Sixteen Volts

The New York Times article "Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job" tells us about men who, rather than working in a crappy job that doesn't pay as well as they used to get in better times, have chosen to jump out of the rat race altogether, vastly simplifying their lives. I am certainly all for simplicity and frugality myself.

Steve Sailer recently wondered in his post "Will wonders never cease?" about a recent LA Times article "6 + 4 = 1 Tenuous Existence" that was critical towards Latino immigration. From Britain, we get another similarly interesting article "Report predicts immigration chaos", which is about a secret government memo that warns about the massive costs and trouble that an influx of immigrants will cause. What, has the world completely gone out of its rocker? What kind of despicable racists have infiltrated the British government and are now spouting their bile and hatred? Don't these vile bigots understand that mass immigration from poor countries will only make us richer and that the poor and uneducated immigrants are a net asset for society, doing the jobs that the natives don't... oh, wait. Nevermind. This report is about the predicted immigration from the former eastern block, because Romania and Bulgaria are slated to join the European Union next year. It's not about, uh, you know.

I probably won't gain any friends by saying that in my opinion, Monty Python is about the most overrated comedy troupe of all time. I could count the times when I laughed at their jokes using one hand, and it's about time that somebody points out that this emperor still tramples its silly walk buck naked. Even so, there is certain pythonesque quality in the news article "Seaside town banned from 'doing the conger'".

In his post "Too much reality" at The Corner, The Derb notes that

I am more and more of the opinion that the greatest single psychological factor in human affairs is not love, pride, greed, nor any of the other usual suspects; it is wishful thinking. We want things to be so. Therefore we believe them to be so. When science (or events) teach us otherwise, we lose our tempers. And science doesn't care! Which of course just makes us madder.

Of course, we only kid because we love: the post "Cory Doctorow Visits a Radio Shack" at Ldopa should tickle anybody who has ever read Boing Boing.

It's good to see that at least some members of the "reality-based" community actually are reality-based, such as professor Mark Kleiman. In the post "The trouble with twin studies", he writes that

Of course there are quantitatively measurable differences among humans (and in the distributions among population groups, even imprecise ones such as "race") in cognitive capacity and personality traits. And of course some of those differences relate to the genetic constitution of individuals and groups. (And of course the overall human gene pool, including the parts of it with large cognitive/behavioral impacts, has been determined by Darwinian processes, but that's the topic of a different denial.)

Uh oh, better hope that PZ Myers and his leftist cohorts won't find about that post. I wonder what would have happened if some conservative had written the exact same paragraph. As I have often noted, only stupid people believe that intelligence differences are important.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, August 01, 2006 at 7:37 AM