Right-Wing Facebook
People for the American Way has the most ridiculous name since HUAC, but they’ve managed to put together a hilarious Facebook parody.
Things That Make Me Laugh At 4:30AM
Overheard at the Pittsburgh airport, just past the security checkpoint:
“Dude, if the terrorists hate me for my freedoms, I think they officially won when that cranky b**** took my toothpaste.”
Chuck Norris, Financial Wiz
Chuck Norris doesn’t target inflation. He roundhouse-kicks it until it begs for mercy.
The Chuck Norris dollar buys 3 Canadian dollars, and trades at parity with the euro.
When the U.S. economy sneezes, the world catches a cold. When Chuck Norris sneezes, the U.S. economy catches pneumonia.
And my favorite:
Chuck Norris doesn’t buy gold to hedge against inflation. Gold buys Chuck Norris to hedge against inflation.
More from Mark Gilbert here.
Why Communism Fails
The most recent PhD comic got me thinking. Conventional wisdom, even among fairly liberal people, seems to be that communism will always fail because people are too greedy to share–call it “the Tragedy Of The Commons,” if you like, or “the Incentive Problem.” But I don’t think this is historically true.
As in the comic, or in The Onion (and again here), the assumption seems to be that Communism establishes a communal set of goods which tempts people to take more than their fair share, so the system breaks down. But can anyone think of a Communist or socialist country in history that has ever managed to accumulate such a set of communal goods to be shared? I can’t. Because in order to get that community stock of goods, you have to confiscate them from their prior owners, which means you have to centralize power and probably use violence. Human nature being what it is, there will always be someone who will hijack this mechanism for his own benefit. [Obvious Cliched Examples here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) So, long before the Tragedy Of The Commons or the Incentive Problem rear their ugly heads, there will be tyranny.
Thus the problem with Communism isn’t that it always breaks down, but that it can never really begin. In this sense die-hard Marxists are right, Communism has never actually existed. But they fail to realize that people are people, and it doesn’t matter how long they fantasize, communism can never work and will always devolve into bloody tyranny.
Obviously Communism is dead, but I think this is still an important point because of the eternal allure of schemes that promise that we can just start over from scratch. We can’t. Everything happens in a historical context, and Communism’s real failing is that it doesn’t recognize this. Communists are so busy fantasizing over how the world will be that they usually don’t give much thought to how they’ll accomplish the preliminary step from the world-as-it-is to the world-with-goods-consolidated. But it’s exactly this step that will end in gulags and unmarked graves, long before the Incentive Problem ever shows up.
Study finds men talk as much as women
This is old, but so ridiculous I had to share it.
The press release from the University of Texas details how the researchers came to their conclusion.
Refuting the popular stereotype that females talk more than men, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found women and men both use an average of 16,000 words each day…
For more than a decade, researchers have claimed that women use far more words each day than men. One set of numbers that is commonly tossed around is that women use 20,000 words per day compared to only 7,000 for men…
For eight years, the psychology researchers have developed a method for recording natural language using the electronically activated recorder (EAR). The unobtrusive digital voice recorder tracks people’s interactions, including their conversations.
The researchers analyzed the transcripts of almost 400 university students in the United States and Mexico whose daily interactions were recorded between 1998 and 2004. The research participants could not control the EAR, which automatically records for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes, and did not know when the device was on.
At the end of the study, the researchers examine one potential criticism.
A potential limitation of our analysis is that all participants were university students. The resulting homogeneity in the samples with regard to sociodemographic characteristics may have affected our estimates of daily word usage. However, none of the samples provided support for the idea that women have substantially larger lexical budgets than men. Further, to the extent that sex differences in daily word use are assumed to be biologically based, evolved adaptations, they should be detectable among university students as much as in more diverse samples. We therefore conclude, on the basis of available empirical evidence, that the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded.
Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune published a great response that is amusing enough for a full read through. Some of my favorite lines were:
All I can say is that if the average male is putting out 16,000 words every day, then I’m living in a verbal desert. Some guys I haven’t met must be gushing verbiage like Old Faithful to make up for the ones I know, many of whom might easily be mistaken for victims of lockjaw. That is not a description I would apply to many women of my acquaintance…
We revere Abraham Lincoln because he made the greatest speech in U.S. history while uttering just 269 words and taking up only two minutes of his audience’s time. (His predecessor on the platform at Gettysburg, famed orator Edward Everett, gassed for two solid hours, and nobody remembers a thing he said.) We’d gladly give up cell phones for a return to Morse code.
Our motto is, “Talk less, think more.” Our hero is Calvin Coolidge, known as Silent Cal, and our favorite story is the time a woman sat by him at a dinner party and said she had made a bet she could get three words out of him. “You lose,” he replied. In a more talkative moment, he confided that “nothing I never said ever did me any harm.”
In The Know: Is Our Wealth Hurting Africa’s Feelings?
Development in Africa has been a huge concern for many people. The folks over at ONN weigh in on the issue.
Their comments about Fisher Price were particularly insightful…
The Lowest-Rated Jerry Springer Show Ever
Crowd: Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!Jerry: Today’s guests are here because they can’t agree on fundamental philosophical principles. I’d like to welcome Todd to the show.
Todd enters from backstage.
Jerry: Hello, Todd.
Todd: Hi, Jerry.
Jerry: (reading from card) So, Todd, you’re here to tell your girlfriend something. What is it?
Todd: Well, Jerry, my girlfriend Ursula and I have been going out for three years now. We did everything together. We were really inseparable. But then she discovered post-Marxist political and literary theory, and it’s been nothing but fighting ever since.
Jerry: Why is that?
Todd: You see, Jerry, I’m a traditional Cartesian rationalist. I believe that the individual self, the “I” or ego is the foundation of all metaphysics. She, on the other hand, believes that the contemporary self is a socially constructed, multi-faceted subjectivity reflecting the political and economic realities of late capitalist consumerist discourse.
Crowd: Ooooohhhh!
Todd: I know! I know! Is that infantile, or what?
Jerry: So what do you want to tell her today?
Todd: I want to tell her that unless she ditches the post-modernism, we’re through. I just can’t go on having a relationship with a woman who doesn’t believe I exist.
Jerry: Well, you’re going to get your chance. Here’s Ursula!
Ursula storms onstage and charges up to Todd.
You’ll have to read the rest of it from here.
Glen Whitman’s Cal State, Northridge page is pretty interesting.
You know you’re in college when…
I was over at Newmark’s Door the other day and saw his post concerning the “You Know You’re In College When…” list.
The list is both comprehensive and entertaining, and I suggest giving it a read!
Some favorites:
1. High school started before 8am, but now anything before noon is considered “early”.
11. Your underwear/sock supply dictates your laundry schedule.
23. You wear the same jeans for 13 days without washing them.
27. You live in a house with three couches, none of which match.
36. You’ve traveled with bags of dirty clothes.
49. You skip one class to write a paper for another.
52. You stay up late to finish homework then sleep through the class in which it was due.
99. You no longer find it uncool to take naps. In fact, you quite enjoy them.