Lawyers without borders
Althouse links to a great new-to-me blog "Anonymous Lawyer",
written by a character almost out of some John Grisham novel. The
cynical observations of life of this ambulance chaser have now
apparently become a book of the same name. Do I hear the television industry already calling? Hey, they should cast Richard Burgi to play the main character.
Speaking of this handsome devil, as I wrote earlier I had realized that "Flavor of Love" is actually a sneak preview documentary about what life and men will be like a hundred years in the future. During the last night's two-hour season finale of "Desperate Housewives" (everybody loves prequels!), I came to realize that this show is also a documentary. You just have to understand correctly what it is a documentary of: not of a different time, but of a parallel universe where humans had faced somewhat different evolutionary pressures and constraints.
You see, I have occasionally wondered what the world would be like if humans evolved differently. For example, what would world be like if the average human IQ was 50, using the IQ scale that we use today? (Essentially, we would be a chimpanzee troop.) More relevantly for this discussion, what if sociopathy, instead of being an rare aberration kept alive with selective breeding as practiced by women for millenia, were actually the norm so that almost everybody was born to be what was, from our point of view, a clinical sociopath? What kind of society would sociopaths, the ultimate homo economicus, form with each other? It's quite simple, actually: their society would be like the one depicted in "Desperate Housewives", where all characters clearly have a very low impulse control and total disregard for the other people and the future consequences of their actions. Any bad deeds can be retconned so that they were somebody else's fault, in a manner suiting the sociopathic fluid notions of truth.
Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this silly soap that is currently hot but is well on the Melrose Place trajectory, which I guess is appropriate since the show even has same people in it, and yesterday's season finale even brought in a new Sydney character. Ever since the major story arc of solving Maryalice Young's suicide was wrapped up, the future of the show has seemed pretty clear. Pretty soon, each episode will divide and team up the characters against each other in some new combination, in total disregard of past animosities and friendships of the said characters. At the end of each episode, the reset button is pressed to wipe the slate clean for the next episode. Ultimately, this show will reach a point where every combination has been tried and everybody has had sex with everybody else, so the lazy writers will simply decide to turn each character one at the time unexplainably into a psycho (yes, I did indeed finish "JPod", more on that later).
Speaking of this handsome devil, as I wrote earlier I had realized that "Flavor of Love" is actually a sneak preview documentary about what life and men will be like a hundred years in the future. During the last night's two-hour season finale of "Desperate Housewives" (everybody loves prequels!), I came to realize that this show is also a documentary. You just have to understand correctly what it is a documentary of: not of a different time, but of a parallel universe where humans had faced somewhat different evolutionary pressures and constraints.
You see, I have occasionally wondered what the world would be like if humans evolved differently. For example, what would world be like if the average human IQ was 50, using the IQ scale that we use today? (Essentially, we would be a chimpanzee troop.) More relevantly for this discussion, what if sociopathy, instead of being an rare aberration kept alive with selective breeding as practiced by women for millenia, were actually the norm so that almost everybody was born to be what was, from our point of view, a clinical sociopath? What kind of society would sociopaths, the ultimate homo economicus, form with each other? It's quite simple, actually: their society would be like the one depicted in "Desperate Housewives", where all characters clearly have a very low impulse control and total disregard for the other people and the future consequences of their actions. Any bad deeds can be retconned so that they were somebody else's fault, in a manner suiting the sociopathic fluid notions of truth.
Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this silly soap that is currently hot but is well on the Melrose Place trajectory, which I guess is appropriate since the show even has same people in it, and yesterday's season finale even brought in a new Sydney character. Ever since the major story arc of solving Maryalice Young's suicide was wrapped up, the future of the show has seemed pretty clear. Pretty soon, each episode will divide and team up the characters against each other in some new combination, in total disregard of past animosities and friendships of the said characters. At the end of each episode, the reset button is pressed to wipe the slate clean for the next episode. Ultimately, this show will reach a point where every combination has been tried and everybody has had sex with everybody else, so the lazy writers will simply decide to turn each character one at the time unexplainably into a psycho (yes, I did indeed finish "JPod", more on that later).
I have a challenge for you. Feminist bloggers usually claim that anyone who disagrees with them is actually disagreeing with the "strawfeminist" but many times, I myself cannot tell the difference between what one feminist says and what another's strawfeminist said.
It would just be unspeakably patricarchy-lowing awesome for someone to collect strawfeminist accusations and then arguments from preferably the same person, to show that feminists actually don't believe anything.
Posted by Anonymous | 4:06 PM
"each episode will divide and team up the characters against each other in some new combination, in total disregard of past animosities and friendships of the said characters."
That's pretty much how the storylines on pro wrestling go, although they have more continuity from week to week.
I suspect that pro wrestling is kind of the R&D test center for the future of entertainment.
Posted by Steve Sailer | 6:20 PM
Shouldn't homo economicus be able to rationally predict the consequences of his/her actions?
Bryan Caplan actually does diagnose him with sociopathy here, in this very interesting economic analysis of "mental illness": http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/szaszjhe.doc
Posted by tggp | 2:20 PM