Bash.org collects quotes from chat room conversations, and is an amusing waste of time (which is a good thing).  Here are a few examples.

#648801:

[Demon Beaver] So, at the LAN-party, there was a new guy.
[Demon Beaver] And when he went for a drink, we snuck up to his pc, and created a folder called Horse-Porn on the desktop.
[Demon Beaver] Then we took a screenshot, put it as his wallpaper, and deleted the folder.
[Demon Beaver] He tried to get rid of that folder for 3 hours! ^^

#5273:

[erno] hm. I’ve lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can’t figure out where in my apartment it is.

#287414:

[DeadMansHand] haha, last night, me and pete went out to celebrate his engagement and got hugely drunk
[DeadMansHand] we got this great idea to bury eachother in the sand close to the water and see who would chicken out first
[DeadMansHand] took about a half hour, but the water got up to my face so i freaked and got out
[DeadMansHand] i looked around for pete and he must’ve chickened out before me and stumbled home or something heh
[DeadMansHand] What’d he say when he woke up this morning?
[Thirteen-] uhh.. he hasn’t come home yet.. i thought he was staying with you?
[DeadMansHand] holy fuck.
[DeadMansHand] i fucking hope im wrong about what im thinking right now
[DeadMansHand] im fucking going back to the beach to make sure
[DeadMansHand] if he gets home, call me, i don’t want to be worrying about this
[Thirteen-] will do. you better hope he’s not still buried, you’ll be in deep shit.
quit: (DeadMansHand)
[Tyran] wtf? pete came home last night you fuck. Ken’s going to be worrying about this shit all day
[Thirteen-] haha yea, but it will be fun while it lasts
join: (PeteRepeat) (bob@3F8C4655.11D1C8C.18637D35.IP)
[PeteRepeat] fucking ken
[PeteRepeat] ken… that fucker buried me in the sand last night, i ran off about 5 minutes to it, left him there to be an idiot
[quiqsilver] pete, ken didn’t come back last night, i thought he was with you.
[PeteRepeat] oh fuck.
[PeteRepeat] if ken shows up, make sure he doesn’t know that im at the beach digging for his body. i don’t want him to think i care or anything.
quit: (PeteRepeat)
[Thirteen-] rofl. Those 2 are going to get a huge surprise when they meet at the beach.
[Tyran] i can’t beleive how perfect their timing was

#4753:

[xterm] The problem with America is stupidity. I’m not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don’t we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

Posted by Rob Fisher as Geekism, Links at 9:59 PM EDT

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Perry de Havilland explains a few things about the source of the power of large corporations (emphasis his):

When the state uses the power of eminent domain to take land from people so a wealthy corporation can profit from it, that is an example of state power. When corporations get subsidies and regulations which make it harder for new market entrants to compete with them, that is an example of state power. When corporations use laws to bust unions and restrict reasonable rights of workers to organise, that is an example of state power.

Large corporations can coerce people because they can manipulate excessively mighty state power. The problem is the amount and scope of coersive power that the state has been allowed to accumulate.

And in the comments section, in answer to the question, “How do propose we eliminate the government power businesses abuse?”:

By refusing to accept that most of what states do is morally valid and proceeding on that basis. The whole point of (viable) constitutions are to limit the powers of the state, so the basic notion that political power (which means using the collective means of coercion to make people do things) is something that has to have limits is hardly radical. That needs to be built on.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, Links at 9:44 PM EDT

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I came across Stephen Hicks‘ website via a Samizdata article or comment a while back.  There are some interesting articles there.  One that jumped out at me was Global Problems Are Too Big for Little Kids.  It’s about the risks of scaring schoolchildren with the world’s real and imagined problems.

Children are not able to deal with problems of international garbage disposal when they are still grappling with issues of personal hygiene. They are not able to put in context issues of international race relations when they are struggling with how to deal will schoolyard bullies and being talked about behind their backs.

When students are overloaded, they become frustrated and frightened. When they think the problems they are being asked to consider are too much to absorb, they give up trying to understand. If the teacher persists, the student simply mouths the appropriate words to appease him or her.

I saw exactly that happen when I was at school.  We were fed all the usual stuff about acid rain and rainforest destruction, and everyone just accepted it and parrotted it right back.  (I also remember being shown an animal rights propaganda video which turned half the girls in the class into vegetarians, and a guest speaker in science class gave a lecture on the limits of growth, which I now know was complete rubbish.)

Hicks has another article published on an Objectivist site, about the conflict between free speech and post-modernism.  It includes an interesting example of the difference between leftist egalitarianism and individualism.

I sometimes have a fantasy that I will play one-on-one basketball with Michael Jordan. He comes by when I am shooting some hoops, and I challenge him to a game. He accepts, and we get into the game. We even have a referee to make sure that there is no undue fouling and so forth.

But then an element of realism enters my fantasy. How would this game actually turn out? Well, we play according to the rules of basketball and Michael wins 100 to 3—one time before he got too close to me, I got a shot off and it happened to go in.

Now let’s ask an ethics question: Would that be a fair game? There are two completely different answers one could give, the leftist and egalitarian answer versus the answer that you are probably thinking of. The first answer says that the game would be completely unfair because Stephen Hicks has no chance at all of winning against Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan is the best basketball player in the universe, and I am an occasional weekend player with an 8-inch vertical clearance when I jump. To make the game “fair,” this answer says, we would need to equalize the radical difference in abilities that are entering into competition here. That is the egalitarian answer to the question.

The other answer says it would be a perfectly fair game. Both Michael and I chose to play. I know who he is. Michael has worked hard to develop the skills that he has acquired. I have worked less hard to acquire the lesser number of skills that I have. Also, we both know the rules of the game, and there is a referee who is impartially enforcing those rules. When the game was played, Michael shot the ball into the basket the number of times needed to earn his 100 points. He deserves the points. And I deserve my three points as well. So, Michael won the game fair and square, and I should seek out other people to play with. That is the liberal individualist answer to the question.

But if we are committed to the egalitarian notion of “fair,” then we are led to the notion that in any competition we must equalize all of the participants so that they have at least a chance of success. And this is where the principle of altruism comes in. Altruism says that in order to equalize opportunities we must take from the strong and give to the weak, that is, we must engage in redistribution. What we can do, in the basketball case, is equalize by not allowing Michael to use his right hand; or if it is a matter of jumping, by making him wear weights on his ankles so that his jumping and my jumping are equalized. That is the principle of sports handicapping, which is widely used, and it entails not letting someone employ an asset so that the little guy has a chance. The other possible strategy is to give me a 90-point head start. That is, we would not take anything away from Michael that he has earned, but rather we would give me something that I have not earned. Or of course we could employ both remedies simultaneously. So, there are three approaches. (1) We can try to equalize by preventing the stronger from using an asset or a skill that he has. (2) We can give the weaker an advantage that he has not earned. Or (3) we can do both.

There is a general pattern here. The egalitarian starts with the premise that it is not fair unless the parties who are competing are equal. Then, it points out that some parties are stronger in some respect than others. Lastly, it seeks to redistribute in some way in order to make the parties equal or it seeks to prevent the stronger from using their greater assets.

Finally, Hicks has a blog-like section with links to lots more interesting reading.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 9:55 PM EDT

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