Sixteen Volts

Like I have said a few times already, I actually hope that global warming turns out to be real and serious, since it would be such beautiful and cosmic justice to all those anti-nuclear activists and other primitivists, thanks to whom most energy is still produced by burning valuable and soon-to-be-peaking hydrocarbons. Today in the breakfast show of our local television network, the host had some guy in the studio, and this guy said that the global warming is not an entirely bad thing but that there are also benefits to it. Well, yes, there most certainly are, although they depend a lot on where you happen to live. However, this guy said that if Canada gets four degrees warmer on average, five thousand fewer Canadians would die each year. Now, I do acknowledge that the cold climate strains and drains and pains and thus indirectly kills especially old people, but at least in the long run equilibrium, I don't see how that claim is even theoretically possible.

When people get to freely choose who they associate with, the market reality necessarily follows, and especially so if the participants tend to have highly uniform and strongly correlated preferences. Like they do in the real world, although if I am wrong, please somebody point me out a woman who would prefer to marry a homeless midget, or explain me once again why the standard sitcom family of fat doofus dad and hot slender wife is "unrealistic". In fact, I would say that all people are something like 97-98% similar in their thoughts, desires and preferences, but most of this similarity is so obvious that it gets ignored and taken for granted (let's do a show of hands, how many of you prefer to eat cow pies instead of eating blueberry pies?) while we concentrate and make a big show about the 2-3% that we differ in (let's do another show of hands, how many of you prefer blondes over brunettes?) Agoraphilia's post "The Calculus of Commitment" analyzes some practical consequences of the market reality of the sexual market. Common sense, really, but looking at what life is like for many people, perhaps not so common. The post links to the post "Commitment-Phobic" at Volokh and recommends the commenter Dan Simon, whose comment is indeed quite excellent:

The popularity of the idea that men are "commitment-phobic" -- despite the rather high percentage of them who get married, many of them more than once -- isn't hard to understand. It serves two constituencies extremely well: women who don't want to admit to themselves that a particular man isn't as devoted to her as she'd like, and men who don't want to admit to a particular woman that he isn't as devoted to her as she'd like.

I'm sure lots of men would gladly embrace the theory that women are "sex-phobic", if only they could get away with it. But unfortunately for them, most women expect men to be emotionally tough enough not to need a mutually face-saving excuse like "it's not you--it's just that I'm afraid of sex".

By the way, I recall that The Danimal also once similarly wondered about this issue of "commitment phobia", and asked whether most men who are classified as "commitment-phobic" would really be that reluctant to marry women who are able to get work as NFL cheerleaders or Playboy centerfolds. Another time, he noted that

How many women have you overheard saying, "That man finds me sexually worthless"? Typically a woman rationalizes away a man's lack of interest by saying he is commitment-phobic, or he is a man who "cannot love," or he's gay, or he "has issues," etc. How many women state the obvious: "I'm just not attractive to most men"?

The weird thing is that lots of women are well aware that they have physical flaws; a few women might even understand that they have personality flaws. But few women seem able to understand what a given level of flawed-ness translates into.

That book "He's Just Not That Into You" was like a great intellectual leap for women, as if many women did not even have the concept that a man might not want to have sex with them (or keep having sex with them). Women have been sold the huge lie that every woman is equally entitled to the same storybook relationship with her dream man. And women generally believe it because they don't hit on guys and get rejected hundreds of times.

Do you think anybody needs to write a book "Dude: Chicks Don't Dig You"? "Dudes" already know they don't get much love from most chicks.

The moment I read Dan Simon's comment, I knew that I want to read more stuff that he has written. Well, the man has a blog, modestly called "I could be wrong...", but it seems to update quite rarely. But let's take what we can and not complain. The post "A Russian joke for International Women's Day" points out a hypocrisy in feminist argumentation. Another post points out a revealing hypocrisy in a group of leftists making an appeal to the government of Iran, as opposed to how they would behave if they had to write the exact same appeal to, say, to the current government of the United States. In fact, I would say that what is clearly going on here is the exact same phenomenon as depicted in my Jussi Halla-Aho translation post "The rhinoceros in our living room". Western leftists understand perfectly well the reality of Islamic nations, but they carefully walk on eggshells to avoid this reality ever becoming too explicit, the exact same way that the family of an alcoholic denies the existence of the problem in their family and makes excuses for it, even blaming others and themselves for the actions of the alcoholic if that's what it takes.

In other news, a bunch of Finnish bloggers maintain a group blog "Tietoisuuden vapautus" that parodies leftists, larp and manga enthusiasts, feminists, anarchists, New Age believers, alternative medicine quacks and other similarly comical people. The post "Lysenko" reminds us that

As the September approaches its end, we get closer to Trofim Lysenko's birthday. This year will be thirty years since his death. Lysenko was a rare sight in the scientific world, since he dared to defend the values of ordinary people and workers. The capitalist establishment of course never acknowledged his results, but they still live in our hearts. Brave trailblazers like him would really be needed these days to show us alternatives to the lax and weakened materialist and technocratic values of the West. Let us light a candle to remember him.

Indeed. The funniest thing about the much-reviled figure of Trofim Lysenko is that the vast majority of leftists still fully support his views in practice. After all, they like to proclaim that nature is essentially meaningless, but nurture and environment determine everything, and that there are no important hereditary differences whatsoever between any two people or groups (thus directly contradicting Darwinian natural selection, which requires hereditary inequalities to select from) so that regardless of his "genes" and "DNA", anyone or anything can be raised to be anything at all.

The post "Liberals, Conservatives, and the Use of Racial and Ethnic Classifications" at the Volokh Conspiracy points out an interesting symmetry:

I have long been fascinated by the fact that most conservatives support racial and ethnic profiling for national security and law enforcement purposes, yet are categorically opposed to the use of racial or ethnic classifications for affirmative action. Most liberals, by contrast, take exactly the opposite view. Both ideologies oppose racial and ethnic classifications as a matter of principle in one area, yet defend them on pragmatic grounds in another.

As controversial as those issues are, intelligence is an even more controversial issue. Noboby objects to the idea that some people are more athletic than others or that they can play guitar better, but intelligence is so important in life that it has to be hushed up. Vox Day's post "Talent is better than brains anyway" contains a few paragraphs that were to me highly reminiscent of The Danimal:

I was not provided with any information about my IQ until I took what was then a form of IQ test at 16. Given the amount of information I had amassed by that time regarding the cognitive capacity of those around me, I was unsurprised to receive confirmation that mine was superlative according to the accepted measure.

It is ironic that parents attempt to hide such information, particularly from those most capable of gleaning it from casual observation. One can no more hide the fact of an individual's intelligence from the intelligent than height from the tall, weight from the fat or coordination from the graceful. I've found that one can even sometimes spot an above-average or a sub-standard intelligence simply from a glance at an individual's eyes.

Lethal Sangerian elitism aside, it is a greater and more injurious error for the intelligent to insist on treating the less intelligent as if they were as cognitively capable as their superiors.

Intelligence is highly correlated to many good things. Tommi once noted that people (and especially teenagers) can be divided in two groups, those who can tolerate peace and silence and concentration, and those who simply can't but who soon have to start some kind of noise and activity. Theodore Dalrymple has a few times noticed the same thing about the unemployed underclass who always have to keep the television loudly turned on in their crappy apartments. In school, when a member of the latter group sees a member of the former group reading or studying, he feels instinctively threatened by this and can't help himself but to start bothering him, perhaps even with a violent slap to amuse other members of the Idiocracy. I noticed that "Mean Mr. Mustard" has encountered the same phenomenon in his travails, as documented in his post "Another Retreat of Silence".

It is always good to acknowledge when and where you have been wrong. If I ever am, I will let you know immediately in a post similar to "Mulligans" by "God of the Machine".

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 10:05 AM