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.
Meller: 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,
That, my dear boy, is called exchange. I can do that right now. I did it, actually, this evening. I swapped $27 for a bottle of gin.
A standard is when a commodity is said to be worth a given unit of exchange. The USSR had a reserve of gold and they said rubles were worth a given quantity.
I happen to own a silver coin, from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, about 3/4s of an oz.(Tr), worth five rubles, at the time.
So, once again, you are wrong. Not only did Soviet Russia have a specie standard, they passed silver as current.
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!
And, you have no clue how standards work. A standard defines the value for the money. The Gov’t defines the value of money as a quantity of gold. In the US that was $20US = 1 Oz (Tr). So, using your model, the value of gold stops becoming the measure of inflation you pretend it is.
So, what you really have is the problem that, as the economy expands, the available money, to grease the flow of goods.
Looking at the record, pre-1930s (and the move to a fiat currency), the boom-bust cycle was pretty steady (and those countries which quit a commodity standard were more quick to recover from the Great Depression; which was actually not as bad as the Depression of the 1870s). Post 1930, and the combination of a more liquid currency, and regulations limiting the behavior of banks, the busts were a lot smaller, and less frequent.
Luckily for us, a return to the Cross of Gold, isn’t going to happen, because gold isn’t money; no matter how you choose to attempt it’s reification. Money is money, and any medium of exchange people agree to will work. Artificially limiting the value of money, and the free exchange of goods(with gov’t regulation… why are you so keen on that?) is bad for business.
Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
Meller, first of all, knock it off with “the leftists” as distinct from “libertarian” when you know damn well you’re speaking to a left libertarian. I ask again, how many of us libertarians, left or right, do you think that there ARE? Whatever our intentions, if we ever get anything done, it’s with a lot of help from allies. And I am telling you as somebody who has actually WORKED to protest the school of the americas, I am very lucky to have had such wonderful non-libertarian leftist allies as I did there. Do you want details, or am I, indeed, talking to somebody from an alternate universe?
Ozy: William Jennings Bryan!
As when you (tellingly, I suppose) said that you guessed my politics were those of “the new left” circa the sixties, despite my telling you that I was a libertarian several times by that point, I remind you that I think you are stuck in your own version of the culture wars of the sixties and seventies. Historically, that fascinates me, but Meller, that was before I was born. The left now is not the left then. The right now is not the right then. Libertarianism now is not libertarianism then, and lets not go into how none of it ever really was how you describe it, either.
Meller, I could sit here all day and list off the horrors of the CIA, but again, I don’t believe in the new world order. Since I don’t think electoral politics are how libertarians should proceed, you can have your internet libertarian jesus Chairman Ron Paul. But let me put it this way. As a queer woman, queer rights and the right to control my own body are, believe it or not, more immediate and pressing to me than the income tax, even though I AM opposed to the income tax. Priorties indeed. This is my life, health, and safety, not some trivial, silly issue to be pushed aside, especially not because “The Illuminati’s A Comin!”
Right to my own body and health – Strangely about fifty spaces above “income tax is unethical in my pure libertarian theoretical conception” when it comes to my priorities.
Us silly ladies and our failure to deal with the important.
ozy, good catch. 🙂
Also, Ron Paul is the ONLY voice out there calling for an end to the drug war? Or even the most famous?
Have you ever heard of a guy named Jimmy Carter?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/opinion/17carter.html?_r=2
Given both his doll love and his opposition to the drug war I am now wondering if Meller has little tabs of acid hidden inside the clothes of his dolls. So, every time he creepily snuggles one he gets a hit, and thus another rambling, illogical post based in an imaginary universe is born.
But wouldn’t it mellow him out more than that? Is he still using the bad batch he got at anti-hippy woodstock? Or, wait, he got one of the CIA batches… It’s all coming together now!
BTW, before you comment on that, Meller, – see how it works? he CIA DID do unethical LSD experiments. There is still no New World Order.
Seriously, how many times in your life do you get to pull out the “crucify mankind upon this cross of gold”? I wish the gold standard would become more of an issue purely so I could quote it more.
I figure maybe he had a really bad trip in the 60s and he’s never recovered. Perhaps a feminist gave him the bad acid, and thus a dream to kill or reprogram all modern women was born.
My god… Feminist Jezebel offered to expand his mind… He ended up on the run, pursued by things to vile to imagine, the paper money in his pockets multiplying and blowing away in great clouds, none of his pursuers willing to take it in order to pay the debt they said he had incurred – They just kept pointing to his gold filling… Then finally, he collapsed and found some refuge…In a collectible doll warehouse…
Maybe feminists from the future came to kill him and a doll appeared and said “come with me if you want to live.”
They are seperated now, by centuries. But Meller knows that someday, even if he doesn’t live to see it, his Robocutie will live… Not organically alive, “live” but still kinda alive in a way, you know? And she and others like her will be there for the surviving Real Men, ready to finally replace feminists and then…
FOOD FOR THOUGHT!!!
Ami: I’m imagining that as an even weirder version of “Mr. Roboto” by Styx.
I was picturing something more like Metropolis myself.
Bryan had an amazing ability to speechify…one of my pals who has a blog has a tag line from Bryan:
“We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them!”
Although if you listen to him give the speech, it still gives you goosebumps even if it was not as electrifying as when he first gave it.
That Bryan is mostly remembered now for the popularized version of the Scopes trial, is a wicked shame. He was somewhat paternalistic in many ways (prohibition supporter, etc), but he was so far from today’s frothing fundie, and quite a champion for women’s equality in the terms of his era’s popularist christianity. It makes you wonder what happened to THAT old time religion.
On the other hand, he may have been among the “kinder/gentler” imperialists and colonialists, but he was still very much a promoter of the white man’s burden… http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/w_bryan_white.html
Historical figures, dude… they’re all complex and shit.
“Again, If not explicitly enumerated for the Federal government, it goes to states or people.”
See, the thing is, I don;’t like how fuzzy it gets between “states” and people. I’m largely for more state power vs. the federal gov, if we’re playing the politics game – but not if, as it often seems to, it becomes an excuse for racists, anti choicers, homophobes, and etc to establish mini territories and lay the force of the state down on people’s heads harder than the fed would. Decentralization is good, but decentralized tyranny is still tyranny. The OR THE PEOPLE needs to be writ larger than “the states” in terms of rights – And again, I’m not a constitutionalist libertarian, but that “or people” shouldn’t be just an add on.
I never got why paper is viewed so badly by the gold “standard-bearers”. It is used to make books, magazines, scripts, sheet music, drawings, receipts, documents, contracts, receipts, and probably many other things I can’t remember right now. It has been the basis of the transmission of human culture and knowledge for an incredible amount of time. Even in the “information age” it is still used a lot.
I think that makes paper a little more valuable than a shiny metal, but maybe that’s just me.
zhinxy: Steven Jay Gould did an interesting piece on Bryan, and his oppostion to evolution. He ties it, actually, to his sense of social justice. He saw it being used as the excuse for rapacious business practice, at the expense of most of the rest of the world. So he wanted a return to the morality of his religion; with it’s emphasis on the share nature of man, and the need to care for the least among us.
Which has a plausible coherence, which the common interpretation lacks.
I read that a long time ago, yes, now that you mention it! (Need to reread all the steven jay gould, really. 😉 ) Gould also floated that he might have been opposed to it’s use in eugenics, if I’m not mistaken, though as much as I’d like to believe that of anyone, I don’t think we can know for sure. Still, even if it was based purely on Bryan’s religion, with his social justice rationales aside, it’s still important to remember the good he did as “The Great Commoner” aside from that, even if his passion for justice always did cool at the color line.
(tangentally related – I’ve been doing some research into the man who coined the term “social darwinism” – Herbert Spencer, and finding a much more nuanced and humane theory there than it became or history has remembered. Ah the olden days with their complexity. It’s almost like they thought they were modern or something! )