Category: Stupidity

Larry nails big-Ell Libertarians:

Libertarians tend to be upper-middle-class professionals. What these Libertard upper-middle-class professionals fail to realize is that their status and wealth is protected by un-Libertarian law and custom (i.e. requiring law degrees and bar examinations; why not let the market decide who should be a lawyer?)
The truly wealthy realize they don’t need a political philosophy to protect their wealth. Indeed, the very wealthy usually realize their wealth — just like the wealth of most of the middle-class — derives precisely from the non-Libertarian structure of society. Henry Ford couldn’t have become rich unless his workers were paid sufficiently above cost to afford to buy his automobiles.

The thing which I find infuriating about Libertarians is that they treat their damned philosophy as some kind of Revealed Truth, just like religious fundies. Things like property rights and markets are human inventions: fairly recent ones, and (if history is any guide) quite likely to be modified or replaced over the next few thousand years.

It seems that the TSA has been lowering the bar for hiring new staff; it looks like a single-digit IQ is sufficient to get hired here in Seattle. From Consumerist:

A 5-year-old boy was detained as “security risk” because he had the same name of someone on the TSA “No-Fly” list. The TSA had to conduct a full search of their persons and belongings. When his mother went to pick him up and hug him and comfort him during the proceedings, she was told not to touch him because he was a national security risk. They also had to frisk her again to make sure the little Dillinger hadn’t passed anything dangerous weapons or materials to his mother when she hugged him.

I know, I’m being unfair to real sufferers from paranoia and OCD. But how else to describe these pusillanimous nincompoops? Honestly: I don’t recognize the country I was born in. I know this story is from the Daily Mail ((And they get it wrong by describing this as a “PC” issue, which it isn’t.)), but even so…

A leading children’s author was told to drop a fire-breathing dragon shown in a new book – because the publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations.
It is just one of the politically correct (sic) cuts Lindsey Gardiner says she has been told to make in case youngsters act out the stories.
As well as the scene showing her dragon toasting marshmallows with his breath, illustrations of an electric cooker with one element glowing red and of a boy on a ladder have had to go.

At least these idiots are only screwing around with books. Here in the U.S.A., the paranoid idiots are playing games with people’s lives.
UPDATE: This ridiculous dumbing-down of material for children is in full swing on this side of the Atlantic, too. Today’s NYT reports that DVDs of the original Sesame Street are not suitable for children:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
[…]
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Aldous Huxley nailed this ghastly kind of insipid ((As he put it, “All of the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”)) mind-control in Brave New World:

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides – made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions… Suggestions from the State.”

Just to prove that stupidity innumeracy knows no national borders, we have a classic example from the UK, courtesy Good Math, Bad Math. The context: a lottery game which involved identifying which numbers (temperatures) were less than some target. And some of the numbers were negative…

On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

It’s interesting to relate this (common) kind of innumeracy with the “naive physics” that Pinker describes in his books. Perhaps the world isn’t ready for negative numbers; anyone for °Kelvin?

The Register reports that the House of Lords debated the ban on carrying liquids onto planes, and thereby demonstrated that British politicians are as stupid and scaremongering as their US counterparts.

At times, the debate seemed to verge on the whimsical.
“We should not complain too loudly,” said the Baron. “I always celebrate the fact that there is effective security at airports… A friend of mine had two jars of Marmite confiscated, which I thought was a bit tough at the time, but these are the things that we have to put up with.”
The only possible reading of this is that, now that the Baron has been briefed in by security experts, he no longer considers the Marmite seizure unjustified. The implications of this are literally breathtaking.
Yes, that’s right: the government have warning of a fiendish terrorist plot to destroy airliners using EXPLODING MARMITE. (Aiee!)

Where’s Neddy Seagoon when you need him for the voice-over?

Quite apart from ignoring their own End User License Agreements, it now appears that Microsoft doesn’t understand the concepts of A/B testing and “phased deployment”. One user reported that:

Window Server Update Services forced Windows Desktop Services 3.01 on the fleet of machines even though admins had configured their system to install updates only for existing programs and the search program wasn’t installed on any machines (well, until then, anyway).

Of course, Microsoft’s EULAs are written so broadly that it is probably quite legal for them to trash your system by mistake.

Apparently IBM wants to patent a “system and method for extracting value from a portfolio of assets”. Patenting the use of a patent portfolio… I need a stiff drink: pass me that Klein bottle of whiskey, please.

Over at Psychsound, Steve Bergstein has posted an extraordinary piece entitled A tale of two decisions (or, how the FBI gets you to confess). It’s about how an Egyptian national was arrested after 9/11 and was coerced into making a “confession”. Then a witness appeared who undermined the FBI’s coerced story; the Egyptian was released, and sued the FBI. The Court of Appeals published an opinion in his favour, then withdrew it and re-issued it with some material redacted:

“This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy’s statements were coerced.”

But it was too late: the original opinion was loose on the Internet. And so we can read the redacted material, which turns out to be a detailed account of how the FBI coerced the confession.
The chilling thing is that we have no idea how many of these coercions the FBI got away with.
And why was this story not front page news everywhere? A commenter over at Washington Monthly nailed it depressingly well:

Ho hum. Rendition, old story. Torture, old story. Imprisonment without due process, old story. Shredding of Constitution, old story.
MSM sez “We’ve been there. Done that.”
Dumbledore gay? Now THAT’s news.

—
(HT to Terry.)

In these times of high oil prices and green sensibility, environmentally friendly small cars would seem to be an important segment. So why are the auto makers so unimaginative in naming their products? Mercedes created the SMART car a few years ago, and now Toyota is teaming up with Yamaha to build something almost identical. And what are they calling it? The iQ…

NYPD: Keeping citizens safe from those evil hopscotch-playing children:

Since when is a kid’s chalk drawing “graffiti”? Since the City Council passed local law 111 in 2005, which defined “graffiti” as “any letter, word, name, number, symbol, slogan, message, drawing, picture, writing … that is drawn, painted, chiseled, scratched, or etched on a commercial building or residential building.”

And that, apparently, includes drawing in chalk on the sidewalk/pavement.