Vivat Libertas

It is fashionable, particularly in pseudointellectual circles, to lament the decline of society (perhaps the decline of your country's society, or the decline of society in general). This is usually tied up with much weeping and gnashing of teeth over how stupid people these days are. I've got to say that this kind of lamentation doesn't exactly make you look smart. It mostly makes you look like an elitist asshole with a superiority complex, and while some  intelligent people are like that a lot of them have better things to do than sit around complaining - I'll get onto this later. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't go through an elitist pseud phase, but I'd like to think that I grew out of it. I realised that I was an absolutely insufferable prick and that nobody really wanted to be around me except other insufferable pricks, which is not really a brilliant track record, but more to the point I realised that complaining doesn't actually get anythin...

Dear reader, whoever you are, I want you to know this: women aren't stupid. If you know me, you might be slightly confused because I'm constantly ranting about how stupid humanity is, so I might as well amend that statement: women are not some special kind of magical, sparkly, feminine stupid that somehow manages to make other genders look cleverer by comparison. We are just as intelligent (or as stupid) as you are. At this point, if you're going to trot out men having bigger brains than women or having higher IQs than women, I have this to say to you: firstly, men are physically bigger than women. This is why their brains are bigger. Relative body size has to be factored in when talking about relative brain size. As to men having higher IQs than women? Laying aside the debate about whether IQ is a decent measure of intelligence (because there is a debate, and because once you get past a couple of standard deviations it does break down quite spectacularly when it comes ...

I am a teenager; I am a teenager under sixteen, to be slightly more precise and to give you some insight into my life. According to my elders and my supposed betters, this means that I am hormonal, boy-crazy and reckless. I am supposedly incapable of not being dramatic; any unhappiness I may feel is me making a mountain out of a molehill, ruled by my hormones and in need of a big, strong adult to show the whiny bitch her place. Anything I'm passionate about is just a passing phase, unworthy of discussion. I have nothing resembling logic, and even if I did, how could it compare to the long years of experience that wore my parents down from fired-up people into passive consumers? In short, if I don't follow my parents' advice to the letter (and perhaps even if I do), I'm going to do something stupid, because a bint like me simply isn't capable of justified emotion, actually caring about something, or doing smart things. I used to get really offended by this line o...

So here I am, browsing through the Linkage Archives - great webpage, but prepare to get sucked into a black hole of articles - and I find this and this . It's a positively ancient argument from 1998 in two parts. The first is something which appears to be an academic article, spends a lot of time bullshitting and faffing around with long words, and has an interesting if flawed (for which read loopy) premise which touches on feudal Europe, libertarianism and left-libertarianism, Thomas Jefferson's slave-owning habits and the EU. All this in an essay about what appears to be attitudes to the internet... ...The article doesn't seem to be particularly rooted in reality. Fine. Too illogical for me to bother blogging about normally. However, I was quite taken aback by the tone of the rebuttal, which is the second part. Not because I'm not used to it - I don't actively seek out flames, although I'm quite aware of them - but because you'd expect that kind of sen...