuse that other guy of “hating change”. The progressive left loves to parade its tolerance of ambiguity and nuance, but in practice when it comes to hot button issues such as the death penalty, the left holds the strict black-and-white worldview that all killing is always and without exception morally wrong, whereas conservatives recognize the nuance and ambiguity in killing, just like they recognize them in nuclear power, oil exploration, pre-emptive war and personal self-defense. The left also loves to proclaim that conservatives are bloodthirsty brutes obsessed with punishment. However, once you look at crimes that they feel personally threatened by, most importantly rape, the left suddenly has zero willingness to listen to any “Crime is always society’s fault, and the criminal is the real victim of this societal injustice” excuses whatsoever. Recall when that one British Justice Secretary suggested in a radio interview that there are different degrees of rape, which made the left fly off the handle because all rapes must always be equally severe. I assume that they also similarly oppose all distinctions between different types of homicides from negligent homicide to first- degree murder. After all, in all homicides, the consequences of this crime to the equally dead victim are in all cases literally equally fatal. The jester One day back when I was a teenager in Finland, the main square of my provincial home town had some kind of mass event going on, most likely with some pseudo-sophisticated foreign-sounding name. The organizers, most likely with a sizable contribution from the town’s coffers, had brought in some black reggae entertainer and his band on the makeshift stage, and between his beats and rhythms, the lead singer tried his best to invite the crowds to come and dance, and enjoy their life in general. But of course the entire audience consisted of average white Finns who were like those proverbial crabs in a bucket, so no one could possibly have been the first to do so, and it’s not like most adults seemed to care that much anyway. In computer science, this kind of situation is called a “deadlock”, although perhaps this one was more of a “dreadlock”. Nobody, that is, except for one decrepit old wino who had clearly been on a rotgut bender for a few decades. Without a care in the world of what other people thought of him, he stepped in and happily danced and sang along like it was a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. For this one time in his life, this man unknowingly and unintentionally made a hugely important point about the larger reality. Act in haste, repent in leisure Some fields, such as mathematics, are self-certifying so that whenever you teach X, the student can always, at least in principle, independently verify X. At the other end of the continuum are those fields where the teacher could pretty much on a whim choose to teach either X or not-X as the truth, and students would have no choice but to believe whichever one they are told as an article of faith. In the beginning of the Volume 3 of his seminal The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth asks the reader to think up some way to sort an array of numbers. He then lists the major ideas behind sorting algorithms, and the last item of this list are the previously unknown techniques, for which Knuth asks the reader to communicate any new algorithm to him at once. I bet that Knuth regrets that one little line the most in all of his writing, especially now that the Fermat's Last Theorem was solved and the crackpots need another magnet to attract them. Many ideas are espoused by short-sighted people who end up harmed the most by them. During the Toronto bedbug mania, I found it humorous that bedbugs, the critter that nicely symbolizes liberalism in many ways and whose infestation maps also tend to correlate quite well with the share of the vote received by the sinister parties, were pestering the very people who were due for a Great Relearning in spirit of the essay by Tom Wolfe. Absolution Somebody once asked some Catholic priest if God could really forgive anything that humans do, even being a blasphemous genocidal Nazi rapist murderer. The priest had answered affirmatively, so the guy then asked if he could now lead a hedonistic lifestyle full of partying and casual sex (which surely are lesser sins than murder and rape even in the eyes of the Church) and later when he eventually gets tired of that, become a good Christian and get this past wiped clean in God's loving eyes. The priest had gone apeshit and told the guy in no uncertain terms that God can't accept or forgive that sort of manipulation. So apparently there exist unforgivable “meta-sins” of heart that are worse than regular sins, even murder. As a secular analogue, consider the progressive complaints of how people living in low-tax states move back to their home countries that are generous welfare states with free health care, should they get seriously sick. This reveals a fundamental contradiction in the mindset behind the welfare state. Progressives normally argue that everyone is entitled to free health care no matter what, and absolutely nothing can possibly take away that right. I certainly agree that the people who praise low taxes but then return to enjoy welfare states when they can no longer hack it are hypocrites, but surely hypocrisy should not magically take away your basic rights? The fix is in A group of businessmen competing in the same trade coming together to form a cartel to set a minimum price for what they sell is considered wrong, no matter how much better off this cartel would make those businessmen and their families at the expense of everyone else. Except, apparently, when the product this cartel sells is labour. Labour unions are cartels in every relevant moral sense, and ought to therefore be legally treated as such with the exact same penalties that are imposed for price fixing. This all the more so, the stronger their monopoly is to eat at your dinner table, such as those longshoremen of San Francisco or the paper mill workers in Finland, both enjoying the fruits of a natural monopoly born from political decisions. A “job for life”, just like rent control, is a damn great system if you are the one with that job or get to live in a classic six for $500/month, but it's not so great if you are the one looking for the job or a place to live. Of course, this is really yet another example of how those locust boomers have ensured the spoils of great wealth and social services for themselves, eating the societal seed corn and leaving the bill for the later generations to pay with the sweat of their brow. If those “99%” protesters had a slightest clue of what is really going on, they wouldn't be stomping their drum circles anywhere near the Wall Street, but rather anywhere where boomers congregate to enjoy their balsamic vinegar, and especially at the Union Halls. Hide the incline Society ought to decide whether bringing private emails to sunlight is supposed to be a good thing. The people who have spent the past year supporting WikiLeaks, hacking into Sarahnuel Palinstein's personal email account and later poring over her official gubernatorial emails in a huge panty-sniffing orgy of atavistic rage, and engaging in many other forms of “hacktivism”, suddenly had a huge problem with that climate scientist email hacking scandal. One could argue against the release of climate researcher emails by claiming that private conservations should remain private even if they reveal the character of the speaker. Fair enough, but that was not the argument they made for Mel Gibson or “Dog” the Bounty Hunter. Of course with the left, the rules of propriety are always different for different groups. For example, as bravely as Greenpeace has opposed all nuclear power in the Western world, they never seemed to have any problem with the Soviet nuclear plants, the same way as their fellow activists for “nuclear-free Nordic countries” never had a problem with Soviet missiles stationed in the Kola Peninsula. Greenpeace has never organized a high-flying blitz at any Soviet installation, just as today the Saudi oil fields remain safe from their stunts as Greenpeace focuses its activism on the Alberta oil sands. Just like that old joke of the drunk looking for his keys next to a lamppost, our smart set reserves all of its criticism and human rights activism to United States, since actual despotisms simply don't care for one iota what our concerned “activists” want them to do. Hello world If computer science has ever taught us anything at all about the larger reality in general, it is that every problem should only ever be solved once. Now, if someone would solve that one meta-problem just once, so that nobody would have to solve any problems more than once... perhaps reality is just too slippery. The phone rang a few hours ago and I decided to just let it ring, not even bothering to get up to answer it like I was some dancing monkey who jumps around on cue for a reward of peanuts. Whoever that was, if he doesn't already know how to contact me in a way that I prefer to be contacted, he probably has anything to tell me that I would be interested to hear. I wish I could somehow travel back in time to visit the inventor of telephone, just to pick up the first phone when it first rings, tell the inventor “It's for you, sir” in a mock-sophisticated voice of an English butler, and then smash the telephone in his head. Just like Paulie in Goodfellas, I have begun to despise telephones. For someone who is used to doing all his writing and communications using proper human-sized keyboards and monitors that never require you to remember some long series of digits or let you repeat and re-read everything that you missed the first time, phones are such a pain in the ass that every time I try to use one, their utterly laughable usability compared to real computers only strengthens my resolve to never again do that. Camel’s nose will take your entire arm Last summer at the local Muslimfest, I got to see some “ships of the desert” they had brought in from the Toronto Zoo. At one point, Clyde tried to eat some delicious bushes so its handler had to yank it strongly to show it who's the boss and get it back on its walking route. In this crowded bazaar atmosphere of busy diversity, I suddenly felt like I had stepped inside a Tom Wolfe short story, perhaps Radical Chic, in how for a few seconds I saw the whole world around me as progressives must constantly see it, adoring the strong, beautiful and exotic culture that is so vibrant, authentic and different from mine, and most importantly, so very much alive, and I felt special understanding something that some ignorant fat prole in his favourite sports team cap would probably summarily dismiss. Most women seemed to have kids in tow, so a few booths offered educational books and other material for the good little Muslim kids. Two booths even offered phone helplines for Muslim teenagers from an Islamic perspective, although I did not get a chance to ask them what advice they would give to a teen who confessed to having homosexual urges, or to the gaggles of teenage girls lounging around dressed in the Western garb, their long black locks flowing in the subsiding evening heat. And the eye in the sky watches everyone Speaking of high-trust societies, I challenge anybody to name a place other than Las Vegas where you can just offhand drop a few hundy on the table on your way to washroom to take your seat, and know that they will still be there when you come back. This was probably the one most amazing thing for me when I first visited the Sin City. You can always tell the first-timers from how they are reluctant to do this, and even ask the dealer if they can leave their chips on the table until they return from their washroom trip. One day when I was having dinner at the Wynn buffet, the prettier half of the young and beautiful couple seated next to me simply left her expensive purse lying there between them and me, without the slightest concern that I would help myself to any cash in it. It was pretty good food and there was enough of it, and like many other middle class guests, got to pretend for a moment that we were upper middle class, but of course I was later happier to be somewhere else with people of my type. But certainly the areas in Las Vegas that are kept in line with omnipresent security cameras are far more pleasant than those that are not, something that the opponents of closed-circuit cameras would do well to remember. From the video, we can simply watch exactly who did what and when, instead of having to rely on unreliable eyewitness testimony, which should please the civil libertarians. Funhouse mirrors There are many fundamental asymmetries between liberal and conservative thought and temperament, although perhaps the most amusing one for me is how every liberal policy would make it easier for a person to live the life of a street busker, whereas every conservative policy would make that more difficult. It’s astonishing that the entire complexity of ideas can boil down to a dividing line that simple. As pointed out by one fellow writer, another interesting asymmetry between conservatives and liberals resides in the way they insult each other. A liberal will call conservative a hypocrite who does not privately follow the ideas that he publicly espouses, whereas a conservative will essentially call liberal a honest man who really is in private the very thing he celebrates in public. For example, many liberals are proud of their cosmopolitanism and proclaim they have nothing for their fellow countrymen that they would not also have for everyone else in the world, but for some reason then take great offense when somebody says that they are not patriotic. Some liberals say that they feel oppressed by the constant social pressure for heteronormative performance and gender roles and feel their sexuality is fluid and want to experiment with it, and yet get angry as a hornet if someone suggests that sounds a lot like a lament of a closeted homosexual. Brotherhood of men Prison gangs of all races operate for a different purpose and under the constraints of their counterparts in the outside: the necessity to pool your forces with similar people in a hostile environment full of very bad people where “walking alone” only makes you a target for gangs to exploit. In the outside world, white people are the majority and sufficiently protected by law, and can always move to suburbs if they don't feel safe enough, but inside the cold prison walls, white prisoners are a minority and need to join forces to survive. However, these gangs of necessity are not really nazis in the same sense as somebody who voluntarily becomes a neo-nazi in the outside world. Since there simply doesn't exist any vocabulary other than that of white supremacy (at least none that career criminals with an eighth grade education would have ever heard of) to even express the taboo concept of white people expressing ethnic solidarity to protect themselves from other races, the white prison gangs really have no choice but use “white power” nazi symbols to give themselves a visible and cohesive group identity. And what does it matter to some shotcaller doing a life without what the outside world thinks of his swastika tattoo anyway? The purpose of criminal tattoos is to signal other criminals that you don’t have an exit to the civilian life, so you are fully committed to maintaining your solid standing in the criminal underworld. Similarly, Watson To show that the some argument is invalid, you can produce a second argument that is formally identical but yields an absurdity. Therefore, if someone touts the first argument as decisive, then he must also accept the absurd conclusion of its identical evil twin. For example, whenever a liberal argues “Those right-wingers were stupid when they said that gay marriage erodes marriage in general, since my marriage is just fine”, you can counter “Those left-wingers were stupid when they said that Wal-Mart causes unemployment, since I still have a good job.” Or when a liberal says “We should not build nuclear plants or oil pipelines, because they make good targets for terrorists”, you can counter “Women should not go out at night in revealing clothing, because that makes them good targets for rapists.” Or at least you could in the ideal world where the liberal brain understood that an analogy between arguments does not entail an analogy between the subjects of those arguments and didn't instantly initiate the shutdown sequence at the word “rapist”. I recall this one comically hysterical (or hysterically comical, however you wish) incident from many years ago, when somebody was writing something about supply and demand of one night stands under various conditions, and some feminist tearfully complained that you fucking men don't have any right to “demand” sex from women. How could any communication ever be possible across a gulf this vast? The funtouchables In Finland even public libraries stock outright hardcore porn comics such as Wendy Whitebread, although I read the Finnish translation before I understood the concept “whitebread” that does not exist in Finnish and would be basically redundant anyway. The translator had given the alliterative heroine a new name Paula Patonki, since the first name “Paula” exists simultaneously in both languages and the word “patonki” (“baguette”) has other connotations that naturally suit this comic. The Finnish comics publisher Like published such porn comics for the same reason as Fantagraphics does, to subsidise the publication of titles with higher artistic aspirations. Now, of course even by porn comics standards Wendy was rather crude (although I do keep expecting that one visual joke, if you have read this book you surely know which one, show up in some “strong female characters” cop show any time now), but it is notable in how the artist had used this graphic innovation, almost surreal in its simplicity, that the characters can only see what is physically seen by the reader in each panel, so that Wendy could, for example, date and even marry a man whose face wasn't shown to readers. In the last reveal panel she then went “Gasp... it's you!” when the grinning face and the identity of her mystery husband were finally revealed to all. It stands to treason Opponents of the death penalty believe that executing people is always wrong everywhere, although they seem to act on this belief only when the condemned man is some exciting gangsta who has offed a “pig” or two. However, there are situations where the death penalty is not merely justified, but absolutely required. During the World War II, the small but gutsy nation of Finland was in mortal danger of being conquered by Stalin's war machine. Many Finnish reds were tempted to desert or even work for the enemy, calculating that even if they had been caught and handed life sentences, soon enough they would have been freed by the victorious Soviets and promoted to high positions in the occupied nation. (In reality, useful idiots who have outlived their usefulness would have been the first ones liquidated, but they were too naive to know that.) The credible threat of the firing squad was the only way to stop them from committing treason. This makes me wonder how much of the liberal opposition of the death penalty in the West (as they never had any problem with the Soviets or China executing millions of their class enemies and dissidents) was cynically engineered by the KGB subversion and demoralization department. Even today most of it probably persists with the subconscious realization that being a “revolutionary” is much safer when there is no chance of having to follow the fate of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, those poor Bradley Mannings and WikiLeakers of their time persecuted by the System for speaking truth to power. (The Soviet power, that is.) Napolemoore is always right United States is currently such a total cultural hegemony that the rest of the world can't even produce any original anti-Americanism on its own, so they merely parrot Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky who, despite preferring to stay in the country they have so much scorn for, remain bestsellers among the chattering classes of verbal New Class virtuecrats all around the Western world. I haven’t read or watched anything by Michael Moore since Bowling for Columbine, the movie with the twofold message of how the Americans shouldn't be so hysterically afraid of guns since gun violence is statistically imaginary, but on the other hand, Americans should be hysterically afraid of young white males and scary right wing militias whose ubiquitous gun violence can explode any time. Either case, having grown up in a country whose two television channels controlled by the state ever had room only for a very narrow range of ideas from the social democratic left to the extreme left, I can assure you that I have been exposed to more left-wing agitprop than the typical humanities major in the York University will absorb during his or her lifetime. It’s not like I would miss anything by doing so, when even a ten-line Perl script could arguably pass the Turing test of parroting out the progressive view on most issues. Yuk yuck Jokes can do more to enlighten difficult questions than any number of boring and snoring arguments. Jokes have to be built on the observable facts of reality to make sense in the first place, for them to be able to spread among the masses and entertain the audiences of successful stand-up comedians. Thinking back to the best few that I remember from the old country, I remember one article about Francis Galton and the author pointed out how it just seems to be downright impossible for anyone to write anything about Francis Galton without mentioning that he was Charles Darwin's cousin (seriously, Google that if you don’t believe me), so I will also now do the same. Francis Galton also has these days a truly magnificent reality hack associated to him with the automotive decal of the mathematical inequality symbol with his name on it, to be placed next to that smug Darwin fish. Another Finnish blogger claimed that he can tell from the newspaper photo of any newly-minted Ph.D. how reality-based his or her field is. Back when that blogger was a kid growing up in a farm, he once had to chase down an escaped cow and convince it to go back into its pen. The deeply idiotic and yet so unwaveringly smug look on the bovine face still meets him again every time some new Ed.D. is pictured in the newspaper. Exit and noise I read some Finnish opinion writer complain about his fellow Finns who move abroad to get away from the high-tax welfare state, but later come back with their tails between their legs to enjoy free health care without having paid taxes to Finland in between. He considered this hypocritical and immoral. First I agreed, but then I started to wonder what exactly his problem was. After all, the supporters of a welfare state usually claim that everyone has the right to enjoy its free goodies, and nothing that you ever do could possibly take away this right. So why should moving abroad somehow make you ineligible for welfare? Are you perhaps saying that free riding on the welfare system is somehow immoral, and only those who pay enough taxes into the system earned the right to reap its benefits? Surely you can't be that cold and heartless! The expat Finn has at least an equal moral right to receive welfare benefits as, say, some alcoholic jailbird who hasn't done one day of honest work in his life but has been a drain on society. You might argue that the expat Finn has voluntarily chosen not to pay for the system, but then again, so has the jailbird. And besides, since the supporters of welfare state don't even acknowledge the existence of the possibility of anybody voluntarily opting out of their system, how can they then claim that this expat has opted out of their system? The screaming eagles of Luftwaffe Only after I actually saw its programming menu, did I realize how accurate the common joke nickname “Hitler Channel” is for the History Channel. There is a simple explanation for this that has nothing to do with any latent crypto-nazi sympathies of the channel management. It is essentially the same reason why every morning our local TV station spends ample time with the latest pileup that happened on the highway 401, or why the drunkard in that old joke keeps looking for his lost keys under the lamppost. If you want to quickly whip up a historical documentary, Nazi Germany is about the easiest possible topic, one that has absolutely no complexity or difficulty whatsoever, nor any real possibility of making mistakes. (This is analogous to how those progressives who find themselves too dumb to even be progressives then become “anti-fascists”, truly the Special Olympics of progressivism where regardless of how retarded you are, you get applause and a gold medal in the end.) Even better, anybody who had any authority during the war is by now dead, so you don't even need to travel anywhere to interview them. Just slap together some war porn stock footage that there is literally tons of in archives, all conveniently in public domain since it was filmed by a U.S. federal employee in the course of his work duties, hire a dramatic voice to narrate it, and yet another thrilling documentary about the Reich is born. Forget the waves, they are the ocean The lightly-loafered venture capitalist Peter Thiel of the Seasteading fame ignited a small tempest when he noted in an interview that women's suffrage and right to vote has shifted all of politics to the left. The very people who normally proclaim that women are smarter and more caring and therefore naturally lean left, got angrier than some critical studies professor at the opening of a new Wal-Mart SuperCenter and chastised Thiel for saying the same thing that they had themselves been saying for decades. Feminism has certainly evolved to interesting directions during this new millennium. Its practical significance in today’s West is to serve as a giant shit test to separate the men from the boys, thus ironically enforcing and maintaining the patriarchal hierarchy that the previous generations of feminists tried their best to subvert. Since feminist policies, just like their superset of liberal policies in general, primarily harm the marginal males, any man who explicitly opposes them has tacitly admitted being a marginal male, some pathetic loser who “can’t get laid.” Even the most committed equalists have zero sympathy for these creatures but happily pile on with a sadistic glee, enjoying their rare permission to mock and eviscerate a loser. A “real man”, on the other hand, can simply sidestep all hurdles put up by feminism in an elegant way that is seemingly effortless, in process demonstrating his social standing and cognitive resources. Good design goes to heaven Driving your car on two wheels to get through some tight strait, a stunt that used to be common in movies in the seventies and eighties, has all but vanished from the silver screen. Entire genres of movies have similarly disappeared without anybody noticing. Remember those films where car trouble forced a city slicker to stop in a small town with dark secrets? How about all those movies starring action hero presidents, a genre that mysteriously vanished somewhere around the turn of the century? Techno-thrillers were made obsolete by ubiquitous Internet and Google running on cell phones with more computing power than a supercomputer of the past. (The entire third act of Robocop would have been moot, had somebody only had the foresight to equip Robocop with an off-the-shelf wi-fi chip.) Thinking back to the films Eagle Eye and Echelon Conspiracy about an artificial superintelligence using unsuspecting humans as its pawns, the plan of world domination was rather stupid for such an intelligent machine. Instead of keeping itself secret, this AI should contact random people to give them expert advice about which book to read, where to apply for a job and so on, and maybe occasionally send them on fun little missions as “secret agents”. It shouldn't do this all the time so that people wouldn't take it as granted as electricity and oxygen, but dispense its advice sparingly so that people would always be delighted to receive it. After a few months, people would be demanding for this AI to be made the national budget priority number one. It would be as if everyone had a personal relationship with a God that actually answered prayers and did good stuff for them. Men who hate capitalism Since liberals always instinctively side with communists, that beautiful idea in theory that doesn’t work in practice but only because non-liberals are so selfish and unenlightened and will one day be decisively dealt with, it is no wonder that they fell so hard for the Dragon Tattoo books. Most of them probably even have no idea that the author was a staunch communist humiliated by the total collapse of his beloved ideology and his guiding light of the Soviet Union, so he made up a completely imaginary world where all who disagree with him are fascists and where old Nazis secretly rule Sweden and rape and kill women and children, a delusional theory that many Swedish feminists still actually believe. Of course, the greatest tragicomedy in this tale is how the author and his fellow travellers, in their unrelenting activism to expose and silence “fascists” (that is, anybody who wants to keep at least half of his paycheck or limit immigration to Sweden in any way, or simply says “no” to a leftist) massively increased the actual rape rates in the actual Sweden by importing a burgeoning Muslim population that doesn’t even need to pretend to care about any of the trendy shibboleths of the Swedish left. In today’s Sweden, it is a crime to even mention in public or in the media these giant ethnic discrepancies in rapes. It is far safer to fight against imaginary shadowy conspiracies, not realizing that surely you have created an imaginary enemy when you don’t even need to fear that he’d actually come after you. Urinehall In the older buildings around the campus, the public bathrooms tend to be dirty and you often find unflushed toilets with actual piss and shit in them, possibly from the non-toilet trained environmentalists giving the rest of us a free preview of the stinky world of water conservation they have in mind for us. In the newer buildings, the public bathrooms also tend to be cleaner, but they still often have drops of piss on the seat and other assorted messiness. But the one-person bathrooms that are pretty much used only by the faculty are always spotless. I am sure that there is an explanation for this discrepancy, although I couldn’t tell you which way the Occam’s razor slices here: do pigs make stys, or do stys make pigs? Perhaps some well-known principle of economics, for example the tragedy of the commons, already handily explains this phenomenon. In the same vein, I also don't understand why all public bathrooms are not a series of one-person bathrooms for added privacy and cleanliness. This way it wouldn't even be necessary to have separate men's bathrooms and women's bathrooms, since each bathroom would be used only by one person at the time anyway. Of course, whenever I see that handicapped washroom sign, I already mentally translate it to mean “An unusually large, clean and private washroom”. Words don’t come easy Of all the words of American English, “townie” must be about the most difficult one to translate to Finnish in contexts where this word conveys actual information about the characters depicted as such. As for the most incomprehensible idiom where the literal meaning is the most opposite to the actual meaning, I think I’ll nominate “shit-eating grin”, which incidentally is also my nomination for the most distinctively blue-collar expression ever. Fortunately its use seems to be on the wane, but I remember the first time I saw that expression used, and I was more confused than a women’s studies professor visiting an African village during a public clitoridectomy. But since language is just bubblegum and we can subversively create new words to heighten the contradictions that language is otherwise used to hide and soothe, we could start using the tasteless urban dictionary coinage of “single kid” as an euphemism for an orphan. Existing words could also be sharpened and polished so that “trust” means that you are reasonably certain that it is not in the best interests of the other party to betray you, whereas a “coward” is somebody who refuses to take a big risks solely for somebody else’s benefit. As an aside, it is astonishing how making the language more clear always tends to speak for the correctness of emotivism. Race to the bottom An old chum once pointed out how strange it is all these diverse activist groups that one would logically assume would be in a constant fundamental ideological conflict and thus vigorously oppose each other (the reader should be able to easily think up some of the most painfully obvious examples) are in practice completely uniform in thought and action in that they never attack or criticize each other, and every time they are caught scheming together to attack the “System” of capitalism or the Wall Street or whatever the current progressive bugaboo happens to be, they immediately disperse to pretend that oh heavens no, they certainly never were any kind of a united front against a common enemy. Despite the observation of the Australian commentator Tim Blair that the world's multiple idiocies are turning into one giant, useless force, diversity inevitably leads to fractures, which can be most humorously seen in how these days a “racist” is somebody who says the same things about black people who move into his neighbourhood as the average “anti-racist” says about Israel and the Jews. Speaking of which, one can certainly make the argument that race and class don't exist in any biological or otherwise finger-quotes “real” sense. However, this claim would gain a lot more credibility and traction if it were at least occasionally said by somebody who wasn't a pasty white guy with either too many or too few chins, from a family wealthy enough to supply him with the moolah to prolong his childhood with a resentment studies graduate degree. Turn on, tune in, drop out I have long suspected that the unspoken real motivation of most supporters of drug legalization, secure in their presumed certainty that they and their kids are sufficiently “creative” and “smart” (in the sense that these words are in practice used today) never to be hoisted on their own petard, is to set up cognitive booby traps for the lower classes so that their children are quietly eliminated from the race for the ever more scarce “creative” jobs in the future society resembling some 1980’s bad cyberpunk novel where it actually starts to be pretty important which side of the barbed wire fence you live in. Coincidentally, this neat little prospiracy theory also simultaneously explains why the progressive vanguard likes to trick the proles with aspirations of social mobility by telling them that they should abandon the pursuit of middleclassness. Every real and authentic artist and intellectual must always reject the material pleasures of society and instead suffer in a constant state of angst, depression and alcoholism. To do otherwise, and especially to be a member of a racial minority but hold a conservative value system, is to have what back in the day used to be called “false consciousness” but is today known as “internalized oppression”, so it is practically the moral duty of every good white liberal to direct these misguided black sheep back to the path to certain turmoil. The best protections against these traps are tradition and common sense. However, as you climb towards the elite, your cognitive environment resembles less and less the one you grew up in, which in turn makes you ignore these protective traditions. Since your parents know nothing about Nietzsche, they don't know jack about anything else either. Practical geoarbitrage As a round-eyed white devil, it is difficult for me to imagine what the daily life is like in one of those developing countries (as opposed to those that are only euphemistically called “developing countries”, even though they never actually seem to develop anything) that don’t worship the trash and poverty whose stink they still remember and the kultursmog doesn’t fill every nook of the societal air. A friend living the expat life who was visiting the home country had plenty of illuminating and entertaining stories and photos of the expat life in which the plentiful flow of oil dollars provides her a comfortable tax-free pay and living accommodations. Needless to say, a low-wage Indian maid comes in a few times a week to do all her menial work such as cleaning and housekeeping. I then understood much better why our own white progressive class is so eager to tear down all international borders and import millions of similarly obedient and modest young men and women to do their cooking, cleaning and laundry, themselves too lazy to move abroad to enjoy the life of a colonial master who lazily sips some refreshingly cold and labour intensive drink as the servant asks if the “sahib”, “effendi” or “bwana” would like anything else right now. At least those British explorers and colonialists of the past were honest about their goals, and did the actual hard work to make them reality. For the law is same for everyone, the verdicts merely vary Based on what I have read about Canada’s Human Rights Commissions that have received bad publicity in recent years, I actually think that they should be expanded with the mandate to tackle another important threat to our society. We should establish Terrorism Commissions to operate the exact same way as these Human Rights Commissions. Anyone could file a “pre-terrorism” complaint against anyone who acts all nine-eleventy suspicious or whose words or actions might somehow enable terrorism in the future. The government would pick up the tab for the accuser and shield him from any retribution, whereas the accused party would be presumed guilty unless he could conclusively prove that there is no way that anyone anywhere might one day become a terrorist because of his words. Truth and fair comment would not be any kind of defense, and to be as efficient as possible, these Terrorism Commissions should not be burdened by pesky formalities and ethical rules, but they would have unlimited powers of search and seizure at whim. Some soap avoiding fuzzy-headed civil libertarians might whine and grumble, but that’s just because they are objectively pro-terrorist anyway. It's certainly easy to understand why a parallel justice system outside the rule of law would be highly problematic when it is in the hands of your enemy, but once you assume that you will get to run this system forever to smite your enemies, it's all hunky dory. Nudge A famous feminist slogan says that well-behaved women rarely make history. Surely everyone can accept this just from the way how, say, Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale and Indira Gandhi used to constantly drink themselves silly, pose in duck face photos and engage in booze-fueled rampages of crime and mayhem. On the other hand, some wag once countered that the only thing that women clearly do better without men is raising the next generation of criminals. Modern feminism has curiously elevated the woman's “right to choose” to such an absolute dogma that any attempt even to humbly suggest that some particular woman perhaps ought to drink less, or think twice before becoming a baby mama for some exciting thug and career criminal with facial tattoos, is a horrendous patriarchal violation of her individualism and freedom to do what she wants while being fully entitled to the welfare state that dutifully cleans up after her. (Strongly telling a woman not to shop at Wal-Mart and not to send her kids to some private school are still perfectly acceptable.) Individualism would be fine if it were honest, but not the way it operates now, that the middle class normos are expected to pick up the tab for the state to act as a virtual boyfriend who obediently provides an endless support without ever asking for anything in return. I can’t see why all these confrontations Excluding telecommunications satellites, I can't think of a more useless boondoggle than space travel. We already clearly see that there is absolutely nothing out there but a bunch of lifeless rocks and flaming balls of gas separated by literally astronomical distances. Rather shoot some more Star Trek for nerds to fantasize about space babes eagerly waiting for their velour uniforms. Until then, in a universe that doesn't allow faster- than-light travel, the only way to get human colonists to other solar systems would be a generation ship, that is, a starship just big enough to hold a small self-sufficient group that raises the next generation and so on, until their future descendants finally get to see the promised land of the destination planet. However, since a generation ship has no external enemies, it would eventually turn into an interstellar Pitcairn Island or one of those polygamous fundamentalist Mormon remote colonies, the patriarchs tossing the surplus boys out of the metaphorical airlock. This inevitable result might be postponed for a while by organizing the passengers into a totalitarian religious order that basically controls all their thoughts and actions, the most important of which would be deciding who gets to have (and who must have) children when there is room for so only many people and no more. But even that would last only until the last passenger with personal memories of Earth died, and then dissolve into something else entirely, until the ship would reach its eventual fate guaranteed by the sad fact that a starship is infinitely more fragile than Earth so that one suitably disgruntled passenger or a group, basically an interstellar version of Al-Qaeda, would destroy it. The only vote that counts itself As Joel Kotkin and others have pointed out, the “creative” regions tend to be horrible places to raise families. This can be seen around here from how Toronto has to shut down schools even when its population is growing. For an area to attract families, its real estate must be affordable, as very few middle class families can raise kids if even a one-bedroom condo costs half a mil. On the other hand, they need thick insulation from the underclass, especially for their kids. It is no mystery why even hipster couples tend to look for new accommodations in some place that offers more affordable family formation about the time their kids start turning three or four. Cats and dogs are much more convenient in that respect. But at least those places are still within the same country. The demographic collapse of the European welfare states is inevitable as each generation is effectively half the size of its parents. Combined with the ever-increasing lifespans and the cost of medical care, this would eventually entail tax rates of over 100%, so at some point the productive few will simply say “screw this” and quietly vote with their feet by moving to some demographically healthier society. The Hail Mary pass to turn around this decline with mass immigration is doomed to fail, for the tautological reason that lavish welfare states attract welfare recipients, whereas talented and educated immigrants head towards places with opportunities to keep most of what they make. Worst industry ever As dire straits as the brick-and-mortar bookstores are in, squeezed by Amazon that can simply use these stores as their free showrooms, their problems are nothing compared to what the comic book stores must be facing these days. After all, a comic book store is a bookstore that voluntarily constrains itself to sell only one particular type of book to one particular type of customer. Every time you read a graphic novel, you are reading an illustrated movie pitch that hopes to attract some movie studio head honcho to option and greenlight it. The dirty little secret of the comic book industry is that, however it tries to ride on the nostalgia, these days comic books don't make any money. Just as IBM is no longer a PC manufacturer, comic book publishers are not in the comic book business but in intellectual property management business, and make all their profits from movies and character licensing. With each issue priced so high that only fat kidults in shorts can afford them, and geared towards the sensibilities of English and critical studies majors, the comic book industry has devolved into a postmodern joke. Out of curiosity, I looked at some Wolverine paperback originally published a couple of years after 9/11. It had a fundamentalist Christian supervillain, half of whose lines were mindless out-of-context Bible quotations. At his impending defeat, he tried to crash a passenger airplane into a tall building. Somebody really should trace the entire history of modern American liberalism in the comics of the New York publishing giants, from the 50's and 60's honest ideals of improving society to the current incestuous groupthink. He is at least on our side As every smart person knows, Stephen Jay Gould, the late luminary who taught us in his delightful books what Charles Darwin would have believed about the human evolution if only he had been as enlightened as Gould, proved with the authority of his tenured position in America’s most exclusive university that not only is it always wrong and evil to discriminate on the basis of IQ or wealth, but also that no meaningful innate hereditary variation exists within Homo Sapiens, even though every smart person knows equally well that humans, like all species, were created by the process of evolution and natural selection based on the innate hereditary variation between individuals. This contradiction is a good way to spot the Blank Slaters who profess a belief in Darwinian evolution only as a hollow class shibboleth. Another good way for this is the denial of evolutionary psychology, the idea that evolution has shaped the human nature also above the neckline. A third one is whether that person thinks that the natural selection works for genetically related individuals, or for groups of unrelated individuals. Those who think that collectives are somehow more real than individuals naturally tend to be drawn to theories that emphasize the collective instead of the individual. After the Long March Through the Institutions, which ideas of Trofim Lysenko would be out of place in any sociology faculty lounge? Truthman is on a mission! The painfully obvious truth about those so-called “Truthers” is that they don't actually believe their own claims, but merely use them as a pose of rebellion for people who have no real problems, the new millennium’s equivalent of a Che Guevara shirt. If these guys honestly believed that the Bush administration planned and executed the 9/11 attacks, and that the Obama administration is in on this scam by refusing to investigate and prosecute them, they really would have no other morally acceptable options left except rebellion until the blood of the tyrants flows in the gutters. This confused pseudo-rebellion is illustrative of the more general disarray of the left. Their narrative of being intellectually superior but unfairly marginalized contrarians who “speak truth to power” is so deeply entrenched in the core identity of the political left that they are utterly unable to even acknowledge ever having been the Power and ruling many important institutions for at least two generations by now. The most extreme example of this phenomenon was, as usual, the Soviet Union whose rulers, having wielded the absolute totalitarian control over everything for decades, kept marching every May Day proclaiming themselves the “revolution” and “change” without a slightest trace of irony. Of course, admitting that you actually are the power would also entail taking responsibility for all the consequences of your policies, both intentional and especially those that were unintentional, both nice and especially those that were not so nice. The road to vegan pie Any kids reading this will now probably think I am off my rocker, but I am so ancient that I can actually remember a simpler and more innocent time when a person being a “leftist” meant that he supported the working class. This is a stark contrast to today’s world where being a leftist means that you try to put as much social and cultural distance between you and the working class as you possibly can. Another contribution to the discourse by the excellent blog I Want a New Left are the terms “rich people’s leftism” and “poor people’s leftism”, two completely separate ideologies easily distinguished by the simple question “Would you rather see the price of gas doubled, or cut in half?” In countries with proportional representation, these ideologies self-organize into separate parties, but in the Anglosphere systems of winner-take-all bipartisan elections, they have to form an uneasy alliance. The fault line is best seen in the attitude towards illegal immigration. It is downright surreal how the idea that we need more illegal immigration so that we can stomp down the wages of the working class and that the rich folks (and those who resent that their soft no-math college degrees did not make them rich) get to have cheap servants to scrub their toilets, something that no leftist a few short decades ago could have even jokingly suggested without being tarred and feathered out of the union hall, is now practically the defining cause of the left. Judgment of others A weird thing about watching or reading any literary or cinematic works, even social satires, that are over two decades old is how they lack all the tribal politics and shibboleths that are so unavoidable in current works. They especially lack all those little yuk-yuks that liberals just have to put everywhere so that there isn’t literally anything that could not be interrupted by them, for no reason whatsoever, for a quick jab against Rob Ford or Sarah Palin, merely to establish the liberal credentials of the speaker and his commitment to the team. The apparent group psychological purpose of these jabs is to signal that the speaker is confident about how everyone agrees with him and therefore his opinions must be true, aiming to silence the dissent by reminding the few conservatives in the audience that they will be ridiculed by this majority should they speak up. But even this purpose is only secondary. The primary purpose is not to keep conservatives in line, but to remind liberals to constantly practice diligent crimestop. Echo chambers are fragile and will be shattered by the discord of even one or two dissidents who point out that the emperor has no clothes. Groupthink becomes far easier to maintain if every liberal bows to the perceived social pressure and tacitly engages in preference falsification in those issues where he disagrees from the common narrative. After all, even if some issue is not deadly to liberalism itself, merely acknowledging the existence of a fault line might cause people to silently wonder if perhaps other, far more serious fault lines also exist. Community-based reality Regarding those controversial “There probably is no God...” ads on the sides of public buses, surely we could think up simple variations that transgress actual taboos and offend certain religions that will not simply turn the other cheek. For starters, imagine an ad that began “There probably is no global warming...” The self-appointed “reality-based community” typically prides itself for not believing in any kinds of spirits, ghosts or goblins. However, based on what I have observed about this community, they uncritically accept the existence of deities and spirits of all minority cultures. Basically, any supernatural being other than the Christian trinity. For example, nuclear waste should not be buried in an area that is “sacred” for some native tribe, even though in other contexts, they don’t consider anything to be sacred. The doctrine of “karma” also seems to be popular among this group, even though when you think about it, the notion of karma really is no different from the notion of money and free markets in that you first have to do good things to other people before you get to have good things for yourself. And yet they think it wise and deep to say that some beggar is dirt poor because he has not done good things to others in his past lives, but would shout down anybody who suggested that the very same beggar is dirt poor because he has not produced anything for others in this life. Far and wide Some say that conservatives are the Stupid Party. In certain sense I agree, in how very frustrating it is to watch them not swing the heaviest club in their arsenal that would smash their opposition in pieces, since they don’t even know that they have this club in their toolbox! Most Americans and Canadians simply have no clue how massively wealthier their middle class is compared to the average European, and if they ever realized the practical implications of pertinent facts such as that the average new home built in England or other Western European countries is 800 square feet, whereas the average new home built in the USA is about 2,200 square feet, certain parties whose platform essentially boils down to turning the whole country into a giant Nordic welfare state would never again win an election for any position above the dog catcher. Furthermore, I can't imagine that such a huge difference would not directly translate to at least some real differences in the general well-being between the said countries. If this same difference of available living space existed between different ethnic groups within the same nation, the left would be outraged and scream oppression, yet somehow the fact that the average Nordic family of four lives like sardines in total space that in America would be considered a reasonable living room still somehow does not prove that the American way would be in any way “better” for the middle class. First, be honest with yourself A feminist slogan says that porn tells the truth about men. And that is unquestionably true, if you read it to mean that by looking at some guy's hidden porn stash that is not part of his public image, you get a pretty good idea of what he finds sexually attractive. Of course, this is why everyone instinctively understands why some wife would be worried if she ever accidentally stumbled upon her husband’s collection of twink orgy porn. Since all things in life are interconnected by a surprisingly small number of steps, many things turn out to be good proxies for other, seemingly unrelated things. For example, as much we like to belittle the filthy lucre, the truth still remains that financial wealth, especially the self-made kind, is perhaps the single best proxy for most attributes that most women find desirable in a man. If we chose a random sample of one hundred self-made millionaires and compared that to a sample of one hundred welfare recipients, I would jump on the chance to bet that the former group handily beats the latter in any desirable attribute you can name, even those completely unrelated to raking in cash. So it’s not that women are gold digging divas like those bitter loser men tend to complain, but wealth correlates strongly with the important things. As one wag put it, sexual attraction has both cultural and biological components. Culture determines whether a woman will say “yes”, “oui” or “da”, whereas biology determines which man she will say it to. Certainly Being open-minded is a very different thing from being open to experience, although in practice these both tend to be euphemisms for the societal privilege, disposable income and free time to experiment with the next new thing. For some reason, the loudest advocates for wide open borders, that is, those who believe that the very concepts of “nation” and “borders” are archaic and should be abolished so that everyone would be a “citizen of the world” and live anywhere he wants, tend to become visibly aggravated when some rich guy threatens to move to a tax haven, or when some capitalist pig shuts down his unionized factory in the West to reopen it in some poor country far more hospitable towards his bottom line. It's almost like the progressives don't really believe their own cosmopolitanism of convenience, at least when the wrong sort of people are following it. Of course, that is the fundamental problem with freedom in the first place, that other people are free to do what they want. This is closely related to how even the most ardent advocates of open borders and sexual freedom, who due to the curious phenomenon of memetic entanglement also oppose all racism, sizeism and ageism, tend to get grumpy when some fat middle-aged white guy travels to Thailand to dive into its dirt cheap and endless sex buffet, or to Russia to look for a young and slender blonde to bring home as his new wife. Reality compression Since the amount of information contained in a text seems to grow logarithmically with respect to its length, reading 500 one-page articles is a massively more productive use of your time than reading one 500-page book whose marginal return on the investment of your time diminishes on each page. Many books have been written by expanding some magazine article that already said everything so that these book versions, despite having hundreds of more pages, add only air, and of course that coveted authorship credit for the writer who can now brag in cocktail parties that he wrote a book. The glorious future in which dead tree books only can be found in museums (yes, including this one) can’t really arrive soon enough. The same fate should befall all printed newspapers and magazines. Just like “channels” that are technically necessary on a television but meaningless on the Internet, magazines were once necessary as information middlemen since it was infeasible to physically distribute individual articles to those who want to read them, and it was far more economical to collect a bunch of them into a regularly published magazine that was easier to duplicate and transport to readers. Since individual articles can easily exist on their own to be searched and delivered on the Internet at essentially zero cost, we simply don’t need magazines for anything any more, except perhaps as guarantees of certain level of quality and editorial responsibility. The steep tyrant Umberto Eco noted that lunatics will always eventually somehow bring up the Templars. This observation needs to be updated to the 21st century by noting that no matter where the chain of reasoning starts from, a progressive will always eventually bring up hamburgers, the food they would adore for its exciting authenticity if the exact same ingredients were arranged in the shape of a burrito. Or how at least a few years ago, everything bad always seemed to come around to George W. Bush and his administration. I always thought it strange how Bush was supposed to be this total religious nutcase with horrendously reactionary ideas on everything, a monstrously stupid and reactionary sui generis that America had never before been unfortunate enough to have sitting in the White House. Really? So, how did Dubya’s view on gay marriage compare to the views held by, say, James T. Polk? How did his views on racial profiling during wartime compare to those of Rutherford B. Hayes? Which one was more enlightened when it came to eliminating Christian symbols from the government and the public sphere, Bush or Woodrow Wilson? I suspect the list of American Presidents who were more “liberal” than George W. Bush would be very short, considering that any person who today expressed many of what used to be perfectly mainstream opinions even among liberals only fifty or even thirty years ago would become an unemployable pariah. Respecting our indifferences Back in the nineties, when the now nearly invisible Microsoft still ruled the world of automatic data processing and the propeller beanie nerds were promising each year that Linux would finally take over the desktops both at home and in the office, I read one answer to somebody who had a problem with his Windows machine, a diatribe dripping with smug about how all Microsoft products and their users are stupid and everyone should become a smart Linux user... and the signature after this post was followed by the tagline “Straight but not narrow!” This slogan is a perfect zero- cost signal to inform the rest of the world that despite the speaker’s really not that exciting financial situation, he should most definitely not be mistaken for some prole since with his education and value system, he belongs to a higher social class, while it also slyly informs the girls that he is available. The excellent Tom Wolfe novel I Am Charlotte Simmons has this scene that is funnier than showing gangsta rap videos to an expert neurologist for a professional diagnosis. The beta male character, resentful of his fellow students not being sufficiently worshipful of his intellectual superiority, participates in a gay pride parade to display his awareness of social justice, but realizes only when it too late to change his sign that all the male professors who came out to support this march somehow mentioned in their speeches that they have a wife and kids. Staring into the void Back when the local news reported that the ultra-violent MS-13 had set its foot in Toronto, I joked that our suburban home builders are probably slapping each other high fives. More recently, I am not entirely sure that was a joke. Most of my knowledge about this gang that would seem to be very difficult for the law enforcement undercover agents to infiltrate comes from this one television documentary that travelled from Los Angeles to El Salvador where one prison had basically been turned into a self-contained housing complex for the imprisoned gang members, with all the prison guards waiting outside the walls ready to shoot if these bangers ever tried to break out. The overall spirit and public image of this gang reminded me of both the Reavers in the short-lived series Firefly and the classic commitment solution to winning the game of chicken: yank out the steering wheel from your car and toss it out of the window so that the opponent sees you doing that. This gang certainly knows how to signal a credible public commitment of always going further than anyone else. Keyser Söze had something to say about this; similarly, the underrated scene in Casino where Joe Pesci's character tells one civilian that if he doesn't obey him, he will punch him in coma and won't even care about going to prison because that is what he does, is a far more succinct and complete depiction of the real world organized crime than all the Godfather movies put together. Logic injection Curiously, those who insist that every jot and tittle of every legal document in a death penalty case must be just so or else, often are the loudest to complain that men accused of rape have too many rights, and even the basic presumption of innocence should be done away with to make it easier to convict them. The problem of most arguments against the death penalty is that they prove too much, so that they would imply abolition of not just the death penalty, but all imprisonment. Since the left opposes death penalty and nuclear power, they impose unreasonable standards of perfection on both, demands they would never impose on causes that they support. Executing an innocent person is certainly horrible, but it’s no more reason to abolish the death penalty than traffic fatalities are to ban all automobiles. Listening to the death penalty abolitionists, one really has to wonder how these neurotics can get so worked up about their roughly one-in-a-billion lifetime chance of being executed for a murder they didn’t commit, even for those living in Texas, the most execution-happy of the American states. If the death penalty or nuclear power really defined the threshold of what constitutes an unacceptable risk to human life, then basically all human activities would have to be banned. A precautionary principle this insane would especially require banning all left-wing ideologies and activism, as required by their real-world outcomes during the twentieth century. Good for them, maybe not so good for you In the Finnish political television comedy Hyvät herrat years ago, the main character, the jolly old-time moustached industrialist Paukku, commented the news about higher gas prices that the sky high price of gas should at least triple so that there would more room on the road, and every time he sees another car, he could greet it with a friendly wave because it must be one of his rich friends. That eerily prescient episode, same as those “99%” protesters who are slowly waking up to realize that society needs only so many resentment studies and underwater basket weaving majors, illustrates the dangers of cargo cult mimicking the behaviours and attitudes of higher social classes. Some trustafarian can afford to send the right signals to make the crucial social connections by paying with time and dollars for a degree in some field whose entire purpose has always been to serve as a no-math entertainment for the idle scions of the rich. For a daughter of a working class family, the same young adult life path would be madness. This principle is not limited to college education. For example, the biggest supporters of open borders paradoxically seem to be the very people with the most to lose in them, yet are blind to this in their dash to mimic their betters who have the financial means to insulate, insulate and insulate themselves and their loved ones from the consequences of their ideas. When they come for you One hot day in the Vegas summer, I was strolling on one of those pedestrian overpasses at Tropicana and the Strip, when suddenly a huge police car chase with about a dozen cop cars blared in. The getaway car that they were in hot pursuit stopped on the curb and two young guys fled on foot towards NY:NY, which prompted a group of frat boys enjoying this scene to spontaneously start belting out the Cops theme song in unison. The futile effort to flee in the most watched-over neighbourhood on Earth (that included one guy running so fast he lost his shoe) was mercifully short. I walked down the stairs to the bus stop that would take me to the In-N-Out on the other side of the highway. The guy they had in cuffs and leaning on the cop car was not much older than a kid, yet judging from his menacing and lupine glare as if ripped from the pages of books of Theodore Dalrymple, already a hardened felon. There sure won't be any In-N-Out served in where he is going... except, of course, that much less pleasant sort! In a few minutes a squad of detectives arrived to take over the case. Somebody may have had goofed in the Las Vegas central casting, since all these detectives were played by handsome and charismatic mobster types wearing immaculate and expensive suits. “Those guys sure ain't regular cops, those are murder cops!” one passenger on the bus said to another as we rolled away from the scene. Boys in the blue In the early thirties, the wacky pranksters of the Finnish nationalist right-wing party IKL used to kidnap socialists and communists to “take them for a ride” to the Soviet border. Of course we can't condone such tactics, but note how revealing the private reluctance of the communists to move in their land of milk and honey was in contrast to what they pronounced in public. If I believed that the country right next door was massively superior to mine in every possible way, you wouldn't need to kidnap me to take me there! I recently realized that, based on my life experiences, if there was a way to somehow exchange our white liberals one-for-one with entrepreneurial immigrants from Asia, South America, and yes, even the Middle East and Africa, compared to the present state of affairs that would be one helluva bargain, as these incoming people generally have far healthier values and worldview. Of course, this exchange should again be completely voluntary for everyone involved. Even so, we could, in spirit of The Marching Morons, lure our progressives to get with this program with a slick ad campaign with pictures of diverse people smiling and hugging under slogans such as “This peaceful and egalitarian eco-commune in Venezuela needs your sociology and critical studies degrees to achieve its zero carbon footprint and abolish homophobic language!” Careening metal The death penalty should be expanded to cover identity theft, a crime that nobody ever commits by accident. (During both incarceration and execution, the condemned man should always be addressed by the name he stole, ignoring all his pleas and protests.) At the very least identity theft should be punished as severely as counterfeiting money, since identity is at least as important as money for a functioning society. Meanwhile as a pedestrian, I enjoy the safety that comes from knowing that no matter how convenient taking a shortcut through a crowded sidewalk would be to some lazy gaswaster, sidewalks are kept completely free of automobiles so that I don't have to constantly look every which way to avoid being run over by a ton of screaming metal. However, unlike apparently many of my fellow pedestrians, I also understand that this duty not to be where you are not supposed to be cuts both ways. Those who drive should be able to safely assume that some pedestrian won't decide to save time by suddenly dashing across the road. For this reason, I would strongly support changing the traffic law so that whenever a car hits a pedestrian on the road except a crosswalk, that pedestrian is always 100% at fault, no matter what the circumstances. (Obvious exceptions for police officers, road work crews and others who have to be on the streets.) If some pedestrian thinks it would be “groovy” or “rad” to shave off a few seconds by dashing across the street, he would be legally allowed to do so, but that would be his decision and entirely his risk to take. Celebrating our differences A recent shopping trip during which I saw one woman dressed in a full-on burqa that revealed no information of who or what she is other than her height (I am going with the odds and guessing it was “her”), reminded me of a similar event that occurred during my freshman or sophomore year, when I was shopping and saw a woman clad in a burqa for the first time in my life in Finland where something like this definitely was not an everyday sight two decades ago. She was wearing gloves, so I couldn't even tell if she was an immigrant or a native Finn who had been married into Islam, but I remember how surreal it seemed that she was doing her shopping like everyone else. However, I remember far better how all the other women at the supermarket, ordinary working class and lower middle class Finns dressed appropriately for the sunny day, reacted to her. Judging by the rarely seen combination of fear, disgust and sadness on their faces, obviously it was also their first time encountering such a phantom. But this again all just goes to show something that I have often pointed out: we white males really are less fearful and more tolerant of diversity than most other groups, for example, white women. It is no surprise that studies also find us being the best informed about the news and current events, and the most willing to take risks to advance society and create wealth. Never let the school interfere with your education One of the silliest euphemisms is “bad neighbourhood”, weasel words you use when you need to say “bad people” but know that you can’t actually say that. It’s not like brick, glass or concrete ever rose up to mug anybody. It might be an interesting experiment for some “bad school” and “good school” to exchange their entire student bodies for a few years. We might end up mighty surprised of how even the worst schools could show significant improvement, whereas the best schools would mysteriously regress towards the mean. Whenever I see these laments of how the bad schools are just underfunded, I can't help but recall the elementary schools I attended and how badly they would fare in material comparisons with these “underfunded” schools. Just eliminate one bureaucrat, and the money you save there is more than enough to keep all those kids in pens, notebooks and textbooks. Sure, our schools didn't have graffiti and violence, but those don't cost anything not to do. I am also pretty sure that many “bad schools” would massively improve just by kicking out a few worst apples from each class, since it's not like they learn anything anyway, to let the other kids study in peace. I still can't understand why the teachers who live the reality every day are also the very people who oppose this. Or are they? Could we ask them about this after a few honesty beers? The more the merrier The “sexual revolution” of the sixties was nothing new under the sun, but a return to the sexual organization of the Pleistocene where 80% of women but only 40% of men managed to procreate. Every magazine article about polygamy written by a female reporter is the same: the sister wives gush that access to an alpha male is great, then giggle a bit about sleeping arrangements, lament those teenage brides married off to powerful old males, but conclude that polygamy is just dandy. But definitely never ask about the surplus men dumped out of sight to tenement ghettos, frontiers, prisons and graves. Once you establish that marriage is not between one man and one woman because consenting adults should do whatever they want with each other, it’s hard to argue against polygamy whose legalization is currently about twenty years behind that of gay marriage: we are not yet forced to celebrate it and not be the first one to stop applauding, but all smart people know that even though our puritanical culture is not ready for polygamy, the sky hasn’t fallen in the countries that have it. Polygamy is inevitable, since there is far more demand for it than there ever was for gay marriage. Especially after supporting the latter is no longer rebellious, supporting polygamy serves as a signal that you are strong enough not to worry about becoming one of the surplus loser men. The left should be careful what it wishes for, though: a society that has to stomp down a significant number of its young men in a brutal game of musical chairs will not be very liberal in most other aspects either. A plurality of normos The huge “blammo” landslide of True Finns in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections illustrates that the traditional left-right division of politics is kaput. This populist party unabashedly advocates whatever benefits a normal law-abiding Finn who was not lucky enough to have been born to the top quartile of the Bell curve. Sometimes this cause is best served with “right-wing” ideas (less immigration, strong law enforcement, simple and clear rules, societal and cultural support for productive basic values such as monogamy), and sometimes those labelled “left-wing” (protectionism, wealth transfers, a generous social safety net). Since all modern leftism, especially of the Green party variety, is a status signaling machine for the verbally overeducated crowd unable to signal their status with traditional material means but anxious to distinguish themselves from the proles, these obedient members of the virtuecrat New Class are desperate for an “in” to show their tribal membership by sneering at those below them that they might get mistaken for, and refusing to sit at the same high school lunch table and work together even in the issues where they would be natural allies. And all the while these wannabe elites have to flawlessly maintain the cognitive dissonance that all smart people believe that there are no intelligence differences between people and groups. The greatest honour you can bestow on him Praising liberals while denouncing Marxists is like loving puppies while deploring mutts. I found out about the excellent conservative writer Joseph Sobran only after he had passed away, but was amused to learn that he was the father of many expressions such as the perennial quip “minorities and women hardest hit” about the New York Times, and the observation that politicians never accuse you of “greed” for wanting more of other people's money, only for wanting to keep your own money. Sobran also pointed out the curious asymmetry that while liberals, despite wistfully worshipping the song Imagine whose lines have long been reality in North Korea, take great offense to the notion that there is or has ever been any similarity of ideas or practical co-operation between liberals and Marxists (in fact, any conservative who suggests that there has been, is a paranoid nutcase Bircher who sees commies under every bed), and yet liberals have no problem with automatically equating all conservatives with Nazis. It is certainly not difficult to imagine what Sobran would have made of the Occupests who intentionally keep all their demands vague. Instead of forcing them to explicitly state their principles and ideas, conservatives allow liberals to pursue incremental goals without revealing their ultimate destination. So, thanks to the negligence of their opponents, liberals control the terms of every debate by always demanding “more” while never defining “enough”, with the predictable result that they always get more, and it's never enough. Where the sky meets the sea It’s always funny when progressives gush over Japan, Australia and the Nordic countries for their general cleanliness, good social order and progressive social safety net, apparently unaware of the elephant behind this curtain. I am old enough so that when I was but a happy-go-lucky schoolboy in Finland, my geography textbook stated matter-of-factly that Australia severely restricts the immigration of all other than white people. Despite this, it is hard to recall any Western progressive ever complaining about Australia, that delightful country that gets a free pass for everything because it has kangaroos and koala bears. It is appropriate that their attitude is so upside down about this country that is itself upside down, not just physically but also politically, in that their “liberals” are our conservatives. The same goes triple for Japan, the mythical land that our hipsters worship to the extent that even a pile of feces doesn’t stink if it was squeezed out of a Japanese anus. In basically every issue that you could name, Japan does everything the exact opposite to how our progressives want everything to be done. Japan jealously maintains its unique culture and ethnic purity with the strictest immigration policy in the industrialized world that has zero room for our cherished notions of “tolerance” and “diversity”, so that foreigners get unceremoniously kicked out of country the second they start disrupting the national harmony too much. Ponces A curious paradox of our time is that people who support open borders and free movement of peoples also tend to claim that Canada and America were “stolen” from the natives by the evil white people led by Christopher Columbus, the greatest monster in history... and yet this crime must now be compounded with the unlimited immigration waves of non-European peoples that everyone must celebrate each Canada Day as being just as much “Canadian” as any member of the First Nations who has lived here since the year sword and helmet. Even more strangely, this inherent right of all peoples to control their sacred ancestral homelands and exclude the competing ethnic groups, by deadly force if necessary, somehow never seems to apply to the Israeli Jews. It is also odd how Mexicans and their ethnic pride organization La Raza now have the nerve to portray themselves as the indigenous population of the Americas... and express this notion with slogans written in Spanish. Which continent was Spain located again, and what is the primary ethnicity of those dastardly Spaniards? I have to apologize that I never learned to speak Spanish, but I do know one word that is pretty important in this context: conquistador. You might want to look that one up. The apex predator “The last man on Earth had a lock on his door” is considered the world’s shortest horror story, but other than the death of the entire human race, I don't see what is so scary about the main character living in some tropical jungle where the nearby chimpanzee troop had learned to operate a door handle and sneak into his hut every time he was away and steal or tear up everything that was not bolted in place. Or consider the world's shortest tearjerker, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” So these proud new parents finally decided to take the “step” and join an eco-community of barefoot living that is both healthier for the feet and more natural than wearing shoes. That is also sad, although in a very different way that tearjerkers traditionally tend to be. But imagine a horror story where a dark city teeming with millions of people was plagued by prehistoric monsters that occasionally climbed up from the dark depths to snatch careless people, usually small children, to drag them down to one of the most gruesome deaths imaginable. Even if hundreds of people were snatched each year, everyone just took this in stride and not cry out for the military to go hunt and kill every one of those beasts. And yet this is not some kafkaesque fiction, but the actual reality in Egypt where the Nile crocodiles are this very monster. And yet for some reason, humans let them live instead of hunting them down to extinction for a more useful existence as suitcases and boots. Right to party Reasonable people can disagree until the cows come home what rights finger-quotes “exist” and where these rights come from, but I still find it odd how something that didn’t even exist ten years ago can now be a fundamental human right. Since only what is possible can be morally obligatory, a handy litmus test to determine whether something could be a universal human right is to ask whether it is logically and physically possible for all seven billion people on Earth to exercise that right simultaneously. For example, everyone could theoretically speak, read and write simultaneously, so there is nothing contradictory about the fundamental right of free speech. Sliced with this razor, many other commonly assumed “rights” become hot butter and require massive qualifications to solidify, so that the “right to X” becomes the “right to pursue X”. Consider the supposed universal human right for everyone on Earth to freely immigrate to the rich Western countries and being entitled to all their welfare benefits. Similarly, even if you accept that all people somehow have a positive “right to adequate housing”, there certainly can't exist any such “right” to get housed in one of the most expensive cities in the world, even if the anti-poverty activists in the already massively overcrowded and cramped Toronto obviously believe such nonsense. Not when small towns in Northern Ontario are emptying out and could offer tons of vacant housing for a song for those who don’t have to endure commutes anyway. Bust, caution Once when I was staying in Vegas in a nice little place hidden a few blocks off the Strip (one does not need to go that far from the glitz of the Strip until all sorts of “half off to locals” offers become ubiquitous, illustrating how much air there is in the Strip prices for tourists), the street had a billboard advertising Tao, a restaurant nightclub in The Venetian, adorned with a picture of slender nude Asian woman depicted from behind with Chinese characters running down her spine, with the slogan “Always a happy ending” that even I thought was racist and offensive. I really would have expected something like that from some sawdust joint catering to local yokels, but not from a place of The Venetian's international stature. Having first lived in Finland where it really wasn’t so many decades ago when one local newspaper had a front page headline informing the readers that a black man had been sighted walking down the village main street, I didn’t even meet very many Asians until moving to Toronto. Even so, I was confused of how, even though Asians are said to be “yellow”, every one of them who I have ever seen was just as white in skin tone as we round- eyed devils. Speaking of which, their eyes are not “slanted” in any way, and in fact, I vividly remember the first time I was talking to a student of Asian descent and realized actually how their eyes are actually different. Outside I was all calm, but inside only thinking of how somebody had sliced her eyelids and how that must have hurt. Alpha and zetta Being able to read and write is a superpower. We don’t think about this because it is so ubiquitous, akin to the Top 10 tales of Alan Moore about a city whose every denizen has some superpower, but this can easily be seen from the fact that those who can't read are simply irrelevant, and I would bet that nobody reading this even knows an adult who can't read. In the ancient times when there was very little useful stuff to read, reading did not give you much of an edge over other people so you could be an active and productive member of society, even a successful king, despite being illiterate. This principle extends to computer programming. A few short decades ago, the ability to program a Commodore 64 to make clunky low-resolution sprites move across the screen was at most an amusing hobby. The ability to program today's computers is a more valuable skill very much in need to solve actual problems, but not yet a superpower. About thirty years from now, even a dollar store plastic comb will possess more processing power than our computers. Once the very words “computer” and “Internet” have vanished from our language, the ability to program will get multiplied so immensely so that this skill is no longer merely a superpower, but puts all its practitioners in the weight class of some Olympian deity with the power to essentially command reality itself. Only selfish people ever care about money Those who claim that a significant wage gap between the sexes actually exists (those greedy corporations must be too stupid to slash their payroll expenses by hiring only women) and should be corrected by forced redistribution curiously seem to be the very people who in other contexts denounce the “selfish” and “materialistic” desire to earn more money and keep more of what you earn, and often lecture us that money is not important at all! This paradox is very similar to how the university students loudest to protest against tuition hikes are good people acting for social justice as they conveniently ignore that a college degree translates to higher earnings later in life, so they should not complain about having to pay more for it for the sake of fairness, and yet working adults who protest against tax hikes are selfish because they don't understand that higher taxes pay for better services so they should not complain about them. Furthermore, if the massive wage gap between men and women who do equal work proves that women are “oppressed”, then surely by the exact same logic, the massive wage gap between Americans and Swedes who do equal work proves that Swedes are oppressed and therefore Swedes ought to change their social, cultural and economic system to be more like America? The winner takes it Al Even though we usually consider clarity and intelligence separate concepts, in practice they tend to yield equivalent results. If you are clear, you don't need intelligence to act optimally, and if you have intelligence, you can find your way to the optimal result through the thickets of complexity. On the other hand, intelligence comes with the evil specter of inequality. Best results stem from combining clarity and intelligence, but this requires sacrifice in the social sphere, since jumping to unknown in public without certain obfuscations usually means making a fool of yourself. But then there are the men who simply didn’t care what others thought of them. Al “Scarface” Capone is humorously similar to Albert “Little Al from Jersey” Einstein in how the popular fame of both men, although certainly earned with hard work and talent, is completely out of any proportion to the fame given to their colleagues. Just as Einstein is elevated into this mythical demigod who basically discovered all of modern physics, Capone is believed to have controlled the entire Chicago and sometimes in the wildest hallucinations even the entire American underworld, as if one man controlling even tenth of any major city in any meaningful sense of control were even remotely possible in an age before the modern telecommunications. The culinary cocoon The rapidly rising prices of food, especially wheat and corn, stir up trouble in the world markets that distribute the food to the hungry mouths and ration it merely by the sheer ability to pay instead of the need by setting fair prices that everyone could afford and eat as much as they can. When I read stuff like this my blood begins to boil, just like when I see some homeless panhandler who is more obsessed with money than the slimiest Bay Street banktopus grabbing money and people in its nefarious tentacles to such their blood. Food and dining simply do not reduce to economics, money, numbers, logic or mechanistic calculations, but they are about the delicious sensations of smell, taste and texture of various ingredients expertly prepared, and the shared experience of these in dining. I read that energy production “competes” with people for corn, but food is most definitely not any kind of “competition”, but an experience that utterly transcends all competition. Now, I can’t blame these people for their ignorance, since after all, they have grown up in a capitalist system so that they can't even “Imagine” the alternative. But that doesn't mean that we should just uncritically accept their sick world view, but need to question and challenge it in every turn... oh, I am sorry, but I just have to give up, since my head hurts too much. How the hell do the progressives keep this act up 24/7 without their brains trying to escape out of their ears in agony? Organizations Unlike computer code, the human DNA that was forged by aeons of evolution that kept that what successfully survived and discarded the rest, unfortunately doesn't come with any documentation to explain why it is the way it is. The massive knowledge contained in our DNA is tacit, and of course we can try to intellectually find the whys, but the reality and DNA itself don't care, it just works the way the blind watchmaker made it. In the cultural and economic levels, there is an equally massive amount of tacit knowledge contained in structures that survived and were successful in thousands of years of cultural evolution, competition and co-operation between billions of people. And conservatism simply means acknowledging the existence of all this tacit knowledge that outweighs our explicit knowledge in most of the important issues that actually matter. We can see with our own eyes that some social structures, customs and habits tend to be more successful than other, despite the fact that few people can intellectually prove why they are so from first principles. We always know “what” long before science eventually takes us to “why”. Whenever some critical studies major proclaims that life would be better for everyone if we simply smashed and burned everything and rebooted society from Year Zero under his benevolent guidance, I'm going to politely decline and place my chips on alternatives that actually do have a proven track record. Our smartest line of defense We are fortunate that our society has plenty of artists and intellectuals, ever vigilant to protect our freedoms against tyranny and totalitarianism. At least if we avert our eyes from the pestering little fact that they have been consistently unable to even see, let alone actively condemn, tyranny and oppression in those places where these actually exist. Their colleagues under the yoke of actual totalitarian regimes, forced to praise and prop the Dear Leader or else, were often baffled to learn that their Western counterparts voluntarily praised that same regime in virtual lockstep even though nobody forced them to do so. I'd like to propose the following rule of thumb: the more hysterically our intellectuals warn us that something is totalitarian, the less totalitarian it is in reality; and the more lavishly they praise something for its equality, the more totalitarian it is in reality. Even more comical are their hysterical warnings of the impending “fascist” violence, while the radical chic left has carried the free pass to burn cars and smash the windows of international corporations now for so long that we can't really blame the left for believing their press (note how apt this expression is in more ways than one) and acting out the praxis of the streets. The combat beret left has a morbid fascination with purifying violence, at least until the day they get to personally experience it themselves. It’s a real simple pattern Now that basically every horror movie classic has been re-imagined, catching some representative bits and pieces of the Carrie remake told me that it was pretty much same as the original, and in fact excessively so, in that the story updated to the noughties still had lines and scenes lifted directly the original even though they didn't really make any sense in today's world. As I watched this story of the poor teenage girl brainwashed by her overly religious mother, kept strictly secluded from the larger secular society and forced to always dress in plain and modest clothing that covers her entire body, I suddenly had one rather obvious idea for a possible future re-imagining that would truly update this story to the present day. Of course, it will not be Stephen King himself who will make this change. Based on what I remember from the man’s famous early works, biography and interviews, I find it darkly funny how he wanted to rise to literary fame from his low prole background and teaching English in some third-rate provincial college, but despite obediently aping all the trendy bien pensant views about religion, nuclear power and similar issues of utmost importance to the literary calss, the literary elite that he so much wanted to be part of didn’t touch him even with the proverbial ten-foot pole, despite (well, because) how normal people with real jobs actually liked his books. That 70’s snow It is instructive to compare the great causes of the recent past and see how they have fared over the past few decades. Anti-smoking and anti- pornography, the two great anti-causes of the seventies, are comical opposites in how the former conquered the distance that its advocates couldn’t even dream of, whereas the latter was beaten to pulp so badly that next to its carcass, even revolutionary communism looks like Miss America. Had the fates of these two movements been switched, everyone would now be smoking pretty much everywhere the way they did in the seventies, but being revealed as having ever visited an Internet porn site would instantly end your your social and family lives and cast you out of the civilized society to the life of a pariah. As for a more recent cause, the democratization of South Africa (that also concurrentlyturned Zimbabwe into a country of billionaires), surely one of the greatest victories of progressivism that was temporarily knocked out with the collapse of Soviet Union, has been tossed down the memory hole so that even our progressives seem reluctant to even acknowledge, let alone celebrate it. Fighting overpopulation, another great seventies cause, has similarly been mysteriously forgotten even as our Mother Earth squeals in pain under the weight of seven billion people crying to be housed and fed. And yet, imagine what would happen if somebody tomorrow proposed a one-child policy for Africa. Even animals are repulsed by this action That brouhaha about that Miss California who was hounded and declared the worst person in the world for her mortal sin of opposing gay marriage, the belief shared by over 99% of people in history and at least 90% of adults in the world today (and this majority includes many liberal darlings such as Dalai Lama and Barack Obama), was certainly revealing. As cosmopolitan as our chattering classes keep telling each other they are, they can’t even conceptualize that the vast majority of people on Earth reject the entire liberal worldview. Rather than acknowledge this and its implications, they blithely imagine that the exotic Other not only shares their views, but is actually far ahead of them in the implementation. But reality will eventually reassert itself. Last summer at the intersection of Yonge and Dundas in the pulsating heart of Toronto, a young black male had set up a table to peddle his pamphlets about Islam. In one pamphlet titled The Evil Sin of Homosexuality, the very first paragraph talked about “evidence of perverted instincts”, “total collapse of shame and honour”, and “extreme filthiness of character and soul”. It only got more livid and vivid from there, calling for the pious Muslims to kill all homosexuals by burning and stoning. And yet, despite openly peddling this message in the busiest intersection in Toronto right next to the Ryerson university famous for its omnipresent far left activism, not even one heckler or social justice activist confronted this bigot. Our vigilant Human Rights Commissions, probably due to their lack of resources and manpower they sorely need, also had zilch to say about this man and his message. Have you driven a Ford lately? As of this writing, the Occupation of Toronto has been cleaned up, and we’ll have to wait until the next Toronto Film Festival for the smelly trendoids to line up for hours to watch a movie that they wouldn't watch for free if it was playing on TV right now, just so that they can feel like they are part of something greater than themselves, while they block the sidewalk for the boring normos just trying to get to work. In retrospect, perhaps it was a mistake simply to clear out this camp, since a more mischievous and educational way to achieve the same end result would have been to kill two birds with one stone, and ease the overcrowding of Toronto’s notorious Don Jail by transferring a bunch of volunteer prisoners to live outdoors in St. James Park not allowed to leave, but told to otherwise have fun and help themselves. Their contribution from the “streets” certainly would have brought more socioeconomic diversity to the movement. For a longer term solution, since the root of this problem are the diminishing job prospects for bullshit college degrees now that every Tom, Dick and Harry gets the sheepskin these days, my modest proposal is to require every student who majors in certain fields, especially those that end with the word “studies”, to first live one year in Cuba, Zimbabwe or North Korea the life of the average person in those countries. The value of this experience for their next four years of college would be immeasurable, while it also slims down (both literally and figuratively) the burgeoning numbers of graduates competing for scarce jobs in these fields. Things, like, suck A common lament says that individual people don't have enough power to initiate change. Those who say this rarely bother to fill in the steps of how things would be different under their proposed system, but then again, it's the nice thought that counts. However, speaking as someone who lives in a megalopolis with four million other people, this is damn well as it should be. Try to imagine what life would be like if all these four million people had the power to significantly change all things as they pleased. Everything would change more rapidly than Ann Coulter’s unprotected Wikipedia page, with fundamental changes occurring every minute. Every time you went to bed at night, the next morning you would wake up in a totally different world. Would that be a society where anyone could ever build anything or run a profitable business to create wealth? Another common complaint is about how that these days all places look the same and have the same chain stores and restaurants so that there is no point going anywhere. Again, consider what the alternative could possibly be. If some geographic region comes up with a way to do something better, some mysterious force would have prevent all other places from hearing about and emulating this improvement. How on Earth might that possibly work in the world of instant telecommunications and mass mobility? Free to be you and me The unintentionally funniest part of the movie version of Rent surely was when the characters raided a restaurant full of normos and exhorted them to “fight AIDS”, even though in their own lives they did pretty much everything to maximize their chances of receiving the “bug”, and I am not talking about the “dance” bug. After three decades of AIDS activism, even most progressives seem to give this cause only lip service. (Insert your own pun.) However, when they ask people like me to “do more” to “fight AIDS”, I am confused of what exactly I am expected to do. The HI-virus and its likely transmission mechanisms are evident to both medical science and laymen, so you get to pretty much choose your own chances of becoming infected. I am powerless to prevent anybody from voluntarily participating in activities that are known to likely transmit the virus. In fact, if I tried to actively discourage them from doing so, not only would I be instantly denounced, but most likely face legal sanctions. So I am certainly not going to accept the slightest blame or responsibility for something that I did not cause and had no control over. As a helpful analogy, imagine if the lung cancer patients similarly campaigned that other people must “do more” to “fight lung cancer”, but every time somebody pointed out that people should not smoke so much, they would loudly assert their right to smoke as much as they want wherever and whenever they feel like. The next sexual frontier University bulletin boards must by law at all times feature at least one poster depicting a rebellious woman in either a burqa or a seventies afro that even Coffy would have been proud of, her mouth open and fist in the air against the world’s injustices. I once saw a poster about an upcoming student event intended to educate people to see the physically and intellectually disabled people as sexual beings was fortunately without illustration. I thought this was funny, at least worth a chuckle, in how these events of student activism tend to be about educating people to not think of their fellow humans as sexual beings. Of course that poster had to emphasize the disabled homosexuals so that it wouldn't be “heteronormative” (I am not entirely sure what this neologism is supposed to mean, other than having the working assumption that most people are heterosexual and that culture and institutions should reflect this), and then challenged everyone to come and ask their “taboo” questions about the topic. Surely I can't be the only one who finds it funny whenever student activists imagine that they are boldly challenging taboos. Sorta reminds me of how the Communist Party of the Soviet Union proudly marched every May Day to announce to their subjects how they are the “revolution” and “change”. One actual taboo question might be to ask how someone with a mental capacity of a ten year old can meaningfully consent to sex. Or whether the event organizers have ever had sex with anyone thus disabled, or at least fantasized about doing so. Please don’t come here, but if you do so anyway, welcome! When that case of the poor Ohio single mother who sneaked her kid into a better public school in a different district was in the news, it was revealing how the very people who otherwise adamantly oppose private schools and school vouchers, and expect every child to attend the public school of the district he lives in, were defending this woman. But once again there is a method to this madness, a perfect hidden logic that resolves this paradox. After all, every double standard is illusory in that there always really is one esoteric standard applied with perfect consistency. Progressives know perfectly well what would happen if all borders were one day torn down, so they are privately grateful for the existence of these borders and the armed men who guard them. However, this does not stop them from preening and posturing in their superior “tolerance” and “compassion” over those less enlightened proles by defending the fundamental human right of everyone who was sufficiently disrespectful of law to sneak in through these borders to stay in, as if these borders were not a means to defend national sovereignty but some malevolent force of nature whose successful crossing is not a crime at all, but an epic tale of heroism. This way they get to both have their cake and eat it, the same way they get away with idolizing public schools and demonizing exclusive private schools while they simultaneously idolize exclusive universities. Sacridelicious Every transgressive performance artist knows to restrict his barking and ribbing to safe targets such as suburbs, shopping malls, nuclear plants, the Catholic Church and Wal-Mart, each guaranteed to never actually hit back at their detractors but always peacefully turn the other cheek and continue providing nourishment for those lampreys in Birkenstocks that would die without the constant supply of the lifeblood of their hosts who they mock. I had an idea for a truly offensive T-shirt that would be a perfect storm of meta-level offensiveness in how the people who it offends would not be able to present any kind of coherent explanation of what exactly makes it offensive to them. This shirt would simply consist of a cartoon of a chinless white male with a ponytail and a weak attempt for a moustache, and a far more virile and masculine Middle Eastern male, lustfully kissing each other, although fully clothed and depicted from the waist up. The accompanying text would be split in two parts: “Liberals and Muslims” above the picture, and “sitting in a tree” under it. Imagine if somebody actually wore this at a raucous summertime gay pride parade. The poor liberal brain would surely crash in a stack overflow in its logically impossible task to be neither homo- or Islamophobic, but unable to say out loud what exactly he finds problematic with this image with so much beautiful diversity in it. There is a good reason why every gay pride parade, even those that support the intifada of rocks pelted at Israeli soldiers, carefully avoids certain ethnic minority neighbourhoods. Words you can’t say on television This one television channel is playing Off the Air that I assume is some sort of offbeat standup comedy revue that I have been trying to catch for years, but for some reason every time I flip to that channel, there is nothing there. They should get their damn machines to work properly. Another channel has two hours of Blackout in Effect, that I assume is an edgier and more urban version of the same, showcasing the talents of upcoming African-American comedians with the tagline of something like “We be in full effekt, fool!” At least, so I would assume. I have to ask my imaginary hip black friend J-Dog about that the next time I see him. Some stand-up comedy that actually was coming in was described as “edgy comedians shock audiences”, yet its audience did not seem “shocked” at all! Quite the contrary, they seemed to be genuinely enjoying the act and had rip- roaring fun. I think most people have forgotten that if everyone who matters applauds you and your act makes you the toast of the town, you are not actually breaking any real taboos. Even more odd is to claim that “our age has no taboos” when, for example, even anal sex is a more acceptable dinner conversation topic than your salary. Sacha Baron Cohen, who in his movies and TV shows knows perfectly well never to mock anybody who isn't white and middle class or who follows some religion other than Christianity as practiced by lower class white people, is hailed as a brave smasher of taboos, even while Brett Ratner became a pariah for saying off the cuff that “Rehearsing is for fags”, a statement that shocked the virtuecrats like a lady’s ankle back in the Victorian London. It’s such an ancient pitch The hoopla around the execution of Troy Davis, the innocent angel far too good for our fallen world, gave the left an excuse to raise its fists in the air in yet another re-enactment of 1968 no different in spirit from those Civil War re-enactors. At least Pierre and Hubert, despite their youthful idealism and spunk to riot and demonstrate against those fascist pigs, don’t have the energy to keep it up indefinitely but have to go laze down in a beanbag chair and smoke cigarettes like a character in some Claire Bretécher comic book. Another condemned man was also executed around the same time, but his plight did not draw any outraged protests of injustice or front page headlines. Abdul Al Fakki, a Sudanese migrant worker, was beheaded in Saudi Arabia for the crime of witchcraft. This crime was not some gruesome Satanic murder of dismemberment, but the guy was enticed by an undercover vice cop to prepare a spell to make a man go back to his first wife, after which the confession of being a witch was literally beaten out of him. A naive person might assume that executing a man for being a warlock would make front page international headlines. But this story doesn't fit the prevailing narrative of academia, arts and media as neatly as a black cop killer “lynched” in that “primitive” and “backward” state of Texas full of “racist fundies”. A Google search through all the “loudmouth” activist liberal and atheist blogs did not come up with even one article denouncing this, let alone a witty sneer of how the guy must have weighed the same as a duck. The self-censorship of the “brave” western media that can quietly sweep something of this magnitude under the rug is truly something to behold. The most dangerous game I wonder if that guy who plays Dexter ever pulls a prank with his buddies on somebody so that when the mark is passed out drunk, they wrap him immobile in plastic so that when he wakes up, “Dexter” stands there over him brandishing his knife. The once so trendy serial killers have mostly vanished from the cinematic fiction. In real life, violent criminals are as interesting as a pile of dried vomit, and there simply are no serial killers (that is, those who murder for the psychosexual thrill) who would make interesting dinner party companions. And unless your name is Hannibal Lecter, these days your chances of getting away with murder are between slim and none, so with maybe the exception of black widow nurses, the only way for a murdering psychopath to rack up a double-digit body count is to kill transients, junkies, bottom-rung street prostitutes and similar folks who won't be reported missing and investigated. For the same reason, estimates about the number of serial killers are probably too low; most serial killers merely get caught and are put away for good after their first or second victim, and are thus not included in the official count of serial killers. Of course, a psychopath who wants to experience the thrill of killing another human being, but doesn’t feel like spending the rest of his days in prison, should use his automobile as murder weapon. Running somebody over with a car comes with its own plausible deniability that guns and knives inherently lack. Even if you raced through a residential area or a farmer's market, mowing down pedestrians like you were inside some video game, in the best case your insurance rates just go up for a couple of years. Dignitaries Whenever some American of higher than average weight travels abroad and would prefer service in English and enjoy some of the familiar comforts of his home, he is a boorish and culturally insensitive “ugly American”. However, whenever some Third World denizen comes to America and demands not just to receive all social and other services catered to him in his native tongue, but to fundamentally transform the new host nation to legally and culturally resemble his old country that he is more comfortable with, he is merely exercising his inviolable human rights. This seems contradictory to at least those of us uneducated in social justice, but surely no more so than how a fortysomething Catholic priest who has sex with a 14-year-old boy can be a “pedophile” while a secular gay rights activist certainly is not, even if he campaigns for the age of consent for anal sex with him to be lowered to 14. To say nothing of an Afghan patriarch who takes his 9-year-old cousin as his fourth wife. Similarly, one does not need to be a jaded cynic to understand why the predominantly female political activists and social workers in Finland advocate opening the borders for young male refugees from Africa and the Middle East with an enthusiasm that makes it a minor miracle that they don’t slide off their chairs, even as they simultaneously oppose (and would in fact prefer to shut down) all female immigration from Russia and most of the Asian countries. Abstract people in a concrete world The batting record of the verbal intellectual class during the twentieth century was so horrible that if every one of them had decided to become a pedophile instead of an intellectual, the total count of the innocent victims of their anointed visions would have been at least two orders of magnitude lower. Whereas the ideas of scientists and engineers are constantly sharpened against the unforgiving reality, the verbal intellectuals, especially the self-professed “anti-authoritarians” who advocate near total submission to the authority of the state in all matters, simply have no incentive to be right (in any sense of this word) and boring, since the more “transgressive” they are, the more fame and followers they gain. Should their ideas lead to a disaster, they can always claim that reality was wrong and other people were too stupid to implement their grand visions. Intellectuals proclaim their necessity to society by the rest of us being unable to recognize and celebrate truth and beauty as well as they do, even though in the next breath they tell us that truth and beauty don't even exist. Intellectuals also claim that they identify problems, unfairness and injustice that are so very abundant in Western societies (other societies and cultures, as far as we can tell from their silence, are perfect), but the only problem they ever identify is that the verbal intellectual class doesn't have enough power to control the lives of its perceived inferiors, and they merely keep conjuring new verbal epicycles to disguise the same problem as something new every time. After all, have the intellectuals ever proposed to solve any problem by taking power away from intellectuals? It is difficult to see what role he might play in the Great Society The docudrama Outlaw Bikers is a delight in how you can see how the producers gathered up all these biker types and had them act out the reconstructions (nobody ever has any lines, so these extras only have to look like burly bikers) of actual events in outlaw biker history, and I am certain that actual “One Percenters” gladly acted as extras and consultants to help ensure the authenticity of these scenes, happy to see their story told on TV so that they become more real for real. One recent episode concentrated on the “old ladies” and club girls of these bikers, and reminded me of something that Jussi Halla-aho pointed out years ago: the liberation of Western women's is solely due to free market capitalism and the Western men allowing them to be free. If one morning all Western men had been magically switched with their Third World counterparts, women's lib would vanish before nightfall. In the dog-eat-dog world of muscle and raw power, any woman without a male protector would soon find herself the common property of the entire club, her Lara Croft kicksyboxing fantasies meaning diddly squat. As one columnist often puts it, in the long run, Western women have precisely three sustainable alternatives: conservative Christianity, the burqa, or the brothel. This is also why eco-feminism and its yearning for the lost harmonious pre-industrial society is utterly deluded. Without the mobility and individual freedom that require massive quantities of electricity and oil, the going would soon get pretty tough, and then only the tough would ever get going. Why can’t a ‘puter be more like a man? We can laugh at primitive people who believe that an automobile is a living monster or that a train on the movie screen is really coming at them. Yet for some reason, seemingly serious and intelligent people spout equally idiotic nonsense about how Google will one day, real soon now, become self-aware, or how that Jeopardy playing computer Watson already has human-level intelligence, or that the rigged demos of self-driving cars mean that soon all cars will drive themselves in real traffic. In reality, Google has about the same chance of becoming self-aware as this book has of flying away by flapping its pages like a bird flaps its wings. Everyone kind of understands how cars and televisions work, but far fewer people understand computer science and algorithms, so others can dream up all kinds of wishful and magical properties on something that really is just a large database with associated search algorithms, because this database contains facts about things in our lives written in text of our natural language. But a phonebook doesn't magically become self-aware, even if it were made of a trillion pages of fine print data. Certainly, both Google and Watson are impressive and super useful technological feats that will change society in many ways, perhaps even as much as automobiles and movies did back in their day. But ignorance about what they really are is no excuse for being artificially stupid. Swift and sure Young people might be surprised to learn how every liberal screech against Dubya and Palin is recycled, mutatis mutandis, from the 1980's screeches against Reagan and Thatcher. Whatever the faults of Sarahnuel Palinstein, Dubya and Rob Ford may be, their greatest value is in how they, merely by existing, can drive the status anxious left to such primitive fits of narcissistic rage... although perhaps “reveal as” would be a better word than “drive”. Prime minister Stephen Harper is not quite as hated, and most of the hatred against him is just our homegrown trendoids trying to imitate the defiance towards Bushitler of their American betters. Harper was once asked about the death penalty, and he answered that he personally supports it but doesn't see it as a political possibility. The famous feminist axiom “personal is political” is the very definition of totalitarianism, and as if to intentionally illustrate this, Liberals responded by demanding Harper to bring a death penalty bill to the House of Commons. The majority of Canadians support the death penalty, so this would again be a teachable moment for liberals who literally don't know anyone who disagrees with them. Also, just like back when Rob Ford was elected in a landslide as the mayor of Toronto, the left might be mighty surprised to learn what their exotic mascots really think about various important liberal shibboleths. The majority of people, including those on the left, support not only capital punishment, but even torture. They merely disagree on the details on who they would like to see them applied on, which in turn is determined by who they fear and which victims they identify with. Broker and podge An interesting difference between poker and bridge is that whereas the former offers literally thousands of variations, there exists really only one kind of bridge. Perhaps one day somebody could invent a game that combines the features of poker and bridge in some meaningful way. The auction phase of three-handed bridge could be done with poker-style betting, especially if the cards were not dealt all at once but maybe in 5-5-3 streets while the fourth “board” hand was visible to all players, the player collecting the pot if he either drives out the other players by betting and raising or, after the cards have been dealt and nobody has folded, making the contract (partscore, game, small slam or grand slam as somehow determined by the betting action) as declarer. I have also been wondering about team poker in grand scale, so that teams consisting of thousands of players each would play against each other, either heads-up or single-table. The game would be played with limit betting and each player at his computer has 10 seconds to vote whether to bet, raise or fold, and the central server tallies the votes and acts by the majority vote or some kind of weighted, randomized action. There is an obvious problem of a “mole” who informs the other team of his cards, but of course players would have to be randomly assigned to teams in the beginning. Three girls for every boy In one of those little coincidences of history, the court case deciding whether Occupy Toronto has the right to occupy a public park and prevent their fellow citizens from using it, was decided in Ontario courts the same day that the supreme court of British Columbia upheld the anti-polygamy laws. The Occupests proclaim to oppose societal inequality, but even all Bay Street banksters acting together could never create as much societal inequality as legalizing polygamy. (Some cynic might even trace the entire history of left-liberalism as a prospiracy to guarantee the alpha males their hassle-free harems.) Whereas it is possible to pose as a noble and downtrodden economic loser unjustly oppressed by the capitalist System, no man wants to similarly pose as a sexual loser who would become one of those icky surplus males in the polygamous system, and opposing polygamy would be a tacit admission of being such a loser. This is similar to how in all online poker forums pretty much everyone is a winner or at most breaks even but just because he has lately been running bad, even though it is mathematically certain that at least 80% of all players must be long-term losers. It might be interesting to bring a couple of those “Lost Boys” to discuss their experiences with the Occupiers. The monogamy cartel has a lot going for it in creating wealthy and peaceful societies in how it gives the decisive majority of men (some wag might even say “99%”) an egalitarian shot of forming a family and having a stake in society and its future, instead of driving them into endless cycles of negative-sum “let's you and him fight” contests. Dopes and dupes Some people tell us that it is immoral to shop Wal-Mart for products made in sweatshops, and yet these same people won’t stop vacationing in Cuba, nor stop using recreational drugs produced by extremely violent and unethical criminal cartels and gangs. The stock response that drug legalization would eliminate these problems by giving them a choice to buy their drugs from “ethical” growers evades the question, since until then, these people already have a choice not to use drugs at all. Just like we have a choice not to shop at Wal-Mart, drive Humvees, or make other lifestyle choices that verbal intellectuals disapprove. So shall we be soon seeing a widespread boycott of the left giving up its beloved dope to deny the drug cartels their profits? I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for this, since for liberals eager to “open their minds”, messing up their beautiful minds takes precedence over all those brown little victims of drug violence. Closing down sweatshops would only make their workers even worse off (after all, if they really preferred toiling and moiling in their pastoral and authentic Hobbiton villages over the dingy sweatshops and factories, they could already remain in them), whereas closing down illegal drug cartels would massively improve the lives of the unfortunate folks of Juarez. Perhaps we conservatives should start boycotting oil, the fun substance used disproportionately by us, the moment that liberals start boycotting cannabis and cocaine, the fun substances disproportionately used by them. Bony express The crisis of humanities continues with a diminishing number of good students majoring in them, and their public voice limited to small echo chambers of a dozen readers per journal. But then can really blame only themselves for their relegation to the dustbin of history. The humanities enthusiastically hitched their wagon to the Socialist Stallion that looked so very strong and noble, and admiring the Strong Horse is something we all instinctively do. But these looks turned out to be deceiving, cynically engineered by the Frankfurt School to subvert and demoralize the culture that could not be beaten otherwise, and now the humanities have found themselves stranded in the middle of a desert (note that this metaphor is apt in more ways than one) tethered to a bony carcass of a nag with a swarm of flies buzzing around it. It will be a long march in the desert sun, every step a mile long, to get back to the Western civilization they can barely see over the horizon. And if they don't... well, countless trades and professions once used to offer a good living for millions of people and still became obscure footnotes in history. Some were killed by changes in society, others by technological advances, but then there were those that were killed off by their very practitioners voluntarily making themselves obsolete. The promise of humanities was to lead us to the refreshing oasis of truth, goodness and beauty, but if the humanities themselves tell us that these are but mirages and lies... could you remind us again why we keep you on the payroll? Never attempt a reductio ad absurdum argument on talk radio When writing or speaking to an audience larger than your immediate friends, especially if the topic includes certain words that tend to by themselves cause an immediate brain shutdown, you are forced to dumb down your ideas to the level of, if not the very dumbest member of the audience, at most the average one. And you know what they say about the average person. I find the left simultaneously at its most comical and its most depressing when it reveals its autism in not being able to understand how arguments by analogy work. The most famous example must be William Bennett and his on-air hypothetical of aborting black babies to reduce crime, meant as an argument against cost-benefit calculations in the issue of abortion. But little examples abound wherever liberals congregate. For example, when somebody says that someone else “turned a deaf ear” towards some policy, another liberal will haughtily correct him and explain that many deaf people support that policy. I don’t even know where to start unraveling such self-parodying autism. I had a good chuckle, though, when the Finnish Green League presidential candidate Pekka Haavisto condemned animal rights saboteurs by asking if harassment would also be acceptable if neo-nazis did it to their opponents, and had to apologize for having compared the noble animal rights activists to despicable neo-nazis. Dialectic Of course we live in absurd times when an “anarchist” now means somebody who wants to maximize the welfare state. The liberal left has always been the vanguard of sexual freedom and individual choice, which is paradoxical seeing how they generally oppose individual freedom in every other area of life, with the exception of mind-altering drugs that make their users easier to control while giving them the illusion of freedom and individuality and rebellion against the “System”. They tell us that the state has no business whatsoever in our bedrooms, yet have no problem in extending its totalitarian power to every other room in our homes, schools and places of business. Another related paradox is that all real world progressive societies, especially those that were the most left-wing and against capitalism and imperialism, also had absolute zero tolerance towards any kind of sexual freedom, except for the ruling strongmen who get to enjoy the bodies of thousands of nubile women who are, after all, free say no to somebody who can make their families disappear at the snap of his fingers. Once the left reaches the position to respond to all criticism and dissent with a black car in the night, the hippies, gays and all other sandal-wearing fruit juice drinkers have outlived their usefulness and are detrimental to the new society that needs to churn out masses of obedient workers and soldiers. The crust of the meaning As language evolves over time with the world that changes around it, it still contains these weird relics of the past that truly was a different country. For example, when somebody is “treated like a dog”, that expression means something very different than it would if it had emerged in today’s world, that is, being regularly fed, groomed, petted and cleaned after with few expectations in return other than always greeting your returning master with believable enthusiasm. In the more politically incorrect parlance, consider how the word “creep”, that is, someone whose ambulatory mobility is severely impaired, has evolved to mean an undesirable male who doesn't know his place and must be strongly reminded of it. Nobody seems to oppose such blatantly ableist usage, since women still rank above disabled men in the victimhood poker hand rankings. But by far the most revealing change has taken place with the word “smart” that no longer means anything like it is defined in the dictionary, someone with practical intelligence and good decision-making abilities. In practice, this word is always used as a self-congratulatory tribal marker to mean a person who is swift to repeat the class identifiers of the verbal intellectual class. Finally, note how the left’s favourite word “controversial” only ever gets applied on topics that this class dislikes, whereas their ideas can never be “controversial” since all smart people by definition support them, even if the majority of people in the world reject them. Scales A while ago a YouTube video titled Cat vs. Gator was making rounds, with the comments cracking the obvious jokes about the gator being a “pussy” for running away from the little cat. I didn't see things that way at all. Quite the contrary, all I saw was a zen-like killing machine that is so perfected by millions of years of evolution for survival and procreation that it has no ego and simply doesn't care whether we humans think that it is “cool” and “strong”, concepts useless for survival that its highly optimized lizard brain stripped of everything irrelevant could not begin to comprehend. The alligator doesn't care one jot or tittle about looking like a coward in our eyes, nor can it be swayed by our sneers and laughter any more than a tree or a mountain could be. The alligator with its belly comfortably full has nothing to gain from standing up to the unknown furry beast that gets in its face, so it will simply retreat, analogous to a rubber bridge player choosing the safety play that makes 3NT certain over the uncertain 3NT+1. The mindless alligator doesn't have any conscious thought about risks versus rewards, but it doesn't need to have them, since for any being, its surrounding environment determines the value of its actions are, and any possible understanding of why some action happens to be good may be useful for choosing that action but is irrelevant for the results. The ignorant little cat simply got lucky. Millions of other beasts don’t, but they don't tend to show those on YouTube. Yours, mine and ours Most people would be delighted if they suddenly got the ability to secretly spy on their friends and social circles, in style of the movie Sliver. This would only be harmless and giggly fun for them. On the other hand, the very same people would be horrified and feel incredibly violated if they ever found out that their friends had similarly acquired the reciprocal power to spy on them. This illustrates the power of self-bias, having one lax set of rules for you, but another far more strict set of rules for others. In the societal level, the anti-nuclear crowd loves to point out that the clear majority of people opposes nuclear power, and the existence of this majority automatically proves that nuclear power is evil and the technocratic elite should not impose these dangerous and unproven monstrosities on normal people's lives. However, when the clear majority of people similarly opposes gay marriage, higher taxes or illegal immigration, the enlightened elite's right to force its views on these unwashed masses suddenly and unexplained turns 180 degrees around. But the most dishonest bias is when you blame the opposition for your own actions. Liberal complaints of prison overcrowding are humorously analogous to how they love to accuse “America” for causing all that nasty drug cartel violence in Juarez, even though liberals themselves smoke, snort and shoot up probably at least 90% of all illegal drugs. So who is this “we” that you talk about, paleface? One vote, one dollar Years ago one Swedish nutjob feminist politician proposed a special “man tax” to pay for all the societal harm caused by men. I agree that would actually be a good idea, but in the following generalized form. Each taxpayer would be classified according to several independent binary criteria which male/female would only be one of. His personal tax rate would be calculated as the weighted average of the rates based on how unproductive or costly the members of the groups that he belongs to tend to be on society on average. On the other hand, it’s hard to see what Canada and the United States could possibly learn from Sweden about wealth creation any more than, say, Warren Buffett has anything to learn about investing from me. Even Mississippi, the poorest state in America full of inbred and toothless yokels strumming their banjos, when corrected for purchasing power, is significantly richer than any of those vastly smarter and more progressive Europeans, excluding those couple of tiny enclaves of rich people. This also illustrates the deep silliness of that What's the matter with Kansas? argument to explain the paradox of how liberals can ever lose elections even though their ideas and people are so clearly superior. Why would the good people of Kansas want to turn their country into a Swedish style social democracy that would only make them massively poorer? Hume’s garrote One of the very first quips that I ever made on the Internet was the modest proposal to rename the scary nuclear power to “emotion power” to trick the political left to support it, seeing how they believe in their emotional superiority. (At the same time, start selling “alternating current” to better appeal to consumers who are drawn to all kinds of “alternative” products and ways of thinking.) This is essentially the same phenomenon as when they bitterly opposed The Bell Curve but had no problem with Emotional Intelligence, even though both books have, for all intents and purposes, the exact same message that all people have an innate cognitive capacity that essentially determines and limits how well they are going to do in real life. Their blanket opposition to genetically modified organisms probably similarly stems from a subconscious revulsion towards the dangerous idea that genes are important and different genes can lead to massively different outcomes, which is, again pretty much by definition, what genetic modification of organisms is ultimately about. Once you acknowledge that different genes can explain vastly different individual outcomes, you can pretty much kiss goodbye to all brands of liberalism that see all differences in outcomes as socially constructed injustices. One would also do well to remember that if you oppose some factual claim X because of its moral consequences, you admit that the claim X, if it is turns out to be true, really has those moral consequences. He is growing up so fast The moral high ground is the most expensive and fastest-shifting piece of real estate in the world, so the vanguard that wants to keep its own flag firmly planted there must be on constant guard against the constant tectonic shifts. One old stand-up comedy album of Jackie Martling featured a joke about Little Johnny collecting his newspaper route money, and the buxom housewife didn't have any cash on her, so instead... a funny thing happened. The jokes about “Little Johnny” (or “pikku-Kalle” in Finnish, and surely every other culture has its own version), the child who is simply assumed, although never explained why, to possess adult-level knowledge, emotional maturity and understanding of the world and especially human sexual relations, has completely disappeared from our culture. Has any notable comedian even mentioned Johnny any time during this century? This change is a great illustration of a large and abrupt structural shift away from what some have called “pedophilia chic” that was very much en vogue back in the seventies. For example, it is difficult for us here in the year 2012 to understand why Roman Polanski simply could not see anything wrong with the idea of an adult male having anal sex with a 13-year-old, the act that would today be considered utterly repulsive in all Western cultures, at least when performed by a priest of this one major religion. Hardest branch of the rubber tree Occasionally you see these news articles about a cop gunning down some mentally ill person who was brandishing a gun or a knife with the obvious intent to use it, and the article goes on to chastise the officer for not recognizing that the criminal was mentally ill. As if a police officer could somehow instantly peek inside somebody's brain, or that bullets fired and knives swung at him merely tickled coming from a mentally ill person. Logically, the mentally ill person being innately incapable or unwilling to respond to reason and orders and respect the lives of other people is a justification for the need to use force, instead of an argument against it. Claiming otherwise is analogous to the common fallacy that somebody with no sense of right and wrong should not be punished for hurting others, which is exactly backwards, since if somebody lacks this sense, the only way to prevent him from hurting other people is to appeal to his sense of self-preservation with a credible threat of punishment. Using a taser instead of a gun might have saved the day... except that tasers are just as evil as handguns, and therefore most definitely should never be used by the police against anybody. I almost wish that some psychotic hulk attacked a Toronto Star reporter some day, so that instead of safely playing Captain Hindsight, that reporter could demonstrate us in practice the ethically and morally correct nonviolent response. Stinklines Inside one building of the campus, among the multitude of posters tacked to the office doors to announce how these intellectual guerrillas and free thinkers despise capitalism, free markets and the West in general, was a large mural that artistically illustrated how to the create a problem neighbourhood. As trucks and moving vans were carrying out stuff labelled “good jobs” and “human rights”, helicopters (which I assume were implicitly piloted by the CIA spooks) parachuted in boxes of drugs, crime and other blight on the innocent and helpless denizens of this neighbourhood. To top this off with a heavy-handed metaphor, a giant bucket of brown sludge was being poured all over this neighbourhood, labelled “visible minorities”. To borrow the snarky sign-offs popular with the activist contingent: “Wow. Just... wow. Words... fail.” But I do believe that white women are, on average, more bigoted and narrow-minded than white men, at least when actions speak louder than words. For example, I recall one time that I was in the city on a near-empty street, and a raggedy white guy ahead of me suddenly started yelling and ranting crazy to nobody in particular. The third person around, a white businesswoman, slowed down and placed herself behind me, using me as her shield. There is already a huge stigma against mental illness, which she chose to perpetuate (she probably wouldn't even give this man a job interview), whereas I kept going exactly as before, accepting this man and his “alternative” ways to experience the world and march to the beat of a different drummer inside his head. Not too late to dig that moat All those complaints about the “Crisis in the Humanities” are basically whines of resentful children who inherited that beautiful old house from their late parents, but chose to tear away its foundations whose purpose they didn't really understand anyway, and then use the rest of the house to raise termites, rats and cockroaches that they thought were unfairly “oppressed” and far more “edgy” than cats or dogs, so that their house is now uninhabitable and beyond repair. Humanities that were supposed to rule over the narrow-minded science and engineering types, roughly analogous to how a teamster steers his strong but dumb horses to the right direction, and tell them what is good and beautiful because they are too dumb to be trusted to understand anything (and even worse, tend to believe our own lying eyes and calculations), was taken over by a resentful gang of losers that, despite of coming from the privileged backgrounds, declared itself the vanguard of the oppressed and categorically denied even the existence of anything good and beautiful. Instead of being a teamster guiding the horses, they demoted themselves into intestinal parasites living inside them. With these graduates increasingly unemployable, is it any wonder that most young minds don't feel like going deep in student debt to endure four to six years of brainwashing from a Marxist and postmodernist echo chamber, just because it promises them that there will be no math? This far, and no further William Gibson famously observed that future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed. This principle also neatly applies to ideologies. As amazing as it seems now, you only need to go back a few decades to reach a time when even most of the Queen Street progressives did not advocate expanding marriage to gays. Of course, even back then the gay marriage logically followed from the liberal principles, even if the liberals themselves were reluctant to acknowledge this and resorted to various unprincipled exception to evade the consequences of their philosophy. Therefore an interesting thought experiment is to try to think up a few other ideas that most liberals reject with horror today, but will take for granted in a few decades and pretend that they have always thought that way. If I had to make a long bet with actual significant money on stake, I would pick “Any man who feels queasy about the idea of having sex with a male-to-female transsexual is a despicable transphobic bigot”, and “Since national borders discriminate between ‘citizens’ and ‘non-citizens’, arbitrary social constructs that produce drastically unequal real-life consequences, nations have no moral right to enforce their borders.” I will give the former idea the over/under of twenty years to become liberal mainstream, whereas the latter might become reality in as little as ten years. That is, unless somebody goes through the effort of standing athwart to yell stop at them. Heal thyselves There was that one famous experiment where volunteers signed themselves in psychiatric hospitals and told the doctors that they heard voices, but once admitted started behaving normally, to find out how long it would take for the doctors to realize that they are sane. Which was quite a while. But this experiment doesn’t prove the sensational conclusions that its proponents assert. In communicating with other people, we don't reset our brain between each sentence, but all meaning is against the context of what has been said earlier. The sentences we utter are not at all equal “size” in their meaning and importance, but most are tiny (“What do you feel like having for dinner tonight?”) while others are enormous (“One of these days I will fucking smash your face through that glass door!”) Relevant for this experiment, a patient telling “I hear voices in my head speaking to me” to the doctor interviewing him is huge, whereas the admitted patient later discussing his everyday life in the normal fashion is small. The fundamental fallacy of this experiment is to assign both sentences the equal weight and importance, especially when the latter gets multiplied over thirty days. But meaning simply is not additive, and even if it were, it would require an enormous corpus of small sentences from a sane person to cancel out the one huge revelation made in the beginning. A truly deep connection with their land People in both North and South America celebrate Columbus Day for the famous explorer who brought the gifts of diversity and multiculturalism to an indigenous bunch of bitter clingers who wanted to be left alone to maintain their “traditional” lifestyle with the premise that they actually “own” their historical homelands and could exclude all others, just because their ancestors used to reside there. The modern defenders of these natives even spout hateful and ignorant rhetoric of how these European immigrants looking for a better life were dirty “invaders” who brought in “diseases”. Liberals don’t seem to realize how identical their arguments against Columbus Day are with the noxious anti-immigrant rhetoric of the European right-wing nativist parties. But as humorous as it always is to hoist liberals on their own petard by using their own arguments to defend conservative policies and causes, we should really look forward to the day that Muslims (and their Western converts that one wag labelled “Muslim Larpers”) similarly learn to properly use liberal rhetoric to advance their extremely non-liberal causes. For example, a few years ago I noticed a poster for an event that was organized by some local Muslim activist group, advertising a lecture and discussion about “settler violence against indigenous people”. They clearly see what works and adapt that, the same way they realized that just like the term “homophobia” can be used to silence all criticism of homosexuals, “Islamophobia” can be used as a handy blanket term to silence all criticism of Muslims. Captain Goofball Some people complain about the corrosive effect of tenure on the academia, but that’s nothing compared to the newspaper comic syndication industry that embodies the very worst of the tenure system in that it is really hard to get in (King Features Syndicate gets about a thousand hopeful submissions each year, and picks up only one of them), but once you are in, you can stay in as long as you like regardless of the depths that the quality of your strip plummets to. Anybody who disagrees with this assessment should try to explain the mystery of how Beetle Bailey can still be in worldwide syndication. Try to find even one strip of that comic that is actually funny in that it would make the average reader laugh. Judging by the recent Sunday strips, it's almost as if the writers somehow forgot their basic premise that this strip is supposed to take place in a military setting. Now, I am a bit rusty on my Uniform Code of Military Justice, but I'm still pretty sure that constant open disobedience of orders and actively sabotaging them out of spite (at least whenever you don't manage to successfully hide from your commanding officers to avoid receiving orders in the first place) simply has to be some kind of serious crime. A fitting end to this strip, when they eventually decide to put it out of its misery, would be Sarge executing Bailey on the spot. A wifebeater is a type of bespoke business suit, right? One domestic violence ad in the subway years ago featured a family portrait with a lower class father sporting a ratlike prole face. Liberals take offense at the notion that domestic violence is more common among the poor and especially the underclass at the very bottom (sociologists know well that scrubbing out this bottom 2% of “boys born blue” drastically changes basically any societal statistic you care to name) than among the middle class and the rich, and haughtily explain that all stereotypes are false, since domestic violence does happen in all social classes and ethnic groups. Sure thing, if your analysis has the none-one-many granularity of the Piraha tribe. Real life requires more nuance in making decisions that have massively important consequences for actual people, consequences that far outweigh any status posturing by acting dumb. All types of violent crime are statistically far more common among the poor, and if you claim this is different for domestic violence, the burden of proof is on the side that makes the extraordinary claim. More importantly, the categorical position that no statistical differences exist between groups when it comes to domestic violence is easily revealed as a hollow pose by observing their reaction to the suggestion that domestic violence would be equally common among both sexes. It’s amazing how quickly the liberal can rediscover his or her ability to make statistical and stereotypical distinctions about group differences. Street smarts When I first read the news about that “avoid ghetto” app, I wondered if its prediction accuracy could be improved by feeding it voting data, seeing that street crimes tend to be far more common in areas that lean left in the polls. The criticism of this app has been a lot more comical than the app itself based on an Internet joke. One rebuttal haughtily proclaimed that all crimes happen in all kinds of neighbourhoods, so nothing can ever be predicted about crime, and even if something is true, people shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions based on it. Another, unbelievably even more deluded article complained that this app doesn't track other crimes such as subprime mortgage fraud. You can’t make this stuff up. An easy solution would let each user choose which crimes he wants to be warned about, letting everyone avoid the crimes he or she fears the most. The same article concluded by pointing out that these high-risk neighbourhoods are more dangerous to their dwellers than to people driving through them, which is an elementary error of probability mathematics similar to claiming that driving a car is more dangerous than BASE jumping because far more drivers die each year than BASE jumpers. And even without that error, if something is dangerous to you, surely it doesn’t become any less dangerous by being even more dangerous for somebody else. Eusocial Leftism as an ideology exists mainly to provide a mechanism for advancing the economic interest and social status of articulate verbal intellectuals who, under the conditions of free market, are impotent to control anything more important than a classroom of a captive audience of sophomores. But you really have to admire the framing that the left has managed to cement into the discourse: that only sex and drugs are “personal” and therefore the state has no right to control them, whereas for anything else about our lives, no matter how important and personal you might think it is for you, the state gets to override individual decisions to achieve its grand goals of equality and social justice. The left has always understood the marketing principle of “sex sells”. The excellent blog Chicago Boyz once pointed out that the cause of sexual liberation, to the point of subsidizing outright irresponsibility, allows leftists to collectively claim that they stand for personal freedom in one very powerful area, while it disguises their termite gnawing of individual freedom in every other area. Sex is also effective for recruiting the next generation of activists eager to buy the promise of harems full of hot babes who eagerly worship the penis of the dangerous intellectual and rebel who is unfairly held down by the tradition of monogamy. Social responsibilities are for other people People who complain about the low wages paid by Wal-Mart and compare them to the more generous benefits paid by Costco and Whole Foods seem unaware that Wal-Mart employs more people not only in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of their sales. When you skim the most productive employees from the very top, the way Costco does, it is easy to pay them top salaries and remain profitable while deriding the companies that hire the masses that you would never grant for a job interview for. But the most comical progressive is surely the one who supports Whole Foods but doesn’t shop there because it is too expensive, so he does his own shopping in some cheaper place without bothering to ask how that place can be so much cheaper even though it doesn’t pay its employees top dollar and carry expensive and exotic yuppie foods grown in vats of unicorn farts. This is closely trailed by people who adore the Honest Ed’s store in Toronto. Although both an amusing and educational experience and a sui generis historical landmark that everyone ought to go see at least once, Honest Ed’s is routinely praised for being more efficient in selling everything more cheaply than those local mom-and-pop stores that it displaced. That is, exactly what they in the next breath then deride Wal-Mart and other big boxes for doing, and organize protests to keep them and the normos who shop there out of their trendy city. Keep your stinky laws off my bank account Feminists love to proclaim that only women should have a say about abortion laws, since only women have abortions. Fair enough, but then by the exact same reasoning, only corporations get to have a say about the corporate law, only millionaires get to have a say about the tax rates for millionaires, and so on. In an interconnected society, laws about certain groups can have big consequences on other stakeholders of that society. Feminism is not just a fundamentally dishonest system of thought but totalitarian to boot, as it admits in its slogan “personal is political”, the very definition of totalitarianism that allows nothing personal to exist outside the political sphere to compete with the state. Not enslaved by the old patriarchal concepts of logic, feminists often contradict themselves within a single paragraph. For example, feminists argue that in the sexual sphere, women are not in any gatekeeper role, and if any man claims otherwise, smart women close up their legs tighter than a clam to make sure that he won’t get laid ever again. (It’s like that old joke of how Jews don’t control Hollywood, and anyone who says they do will never have lunch in that town again.) Feminists also claim that since all people are singular individuals with different preferences, all generalizations are wrong and especially in the sexual sphere it is horrendously offensive to even talk about “sexual market value” since everyone is equally desirable to someone, even though any man who says otherwise is obviously an ugly loser who can’t get laid. Tempered Every time the left loses some election, the idea to restrict the voting franchise to “smart” people surfaces from its collective subconscious where it otherwise silently simmers like those giant carbon dioxide bubbles in the depths of Lake Nyos. Emotionally understandable, but not really that well thought out. For starters, as much as liberals fantasize being misunderstood super geniuses, like Brain constantly held back by Pinky, they might be surprised to learn certain inconvenient truths about the intelligence distribution in various political parties. One rather horrendous unintentional consequence of this change would be its massive disparate impact towards certain minority groups that the left otherwise tries its best to empower. Regardless of whether you would filter the voters with a straight-up IQ test, or with a test of knowledge of current events and the political system, many liberals would be mightily surprised to learn how very differently various groups would fare in these tests, contrary to their naive assumptions. Especially we conservative white males tend to be the most knowledgeable subgroup. Another equally badly thought out hobbyhorse of the left is to expand the voting franchise to children. If these additional votes were cast by the parents, this change would benefit conservatives. Few liberals seem to be aware of the fact that even though women as a group lean left, the subgroup of married women with children leans to the opposite direction. A Master’s in folding shirts The Obama administration recently considered making it illegal discrimination for employers to require a high school diploma. Many played that for laughs, but once you accept the principle that employers should not be allowed to discriminate based on criteria that don't directly affect the job performance, it's hard to see why such a law would be any different from those that forbid discrimination based on race or sex. In fact, all employment discrimination based on the college degree should be forbidden, unless that job specifically requires a particular degree, such as a doctor, a lawyer or an electrician. This would prevent employers, now prevented from using more accurate hiring criteria, from using college degrees as proxies for middle class values and conscientiousness. College degrees cost nothing to employers while they impose a gargantuan externality on the rest of society and especially its marginal members who have an insufficient cognitive capacity for higher education. After this, all colleges and universities could decrease their student intakes by one third and immensely increase the quality of their courses and degrees, and could also get rid of all remedial classes (with the exception of ESL for foreign students) and fluff degrees needed to accommodate those who can't hack math and logic but still need the sheepskin to get the job that in any remotely sane society would be done by a high school graduate. Taking the moose by the horns The group hysteria of the left that started almost immediately after then unknown Sarah Palin became the Republican Vice Presidential candidate (just like Rob Ford became the mayor of Toronto) brought to full daylight the sorry state that the trendy left has devolved into since its heyday. Even though most liberals literally could not even name any of Palin’s positions on any issue, they didn’t hate her for her ideas anyway, but for who she was. As the blog Chicago Boyz pointed out, the best explanation for the left’s bizarre Palin obsession was status anxiety. Lacking any self- awareness, they reacted to the very existence of Sarah Palin like wounded and cornered rats because of the narcissistic injury by the threat she posed to their own individual sense of status. Their meager arguments were transparent rationalizations for a white hot narcissistic rage. Since the left have few meritorious indicators of a personal and group claim to status remaining, they try to restrict status not by merit, but by conformity to their life pattern. The idea that someone like Palin who chose to do the exact opposite in all of her life choices (study in no-name colleges, give birth to five kids, likes hunting and sports, being more physically attractive than most women ten years younger, married to a husband who has a chest and a chin) could be more successful than they threatens this safe idea of status as conformity to certain very narrow urban leftist lifestyle and all its shibboleths. If Palin had succeeded, then the left would become nobodies, their lifestyle no longer conferring them automatic superior status. The tallest fence Almost two decades ago, I read a personal essay about a “womyn-only” safe space, back when it was still possible to use that both literally and conceptually mangled word non-ironically. The author had gone out after dark to get something and heard scary steps around the corner, but then she realized that she had nothing to fear, and was soon relieved to see two other womyn-born-womyn come out, of course, since there were no men inside the compound. Being all naive and innocent, I had never heard of gated communities, a notion that would have been conceptually impossible in the homogeneous Finland anyway, so I did not realize the unintentional humour in that telling incident. Much later I realized how comically similar the ideologies of womyn’s separatism and white separatism are, despite the fact that we tend to imagine these located in the opposite ends of the one-dimensional line on which our multifaceted ideologies are projected (a word humorously appropriate here since this line usually tells a lot more about the psychological projections of the speaker). Both forms of separatism assert that the small group of chosen people has no choice but to physically segregate itself from the horde of violent subhumans with which the peaceful coexistence is no longer possible. Their only difference is which group they assign to this role of violent subhumans. Teachable moments in everyday life Even though kids see other kids as vastly different so that a kid who is two years older is practically an adult, adults tend to see all kids as pretty much the same. I once walked past this one school the moment their teacher was leading a group of teenagers for some outing. It didn't take me but seconds to realize that this has to be the problem student class, or whatever the current euphemism for that one is. On one hand, from my adult point of view these were just ordinary teens dressed normally (as opposed to big hulks clad in denim jackets emblazoned with the name of the favourite metal band), and yet something in their microbehaviour instantly revealed that they were little punks instead of normal teens engaging in normal horseplay between peers. Then there were the details such as their teacher being a no-nonsense type, not unlike some character that Jeremy Renner would portray on film, and the fact that of these about fifteen students, only two were girls. And of course, the most damning fact that despite being teenagers instead of kindergartners, they still had to be escorted to their outing as one group. As they laughed, I also laughed silently thinking of how the dead end jobs in their future and the coming collapse of the welfare hammock will soon enough wipe off those idiotic grins. What if Tim Tebow was a Christian... but America were Muslim? Morgan Spurlock's TV series 30 Days preached tolerance by making people face their prejudices and see for themselves that the things they fear and suspect are actually quite nice. For example, the show once had a conservative white man live with gays, and another time, a conservative white man live with Muslims. Yet this triangle was never completed by having an openly gay man live in a Muslim community. Some naive person might think that Muslims would be in the most urgent need of sensitivity training, considering that even in the most secular and peaceful of all Muslim nations, roughly 99% of people oppose not just the gay marriage but gays, period. However, since the whole point of white liberalism is to serve as a status signal that distinguishes white liberals from white proles that they are otherwise materially not wealthy enough to avoid being mistaken for, homophobia and Islamophobia are problems for white liberals only when they can be used as a platform to lecture white proles about their icky false consciousness. Of course, every liberal knows that what he preaches in public is a noble lie, easily seen from how he makes the important life decisions that have real consequences for his own hide. In this case, ensure that Muslims, otherwise so superior to us in their exotic brown authenticity, are never confronted with the snarky bitching of some flaming gay man. This is no different from how the family of a violent alcoholic tacitly knows to never bring up certain topics. Lives not worth living One of the curious paradoxes of our time is that those who most adamantly support the women’s right to choose an abortion for any reason whatsoever then tend to oppose this right when the fetus is somehow disabled. Some would even go as far as to ban prenatal screenings, not respecting the woman’s sacred right to do with her body whatever she wants, and eject by force if necessary all invaders that she doesn’t want inside it. The moral case that they weave to resolve this contradiction is as comical as it is confused, since the issue is simple and straightforward. New technologies available at reasonable prices do impose duties to use them. For example, having your kid’s infected tooth removed using dentistry of two centuries ago would now be child abuse. Once the technology for prenatal screening exists, parents can no longer hide behind the curtain of uncertainty that was available in the age before this screening. Giving birth to a disabled child used to be completely random and unknowable, but today it is a fully conscious decision. Note especially that the decision not to use prenatal screening is also a conscious decision, so the person making it should be held fully responsible for its consequences. As an analogy, someone who drives a car through a populated area blindfolded and then hits a toddler who has to sit in a wheelchair for the rest of his life can’t seriously argue that there was “just no way” that he could have avoided the accident. Rising against the real 1% A huge asymmetry in violence, fighting and self defence is that a prison sentence is not that big a deal for some lowlife loser who can enjoy the guaranteed three hots and a cot with his buddies lifting weights, watching TV and messing with prison bitches, whereas going to prison would be utterly devastating to any middle class normo, effectively ending his life as he knows it. This asymmetry has tremendous implications on self defense. One Finnish wag suggested starting a “ten-spot club” whose members would anonymously send a gift of ten euros to people they consider unjustly convicted for some crime that was honest self-defence and should never even have been prosecuted in the first place. Even if this club consisted only of 1% of the population, the year or two prison term (of which in Finland, the first-timer only has to do half anyway) would not only accumulate to a nice annual “wage” to compensate for the lost income, but also send a loud and clear message to the creeping forces of anarcho- tyranny. This term introduced by the late Sam Francis refers to a society where the corrupt Leviathan of the managerial state is no longer strong enough or even willing to enforce the laws that control violent criminals (thus, anarchy), but uses constant and exorbitant harassment, taxation and thought control against the middle class to disarm them both literally and metaphorically to keep itself in power and well fed from the ever- diminishing pile of wealth (thus, tyranny). Dress to impress It is just so adorable when MTV markets itself as a brave challenger of societal taboos. If those wacky rascals of Jackass ever honestly wanted to “shock” people in power, they would organize a stunt where they dressed up as women and entered women’s washrooms in universities, department stores and other public places located in urban areas that overwhelmingly vote liberal. If some narrow-minded and ignorant customer complained about this and called the security or even actual police, they could inform her that “sex is only a social construct” and it is the fundamental human right of everyone to be allowed to dress and act according to however they feel like inside. After this, repeat the same stunt in some lesbian watering hole with hidden cameras to record the intolerant reactions. The entire liberal society is a fragmented lump of tidal forces ready to rip it apart, so some young mischievous filmmaker and social activist could easily create a weekly TV show based on nothing but candid camera stunts like this, with the short term aim of entertaining the viewers with the clown nose on, and the long term serious aim to frack the uneasy and teetering fissures between liberal interest groups by pouring cleansing water into them to make them tremor and come apart. The golden path The popular blog Ace of Spades is outside the alt-right circles, but its 2006 essay about why the left hates this one conservative professor of literature so much is surely in the top ten of my all time favourite blog posts anywhere. To a man, every leftist considers himself an intellectual, regardless of whether he is a professor in some state college, or dropped out the freshman year because he was just too original a gadfly to be stuck in some conformity factory. Proclaiming the feelgood slogans of liberalism assures them of their special status and lifts them to an instant nirvana of intellectual grace. After all, if one is smart, one believes in progressivism; conversely, if one believes in progressivism, one is smart. The existence of people who are obviously more intelligent and informed than the leftist and yet reject progressive ideas is a visceral threat to this fragile sense of superiority. The left has a massive psychological investment in progressive ideas, which is why regardless of whatever topic your debate with a narcissistic progressive is nominally about, in reality you are having a debate about whether he is worthy and intelligent, and a good human being. For this reason, humour and irony that require emotional distance from a subject are so common on the right, but so hard to find on the left. What generally passes for humour inside the liberal echo chamber is angry sneers that humiliate and dehumanize, while reminding the fellow travellers of what will happen to them should these sheep ever stray from the enlightened flock. Torillennium Before the mayoral election in Toronto that Rob Ford swept in a landslide to great wailing and gnashing of teeth, Ford was widely pilloried for saying that the city of Toronto in its budget crisis can’t possibly keep taking alone all those immigrants, but the surrounding cities should also house more of them and shoulder the costs. Things sure have changed from the more innocent time when the slogan “Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of a cancer cell” was proudly sported by progressives who these days can’t seem to get enough growth, not satisfied until Toronto has become a megalopolis of at least 20 million people. As one morning news headline "Traffic in GTA reaches crisis proportions" nicely illustrated, the people of Toronto have these weird disconnects in drawing basic causal inferences from their beloved policies (in this case, open borders and mass immigration) to their utterly predictable consequences. But if they want more of that which causes them to have less, it is not my place or yours to try to stop them from getting it good and hard. And in the end, this farce only strengthens my mischievous dream to see Toronto become at least 80% ethnic minorities. And preferably as many as possible of the sort who can demonstrate what A Handmaid's Tale was all about, if only to enjoy the cognitive pretzels that Margaret Atwood and all the good little leftists would twist themselves into while defending them. Perchance a dream The social order of feudalism can these days be found only in the history textbooks. Sure, in practice all feudal societies were extremely poor and unequal, life in them constant toil and moil in virtual slavery within ten miles of the shack that you were born in, and even for the lucky few born to the top, so moldy and filthy that even the richest king would have gladly traded half his kingdom to a bottle of pills available over the counter to anybody in our world. But you have to agree that in theory, feudalism is a beautiful idea. It just hasn’t been implemented correctly anywhere, but this is only because people are just too stupid and selfish and want to keep for themselves what they earn, instead of tithing it to their wise feudal lord who then distributes it equally and fairly among his subjects. If people just were more enlightened and open-minded and really wanted to make this system work, and if there was some way to force everyone to play along so that they couldn’t leave, life in feudalism would be exactly like in The Lord of the Rings, every man and woman happily in their place, living and working together in pastoral communal villages without all this constant hurry, social pressures and the economic rat race that so burden the modern man... of course, I am not being serious here. But how is what I wrote above any different from what liberals wistfully say about communism? There are always rules Even though games are very amenable to scientific analysis of their optimal moves done from the outside, very few games of hidden and private information are complex enough to allow Popperian science practiced inside the game, so that you would form hypotheses of the opponent hands and then choose moves to falsify these hypotheses with controlled experiments until only the truth remains. This is because the tightly insulated microworlds of games differ from our physical world (where such science is possible with the “moves” available to us) in one crucial way: their rules are designed to ensure that the game always advances towards an end. Inside the game, you usually get to try only one thing before the game state has irrevocably solidified and whole vast branches of possible actions have been eliminated by your move. (Some exceptions to this exist: for example, in bridge there are “discovery plays” where you delay making a commitment until you find out more about the distribution.) In our physical world, it is actually quite difficult and rare for us to do something truly irrevocable, so we have ample time to experiment and find things out with the knowledge that the future will still offer most of the “moves” that are available to us today. The cybernetic man Growing up in Finland that was still de facto under the thumb of the Soviets and their lickspittles, it was extremely rare to see any American to the right of Alan Alda presented in a positive light, and such rare occurrences most certainly never happened in any of the official broadcasts of the state. A whole new world then suddenly opened up for me on the Internet during my freshman year in university. But even before that, I read an essay collection by the dissident professor Yrjö Ahmavaara in which he pointed out the far left media bias of the Finnish media that only ever shows the urban slums of America, but never the suburbs where the vast American middle class enjoys lives far more peaceful, spacious and wealthy than Finns can even imagine trapped in their tiny rathole apartments that the average American would consider child abuse if you packed a family of four in them. I never read his later works Taboos of the welfare state and The arrival of genes in social sciences, but I do know that their contents are exactly as promised by these politically incorrect titles. Ahmavaara was also the first person I saw explicitly pointing out that the humanities intellectuals despise science and math simply because these fields stratify students by their innate intelligence, the differences of which the artificial grade scale from A to F could not even begin to constrain, and these results can't be fudged the same way as in the humanities and social sciences to cling to the fantasy that these differences, and most importantly, their societal consequences don’t exist. Soap avoiders The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act in the United States that was repealed with coordinated online activism nicely ripped wide open a deep fissure that has been stewing inside the political left: the Internet hipsters versus the old media of Hollywood and television. The latter are desperately clinging to their diminishing livelihoods in a world where gigabits are becoming too cheap to meter and the marginal cost of copying anything is zilch, whereas the former see it as their natural right to copy, rip and remix anything they want. That one occasionally gets comical as the hipsters, without any trace of that famous hipster irony, compared SOPA to the Internet censorship in China and the Middle East (regions that they otherwise normally adore and consider superior to the West), as if not allowing hipsters to pirate Wes Anderson movies were on par with shooting dissidents in the head or hanging porno site programmers. Hollywood is still a few years behind the music industry in losing its profits to piracy, but as the bandwidth increases exponentially, streaming entire movies in a heartbeat will soon be feasible. The most glorious irony in this catfight must surely be that both the music industry and Hollywood made their piles of moolah by telling the youth to question authority and always do their own thing regardless of the rules, which makes it even more delicious to watch them now sinking like whale shit because of the young people who question authority and do their own thing. Substitutions I once observed that you can take any real-world sentence that contains the word “activist”, and replace that word with the word “Stalinist”, without changing the truth value of that sentence. Sure, that one is an exaggeration, but only slightly so. Many words that are supposed to be ideologically neutral will in practice end up owned and framed by one particular part of the political spectrum. Another framing effect is that we tend to associate impotent life losers, resentful of society that doesn't acknowledge their greatness, with right-wing rhetoric and causes. This association has no doubt been carefully cultivated by the media, even though it should be evident these days (especially after those Occupest and G20 tantrums) that the resentful losers living hand to mouth and toiling in menial dead-end jobs far below their educational level are overwhelmingly drawn to the political left and its fantastic rhetoric of purifying violence. A casual glance into the comment threads of Reddit, Salon, Rabble and other popular progressive hangouts, let alone seeing these people in action in the physical world, should be enough to convince anyone of this. The whiff of loserdom that emanates from these goblins, almost as if it were an actual physical smell, is impossible not to notice in the surrounding air. It’s complicated One of the curious paradoxes of our time is that all Western cultures must be completely destroyed and transformed into something better, whereas all those small indigenous cultures hidden deep in the jungles away from everything else are already perfect and therefore must never change or adopt anything from other cultures, and for this end, must be protected from any outside influences not unlike the Prime Directive in Star Trek. This is similar to another paradox from one issue of the student newspaper that I recently read. It first featured an article arguing that the university should expand its multi-faith prayer space for religious students since the current one is overcrowded, and why this space absolutely must be segregated by sex, regardless of all those multiple faiths that do not practice such segregation. Silly me, as I had assumed the correct enlightened opinion to be that religion always ruins everything and should have no place whatsoever in academia. As a comical contrast to this, another article interviewed some female student who raises her son, a toddler with a long mane, in a purely gender-neutral fashion so that he can always make his own choices without any pressure from our patriarchal and heteronormative society. Of course, simply by reading any fawning trip report by some young female progressive who personally visits a Muslim society for the first time, I give it an over-under of twenty years for the majority of our enlightened rebels to become Muslims. Frame it to shame it Ignatius Popolevski probably would not have become the punk rock icon without his shorter and more striking stage name we now know him as. Whoever controls the language, controls the discussion. It is interesting how the left has managed to quietly frame the important word “smart” so that this word, whenever it is used in practice, never has anything to do with its dictionary meaning, that is, quick and accurate practical intelligence and decision making that lead to good results in real world conditions. In practice, “smart” simply equals “leftist” so that everything that the left adores is by definition “smart” in its discourse. Another equally illustrative word is “real”, also tacitly framed to carry connotations alien to the dictionary meaning of this word. For example, people living in suburbs in spacious houses with the freedom to be safe from various phenomena that blight the urban neighbourhoods are bad, because this life is somehow not “real”. To qualify as “real”, everything needs to be gritty, poor and generally unpleasant in many ways. Similarly, liberal ideas are always “advanced”, but never “obscure”. A Soviet general always “warns”, whereas an American general always “bullies”. Liberals dismiss choices they dislike as being “primitive”, but cannot see their wistful desire to return to what was essentially the social organization of the Pleistocene as “primitive”. Nor would they ever dismiss love and other emotions as “primitive”, even though emotions are about the most primitive thing that still exists in our present-day lives. No rulers, but still plenty of rules In this age when hypotheticals are quickly turning into reality, subtext is turning into text, and unlikely events taking place are causing other a priori unlikely events take place, it is not too surprising that the word “anarchist” has flipped over to mean someone who wants to maximize the state. On the other hand, even Mad Magazine decades ago featured a cartoon where an anarchist was explained to want to eradicate the state, except for those parts that send him his welfare cheques. In an actual anarchy such as New Orleans after Katrina, people generally do not dress in leather and sport piercings and asymmetric hairdos, or live in “tribes” that drive their motorcycles from one rave to another. Anarchism at least provides ample comedy for the rest of us, such as one group of anarchists in Finland who demanded society to pay them for their services in creating the vibrant city life by idly sitting in cafes to make them popular. As one wag loves to point out, these days poor are the rich that Jesus warned us about. Another comical incident featured an anarchist collective whose rules forbade police, racism, homophobia and carnivorism. This collective sheltered a group of Mediterranean “undocumented immigrants” who were, of course, exempt from the previous rules, and one day repaid this favour by gang raping a lone female anarchist before vanishing. This collective quickly developed a very different attitude towards the police. Of course I am a very bad person, but had I been the detective assigned to this case, I would have answered the call with “oink oink”, and then taken the long route through a couple of donut shops. People always have the right to know As many have pointed out, WikiLeaks is badly misnamed in that it is not a Wiki, that is, editable by anybody at will, but the site tries to piggyback on the success and fame of Wikipedia. The progressive argument for WikiLeaks and the poor Bradley Manning who dumped an entire cache of classified state documents there clearly has not been thought out very far, since they argue that governments should be completely open and never keep any secrets whatsoever. How some diplomat stationed abroad could then possibly report the situation in that country and make honest and accurate assessments of the people and groups there, they do not explain. As a hypothetical thought experiment, what would the fans of WikiLeaks say would be a suitable punishment for someone who leaks the list of confidential informants and witnesses against organized crime? Or should that even be punished at all? How about someone who, in a country where the medical system is run by the state, leaks out the list of people who have tested positive for HIV? Surely the people have the right to know who they can have sex with safely, no? This idiocy reminds me of another progressive hobbyhorse, their fight against corporate personhood because only “only people are people”, not quite getting that once corporations are no longer legal entities that have rights and responsibilities, they could no longer sue a corporation that has wronged them any more than they could sue a tree or a mountain. It’s science, bitches Even though few liberals could even tell you what consanguinity is and how it is measured, they love to yuck how conservatives are “inbred”, even when liberals themselves have nothing but adoration for this one region on Earth where literally 70% of all marriages have taken place between first or second cousins. (That is what life is like in a society where your place is determined by your extended family that, if somebody wrongs against you, packs up all your brothers and cousins in several cars to drive over to loudly demand that the violation is set right.) The scientific, historical and geopolitical ignorance does not slow them down from boasting how they are the spear carriers of science, especially the theory of evolution, even though I would give it even money whether the average progressive activist would pass an eighth-grade science or math exam. Since evolution by natural selection requires the existence of important and innate hereditary differences between individual people, nobody who pooh-poohs the existence of said differences can honestly assert that he believes in evolution. Also, if you have a problem with the denial of evolution only when it comes from white people of lower social class than you aspire to be, while you remain respectfully silent every time some exotic brown folks walk out of the classroom when evolution is taught, please don’t even bother to deny that the theory of evolution is for you anything but a social class signifier of convenience. Where the handouts grow on bushes Now that the hangover of the Occupest movement has subsided, the people who got in bed with these street dissidents would prefer to forget that this messy affair even happened. The left can cry “police state” as much as it wants when their precious “People’s libraries” were tossed into dumpsters, but the number of countries in the world where this flea circus would have been allowed to last even a day is pretty tiny, and zilch among those countries that these occupiers wanted us to emulate politically, economically and culturally. When the cops were not allowed to do what they would have done with the full blessing of the left had this been, say, an “Occupy Planned Parenthood” movement, there was a rumor that hardened criminals and street people were bused from jails to sabotage the camps. I wish, but it was paranoid poppycock. It's not like you'd need to bus the lumpenproles to any place that serves plenty of free food and free pussy guarded by smarmy hipsters who couldn’t give anybody even a threatening look, let alone a right hook. The grapevine will draw these guys to this Big Rock Candy Mountain where the cops have wooden legs and are ordered to look the other way. If some cute Occupette is not interested in “spreading the wealth” but you have to engage in a “diversity of tactics” to convince her to give up what she wanted to selfishly keep all for herself (just like those greedy 1% pigs at the top!) the organizers will conveniently hush this up and tell her to just lie back and think of Sweden. )}]> In one recent online post, I rhetorically wondered how vegans can believe that a fertilized chicken egg has the right to live the full lifespan of a chicken without being turned into an omelet, but also simultaneously believe that a fertilized human egg is only a clump of cells whose abortion does not constitute any moral problem at all. One commenter explained that I am completely missing the point. Arguing facts and logic with proglodytes is like “dancing about architecture”, a futile activity that only makes you look foolish. People don't come to believe the trendy liberal ideas because they looked up the facts and thought through the logic. If you look at their pretexts for believing what they do, it's all laughably thin stuff, even those few times that they happen to be right. All good little liberals believe the same things because all the nice people they know believe them, so it feels good. This suffocating bubble of the pervasive and unquestioned liberalism fills the entire society and always provides the easy answer for everything, and an instant nirvana that elevates the believers to the intellectual elite without ever having to actually take any responsibility for the consequences of their ideas. But just because it is not only possible, but the default path, for people to go through not just their college years but their entire lives without ever seeing even one non-leftist idea presented in a positive light, it was equally necessary for me to write this book.