Sixteen Volts

The post "Incentives to Delinquency" in the new-to-me blog "Foreign Dispatches" comments about the phenomenon depicted in the article "Teenage mothers see pregnancy as a 'career move'" that I linked earlier. It's funny how many people are unable to grasp the simple economic truth that if you subsidize something, you will get more of it. Incentives do matter. Another post, "When Ugly is More than Skin Deep", makes the politically incorrect observation that I have also made a few times before:

I've met my share of beautiful, plain and outright hideous-looking women over the years, but if there's one thing I haven't noticed, it's the existence of an inverse relationship between physical attractiveness and attractiveness of character. On the contrary, to the extent that I have noticed a connection, it is that the odds are better than even that the more physically attractive of two given women is not only likely to be the nicer and more intelligent one to boot [...]

The silly myth of the noble and morally superior uglos and fatties who are somehow magically blessed with more "inner beauty" than others even if we superficial normos can't see it is precisely that, a silly myth. Despite their rhetoric, even leftists understand this perfectly well when it comes to obese middle-aged men, who are, like, yuchh barf. Perhaps our superficial attraction to looks isn't ultimately really as superficial as it would, uh, superficially seem to be.

The post "We are the borg" at "This ain't livin'" nicely illustrates the fundamental anti-reason nature of modern feminism. It is one thing to claim that some generalization about a group is false or that some strategy for interacting with the members of that group is suboptimal. But it is quite another thing to categorically deny that working generalizations and profitable strategies could even exist. Because, you know, everybody is an individual and trying to put groups of people inside neat little boxes is just wrong.

After Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, fundamentalist Muslims got free rein over there and the Iraqi women suddenly started feeling a pressing need to wear a burqa and be escorted by male relatives, or else. But did you know that this is actually the fault of America and George Bush? Oh, I bet you didn't! Ampersand explains this for us less enlightened people in his post "Ruth Rosen: The Hidden War On Women In Iraq". But as evil as those dastardly Americans are, let's hope that the fundamentalist Muslims who actually perform the rapes and killing of the loose women are at least in the Top Ten when the rest of the blame is assigned.

An earlier post "American Soldiers Arrested For Rape/Execution Of 14-Year Old Girl And Her Family" explains that American soldiers are evil because they rape Iraqi women. I wonder what more evidence you could possibly need to prove that Americans and Al Qaeda are morally equivalent. Well, of course there is that the little difference that the United States Military severely punishes its members who commit atrocities against innocent civilians, whereas Al Qaeda praises and promotes them. But other than that, both sides are clearly morally equivalent.

The greatest humour can be seen in the comments, though. When Glaivester makes the mistake of pointing out that the overwhelming majority of interracial gang rapes in America are black-on-white, not white-on-black the way leftists claim, and asks if we can similarly infer anything about the American black culture from this disparity... la de da, I can't hear you, such disparity cannot possibly exist! (Other than in the U.S. Department of Justice statistics, that is.) Of course, as I wrote in my old post "Milky-white bitches and hos" about this, what the uber-lefty Ampersand probably can't comprehend is that most black people are not as enlightened as he is, and thus haven't properly internalized the doublethink that says that when leftists constantly say that white people are evil, they really mean that white heterosexual able-bodied Christian homeowner men are evil. From the ivory tower of leftism it is probably easy to forget that not everybody is able to automatically make such subtle distinctions, so when you constantly hoot and holler and praise black men for "sticking it to the Man", don't act so surprised when they occasionally stick it to the Woman too, and in a very literal sense at that.

Similarly, whenever Western leftists attack religion, it is tacitly understood that this attack really concerns Christianity only. If some religion is predominantly practiced by a bunch of brown people in the Third World, then there is no limit how patriarchal, primitive and cruel this religion can be and the Western leftists will still constantly praise and respect it. And the more New Agey this religion is, the more enthusiastic the Leftists. Just take a look at how deeply the supposed "reality-based community" is in astrology, wicca and similar idiocies. The post "She is all that is born and what is to be" of "Days in a wannabe punk's life" contains the following paragraph:

There was a time, before the Aryan invasions extended their web of patriarchy over the land, a time when a single Goddess carrying Agni in her womb was considered as the Mother of all, the Goddess of the skies and the heavens, the Mother who gave birth to the universe and She was called Aditi.

Now, as an honest and somewhat nasty atheist, I personally see very little difference between crap like this and your garden variety biblical creationism. But I can see a pretty huge difference in what would happen if both groups asked for their beliefs to be taught in public schools for their children. Dear readers, do you know what causes this difference? (Rhetorical.)

Panu is certainly the best example of a leftist man who became disillusioned with feminism. Judging from the post "Because I Just Can't Shut Up", Anthony Kennerson is another one. I wonder how the profeminist front of the Internet will react to having such a callous thoughtcriminal in their midst! Even better, since Mr. Kennerson is black, they are unable to play many of their usual kneejerk cards. Say it like it is, dog, and smack down these white followers of the Goddess of St. Andrea! [offers his fist]

Of course I know that George Monbiot is the original moonbat, but I haven't familiarized myself with his work until now. Good thing I did, since he has at least one essay that absolutely defies parody. "Britain’s Most Selfish People" proposes to combat homelessness by making it prohibitively expensive for anybody to own a second home. And then some people dare to claim that Professor Kurgman is a parody of a typical left-wing intellectual. Another essay, "Low Hanging Fruit", opposes Wal-Mart by complaining that this company employs illegal immigrants because it can pay them less. Man, I never would have thought George Monbiot, of all people, to be such a nativist and racist, complaining about corporations that hire illegal immigrants. Who is he, some secret Minuteman? And I can't help but wonder if Wal-Mart had not hired all those illegal immigrants, would the company have been sued for discrimination and forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in punitive damages? (This was meant to be a joke, so please don't tell me if the answer is "yes". I can take only so much leftist nuttiness at once.)

Speaking of Wallymart, after reading the post "Obesity, Addiction, and Class" by Dennis Mangan about the lack of future time orientation that is typical with the poor and especially the underclass, for some reason the post "Could You Afford to be Poor?" by Barbara Ehrenreich (hmmm, her blog template looks kind of familiar) seemed just as silly as it really is. Notice how Barbara asserts that it is a great injustice that the poor pay more for their car insurance and loans, without even bothering to address the question whether the poor also tend to make more insurance claims and default on their loans more often. If they do, then there is absolutely nothing wrong in the insurance and lending industries charging them more to cover their extra costs. If anybody has a problem with this, very well, maybe you could start your own insurance and lending company that sells inexpensive insurance and low-interest loans to the poor, so that the lending company never turns anybody down and the insurance company pays all claims no questions asked.

Oh, wait, I guess they already did, as Ezra Klein explains in his post "Left My Insurance In San Francisco". As if the city of San Francisco wasn't fucked up enough already. But such instructive lessons in economics and incentives are always needed, as long as I don't have to suffer from them. Speaking of which, we don't own any cars, but I still got a great laugh when the local TV newscast reported that some gas stations in the Maritime provinces that had instituted price controls for gas one day just chose to remain closed rather than sell gasoline at a loss. Man, did I ever laugh when I saw that news report. Prices that are determined by the supply and demand in the free market simply depict the underlying reality, and reality just is not optional nor can be ignored at a whim or stomping your feet, no matter what the postmodernist left believes.

In another post "The Class of ’06", Barbara laments the fact that college degree no longer automatically guarantees its holder big income to which I guess they are somehow magically entitled to. Well, that is certainly something that leftists should have perhaps thought about before declaring that college degree is a basic human right. Once the colleges became populated by the hordes of sub-averages who need to taught basic literacy and arithmetic, it is no big surprise that the end results also turned out to be sub-average.

As an amusing aside, the Finnish educational system has for a decade now had the goal of providing 80% of each age cohort a university degree. You read that right: it's not a typo and I am not kidding. Of course, the only way that this could happen was that every school that requires a high school diploma is defined to be a "university". The results have therefore been pretty much exactly what you'd expect, so that "economists" who graduated from polytechnics that were sold to them as "universities" are complaining that despite their degree, they can't get better jobs than working the cash register at Valintatalo, the cheapo supermarket chain. If my Finnish readers have anything amusing the share about this topics, please let me know in the comments!

Many people confuse the words and the ugly realities that those words refer to, so that they believe that changing the word will also magically make the ugly reality go away. It just never does, and once the people learn to associate the ugly reality with the new word, the new word also becomes ugly. Today's case in point: "Better tardy than never".

If only we all lived like the primitive people who worshipped the Venus of Willendorf in their pastoral matriarchal small villages, there would be no problems, but then the evil White Man came and ruined everything. Or not. The essay "Before the white man came? War" by Mark Steyn wonders why we have deluded ourselves into believing in the myth of the noble and peaceful primitive. Well... I guess that that was rhetorical again. Just ask yourself whose interests the idea of the primitive societies being a paradise would serve, and you will instantly see the answer.

But hey, perhaps it would be fun if the Western men suddenly became enlightened and started treating women, gays and other beloved minorities the exact same way that men routinely treat these groups pretty much all over the Third World. Would that be OK with you, feminists and leftists? If not, why not? I have certainly received the impression that you think that the people in the Third World are morally and culturally superior to us, and there is absolutely no aspect in life in which our culture would be superior to theirs. So us becoming more like their men would probably be a good thing, right?

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Thursday, July 20, 2006 at 3:29 PM