Sixteen Volts

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine comments on the ruling in "CleanFlicks v. Kate Winslet's Breasts". All I have to say is that this whole idea that editing and cleaning up movie content would somehow be an offense against filmmakers and their artistic integrity is rather strange to anybody who has ever watched a movie on TBS or in an airplane. And as I said before, I certainly am eagerly looking forward to the Internet hipsters jumping to the defense of this company, seeing that they have been telling us for years now that there should be no copyrights or other nazi restrictions to freedom but that anybody should be able to edit, remix, culture jam, mash up and copy anything they want and this way participate to the creation of our shared culture. The whole mediasphere, like, roxxors!

Hey, has anybody ever seen Fjordman and Jussi Halla-Aho in the same room? Fjordman's new essay "”Let Them Eat Kebab” — The New Marie Antoinettes" is exactly like something that Jussi would have written, and often has. In this essay, Fjordman captures perfectly the real nature of the people who advocate unlimited Third World immigration. In fact, there are so many paragraphs in this essay that say the same things that have appeared in my Halla-Aho translations that it would be the greatest thing ever if Fjordman had read this blog and been inspired by it. But it's not like this is advanced arithmetic, believing your lying eyes and putting two and two together. Money quote:

Of course, it is possible that Multiculturalism never was about tolerance to begin with. For some, it was about vanity. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s most open-minded of them all?” It’s a beauty contest for bored, Western intellectuals who use immigrants as a mirror to reflect their own inflated egos, a sport where they can nurse their vanity in the mistaken belief that denigrating your own cultural heritage is a sign of goodness and lack of prejudice.

The site ""Science Myths" in K-6 Textbooks and Popular culture" is a good refresher course in basic physics. I am ashamed to admit that I only took the two compulsory physics theory courses during my freshman year at the university (plus the compulsory physics lab course, and its continuation lab for credits) and got the minimum passing grade in both theory courses. I remember wondering how the symbol E seems to stand for a dozen different things. But I am sure I would do better today, although as an extreme finitist I still stand with my opinion that continuous mathematics and anything that involves integral signs is unnatural.

It's actually too bad that computer science is not taught before college level (learning to use Windows and Word does not count as "computer science") since it would be interesting to see what kind of misconceptions would crop up in high school textbooks about, say, the general unsolvability of the halting problem. Of course, the way that high school textbooks tend to be today, the main emphasis with this issue would be in Alan Turing's homosexuality and how he was unjustly persecuted for it. How does it make you feel?

Since the vast majority people are completely science-illiterate (I shudder to even think of what most people make of the fact that about forty generations ago there was at least one person who is an ancestor of every person alive today), nuclear power is a convenient bugaboo that can be used to symbolize everything bad everywhere. It is high time to admit that the opponents of nuclear power are simply irrational and it is not worth it to dignify their views by engaging them in a debate, any more than it is worth it to try to debate biblical creationists. An anti-nuclear activist is not going to change his mind any more than a fundy Christian will bow down towards Mecca to ask forgiveness from Allah. Fortunately, one commenter pointed out the news article that says that "Nuclear power plants get go-ahead" in Britain. Look forward to British leftists and green watermelons spouting out nonsense about three-eyed fish and bald children in publicity campaigns that are financed by the coal and petroleum industries who just play these dimwits for stooges.

But there is no way to stop technological progress, and the Singularity is near. It is near, brothers, and it will come very very soon, so let's share some bread and salmon while we are waiting. Meanwhile, Dean Esmay lists the top ten "Signs the Singularity Has Arrived".

I am actually rooting a bit for the global warming, just because it will hurt many people worse than me and at least leftists will have to suffer for the anti-nuclear activism. We'll see if the news article "Alpine glaciers could all but disappear within this century" turns out to be true. In fact, I tend to believe the global warming activists from a firsthand experience from childhood. You see, the town where I grew up is the starting point of the annual 75 kilometer skiing marathon Finlandia-hiihto. When I was a kid, the event started from the ice of a local lake Katumajärvi that was just large enough flat area for the tens of thousands of skiers. When I was an adult, it wasn't possible to do this any more, since this lake no longer freezes properly. Go figure.

Another occasional commenter around here, GMR, has a little blog of his own with only three posts so far. The post "Gold-Plated Motorcycles" asks us to

Imagine that gold-plated cars became all the rage, and that lots of people starting driving gold-plated cars. Every fender-bender that normally costs $5,000 in repairs would now cost $80,000 if you were unfortunate enough to get in a wreck with one of these gold-plated cars. The consequences of this would be that insurance rates would skyrocket, and speed limits would probably be reduced.

Now, how is a motorcycle different from a gold-plated car? If you're in a wreck with a motorcycle, there's likely to be significant medical bills, whereas there'd often be none if the wreck was with another automobile.

It must have been almost a decade now when I read some discussion about the Unabomber manifesto. I never actually read any of the actual manifesto but just saw pieces of it quoted. Recently somebody hinted that this manifesto is the best analysis of the psychology of leftism, so I naturally checked it out, and that was indeed quite true! For example, the following paragraphs sound quite familiar, almost as if I had read them somewhere else several times...

15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

18. Modern leftist philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftist philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e. failed, inferior). The leftist's feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual's ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but society's, because he has not been brought up properly.

218. Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much like that which religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts. He has a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone. (However, many of the people we are referring to as "leftists" do not think of themselves as leftists and would not describe their system of beliefs as leftism. We use the term "leftism" because we don't know of any better words to designate the spectrum of related creeds that includes the feminist, gay rights, political correctness, etc., movements, and because these movements have a strong affinity with the old left. See paragraphs 227-230.)

219. Leftism is totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism; everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists' drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement (see paragraph 83). But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate activity (see paragraph 41). That is, the leftist's real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal.[35] Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to reeducate him. And ethnic minorities are not enough; no one can be allowed to have a negative attitude toward homosexuals, disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and on and on and on. It's not enough that the public should be informed about the hazards of smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every package of cigarettes. Then cigarette advertising has to be restricted if not banned. The activists will never be satisfied until tobacco is outlawed, and after that it will be alcohol, then junk food, etc. Activists have fought gross child abuse, which is reasonable. But now they want to stop all spanking. When they have done that they will want to ban something else they consider unwholesome, then another thing and then another. They will never be satisfied until they have complete control over all child rearing practices. And then they will move on to another cause.

Can't really put it much better and more clearly than that! Another similar (in)famous nutjob tract, "SCUM Manifesto", is also worth reading, since in many places it is actually quite different from what you might expect.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, July 15, 2006 at 7:31 PM