Sixteen Volts

Now that the Finns are celebrating Juhannus and then typically take off to their cottages to spend their generous five-week summer holidays, I will probably lose about half of my blog's daily readership until August or so. No biggie. Everything that I write, I write for myself, and all of youse reading this are just invisible figments of my imagination. Similarly, everything that I ever read has probably been generated by some computer somewhere, or just come into existence by itself. Bits is bits, and I am the one who gives a meaning to anything, and saying anything else is only trying to hit the Moon with a broom. In this spirit (or non-spirit?), perhaps we can take a look of something and thus give it a meaning. After all, if a post is posted on a blog and I don't read it, what has there ever truly been?

First, the post "Why Americans Don’t Like Soccer" at "Lean Left" explains why soccer is a stupid game. On the right, the essay "Nil, Nil" explains the same thing even better.

The article "Big business — it's mankind's biggest boon" examines why the big business gets such a short stick from the artsy types, even though in the end it is what keeps the hippies in the material luxury that they are accustomed to and take for granted.

I am sure that conservative thinkers such as Lawrence Auster could write several observations about the lovable children's toys Pee and Poo. For some reason, I am not surprised that these two hail from Sweden.

I had forgotten about Richard Morin and his excellent "Unconventional Wisdom" column series. The latest, "Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?" has been linked to quite a lot recently.

I watched earlier the Canadian horror movie "Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain" about a bunch of college kids who go camping in the woods and are eaten by cannibals. I was annoyed to think that my tax dollars might have somehow financed this gorefest. I wondered earlier how it is that Jenna Jameson, who had a small part in this movie, can get paid tens of millions of dollars for her website. Apparently porn really is a "winner-takes-all" business, but I have to wonder how long its tail is, heh. Speaking of which, the blog "The Long Tail" reminds us that "Scaling up is good. Scaling *down* is even better."

Today in the bus, we saw some high school girl wear a "Bill and Ted" shirt. Her more plain-looking girlfriend was wearing a "Nerds [Heart] Me" shirt. I naturally started wondering whether these shirts were "hip" and "cool" or not, and if not, how many years we will have to wait for them to become cool again. Or perhaps we should not. For some reason, I had totally forgotten "The New York City Anti-Hipster Forum" and the many excellent articles therein.

The post "Emotional relativism" at "Classical Values" asks why it is easy to get outraged when a puppy is tortured to death, but not when two American servicemen in Iraq are tortured to death. "Don't you laugh, damn you!" examines the utter stupidity of the recent "community garden" debacle in Los Angeles. I wonder how many of the LA's finest it would take to take down Elle Driver. Last, the post "Advancing socialism -- one penis at a time" notes that

Being a socialist today means never having to admit you're a socialist, while at the same time being able to call anyone who disagrees with socialism a fascist or worse.

John Scalzi explains "Why There Are No Great Video Game Critics (Yet)". Another post "Why I Don't Argue With My College Girlfriend" remound me of Lloyd's old article "Kung Fu Codswallop". (Pay attention to trick #6.)

In Finland, all men are still required to spend a year of their lives in slavery under the consription system. Civilized nations have given up this barbaric relic long time ago. A professional military is always a more efficient protector of freedom, for reasons listed many times elsewhere. However, the opinion article "Ghost Warriors" asks whether it is a good thing that the elite is absent from the professional military.

Speaking of the elite versus all other social classes, Half Sigma takes a look at "Class". A large and diverse nation such as the USA also needs a complex class system. In the public discussions in Finland, one occasionally sees a four-level class distinction from A to D being used, so that the best A level simply consists of those people who could walk off their jobs if they got bored. The B level consists of the regular people who are doing all right but have to keep working. The C level consists of the precarity who are working temp jobs and live in constant insecurity. Last, the best and simplest one-line description for the D level that I have ever seen simply stated that the level D consists of people who nobody would ever hire for a job, not even for free. Rarely has so much information and predictive power been compressed into such a short and straightforward definition, cutting through many kinds of smokescreen and bullshit.

(Or actually now that I think about it, the four-level classification scheme about women's attractiveness that I once saw explicitly described, using the four levels "I would have sex with her and brag about it later", "I would have sex with her but not brag about it later", "I would have sex with her if I was drunk" and "I would not have sex with her even if I was drunk", is similarly succinct and cuts through a lot of handwaving and evasive bullshit.)

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, June 24, 2006 at 3:43 PM