Archive for the ‘Stupid’ Category
Maybe free speech is less popular than I thought
Friday, February 3rd, 2012I had a bizarre experience yesterday: I encountered two people who were wrong on the internet who asserted that words can harm people and so their (mis)use should be punishable by law. I don't mean using libel or slander to harm someone's reputation, which should not be considered crimes anyway. ...
Farhad Manjoo is a raging moron and a danger to society
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011It's a good thing Slate.com columnist Farhad Manjoo isn't a historian, or he'd probably argue that the best solution to slavery in America would have been to allow blacks an equal chance to enslave white people, because that would be "fair" in his biased, uninformed, unimaginative mind. Amazon.com is resisting the ...
Because in a free society, unfettered corporations would prey on poor, defenseless individuals and extort them for illegitimate and non-consensual “protection fees”
Thursday, July 14th, 2011Yankees fan Christian Lopez, who caught Derek Jeter's 3000th career hit, which was a home run, could owe an extra $14,000 in income taxes next year due to the value of the seats and other perks the Yankees rewarded him in exchange for giving them the ball back and not ...
Democrats’ same old “raise taxes” crap
Thursday, March 17th, 2011After 8 years of Republican deficits, inflation, cronyism, and war, the liberal Democrats of this country had a nice opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile, or at least stand for something new and different. Their motto was "hope" and "change", and even if we knew their President and their Congress weren't ...
Locavores want to have their cake and eat it, too
Thursday, February 24th, 2011I just typed that title and didn't realize until after typing it that it was quite a good pun. A perfect example of no pun intended! This post does have a point. I really liked this post from a blag called The Whited Sepulchre. It rants against "locavores" who want to ...
Fish in a barrel 7
Monday, May 24th, 2010I've been a little depressed about how little time I have/make for blagging and reading about politics and economics this year, but it's because I'm working a lot, exercising five or six times a week, and watching things obsessively on DVD, like Star Trek and Futurama and True Blood. I ...
Fish in a barrel 6
Thursday, December 17th, 2009For some combination of reasons, the main one probably being the coming of the Second Great Depression and the need of so many people to save money, the exorbitant price of a college degree is being criticized and questioned more loudly and frequently than I can remember. For instance, Peter ...
IP absurdities, part 23,984
Friday, October 30th, 2009"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." —Voltaire Apparently hosting a Harry Potter–themed dinner party for charity around Halloween is an infringement of Warner Bros.'s copyrights.
Comic of the day
Friday, October 30th, 2009This is three years old, but it is today's comic in my Dilbert page-a-day calendar. It's so appropriate for the real world of internet debating in general and political debates in particular.
An “up-or-down vote on health care”?!
Saturday, October 10th, 2009Sadly, we have yet another example of liberal short-sightedness and overall inability to understand the key part of an issue: this petition that the political action committee Progressive Change Campaign Committee is going to submit to Harry Reid. It reads, "Any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block ...
Obama: More government school is the answer!
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Perhaps you've heard that the Savior of America and his Secretary of Education are proposing rules (edicts backed with explicit threats of murder) that would add hours to the school day and days to the school year. This is so typical of the simple-minded Statism that pervades Washington that I'm ...
Government health insurance, Social Security, private mortgage lenders
Sunday, July 5th, 2009At this site and others you might have come across the libertarian argument that State-provided medical insurance will out-compete private medical insurance because the State has the privilege of coercing ever-increasing tax revenues out of its captives. For instance, I blagged about Sheldon Richman's recent column putting forth this and ...
This just in: Americans are stupid
Friday, June 19th, 2009No, this isn't just stupid. It's stupid and evil and inhumane. As if electing complete idiots with no economic knowledge and no regard for individual rights to the presidency every four years for the last several decades weren't proof enough: A jury ruled in favor of the RIAA, against the ...
Obamaism is Statism
Friday, April 10th, 2009Out of some strange curiosity I decided to peruse The New Yorker, probably because it is supposed to be a source of good artistic criticism, cultural-political commentary, and humor. One of the first things that caught my eye was "Obamaism" by George Packer. It is supposed to be a commentary ...
Refutation is simple
Monday, March 23rd, 2009All you have to do is just state something as a fact! Don't believe me? Watch how simple it is! When I saw his list of questions that he would supposedly refute, I was very interested in number 3: "Isn't having to work for a boss in capitalism the same as having ...
John’s thought of the day
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Maybe if Americans weren't so stupid and/or willfully ignorant of important political and economic issues, they wouldn't be as outraged at AIG executive bonuses as they were at the government taking all that money from people who earned it and giving it to people who didn't in the first place.
Keynesianism in The Fifth Element
Saturday, March 7th, 2009Zorg: "Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder, and chaos. Now, take this empty glass. Here it is, peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is [knocks glass off table] destroyed... [robots come to clean it up] Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how ...
Overeating makes you the property of the State
Sunday, February 15th, 2009Not surprisingly, now the nanny-state fascists want to take obese children away from their parents. Certainly many people who procreate are bad parents and some are even entirely unfit to be parents. You know what I think makes people even less qualified to be parents than the parents of obese ...
Saving is good, not bad, for American economy
Sunday, February 1st, 2009I was pretty angered by this Associated Press article, Americans save just when economy needs their money, by Martin Crutsinger. The very reason that Western economies, especially the U.S.'s, have experienced bubbles that have burst and left many people with dying businesses, foreclosed homes, no jobs, and insufficient savings ...
How to create jobs in a heartbeat
Thursday, January 29th, 2009So said a headline on MSN.com this morning. It links to an article at Slate.com. Wait, before I click on the link, let me guess! Hmmm...take even more money, even faster, away from individuals, and borrow or print even more money than ever before, and throw it at government works ...
Quote of the day
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009From bumbling idiot and Obama-worshipper Brad DeLong (page 12 of the linked article): Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter led those "Austrian" economists who tried to build theories in which government attempts to cure recession caused more harm than good. Behind Hoover and Hayek stands the figure of Karl Marx, who critiqued ...
Freedom-hating “nudger” appointed to regulatory post
Thursday, January 8th, 2009Skip Oliva writes about the appointment of Harvard law school professor Cass R. Sunstein as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This is one of the most important "regulatory" (murder/slavery-mongering) bureaucracies in the federal government. There isn't much I could add to Oliva's post. Except to link ...
Scarcity is not shortage
Thursday, December 11th, 2008The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. —Thomas Sowell I might only be an amateur student of economics, and a lazy one at that (I have totally ...
Unlawful imprisonment on airplanes
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008Passengers aboard a TACA International Airlines flight were kept on board the plane for nearly 14 hours on November 30. It was supposed to be 4.5 hours. Radley Balko asks, "How is holding someone in an enclosed airplaine on a tarmac with no circulating air and little food or water ...
Undecided voters are the biggest idiots on the planet
Monday, November 3rd, 2008In Michigan and probably some other states, there has been some moderate amount of discussion, amongst state legislators and radio hosts and other worthless people, about whether voters should be allowed to wear political shirts to their polling places on election day. Since campaign advertisements such as signs and flyers ...
Hamburgers
Friday, October 24th, 2008In a valient effort to not be very productive at work on a Friday, I stumbed across a group on Facebook that has a collection of amusing pictures. Like most of my college aged cohorts that populate Facebook, this group is unabashedly pro-Obama. He's the new Jesus, so sayeth the ...
Liberals obsessed with Sarah Palin
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008My hardcore-Democrat friends (read: my friends) are officially obsessed with Sarah Palin. Not in the stupid, absurd way in which Charles Murray or Rich Lowry are, but it is no less pathetic. They gave up talking about the issues three or four weeks ago—although they did watch the idiotic and ...
Andy Rooney: More war! More death! More inflation! More corporatism!
Monday, October 20th, 2008I still don't have much time for real writing, but I hope to some time late this week; until then, enjoy this dim-witted quote from the doddering old Andy Rooney, from last night's "60 Minutes": I'd really like to meet our next president, so I sort of hate to tell you ...
Quote of the day
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008"This is the way government's supposed to work, folks, and it did." —Senator Judd Gregg, R-NH, on the "Bank Robbery of 2008" How right he is, though he has no idea why.
Democratic voters are stupid, evil, or ignorant
Sunday, September 28th, 2008Being a big-shot blagger is a stressful and demanding hobby. Similar to the evolution of rules, bylaws, punishments, and social mores in a customary-law society, our positions, assertions, and predictions are under constant judgment and scrutiny by the global community of readers and other blaggers, leading to the success of ...
Mob-rule is the answer
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Yeah, 'cause that worked real great in ancient Athens.
“Libertarian paternalism” is idiotic
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008This concept of "libertarian paternalism" is possibly the stupidest thing I've heard since some self-described libertarians suggested that Rudy Giuliani had a libertarian molecule in his body. It is so stupid because it is a metaphysical impossibility. Tim Harford of the Financial Times seems to be largely amenable to the ...