Meanwhile, the birds are dying
If Americans intentionally want to create more misery among their own, I guess that it is not my place to try to stop them. And this whole thing certainly isn't much different from when leftists want that Third World cultures should remain the way they are forever instead of improving by becoming more Westernized. (Peter Bagge once drew a funny comic strip about this, "Ex-Pats Say the Darndest Things".) In my opinion, hoping that some people remain poor so that you can feel all vibrant and edgy when you watch them on TV and kind of dress like them but would not in a million years actually move to live with them is at least somewhat immoral, but hey, that's just me. Via Steve Sailer, I noticed to my surprise that the other side of the political spectrum has joined the same cause: my favourite economics blogger Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution fame writes in the article "An Economist Visits New Orleans":
Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. Low rents make it possible to live on a shoestring, while the population density blends cultural influences. Cheap real estate could make the city a desirable place for struggling artists to live. The cultural heyday of New Orleans lies in the past. Katrina rebuilding gives the city a chance to become an innovator once again.
The plan requires little or nothing in the way of government grants or planning commissions. It will be an experiment with parts of the city that otherwise will never recover. It can be applied selectively to particular wards and allowed to spread if it works. It is probably the last chance for New Orleans to regain its position as an American cultural innovator. Just imagine the chant: Shantytowns for New Orleans now.
But hey, at least this way New Orleans will be
"real" and "authentic" instead of being "disneyfied" and "homogenized"
for the evil white middle class normos and other corporate drones who
would then come enjoy it in their tacky pants and a brood of children
in tow. Everybody wins!
Newmark's Door, which I haven't checked out for a long time, offers us two excellent links, "There Is Such a Thing as a Stupid Question" and "Boiled Shrimp and the Sunk-Cost Fallacy".
Since we have two cats, perhaps I should show Vox Day's new post "Two can play that game" to my wife:
Clearly, cat owners are desperately in need of psychological help since they not only feel that they deserve this malicious and sadistic treatment, but actually crave it. They perceive cats as honest only because the abusive little beasts treat them as badly as they believe they deserve to be treated, being of such little inherent worth.
I also noticed that the movie "What the bleep do we know?"
has finally received some attention in the blogosphere. I watched this
movie last year, and it seriously was the most astonishingly dumbest
movie that I have ever seen in my life. Words simply fail to describe
how stupid this movie actually is, and it has to be seen to be believed
that this movie can exist. Even so, these days I find it pretty strange
that leftists seem to be against this movie, since the basic messages
in it (e.g. nothing is really real but we socially construct our own
reality at will, and we must give up our restrictive Western linear
thinking and embrace alternative ideas) really are not that different
from the ideas that I constantly see and read college leftists and
intellectuals expressing. I am actually pretty sure that this movie has
done well in screenings in universities, where the little humabots are
encouraged to "keep an open mind" and watch it and then "make up their
own mind" instead of immediately rejecting its anti-intellectual
message. After all, that would be, like, judgmental and stuff.
In these same lines, we sure had plenty of fun watching a whole bunch of "Emo21" videos last night, starting from the page "So Emo"
and then searching in YouTube. Unfortunately, it seems that these
newest Internet celebrities are acted fakes, which is, like, sad, since
I was, like, already looking forward to an SNL spoof. That third SNL
woman, you know, what's her name, the dorkiest-looking one who is not
Tina Fey or Amy Poehler in Weekend Update, could play the EmoGirl21.
But at least there is "EmoGirl21 Toronto", which is already rip-roaringly funny.
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