Sixteen Volts

The news article "Rambling Romeo's soppy email is sent round the globe" nicely illustrates why men feel butterflies in their stomach when they are asking a woman out: the social consequences can be rather serious, should the woman decide that you are trying to play "above your league", as they say. For most men, dating scene is a minefield in which there is a whole bunch of fine lines that you are not allowed to cross. This guy perhaps crossed some of them... and then some. But ah well, as I wrote in my previous post, just wait a few years and this guy will have a dozen exotic ladies competing for him.

It is important to have your pulse at the cyberspace. Collision Detection points out that "The half-life of an online posting? 36 hours". For some reason, I don't really care. I will link to stuff of any age provided that I find it and it is good. Of course, the problem is always finding the good stuff in the first place.

At "GMR Musings", we should notice the long post "DVD Region Codes and Pharmaceutical Safety" that examines price discrimination done on geographical basis for goods whose marginal cost of production is small.

And I really hope that the next time Hillary Clinton writes a book, some enterprising import firm imports large numbers of them from India or whatever English language market has them really cheap, to undercut the local market. If the US publisher sues, then I think it would be hysterical to use the exact same argument to promote the book import as Hillary used to promote pharmaceutical imports from Canada. ("Americans cannot afford the high prices of Hillary's wisdom, and why are the evil publishing companies selling her tome in other countries for less? It's unfair, and we should be allowed to import books from overseas.")

Indeed. It would be similarly interesting to see what Bono would say if some Third World country started to copy U2 records and sell them for a few cents each to both their people (and heck, why not also export these copies to the West), or if some Third World music distributor one day just announced that they are not going to pay the debts that they owe to the Western record companies.

In the post "A Parody of Feminist "Logic"" and its comments, the boys at Gene Expression are having fun knocking down the feminist opposition to CRACK a.k.a. "Project Prevention" and its 300 dollar reward for drug users to get sterilized. There is certain irony in it when a feminist argues that poor women can't make right decisions with respect to their bodies and hence somebody else should override them. The easiest way to sum up this principle is indeed "My Body, My Choice, Unless My Choice Is Counter To Feminist Dogma, Then It's Still My Body, But It's Someone Else's Choice", as TangoMan puts it. Elsewhere, "The Audacious Epigone" presents more arguments to support CRACK in the post "Every child deserves a sober start".

At "Across Difficult Country", the post "Marginalia" makes a bunch of minor observations that are perhaps not worth a whole post of their own, but together they make an enjoyable "Things that make you go hmmm..." type collection. In addition to the most excellent bumper sticker "Libertarianism is applied autism", my favourite observation was certainly

If, as immigrationists often claim, the economy benefits so much from low skill workers, why continue to spend money educating native born Americans? Think of the economic boom to result if we stopped funding high schools and colleges in order to increase the homegrown pool of unskilled labor.

Professor Kurgman has used his beautiful mind to find racism in unexpected places, an ordeal which he describes in his post "Professional Sports: Unbound Racism". Speaking of which, could some friendly soul help me out here and explain the puzzling complaint that I have recently noticed in several leftist blogs? That is, the lament that minorities and especially minority activists don't get to have exclusive "safe" spaces of their own to congregate in without the well-meaning whites barging in to wallow in their pervasive privilege and ruining everything that way? The reason why I can't understand this complaint is that as far as I know, especially in America there are already quite a few spaces that are in practice reserved exclusively for minorities since no white people ever enter them.

Maverick Philosopher explains in the post "If You are a Conservative, Don't Talk Like a Liberal!" why the word "homophobia" should not be used the way it is currently typically used.

The site "Carnival of Reaction" that I found when browsing the archives of "Eternal Bachelor" seems to be mostly about something called "The Men Going Their Own Way". I don't know if this is some nutcase outfit so I'll delay my judgment of endorsing it in any way, but hell, I sure can't deny that their logo is nothing short of astonishing in its ingenious simplicity. Some graphic designer clearly truly understands how to design striking logos, and has in this particular job been worth every penny that these people paid him.

Speaking of the Eternal Bachelor, his archives are full of excellent observations, such as the following that-is-so-true-why-didn't-I-think-of-that-one featured in the post "Quotes and Arses":

Welfare recipients are the new feudal lords--they are the unproductive living off the productive by holding them at gunpoint.

and in "Natural Born Lesbians", he echoes Panu:

Isn't it curious how it would be to the advantage of a sexually frustrated lesbian Women's Studies lecturer to make nubile 18-year-old girls think that they are actually lesbians and should therefore immediately have sex with another woman...like, say, a sexually frustrated lesbian Women's Studies lecturer.

In the dying Usenet that we can fortunately observe from our eye-of-God position on the web without them being any wiser, The Danimal makes an epistomological observation:

How is freedom of thought a prerequisite for knowledge? Knowledge also entails giving up some freedom of thought, to constrain one's thoughts to those things consistent with the knowledge. Once you have knowledge, your thinking becomes less free, because now there are many potential thoughts you can no longer entertain, as they are nonsense in light of the knowledge.

For example, after we learn about the law of gravity, we are no longer free to think seriously about making mountains rise from the ground and hang magically high in the air.

Complete freedom of thought doesn't lead to knowledge. It leads to fiction, or to religion.

The pursuit of knowledge means giving up freedom of thought and subjecting one's thoughts to the constraints of reality.

In another long post which I shall just link to instead of quoting snippets from it, The Danimal explains to a woman why it should be obvious for anybody that in the real world men, as an aggregate, desire casual sex significantly more than women. Many mysterious phenomena become a lot clearer with some economic thinking about the relevant constraints and supply and demand. But all right, let's include one simple quote:

To come up with men you would do in a heartbeat, you probably have to think about extremely rare celebrities. To come up with women I would do in a heartbeat, I only have to take a stroll around the neighborhood.

As long as sexual scarcity remains reality in the lives of most men, various inferior substitutes have a lucrative market open for them. I can remember when I first saw a video clip about Playstation 2 on television. From the way the female character's natural assets moved, I knew what the new technology would be used for in the future. For some reason, this didn't happen. However, apparently Jenna Jameson is now coming out with a porn game. The post "Gentlemen, Start Your WhaAAAGH OH GAWD WHAT IS THAT?!" links to the YouTube trailer, obviously not safe for work.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, July 26, 2006 at 8:19 AM