Journal Of Applied Misanthropology

Because, basically, if you've heard anything stupider recently, I really feel sorry for you.

Sort summary: Moron lawyer (wait, is that redundant?) writes in the Washington Post that media ought to be more concentrated in the hands of a few large media corporations, in order to save energy and free people from the tyranny of "too much information".

My reply:
Well, that's not the stupidest thing I've heard lately...oh wait. Never mind. It IS the stupidest thing I've heard lately, and I sometimes visit rense.com. Just so you know the kind of competition you're up against.

I can only assume, for your sake, that this is some kind of Swiftian "modest proposal". If so, my congratulations -- you got me, hook, line, and sinker. The alternative -- that anyone could be so dim witted as to think that the core freedom on which America -- or any liberal democracy -- is built, the freedom to shout one's ideas into the public square, should be deliberately curtailed and reserved for a self-selected elite, is terrifying.

As a PS, which takes more energy: Printing a newspaper or posting to a blog?

As a PPS, you might be familiar with the ancient saying, "Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one". You may be the first putative "progressive" I've ever encountered who wishes to REDUCE the number of people who "own" a press. The Internet finally has made possible the realization of the ancient Jeffersonian ideal of every man as publisher, pundit, and pamphleteer; you wish to tear that down in the name of...uhm...tearing it down. As far as I can tell, you don't want to reduce what you call "information overload" (and what sane people call "choice") to achieve any actual goal, you just don't like it and want it to stop. Right.

Posted by Lizard in Politics at 11:15 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A new age nutjob?

What is withDemocrats today? JFK bagged Marilyn Monroe. Thesex symbol of an entire generation! What do top tier Democrats get now? A chunky intern and a flaming nutter!

We need a better class of sleazoid, I tell you what.

Posted by Lizard in Politics at 06:49 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Wall-E is a wonderful movie, well worth the 98% or so positive rating over at Rotten Tomatoes, but it has the usual Hollywood anti-capitalist overtones (despite being manufactured by one of the largest and most bloated corporations in Hollywood, producers of precisely the mountains of useless junk which, in the movie, Wall-E is consigned to cleaning off the face of the blighted Earth). Or does it?

Seems to me Pixar may have slipped a subversive anti-Communist message past the bleeding heart liberal masses. Given the Randian undertones of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, this is not entirely surprising.

Consider: All property and wealth is owned by a single, central, power -- the Buy-n-Large corporation. Corporation? It has no customers -- all citizens are given all they desire for free. It has no workers, just robots (mostly) without free will. (The only ones who do have obvious free will are not victims of oppression, but are, in fact, the true masterminds behind the civilization -- and, well, our hero and heroine of course.) It has no competition. It has no executives, managers, or workers. There are no unemployed or underemployed. There is no evidence of any economy, money, or exchange going on aboard the Axiom -- all of the bloblike citizens are fed (and fed, and fed...), clothed, housed, and entertained from cradle to grave, for free. They live the ultimate Marxist ideal -- a life without care, struggle, need, or want -- and, as a consequence, a life without purpose or meaning. They are not the Oppressed Proletarian Slaves Of The Capitalist Class; they are the Liberated Workers, who do not actually do, or need to do, any work. Individuality, with all of the conflicts and problems it causes, has been eliminated; fashions change in an instant, conformity is all. The only decisions they must make are how to momentarily distract themselves from the tedium of their unchallenging life.

I find it amusing that many reviewers -- both approvingly leftist and disapprovingly rightist -- accept the world of Wall-E as one of "extreme capitalism" when there is no capitalism in evidence -- there is, after all, no capital! Calling the ruling government a "corporation" no more makes it capitalism than the government of the German Democratic Republic was a democracy. It seems people are often blinded by labels and symbols, instead of looking at the actual facts of the thing. Big shock there.

Posted by Lizard in Culture at 12:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Let's face it, this Supreme Court has been one of the shakiest on individual rights in recent memory. There have been some good decisions, but by thin 5-4 majorities. Now, we have one more, again by the barest of margins -- the Second Amendment has been confirmed to mean what it says, that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

I haven't had a chance to read and digest the decision yet. Obviously, you will not be able to go out and buy a howitzer at Wal-Mart any time soon. Regulations, licensing, and so on are not going away, so the predictable weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth (and fatuous comparisons to the old West, which actually had a much lower per-capita murder rate than 'handgun free' places like Chicago and DC) will be, as is usual for the Left, pathetic self-indulgent posturing. However, it looks the Second Amendment will be at least as protected as the First (to damn with faint praise), forcing states to actually have to justify their unending attacks on the right of self defense, a right the government rightly (sigh...) fear. (After all, if we can all defend ourselves, what are we paying the government to do? Besides which, let's face it -- historically, the thing all humans on Earth have needed the most defense against has been their own government.)

Posted by Lizard in Politics at 10:58 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Barack Obama says Ralph Nader is an attention whore. In future speeches, Obama plans to say "Hitler was a very bad man", "Bill Clinton played around a lot" and "George W. Bush isn't very bright."

John McCain replied with "Pancakes!"

Posted by Lizard in Politics at 10:25 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

How do we know God created the world? Because carrots look like eyes and walnuts look like brains.

Really.

This is the medieval "doctrine of signatures", a way of understanding the world that, for most of us, vanished along with witch burnings, the black death, and the Crusades.

These people are allowed to vote.

This explains a lot.

Thanks to Pharungula for the tip!

Also, check out John Derbyshire's excellent excoriation of Stein's blood libel against western civilization.

Posted by Lizard in Religion at 10:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Technological progress has had its critics for a long, long, time....

Posted by Lizard in Technology at 07:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

As one of only two surviving hard-line Communist nations, Cuba bears the heavy burden of sustaining the hopes and dreams of uncounted thousands of American leftists who bravely and stoically perform the tragic task of living at taxpayer expense in American universities, telling all of us victims of capitalism, with our 'cars' and 'computers' and 'reliable electric power' just how miserable we are, instead of joining their comrades in bliss in Cuba, where there are lots of doctors (and concentration camps for AIDS sufferers), and 100% literacy (though you'll be shot if you read anything the government doesn't approve of). But, wait! Showing the kind of daring, vision, and courage that only an 80 year old leftover of a long-gone revolution can manage, Raul Castro has decided to let Cubans use the Internet...if they can disguise themselves as a tourist and sneak into a hotel, that is. How can one ask for more freedom?

It's fun mentioning this to liberals. They stick their fingers in their ears and go 'la la la free health care I can't heeeeaaaar you'. Try it out yourself! You'll be glad you did.

Posted by Lizard at 08:41 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Yeah, I know, big shock, but apparently it is to CNN...and to a lot of the army. As for me, I find it amusing that we're told the military is out there "protecting our freedoms", but, apparently, a lot of members of it don't actually believe in them.

Note I said "amusing", not "surprising". The military, by definition, is a conformist, groupthink, organization -- any military, not just ours. The whole point of military training is to destroy individualism and turn a person into a part of a machine, a part willing to die if ordered to do so, a part willing to order others to die if necessary. The grimly hilarious part is that it's the only way the system can work -- an army of individualists would be swiftly destroyed by the enemy or destroy itself in chaos. Call it reason 598,012 why only an all-volunteer army is morally justifiable -- because no one should ever be subjected to that kind of deconstruction and reconstruction if they didn't sign up for it as a free adult. The other side of that dodecahedron is that the kind of people most likely to volunteer are those already not too keen on this whole 'individualism' thing in the first place, people who want to 'belong', who enjoy being 'part of the team', etc. (Well, and the occasional high functioning sociopath steered to a place where his predilections can be channeled in a socially acceptable manner.)

Posted by Lizard in Religion at 05:42 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Another article explaining why the guy at McDonald's can't make change and why people think Paris Hilton is interesting -- schools continue to promote students who have the intellectual capacity of a somewhat addled turnip, but without the chance of being made into a possibly tasty soup. (Well, for some people, I hate turnips, but the point remains...)

If he had been held back and made to retake all his courses with lowerclassmen, he said, "I would have felt bad

Yes, and we can't hurt the feelings of our precious little snowflakes, even if they themselves acknowledge it would make them work harder.

Self esteem is consequence of success, not a cause of it, people!

This is not, contrary to the article, a difficult problem. The answer is dirt simple. Eliminate grades -- not in the sense of 'you got an A', but in the sense of 'you're a third grader'. Assign progressively harder work, from introductory facts to full mastery, as fast as the student can absorb and assimilate it. When the student has reached mastery in all subjects, he graduates. If this happens when he's ten, he has eight glorious years of goofing off before he has to earn a living -- though I suspect he'll do more in those eight years than most of us manage in a lifetime. If it doesn't happen by the time he's eighteen, well, I'm pretty sure there will be some meatgrinder of a war out there he can be a useful part of.

And for Ghu's sake, let's drop all this nonsense about feelings. Your boss isn't going to care if you feel sad when he tells you that you're an incompetent jackass, so let's not start kids off thinking that's how the world works. The later in life they learn that, no, they aren't precious snowflakes, the harder it is for them and the more likely they are to self-destruct in a spectacular fashion. You do not learn to swim by thinking about how scared you are of water; you learn to swim by getting kicked into the deep end and managing to not drown.

(And here's another example of what you get when 'social promotion' rules the day...)

Posted by Lizard in Culture at 12:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

We've all heard the uproar over the Yale student who claimed to make performance art out of her miscarriages. Or maybe she didn't. My only general comment on the morality/ethics of this is: So long as my tax dollars aren't being used, I don't give a damn. Ignore the attention whore, and she'll go away. But anyway, I found this article amusing, mostly for this:

"“No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen,” Shvarts said, “because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”"

There's something magically wonderful about a person in real life talking like an Ayn Rand villain.

Now, if only someone in real life talked like an Ayn Rand hero. (Ideally with a fast forward option...)

Posted by Lizard in Culture at 10:56 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Or so says Barry Sonnenfeld, and he should know, because...uh...because...well, OK, he's just another hollywood Luddite blabbing about things he doesn't understand.

I remember, as a teen, being chilled at the scene in "1984" where Winston Smith, under the omnipresent glare of Big Brother, wrote "had totally lame day 2day. work sux lol! but saw cute girl mayb things get betr soon :) :)" on his government-mandated MySpace page.

Posted by Lizard in Technology at 06:22 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

For those who don't know, the Neuman Singularity is the point at which reality has become so warped that satire is impossible; things reach ludicrous extremes faster than satirists can write.

As an example:
The Onion, 2003
Reality, 2008

Posted by Lizard at 04:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Yes, I'm alive. And feeling oddly productive.

In any event...

CNN has issued a memo requiring reporters talk about all the "good" things Castro has done. Wake me when they begin a retrospective on Hitler with a discussion of how the German economy thrived under his regime...

(Waiting for the usual "Well, they're just being fair" and "How is this bad?" replies from the Usual Suspects, said suspects unlikely to extend same courtesy to any right-wing dictators, among whom they would no doubt include Bush II...)

Posted by Lizard in Politics at 05:49 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A bit leftist in specific examples, but the core truth remains....

Posted by Lizard in Politics at 09:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)