Sixteen Volts

Tjic links to Joel's essay "The Development Abstraction Layer" which reaches an almost paulgrahamian level.

The post "Call Me An Elitist If You Want..." reminds us that there are lots of people out there for whom a double-wide trailer is luxurious.

The article "Are You a Thrillionaire or a Realionaire?" classifies real-world millionaires to five different basic types.

I linked to the song "Bush was right" a long time ago, thinking that it was a southparkian parody, but apparently not, and now there is even a video of the band. The American conservative writers that I typically link to and enjoy reading are not exactly fans of Bush or his administration, but it's an entirely different crowd of neoconservatives and Jebusoid wingnuts who do that. But all in all, the Bush presidency has been a pretty great comedy so far and only keeps getting better: I just hope that the looming economic collapse doesn't totally take Canada down with it. "Asymmetrical Information" once put it something like that in the American politics, the party in power is smug and the party in opposition is deranged, and after the past five years it's just not possible to deny this observation. I think my personal favourite moment was when leftists called Bush a fascist because he said that there ought to be limits to freedom. Pot, kettle, black. If you lost and keep losing to an idiot monkey, then what exactly does that make you? Or as the Danimal once said

Liberals have only themselves to blame for living in their Potemkin village of political correctness, relentlessly losing touch with how absurd their message became to Joe Six-Pack.

Bush has something special that takes him beyond what his apparent ineptitude would seem to limit him to. Whether you like Bush or not, especially if you don't like him, you might as well face facts. If Bush was as inept as he seems, he wouldn't be able to vex his opponents so. There are lots of inept right-wingers who never amount to shit.

Bush is clearly not one of those. He has amounted to enough to change the course of U.S. politics for a while.

Calling one's political opponent incompetent is an obviously self-falsifying argument. If the opponent was truly incompetent, you wouldn't have to oppose him. You'd just stand back and let him self-destruct.

By the way, when did the server capacities and bandwidth increase so massively that TV resolution video is now considered a perfectly normal thing to serve over the Internet? There's Google video and YouTube and whatever others have you, just kind of happened over the last few months.

The post "Blog" at "Unqualified Offerings" must be some kind of a meta-joke.

The post "Argentina On Two Steaks A Day" at Idlewords describes the way the Argentinians eat meat. What a delicious way to live your life!

Speaking of delicious meat, "The Girl Next Door" lists the "Top Ten Lies Strippers Tell".

Bruce Schneier announces a "Movie-Plot Threat Contest". As far as I can tell, many ideas posted in the comments look quite feasible for a determined terrorist group, and would cause severe destruction and mayhem.

I have to say I am (be|a)mused how very determined the American left is to let in millions of illegal Third World immigrants, considering that those immigrants tend to pretty much oppose all things that leftists generally hold dear. For example, what do the Mexicans typically think of gays and gay marriage? How are the gay rights and women's rights movements generally faring in the Latin American, Arabic and African countries? It might be good for leftists to actually go talk with their objects of adoration a little, instead of imagining them to be your college leftists with a bit more spicier and exotic cuisine. I have no horse in this particular race, since these immigrants probably stop before they reach Canada, but meanwhile, on the right, the post "Take California" at "Right Reason" wonders what will happen when half of the population in California is Hispanic.

Abortion is another issue where I have no horse in the race. If some slutty cheerleader gets knocked up by the soccer coach behind the local gas'n'gulp, there is no point in forcing her to keep the baby but it's no skin off my back either way. I am pro-choice mostly for eugenic reasons, the same way that most people reveal themselves to be pro-choice if it turns out during the early pregnancy that their baby would have Down syndrome. However, I can't deny enjoying the writings of "Raving Atheist", who goes against the stereotype of a godless person and is pro-life. The post "Magic" notes that even many pro-choicers in fact believe that life begins at conception, and even if they don't, they do have to draw the line somewhere in an arbitrary fashion. "Conceptual Thinking" continues that thought.

I don't need to be convinced that FireFox is a good browser (how could closed-source software possibly compete with open source in infrastructure software such as browsers, editors and compilers?), but the advertisement "Wheee!" still made me laugh. The post "Firefox Tweaks, Extensions and Optimizations" shows how to make this browser work even better.

The essay "One Man, Many Wives, Big Problems" by Jonathan Rauch explains why legal polygamy would be disastrous, using many of the same arguments as I did in my essay "So what if polygamy?" When it comes to the gamma males that polygamy would take away any possibility of finding and marrying a woman, it is pretty ironic that both socialist feminists (but I repeat myself) and Christian polygamy supporters use the same argument that the gamma males are not entitled to marriage and who even cares what happens to those losers. Strange bedfellows, those folks.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, April 13, 2006 at 12:55 PM