My latest article, Eat This Book: Review of Brad Edmonds’s There’s a Government in Your Soup: Why There’s Too Much Government in Your Kitchen, and What You Can Do About It, July 24, 2004, LewRockwell.com.
I despise when people use the word “coed”. I don’t think I’ve ever found a need to use it. It’s about as useful as the word “ontology”. I mean what is this, the fricking 1950s? Why would a female student be called a Co-ed? Stupid.
Someone sent me this horribly misogynistic and tasteless email. I just want to say, I strongly object to such immoral objectification of women.
***
Coda: Tim Swanson found out that this woman is porn star Sydney Moon and the original clips are here.
Tucker Max has a new story up. The part from the blind piano player (about 2/5 of the way through) to his toilet adventures in the hotel (about 4/5 through) had me laughing so hard my stomach hurt.
“The accident occurred at the intersection of Fifth and Elm.” You hear such things on occasion, or “where did it happen?” There is an implicit assumption that an event has a location. I do not understand this. And event is a happening. Happenings don’t have a location for they don’t have a body or a size.
If two cars hit each other, where does the accident occur? Between the cars? The volume of space the cars occupied when they first hit? Or the volume of space traced by the cars from the beginning, to the end, of the accident, i.e. a 4-D volume? The concept is simply not well-defined.
To take some other examples–I love my wife. Where is the love? Last year, I loved my dog. Where did this event occur? What was its location? The sun got a year older last year–where did the aging occur? If I talk to a Dutch friend on the phone, where does the conversation, the talking, occur? If I bury a time capsule, and you dig it up after I’d dead, where did the message-conveying occur?
People who say “I was taken back” instead of “taken aback”. Don’t use fancy expressions if you have no real idea of what they really are.
Recipes that call for chicken stock. I have no idea what chicken stock is. I only have cans of broth.
Recipes that say to use a “broiler”. what the heck is a “broiler”? I have an oven. It has a broil feature, but I have no idea when it it to be used, and whether that means I have “a broiler” or not. Sheesh.
Recipes that refer to a pot as a “sauce pan”. I always thought there were pots, and pans. Pans are the low-rimmed things you can fry in. Pots are the deeper things you can boil in. So what in the world is a sauce PAN? Obviously what is meant is a pot, why not call it one.
I hate people. They’re such idiots.
A recent thread on Chronicles where Hoppe’s views were mischaracterized; I attempted to set the record straight.
I hate long outgoing voicemail messages that waste the caller’s time by having to listen to pointless information. I like it short and sweet: “Please leave a message” is good enough. Or, “I’m not here: here’s the beep.” My wife hated the one I left on our home voicemail, it said “LEAVE … A … MESSAGE” in a robotic voice.
Why do people need to say, “I’m not in right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you for calling, and have a nice day.” I want to tear what’s left of my hair out when I have to suffer through such meandering, time-wasting crap like that. Why do you even need to say, “you’ve reached the Kinsellas.” Duh. If it’s a stranger or wrong number, why give them your name? If it’s someone who you want calling you, they already know your name.
Also annoying is when people say, “I’m unavailable to answer the phone right now.” Look, you can say “I’m unavailable” or you can say “I’m unable to answer the phone,” but what the hell does “unavailable to answer the phone” mean?
A recent post on LewRockwell blog lately about this and Thomas Woods versus Thomas Fleming, Storck, et al.; a Chronicles blog thread I participated in with Fleming et al. Here’s another thread I participated in with Scott Richert about the non-aggression principle.
Other recent LRC posts:
Girls and Monkeys
Exponential Progress
ALOHA! LET MY PEOPLE GO (about Hawaii)
Green Nukes
Yet More on Galambos (on Galambos, engineers, and scientism)
Federal Rights and Federal Power (naivety of libertarians wanting the feds to protect our “rights”)
World Investment Court
From LRC Blog:
Yet More on Galambos
Posted by Stephan Kinsella on May 24, 2004 12:02 AM
Tim Swanson’s blog linked to Isaac Waisberg’s blogpost regarding the nonsensical nature of the owning-a-word mentality. Waisberg links to a Harry Browne Liberty article on Galambos. What a crankish nutball.Browne writes: “A few years later, I realized that the inability to conduct controlled, repeatable experiments made it impossible to transfer the methods of the physical sciences to the social sciences — including economics and investments. Still later, I came across Ludwig von Mises’ The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, in which he explains this point better than I could.”
This reinforces what I’ve come to think about Galambos: he adopts the monist, scientistic mentality which Mises showed to be flawed. He is like many engineers I’ve known: most are bright, but nowadays uneducated beyond calculus and applied engineering courses; yet they believe that, because they are the “best and brightest” they can solve social problems by some kind of brute force empirical-practical engineering type solution. The result is almost always embarrassing, totally devoid of any familiarity with philosphy or the relevant literature; it is just a step above the long-winded “I’ve-got-the-world-figured-out” diatribes by frustrated truck drivers who also think they have a system to win the lottery. Galambos was brighter and better read than most engineers, but he could not escape the pseudo-science of scientism into which engineers are immersed; he adopted the idea that we should find a “science” of liberty, with “science” used in the conventional, natural-sciences sense. Kind of a weird combination of California surfer-dude “hey-man” mentality combined with Carl Sagan wide-eyed love for (natrual)-science combined with the engineer’s misplaced confidence in his ability to solve all human problems using engineering techniques.
Galambos was wrong. He should have read Mises.
Galambos’s entire philosophy rests on the shaky grounds of scientism. To the extent I can understand what he really meant, that is. Because of his crankish views, he self-censored and doomed himself to dwindling cult status. Wow, man, like wow. Really impressive. Not.
I have to give Galambos his props, however: look at this great slogan he promulgated: “If you vote, don’t complain.” Now that’s brilliant!
Coda: Writes Tim Swanson): “So true. All of my roommates have been engineers as have most of my friends. Rather than reading any sort of economics text they simply come up with a “plan” utilizing some sort of top-down approach.”
Recent Comments