Sixteen Volts

My common sense tells me that the site "Pimpfants" must be a joke, but it's just that you can't always tell these days. If it is genuine, I guess that that tells a lot about Tommi's prediction powers, with his old observation that

After all, our whole cultural industry teaches us that users of hard drugs and murderers are handsome and stylish, and they are shows as examples to both the young and the old in every TV show. Pretty soon the characters of Sesame Street will spraypaint graffiti and study the hand signals of drug dealers.

I haven't read Ben Mezrich's book "Ugly Americans" yes, but "Daily Dose of Optimism" has reviewed it so well that it's like I have already read it. Very convenient and time-saving! The same blog also has a post "Wal-Mart, Gardening, Chat Rooms and Japanese CEOs" that asks:

I find myself wondering: does the fact that Wal-Mart offers economic opportunity to those outside America's higher-education edifice perhaps explain the antipathy of many colleges and their students to Wal-Mart?

Darleen has also noticed the inane "Blog against heteronormativity". The post "Why would you let the government set the value of your friendship?" reveals a serious hypocrisy in one socialist's whine. This is actually part of a more general phenomenon among leftists. They are always complaining that the non-leftists "only care about money", even though it is the leftists who constantly want to use the state power to take money from people that they don't like and redistribute it to other people that they do like, thus revealing that they actually do care about money quite a lot.

Typhonblue's post "A Reply to "I'm Not Feminist, But..."" is an oldie but goodie. Especially the last observation "Why do feminists call men who want to maintain all-male spaces latent homosexuals?" is so true. For somebody who is supposedly gay-positive, feminists sure love to mock their opponents by implying that they are fags.

EconLog always helps you understand better how the world works. The post "Shocked by the Gender Gap" reveals a rather non-surprising result about the economic thinking skills of both sexes. I guess that there is no need to wonder why women are still so gung-ho for socialism. Or perhaps socialism will never die. The post also has one great comment, namely that

In my experience as a woman, men and women pretty much have an equal shot at everything now. If individual women want to use bias as an excuse to not learn things for themselves, it only improves my chances to succeed in this world. The more women expect teachers and society in general to hold their hands, the less we as a group are taken seriously by men.

I would like to see a quiz that focuses on gas prices to see how poorly EVERYONE does. Questions to include:

*Does driving 50 miles out of your way for gas that is one penny cheaper per gallon save you money?

*Will boycotting Exxon gas cause the gas station across the street to lower its prices?

*What will happen if the government instituted a price ceiling for gas? (What do you mean the gas station is out of gas!?!)

While we are speaking of economic illiteracy, the news article "Study: US mothers deserve $134,121 in salary" seems to be making rounds. You might think that everybody would realize how absurd this claim is in a nation where the median income is about $40K, but I guess not. My old post "Some elementary marital economics" replied to this folly. Next, a study that computes how much value your car provides you, based on much each trip would have cost if you had rented a limousine to make it.

Gerard van der Leun's post "The Heat of Hot Air" suddenly explains to me why his name always sounded so familiar. A significant part of my English language skills came from reading that magazine when I was younger, and of course it was quite a different magazine back then.

Instapundit has a little William Bennett moment with his post about seizing the Saudi-Arabian oilfields by force and how the left would react to it. I can't deny that the update paragraph is apt:

But just to troll a bit more, I do think that seizing Saudi and Iranian oil would be entirely morally justifiable on terms usually approved of by the left: They didn't earn it, they inherited it (it's like the Estate Tax writ large!). They're extracting huge profits for fatcats at the expense of the poor. They're racist, sexist, homophobic theocrats! (Literally!) Surely if it's ever permissible to redistibute wealth by force, this is the case. Right?

One commenter of my earlier post linked to the article "No gay tolerance in Africa's Anglican Church: Growing rebellion against liberal doctrines of U.S." which describes the ideological rift between Western Christians and their Third World brothers. Pretty soon, the direction that missionaries are dispensed is from the Third World to West, instead of the other way around.

Speaking of missionaries, the post "I May Offer a Libertarian Summer Internship" at Coyote Blog offers a practical suggestion of how to educate college leftists in their folly.

The post "Neat Picture....." at "The Cathouse" shows an image that I can't bring myself to believe is not photoshopped. I can also sympathize with his post "A Man's Haircut".

A simple rule of thumb says that countries that have little socialism have to build walls to keep people out, whereas countries that have lots of socialism have to build walls to keep people in. And as I never grow tired of saying, feminism and socialism are one, and that one is socialism. You might think that the last century and its remnants would have been enough evidence for anybody to see what socialism always ends up being in its own impossibility, but for the little stalinoids in petticoats, the socialist utopia is always just around the corner if the right-thinking progressives just got the power. This time it will be different! Until then, somebody please tell me how you would even begin to parody something as inane as the post "Capitalism's Fault".

I remember a few years ago when I my old chums emailed me a scan of a municipal election advertisement of one Finnish communist. This ad proclaimed, with no apparent irony or satire as far as I can tell, that simply by the state declaring that everybody has lots of money, every Finn could live in a luxury lakefront house and drive a Mercedes-Benz to work. I wonder how many hectares their ecological footprint would be then: mine was 6.5, so if everybody lived like me, we would need over three Earths. I guess that it is good that everybody doesn't live like me, but various brands of socialism and primitivism keep a large swath of brown people in eternal poverty.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, May 06, 2006 at 7:22 AM