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Oi, bookworm!

I can't remember the last time I saw a computer that didn't have Internet connection, let alone had to use one myself. (Embedded devices such as VCR's and microwave ovens that in reality comprise the vast majority of computers do not count for this argument, but here I only consider machines that we normally think of as "computers".) I guess that a computer being connected to the Internet is these days pretty much given, an essential feature of the notion of "computer" itself. I don't remember what TV show I was watching when I realized this to my delight, when the character needed to find "a computer" to do something that required Internet connection. The network is the computer, as they say, and a computer not connected to the whole wide world is pretty much useless. Next I will be looking forward to the future when the expressions "the company X operates on the Internet" or "I bought something from the Internet" are retired, since they would be as absurd as wondering whether a company has a phone number that you could use to contact it.

The ubiquitous Internet connectivity brings the problem of spam, of course. I tried to read the book "The Spam Kings", which is an expose to the people who send us the ads for penis enlargement pills. The book is published by O'Reilly, so I had very high hopes for it. The back cover also promised that the book would be "a classic, in the spirit of Soul of the New Machine and The Cuckoo's Egg." Let's just say that it wasn't and leave it at that.

Another similar disappointment was Bill McKibben's "Maybe One", which is a plea that (Western) families should have only one child. Myself, I have always thought that one should either have no children at all, or have at least two or more, since having just one child strikes me as the epitome of inefficiency. From the efficiency standpoint, it would perhaps be optimal if there were childfree people and then there were "breeders" who had large families, with the average of 2.1 children per family to sustain the population. Comparative advantage, specialization, marginal costs and all that. But the open-minded and culturate person that I am famous for being, I borrowed this book to find out what the arguments for the opposite solution are. Again, I shouldn't have bothered, since this book was so absolutely inane that I had to stop reading it after the first 50 pages or so.

The previous book was even more comical in the light of Peter Brimelow's now almost quaint "Alien Nation" which I finally found the energy to pick up and read. I had seen the movie years ago, though. I am sure that this book was important and a revolutionary thoughtcrime in the dinosaur era of 1995, but as seems to be usual with all political books, there was nothing there that I haven't already read expressed much better and more succinctly in the blogosphere. A while ago, I actually picked up and read a conservative polemic ("Shut Up And Sing" by Laura Ingraham) and a leftist polemic ("The Truth" by Al Franken), and had to marvel how totally... for the lack of better word right now, obsolete they both were. For all the hoopla of how the blogs and Internet will supposedly make the mainstream media dinosaur obsolete, the one thing that they have already made obsolete are books of political polemic. I wonder if anybody else out there has made this same observation.

This morning, when I woke up earlier than usual and my wife was still asleep, I checked my email and then went to lie down on the sofa and read "Status Anxiety" by Alain de Botton. The book examines how social status and its various indicators become reliable indicators of moral worth in a meritocracy where status is earned instead of inherited, and how new status symbols are needed now that the average working man enjoys the material luxury unimaginable to richest kings of the past eras.

The most humorous part was near the beginning of the book, where it describes what happened in 1959 when Americans were allowed to build an exhibition of American way of life inside the Khrushchev-era Soviet Russia. This exhibition included a full-scale replica of the average American home and the things that it contains. Seeing this replica, the Russians couldn't accept that such luxury could possibly be available for the average American, so they declared it to be propaganda and mockingly named it "Taj Mahal".

But the single funniest part, at least for me, was when Khrushchev was shown an electric lemon squeezer and couldn't see the point of such silly gadget. (Apparently, in Brutopia people have more important concerns than such childish games.) Nixon suggested that anything that makes women work less hard must be useful, to which Khrushchev angrily replied: "We don't think of women in terms of workers --- like you do in the capitalist system." There is so much in that single sentence that still applies to present-day leftists. Oh, the outrage when a blasphemer uses economic reasoning to discuss something that leftists consider sacred and instictively know that it's not in their best interests to take a closer look at it, so they would rather not think about it too deeply.

Speaking of leftists, another book that I recently finished was Todd Gitlin's "The Twilight of Common Dreams". In this book, perhaps the funniest part was the passionate footnote that lamented that the author has to use the word "race" and talk about different races, even though races don't really exist since variation within races is greater than variation between races. I wonder what other categories would not exist, according to that criterion. But at least to the man's credit, he doesn't seem to like postmodernism and identity resentment politics very much either.

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