Robb Allen weighs in on the election debacle.
See also this.
Tag: linkery
Quote of the Day
In comments to Weer’d Beard’s post Mitt Romney Wins the GOP Nomination:
Given how the GOP field has been winnowed, this has really just been a race to determine the form Gozer the Traveler takes.
So this just means the giant Sloar is off the table and means is we’re looking between the moving Torb and the Staypuff Marshmellow man.
— Jack
Edited to add this link to a T-shirt I must have courtesy of WFGodbold.
You Will Cry
Or there’s something wrong with your soul:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJkZXh9v_i4?rel=0&w=640&h=360]
Found at var/log/otto.
Oh, and fuck PETA.
It’s Official
I’m an old fart. (via Vanderleun)
Brilliant!
Dr. Sanity has a timely repost of the explanation behind the different ways the Right and the Left deal with shame and guilt. Excerpt:
“Conservatives believe they have better ideas. Leftists believe they are better people.”
This is extremely relevant to a discussion about the differences between the Democratic Party culture (which has become primarily, though not exclusively, influenced by the political left) and the Republican Party culture (which is predominantly influenced by conservative ideas and values).
Eventually for the shame-avoidant person, reality itself must be distorted in order to further protect the self from poor self-esteem. Blaming other individuals or groups for one’s own behavior becomes second nature, and this transfer of blame to someone else is an indicator of internal shame.
Go, RTWT.
Preach It, Sister!
QotD, Tam (who else?) Edition:
All the probulating, door-kicking, snooping and spying, asset forfeiting, and armored personnel carriering has done more damage to this country than a hundred Woodstocks worth of stoners, to say nothing of the obscene profits we have basically legislated into existence for vicious criminal scum south of our borders and in our own cities.
I’d rather my neighbors smoked a bong every day than run the risk of a dyslexic SWAT team taking a battering ram to my front door at oh-dark-thirty. We need to stop burning the village to save it.
It is Not the Business of Government…
In related news, how to make hard-to-obtain Sudafed from readily obtainable street meth.
Quote of the Day
I believe it is now time for Western Christians and non-Christians alike to acknowledge that men such as Alexis de Tocqueville were correct and various concepts such as free expression, freedom of association, and other hallowed concepts of Western civilization simply do not translate outside of Western Christian culture. What was once theoretical is now empirical thanks to more than sixty years of evidence that strongly suggests conventional Western views of human liberty are simply not compatible with non-Christian, non-Western cultures. — Vox Popoli, The chickens begin to roost
Once again, I’ll point you to my October, 2006 post The United Federation of Planets.
Quote of the Day – Joe Huffman Edition
It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s just a government rule. — The View from North Central Idaho
And the interpretation of those rules varies by .gov employee drone.
RTWT.
Quote of the Day – Tam Edition
The internet has been a goose that has been laying economic golden eggs for an amazing amount of time, considering the continual ham-handed efforts of the government to try and serve itself up some foie gras.
As commenter Windy Wilson observes:
Tam has a lock on uttering pithy, humorous and trenchant one liners like no one since at least Mark Twain, and possibly Ralph Waldo Emerson (who lacked the humor).
Thankfully, the internet means that millions can get a chance to read them.
The Decline of Violence
Instapundit links to an interesting Reason piece on the decline of violence throughout history, as chronicled by Harvard University cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker in his new book.
The book is entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Ronald Bailey, the author of the piece writes:
Human nature did not change, but our institutions did, encouraging people to restrain their natural tendencies toward violence.
I am reminded of a Usenet sigline by one Trefor Thomas:
To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated.
I get the uncomfortable feeling that the decline of violence is due to that violence being banked away for a rainy day. As Bailey notes, human nature hasn’t changed.
What has changed is that violence has largely gone from from personal, retail events to state-level wholesale slaughter. As Tam has noted,
Central governments have managed to turn murder from a hobby pursued at home by individual craftsmen into a wholesale industry churning out slipshod and substandard corpses in numbers that can’t be read without sounding like Carl Sagan.
True, the overall percentages have declined, but when violence is really unleashed the casualties are overwhelming. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from economics, it’s that past performance is no guarantee of future results.
If When Iran does go nuclear, for instance ….