The director of the first Human Centipede film – the one about a psychopathic doctor who sews three unwilling and unwitting captives together mouth-to-anus to make a sort of “centipede” — proudly declared that his film was “100% medically accurate.” That is, he found a doctor who was willing to say that if one were indeed to create such a centipede, the second and third segments (i.e., people) would be able to survive, provided that you supplemented their rather dismal diet with IV drips to give them the nutrition they were lacking.
This dubious claim to 100% accuracy came to mind today as I perused a post by the blogger who calls himself Dalrock, a manospherian nitwit with a penchant for pseudoscientific defenses of old-fashioned misogyny. In a post with the whimsical title “We are trapped on Slut Island and Traditional Conservatives are our Gilligan,” Dalrock argues that the best “solution” to out-of-wedlock births is some good old-fashioned slut shaming.
Here’s how he breaks down the (imaginary) numbers in a post that is “100% mathematically accurate” – which is to say, not accurate at all:
Assume we are starting off with 100 sluts and 30 alphas/players. The sluts are happily riding on the alpha carousel. Now we introduce slut shaming. It isn’t fully effective of course, but it manages to convince 15 of the would be sluts not to be sluts after all. This means an additional 15 women are again potentially suitable for marriage. This directly translates into fewer fatherless children. This also makes the next round of slut shaming easier. Instead of having 99 peers eagerly cheering her on her ride, each slut now has 15 happily married women shaming her and only 84 other sluts encouraging her. After the next round this becomes 30 happily married women shaming the sluts, and only 69 other sluts cheering them on, and so on. This process continues until all but the most die hard sluts are off the carousel. You will never discourage them all, but you can do a world better than we are doing today.
Why not shame the fathers as well, while we’re at it? Dalrock explains that this just doesn’t make good mathematical sense:
Start with the same base assumption of 100 sluts and 30 players. Now apply shame to the players. Unfortunately shame is less effective on players than it is on sluts, so instead of discouraging 15% of them (4.5) in the first round, it only discourages three of them. No problem!, says the Gilligan [the social conservative], at least there are now three fewer sluts now that three of the evil alphas have been shamed away, and all without creating any unhappy sluts! But unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. The remaining 27 players are more than happy to service the extra sluts. They are quite maddeningly actually delighted with the new situation. Even worse, the next round of player shaming is even less effective than the first. This time only 2 players are discouraged, and one of the other 3 realizes that his player peers are picking up the slack anyway and reopens for business. This means in net there are still 26 players, more than enough to handle all of the sluts you can throw at them.
Well, there’s no arguing with that!
Seriously, there’s no arguing with that, because it is an imaginary construct with only the most tenuous connection with how things work in the real world. “But … MATH!” doesn’t really work as an argument here, since human beings don’t actually behave according to simplistic mathematical formulas.
Film critic note: While the first Human Centipede film offered little more than a workmanlike treatment of a fantastical idea, the recently released sequel, which details the attempts of a deranged Human Centipede superfan to take human-centipeding to the next level, is actually sort of brilliant. If you like that sort of thing.
Man, I am glad that collectable dolls don’t have the right to vote.
No sillier than you feminists suggesting that people should vote purely on the issue of abortion or gay marriage–the only issues that you seem to have the bias against Ron Paul!
Economy/ What economy?
Regarding the candidate who has given more thought to the economy than anybody else in public life in the past 35 years!!
Meller: When was the last person in the US drafted?
When was the last one denied the right to marry because they weren’t straight?
When was the last on denied an abortion?
Which of those has Ron Paul’s stance had more effect on real people’s lives?
2 out of 3 hurt people. One out of three hasn’t. Repealling registration won’t affect anyone, because if there is a decision to draft the lack of present registration won’t stop it.
So, Ron Paul is batting 1.000 for hurting people, and 0.000 for making any real difference in a draft.
This your idea of the lesser of evils?
Silly us, having problems with Ron Paul because he opposes basic human rights like bodily self-ownership (abortion) and the right to free association (gay marriage). Instead we should support Ron Paul because of his idiotic economic policies, like the gold standard!
You think that his policies on abortion and gay marriage are the only things we don’t like about Ron Paul? Damn, that’s funny.
Meller: Why don’t you like the 9th amendment; you being a Libertarian and all.
You want to reserve things like marriage and abortion to the states. I am saying they are one of those rights not named, which are in no way limited, nor disparaged.
You want to take them away, you Statist you.
Meller: if you think Paul’s hypocrisies aren’t good reasons to vote against him, well I have to say your sense of what makes for a good representative is lacking.
But his total isolationism, his daft ideas about gold, his silliness on the subject of federal vs. state vs. individual powers/rights/liberties, his slipshod grasp of economics at any level (from family, to state, to nation) and his inability to detail any sensible scheme for impementing his ideas ought to give even you pause.
That he hasn’t had the courage of his convictions, and runs as a Republican, from a craven desire to keep the perquisites and prestige that come of being affiliated (and aligned) with a Party should also make you wonder at him.
He’s been secure in his district for ages, but he doesn’t run as an named libertarian, even though that ought to benefit his stated (as opposed to apparent) goals. He’s a carpetbagger. He plays the part, but his actual record says, “Republican”.
He’s inside the tent pissing out, and that’s fine with him, after all, it works to get people like you supporting a Republican.
Yes, because super conservative anti-war groups like this one http://www.warresisters.org/index.php or this not at all socialist anti-war committee’s protests http://socialistparty-usa.org/images/m20k.jpg and this not hippy related in the slightest Peace Council http://www.peacecouncil.net/ don’t exist. Also, a recent issue of the not socialist in the slightest Socialist Party USA newsletter “The Socalist” didn’t highlight a party member that does counter recruiting in schools….
Also, one of the men who burned his draft card in Union Square in ’65 was a gay socialist, who went on to a life of socialist and anti-war activism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McReynolds
Shit, Eugene fucking Debs went to jail for anti-draft activism.
Or course, Meller doesn’t want to think about the existence of leftist peaceniks, so they must not exist, per Mellerlogic.
Ron Paul has very good reasons for supporting the gold standard, but I am not going into them here or now! Suffice to say that gold as money makes sense, and paper as money doesn’t. http://www.Mises.org can explain it better than I can, if you are willing to understand!
since 1948, and the emergence of the “cold war”with the postwar fall of one-third of the world to communism, one may surmise why there are all of these leftist “peaceniks” floating around, especially after most of them were so gung-ho in the worldwide “war-against fascism-and-war-for-democracy”.[sarcasm]
Their terms for Stalin’s (and FDR’s) war, and for the most part, showed all too clearly how most of that disreputable lot only turned “anti-war” in the ’60s and ’70s, decades later. But silly me, I don’t think about “leftists” as antiwar protestors. To most of the American left (in those years), youall weren’t “antiwar” at all. You were simply angry at America (or was it Amerikkka?) fighting on the wrong side!
Hey.as long as we are all on the subject of peace and antiwar dissent, where are all of you antiwar protestors TODAY? I swear that I saw that there were MILLIONS of you when George the Stupid occupied the oval office, especially after he launched his war against Iraq, but now that a fellow (or is it brother) “progressive” occupies the Presidential Nut House, you all–in your MILLIONS–disappeared? Where??
Ron Paul is STILL antiwar! As for the rest of you…
Antiwar, my arse! You are mistaken darksidecat, as usual! I am not going to think about what doesn’t exist, and left-wing antiwar protest doesn’t exist today, even if it ever did, whether I think about it or not!
So… which wars are they supposed to be protesting? And how is it that millions of people somehow don’t count because they were protesting when the wars were being intiated, and now that they are being stopped they aren’t howling for blood?
And Gold… dude it doesn’t work. The ability to deal with expanding trade makes it so unresponsive as to be useless. It’s also not something which can be used as actual currency. If specie could be gotten in hand… Mexico in the early 1960s is a good example. The US dollar was worth about five pesos. A five peso coin weighed more than a US Dollar coin (by about 1/4th of an oz. IIRC). So one could go to Mexico, and swap dollar bills for peso coins, and bring them home. Instant profit for you.
But Mexico was losing money (not metaphorically, literally, their specie was leaving the country). The USSR was on a gold standard until at least 1990, but the ruble wasn’t worth much. Even Switzerland has abanonded the gold standard. They were the last country to do it (after the USSR). They stopped circulating silver in 1967, and were on fractional gold (at 40 percent) until 2,000. From 2000 on they have been off the gold standard and sold off their gold reserves, down to a present value of about 20 percent of Swiss francs in circulation, But the gold isn’t related to any valuation of the economy.
As you may imagine, they have suffered terribly, with the Swiss franc trading today at 1.09to the dollar. When it was on gold, the rate was less.
And Switzerland is, by way of comparison, not possessed of an overvalued housing market, and the average price of a home is valued at 900,000USD and the US (in a market which is overvalued, even after the recent collapse), is at 272,000USD.
So yeah, Gold, not so much.
And Dude… “Stalin and FDR’s War”. Yeah, Hitler probably would have done something different if the Molotov/Ribbintrop Non-Agression Pact hadn’t been signed, but neither of those two started the war. And things like the Anschluss, and the annexation of the Sudetenland and the demands for Gdansk, all of that was peacful as never you mind.
That whole invasion of France, and Russia, and Greece, the rampaging across Northern Africa (and the assault on Crete), That was all because of Stalin and FDR?
What, they didn’t just say, “Peace is such a good idea, we’ll just let you have control of Russia, N. Africa, Poland, Ukraine, and 2/3rds of France because you need the Lebensraum”, and so it’s their war?
Your grasp of history seems no better than your ideas for the future.
and left-wing antiwar protest doesn’t exist today, even if it ever did, whether I think about it or not!
Seriously?
Meller, when was the last time you helped organize any protesting? I’ll tell you, you run into other libertarians, but we’re pretty thin on the ground compared to the garden variety democrats and etc… Since, you know, there aren’t many libertarians, and if you think we comprise the entirety of anti-war…
Okay, Meller, how many of us do you think there are? Maybe that’s why you think Paul can get elected…
I have been to protests that didn’t happen, how strange. I can only conclude that either Meller is utterly disconnected with reality, or he lives in some sort of bizarre alternate universe with a different history and sentient dolls.
Also, that whole business with leftist anti-WWI resistence and brutal backlash against them, that must have happened only in my universe, and not in the alternate universe Meller dwells in.
This is like when I pointed out to you how many statist leftists were foes of the CIA’s school of the americas, isn’t it? We don’t believe the conspiracy theories so we have to believe the CIA is a good thing? Meller, I can’t imagine you ever go out there and do much of libertarian anything if you don’t have ANY notion of what the non-libertarian left is doing for good out there.
DKM:
Did you know the 13th Amendment was only passed because Thaddeus Stevens had a black mistress? A dude in Louisiana told A.J. Liebling in the 1960s.
That’s the so-called 13th Amendment, of course. The real 13th Amendment invalidates every Democratic presidential administration since Kennedy.
Pecunium–USSR never had a gold standard-It never even had a fiat money standard. A standard is when people can swap money for goods, either gold, or at least a “substitute” or a “receipt” for gold. None of this prevailed in the USSR. The gold was simply nationalized (e.g. seized by the Party, or more specifically, by the owners of the party, the First Secretary and his “Politburo”, and then spent as said owners wished. This had nothing to do with a “gold standard” of the country, or even the country’s government, which used paper “rubles” for purposes of state mandated “rationing”, for want of anything better.
The closest that the Soviet State may have come to having a money economy, even on a fiat-based ‘ruble standard”, might have been so-called “cirtificate rubles” which highly privileged Soviet officials, top scientists, important diplomats, artistic and sports celebrities, and of course, KGB spies posted abroad, all used to buy foreign goods in special stores, closed off to the ordinary public, or exchanged for foreign currency overseas (which was punished severely, even with death, if used in the USSR by ordinary workers or peasants!
Gold standard, I think not. Even a fiat money standard would be stretching things describing the monetary structure of the USSR!
The value of gold–and even of silver–has remained remarkably stable as purchasing power goes, except it is not the prices which are going up, it is the purchasing power of the fiat money which goes down. To take an extreme example, in 1913, a top-of-the-line “model T” Ford costs 500. brand new. If one considers that the automotive technology was just starting to become marketable to ordinary workers around then, it may be expected to be rather expensive for the time, and it was–although certainly affordable to those who were already prosperous and wanted ‘the latest gadgets”, much like home computers in 1985 or so.
What did this Model-T cost in terms of today’s money. If gold is 1700 dollars an oz today, and it was 20.57 per oz in 1913, a good approximation could be obtained by simply dividing 500 by 20,57 (Okay it’s going to be 20 dollars an oz, because I don’t have a calculator with me, if you don’t like it, YOU do the math!) and we come out to a nice figure of 25 oz of gold. We take 25 oz. and mutiply it by 1700 (today’s dollar price in gold) and we get $42,500–more or less what a new-model good brand new auto would cost today, and certainly comparable to what–in today’s “dollars” would be a likely price for a new top-of-the-line popular automobile.in 1913!
Gold ‘works”! It is fiat currency, which is an attempt to really get something for nothing, which leads to periodic currency crises and banking crises, that fails each and every time, and gold (or silver) reasserts itself as being the legitimate store of value and medium of exchange, after paper notes of credit, banknotes, federal reserve notes and so on…ignominiously drive their issuers (and users) to bankruptcy. When President Nixon “closed the gold window”, suspending gold payment even to foreign banks in August 1971, everyone from Fed Chairman Arthur Burns to Senator Wayne Morse (of Senate Banking Committee) from the New York Times to Nobel Laureate Paul M Samuelson and best selling author John Kenneth Galbraith all predicted the end of Keynes’ so-called “barbarous relic”, and suggested that gold would depreciate in value to c. six dollars an oz (from the 42.22 it was supposedly valued then). The exact opposite happened, the dollar began the first stage (in the ’70s) of its downward spiral, “stagflation” gripped the economy with simultaneous inflation AND unemployment, and gold began its ascent toward some 800 dollars/oz.
Gold–when it is permitted by the government and banks to be– is MONEY. Paper is just paper, good for printing books and magazines, good for cleaning surfaces, and even useful for bathroom purposes, but it is only paper. It is not, and can never be, real money! When governments, or banks, try to use it as money, the results are just as destructive as if they tried to pass laws mandating use of tractors as bicycles, tugboats as speedboats, or of birds as airplanes-and vice versa. A bloody mess!!
“Government takes a socially useful commodity like paper, and by slapping some ink on it, and calling it “money”, eventually renders it completely worthless”-Ludwig von Mises
Maybe Ron Paul–and his supporters–knows something that you don’t!
Meller, I’ve told you, I don’t have a dog in the gold vs. fiat fights when it comes to state currency. But if you think Paul is gonna be able to get us to switch back to the gold standard even if he by some horrific miracle wins the election, you have faith in the powers of the executive branch that far outstrip the Bushes.
What wars are they supposed to be protesting? Gee, I don’t know? Maybe the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan seem to be pretty good for a demonstration or two, The endless,ongoing threates against Iran (so reminiscent of Bush II’s challenges to Saddam Hussein and his WMD remember), the escalation of American intelligence activity in Libya, along with Obomber’s aggressive air and naval support of NATO invasion of that troubled country, the expansion of the CIA “school of the Americas” to truly worldwide dimensions under Clinton, Bush II, and especially President O bomber today, whom unlike his predecessors, doesn’t even recognise any Congressional authority or oversight in his activities!
The extrajudicial murder of Al’ Awlaki and, a week later, his 16 year old son, is something that might have merited a few signs and banners in front of the Whitehouse in Bush years, Leftists there that I am aware of are all too busy whining around various cities that there aren’t as many jobs for valedictorians in black studies, gay studies, gender studies, basket weaving, and thumb twiddling as they had hoped and expected, and that they–and their parents–were now saddled with a lifetime of debt to pay for an “education” about as useful to them as their Occupy Wall Street has been to the rest of us,for the past two months!
One would have to remark that, however, the overtime pay for cops that those loafers cost us 99 percent has sure fattened the wallets and bank accounts of policemen, hasn’t it?
Other wars which antiwar advocates could protest. Maybe the massive gangland type slaughters taking place in a number of States in Mexico. The victims are exclusively civilian, the weapons killing them, and much of training, both of the gangsters and the ‘federales’ courtesy of the CIA and DEA, are by the NorteAmericanos, and it is altogether because of an USA policy run amok–the Nixon/Rockefeller/O-bomber war-on-drugs!
Ron Paul has, alone, opposed this war-on-drugs from the beginning! If there have been any ‘leftist’ demonstrations in front of the Langley headquarters of the CIA headquarters, the DC headquarters of DEA or FBI,or even confronting the appropriate committees of Congress then I have missed them!
There are probably others which I am either overlooking, or don’t have time to discuss, but the fact is that the election of O-bomber in 2008 has sent you leftists–libertarians or otherwise–into a state of suspended animation, politically speaking!
As far as WWII goes, I have never read ANYWHERE, from left, right, or anywhere in between, that Europe or Asia were clearly better off by 1945 then they were in 1939 (or 1937, in the case of the Pacific war), or that Poland was better off or freer in 1945, which Britain and France went to war over in ’39. If Europe was no better off, then the arguments that the US entry into the war(s) ought to have been prevented, becomes VERY persuasive.
How in blazes the UK and France were even supposed to help Poland–even without the Soviet invasion to their east–short of magic has never been made clear to anybody with a map of the continent in 1939! Appeasement, indeed!
The School of the Americas was appalling, but nevertheless, the leftists have done little or nothing since 9/11 to prevent that horror from metasisizing onto the entire world, as the CIA now employs School of the Americas EVERYWHERE from Ghana to Uzbekistan, from Turkey to Guatamala, from Rumania to Columbia…
The original School of the Americas has grown under CIA auspices to literally do its part to turn the entire planet into a loathsome police state for the New World Order. There has even been a pronounced militarization of local and municipal police here in the USA due in large part to their efforts! I almost daily have heard about such CIA activity on the websites (libertarian, like Alex Jones’ excellent infowars.com and his prisonplanet.com, some paleoconservative, or even, as per http://www.anu.org, White Nationalist, which I have cited on these pages, but your leftist sources, not so much! Occasionally a piece from the Nation here, a Center for Constitutional Rights there, but I repeat, not so much!
Nothing is WRONG with your concern about gay “marriage”, abortion, and so on. Whatever makes you happy, I suppose. But we live in very troubled times, which may get MUCH worse, and face adversaries to whom the ‘right to life” of billions of the already born, much less the unborn, are of as much concern as the dirt they scrape off their shoes before entering their house! Prioritize intelligently. Ron Paul isn’t perfect, but at least he isn’t among the enemy!
Did DKM seriously miss the whole Occupy movement? It’s not their sole point, but there are an awful lot of anti-war protestors there.
See, Meller’s version of the left and its activities clearly does not derive from this universe. The “alternate universe” theory gains traction every minute.
Ah, I see. DKM thinks that OWS is about a lack of jobs for “basket-weaving majors.”
You know what OWS is about? OWS is about my mom working for the health insurance, and my friend’s mom who’ll never be able to retire. It’s about the guy who graduated with honors with a degree in economics and works at a shoe store and counts himself lucky to have a job. It’s about five unemployed people for every opening. It’s about people dying because they can’t afford health insurance. It’s about me paying a higher percentage of my income in taxes than George Soros. It’s about half the houses on my block being foreclosed. And, yes, it’s about Iraq and Afghanistan and the drug war, too.
You know why we Occupy? Because we’ve been fucked over for our entire lives, by Wall Street and big corporations that went crying for a bailout when they failed, when I and my friends are doing everything right and suffering the consequences of their malfeasence and no one is bailing us out. That shit has gotta end.
Yes, and they’re wrong.
I watched a thing on YouTube about The Wizard of Oz being an allegory about the gold standard. Bearing in mind that it was the middle of the night, months ago, and I wasn’t really paying attention, here’s the part I took away: if money is based on gold (a limited resource) then only the people with gold will have money. Which is to say, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
The Roman empire started collapsing when they returned to the gold standard (I think). It’s a dumb idea, generally embraced by people who think they’re libertarians, but are actually just self-centred people who don’t realize how much help they get from their neighbours.
@Ozy, have you seen this?
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jJwxp4OFZ74P1lYkFy1r8dortM7w?docId=5796fdc0a0e345ecb7d5d4ff02c3e100
The Rude Pundit said at the time that Wall Street should be littered with the bodies of bankers and brokers. Those fuckers don’t even have the brains to know they should be ashamed of themselves.
What wars are they supposed to be protesting? Gee, I don’t know? Maybe the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan seem to be pretty good for a demonstration or two,
Those would be the wars that the Left has been saying we need to leave. The wars the party Paul supports (and is a member of) says we can’t stop. The wars which the protest of are ignored by the press, and abused by Paul’s Party.
Yes, they never should have started, but when the Left protested they were shouted down; and ignored. It was done so effectively that you have (perhaps conveniently) forgotten just how much protest there was.
I, for one, have complained about the use of assassination as a tool, not just of Americans. I’ve been protesting the over-classification of gov’t information, and the continued erosion of privacy, search and seizure, etc.
The Occupy movement has been protesting those ongoing wars. That too you have conveniently forgotten, or ignored. It would prevent your harangues against, “The Left!!!!!” and steal your thunder as a brave iconoclast standing against the world preaching, “THE TRUTH”.
Rather you have been mewling that women are too uppity and all men ought to be replaced by them in the military, so we can see how ineffective they are, and their return to slavery can be more quickly effected.