Silflay Hraka

G’day Bruce!

Silflay Hraka, the home of white-hot philisophical debate, directs your attention to the latest entry at Philosoblog, Moral Equivalence.

There is a dominant culture of excellence today. It produces people who lead good lives and who are not likely to take advantage of others. It acts as policeman to the world and throws its huge military weight around. Imagine living in an ivory tower defending a nutty, multiculturalist, socialist utopianism that has now been deemed of lesser value by most of your country. You watch the Big Man strutting around, with his wealth and his happy, judgmental, confident and proud demeanor - it?s enough to drive you mad with envy. Champion the cause of the poor! This will help alleviate your guilt for not being poor, and it will give you a chance for revenge against Big Man. You?ll be able suppress your feelings of envy and guilt if you take up the leftist cause without flinching, no matter what flaws someone might find in your reasoning. Find out Big Man?s sins; try to bring him down a notch or two. Didn?t his spy agency put an evil dictator into power Nicaragua or somewhere like that? Of course, the regime was better than the alternative, but still, that can score a point if you twist it hard enough. And didn?t Big Man make some pretty valueless mass entertainment and some ugly suburbs? Yes, Big Man isn?t so great, and you can put him in his place. If you squint your eyes and cock your head to the side, it almost looks as though his record is morally equivalent to that of every other culture. And surely his values are no better, either.

Thomas Deeny, the artist behind Planet Earth (and other tourist traps) wrote in to thank us for the traffic surge to his 9/11 strip.

While looking over my site’s stats, I noticed a rather large spike from your blog page. It’s really hard to say something meaningless as “thanks for the link” when one considers why the link was there to begin with. In fact, I even feel like a knob for even sending this, but thanks.

So I’ll just say thanks for mentioning Planet Earth (and other tourist traps). A better link to that strip may be here. That page has all the navigation for the rest of the site. (Now I feel even worse. “Thanks for linking to my site. Now go fix your link.” I am such an ass.)

Thomas, we get the Whee! feeling every time someone links to us. I think link sluttage is a natural condition of the Internet. In any case, thanking us for traffic is like complimenting a sloth on his turn of speed. Well, perhaps a hyperactive sloth. I’ll take some credit, but most of it should go to our close, personal friend, Glenn.

Aside: for a glimpse of the relative position of the blogosphere in the Internet, here’s a look at Instapundit’s visitor stats versus those of the fairly well-known webcomic PVP. Now if you’ll excuse, I need to go suck up to Scott Kurtz.

You can read Planet Earth (and other tourist traps) from the beginning here.

Aside: Free No-Prize to the first person who identifies the obscure Silflay Hraka in-joke in the post above.

Arch links

Years ago, in one of my anthropology classes, I hypothesized that early man used the wild grains of the Fertile Crescent to brew beer long before they were used to make bread. After all, rotten grain in water was a much easier concoction than drying, grinding, and baking bread. My hypothesis was huffily dismissed, and I was advised to quit studying in bars. All I can say now is “Here’s mud in your eye, Prof.”

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The absent-minded professor might be the oldest stereotype of all.

We might not be in the situation we are in today if someone had just had the sense to bomb Nebuchadnezzar

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