Behold, Space Camp Barbie. Maybe math isn’t as hard as she thought.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Is Big Government A Mac?
Or a PC?
[Update in the afternoon]
Why we should want big government to be a PC:
You know I love the products, but Apple is a fascist company. I should know — I worked there. Even got personally cussed out by Steve Jobs (may his name be praised forever).
Apple products are based on centralized command-and-control. Apple makes the hardware, software, and — increasingly — many key applications (“everything inside the state, nothing outside the state”). The Apple faithful believe that the computing world dominated by Microsoft is bad (if not outright evil) and must be redeemed. If only everyone changed to their way of computing, we would reach computing nirvana. And society would be changed for the better, too. If only.
The analogy may be getting a little strained.
Being All Judgmental
That’s what Rachel Lucas is doing. Well, someone has to do it, since society at large seems to have abdicated its role.
Like her, I was struck by the stupidity of this, reported apparently completely unironically, as though it made, you know, sense:
The Gloucester baby boom is forcing this city of 30,000 to grapple with the question of providing easier access to birth control…
Well, hey folks. It’s hard to see what that would do for this particular little baby boomlet.
There may be some problems that are solved by easier access to birth control, but brainless young women going out of their way to get knocked up isn’t one of them. I think, for that, there will have to be some other solution (unless by “easier access,” they mean tubal ligation).
Deep Misanthropy
Ed Driscoll has some thoughts on haters of humanity, who are now making Hollywood films to convey their views.
Hey, how about if we save the earth by migrating into space?
Somehow, I don’t think they’ll like that, either.
Cyd And The Cape
Both are discussed today over at Lileks’ place. Also, judicial overreach in the Great White North.
A Great Dancer, Gone
The Top Ten
I’m sure that the Canadian Human Rights Commission will be weighing in any minute.
[crickets chirping]
Obama Doesn’t Have Charisma
He’s glamourous. Virginia Postrel, a glamour maven, explains:
Charisma is a personal quality that inspires followers to embrace the charismatic leader’s agenda (an agenda that, in the original sense of the word charisma, is seen as divinely inspired.) Glamour, by contrast, encourages the audience to project its own yearnings onto the glamorous figure. So, in this case, Sebastian Mallaby imagines that Obama will find “a way of crawling back from his embarrassing talk of reopening NAFTA.” Mallaby maintains his own views about what’s good for economic growth; he doesn’t defer to Obama’s own vision.
When voters motivated by charisma disagree with the leader they’ve backed, they support him anyway and possibly even change their minds about the right policy course. When voters motivated by glamour disagree, they become disillusioned and angry.
Let’s hope for a peak of that come around late October.
Obama Doesn’t Have Charisma
He’s glamourous. Virginia Postrel, a glamour maven, explains:
Charisma is a personal quality that inspires followers to embrace the charismatic leader’s agenda (an agenda that, in the original sense of the word charisma, is seen as divinely inspired.) Glamour, by contrast, encourages the audience to project its own yearnings onto the glamorous figure. So, in this case, Sebastian Mallaby imagines that Obama will find “a way of crawling back from his embarrassing talk of reopening NAFTA.” Mallaby maintains his own views about what’s good for economic growth; he doesn’t defer to Obama’s own vision.
When voters motivated by charisma disagree with the leader they’ve backed, they support him anyway and possibly even change their minds about the right policy course. When voters motivated by glamour disagree, they become disillusioned and angry.
Let’s hope for a peak of that come around late October.
More Vampire Rights
Jon Schaff, who started the subject, has what he hopes is the last word. I have to confess being a little lost in the conversation, not having been a Buffy fan.
And if it’s the end of the vampire discussion, perhaps it’s time we moved on. To zombies.
[Update mid-Friday afternoon]
Well, I should have Googled the subject; we could have saved ourselves a lot of discussion. Here’s a Rothbardian treatise on the subject from three years ago:
In The Ethics of Liberty, his great reconciliation of Austrian economics and natural law ethics, Murray Rothbard commented that a new species of beings having “the characteristics, the nature of the legendary vampire, and [that] could only exist by feeding on human blood”(1) would not be entitled to individual rights, regardless of their intelligence, because of their status as deadly enemies of humanity. I wish to discuss this issue in more detail and argue that Rothbard, who was kind of a night owl himself, was unfair to those mysterious creatures. The libertarian theory of justice would in fact easily allow for a peaceful coexistence with vampires.
But of course. Just no non-consensual neck biting.