Sixteen Volts

This morning, the breakfast television show on the local TV channel featured a homeopathic "doctor" who was peddling his "scientific" ideas about health, with the host cheering him on. I could only watch it for a few minutes before becoming thoroughly disgusted so that I had to change the channel. Homeopathy and other "alternative" medicines seem to be the same for leftists as creationism is to the right: the more intellectual leaders of the movement silently feel ashamed and disgusted by the sheer stupidity of these ideas, but they know that a large number of people in their team enthusiastically support them, so they pay these ideas lip service and abstain from ever criticizing them, quickly changing the topic whenever it comes up. But I do find it very telling of the leftist moral principles that they have no problem with charismatic quacks selling water as medicine for sick people, as long as it comes with a scientific-sounding story of "molecular water memory".

Ah well, perhaps one day these people will have to get treatment for their serious burn injuries in a burn ward that operates on homeopathic principles. Just like there are no atheists in foxholes, very few homeopaths (or any other ooga-booga faith healers, for that matter) can be found to operate inside burn wards! That would almost be something out of the Hoogerbrugge site (what, is that like Dutch or something?) that I first encountered years ago and that features several little interactive Flash animations of existentialist bent. Now there is a whole new series available, called "Nails". Jump, little man, jump, so that you might one day get some cigarettes that would momentarily make you feel better in this non-caring and completely pointless universe.

The farmer and the cowman should perhaps be friends, but no matter how you slice it, to get more than 50% of population behind your party you necessarily have to reel in under your banner some mutually hostile groups whose interests are fundamentally in conflict with each other. The essay "The Populist Paradox" at the Progress Report indirectly examines what this means for politicians aiming to be populist.

Don't be afraid to ask, comrade, since you also are a worker! The site "Soviet Music" features many songs from the socialist international to inspire us the advance the worldwide socialist revolution. Che Guevara, the handsome and brutal revolutionary who is still the perennial idol of the "progressive" youth everywhere so that they love to display his imagine in their shirts and dorm room walls, alone has inspired several pages of songs by the workers from all around the world.

The whole brouhaha about the demotion of Pluto from the set of planets seems to have died down. The post "Pluto: Stupid planet for dumb jerks" at "Man vs. Clown" sums up the relevant facts.

When I was a kid and saw the movie "Star Wars" for the first time, I thought that the stormtroopers were supposed to be robots. Ah well, clones, robots, same diff, either one having no soul. However, we now learn from the news article "Stormtroopers blast through gender barrier" that Stormtroopers can also multiply their ranks in the traditional manner.

The more "rebellious" somebody is, the more certain you can be that behind that "I'm so edgy, I don't conform to rules" act he knows perfectly where the real limits are and observes them carefully. In the end, nobody is as conformist as a "cool" person. I also find it interesting, whenever some comedian or other entertainer claims that there is "nothing sacred" for them and that they just love to slaughter and skewer sacred cows, to look for an issue, a group or a topic that they carefully avoid offending and that they tread around only from a great distance, their silence about it thus ending up speaking much louder than their words. Usually you can pretty much guess from the context and by looking who raves the loudest about him what the sacred cows of a particular person are, so that you don't even have to actually watch these people perform. As an idle exercise for my readers, consider the deliciously poison-tongued but innocent beauty Sarah Silverman, whose comedy musings you can watch in, for example, YouTube or the post "Sarah Silverman: VMA" at "Milk and Cookies". Off the top of my head, I could list about a dozen groups and issues that she would never dream of mocking. How about you?

Speaking of limits, The Derb examines them in his new essay "Race and Conservatism". I find it amusing that he has made the same observation about pre-numerates as I have (my emphasis):

I use a different thought experiment to illustrate this sad truth. Imagine you are addressing a room full of people. We can let them be quite well-educated people, so long as they are not trained statisticians. A room full of students from some university Humanities department will do nicely. Now say the following thing to the room: “Men are, on average, taller than women.” I can almost guarantee—it is nearly a dead certainty—that someone in the room will stand up and say something like: “What about Sally? She’s taller than any of us. Taller than you, for sure—Ha ha ha ha!” The room will then consider your thesis to have been decisively exploded. Men taller than women? Nonsense! Look at Sally!

Easy come, easy go, say the English speakers, whereas idiomatic Finns say that what comes in singing will go out whistling. These principles are vividly illustrated in the article "8 lottery winners who lost their millions".

But we can take confort of the fact that it was all fatalistic anyway: "Living Without Ultimate Moral Responsibility". Even so, it is not smart to post the details of your life online, as explained in the post "Death by Google Calendar: How I Identified you to rob you".

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, September 04, 2006 at 9:10 PM