Review of “The Wingnut Musings” by Ilkka Kokkarinen

Ilkka’s blog is gone and his book is slowly disappearing from Amazon.

(Perhaps he wants it that way – if so, I’ll delete the post if he contacts me). (Perhaps you’d like his book. If so, email me and I’ll pirate you a copy, since I have an ebook edition).

His book is a collection of his blog posts, with a liberal amount of editing in some cases. Ilkka’s posts are always relatively short – a long paragraph at most. However, they are always filled with insight on the contradictory nature of our ruling ideology.

Ilkka grew up in Finland and now teaches (taught?) at a university in Canada. One can’t help but wonder if he is so insightful because he grew up in a strange society – Finland was filled with contradictions because it was almost, sort-of Soviet. He seems to effortlessly notice contradictions in society and he sets his sights on progressivism.

Perhaps the best way to review this book – since it is unavailable and his blog is gone – is to quote extensively from it.

On progress:

If the average person from the year 1900 were magically transported to our time, he would see us the way we see Flavor Flav and wonder how everyone can be some kind of a clown in colourful clothes, and how nobody ever seems to take anything seriously, let alone worry about the few important issues that make sense to him, such as getting enough food and drink.

Food and diversity:

I can’t remember who it was who compared the dietary rules of SWPL’s and Orthodox Jews with the result that the latter really are not really that much more complicated. For example, the SWPL dietary rules limit the distance the food is allowed to travel before consumption, a concept that doesn’t exist at all in Kashrut, and uses for this purpose a rule that is completely arbitrary so that clearly its only purpose is to make the faithful demonstrate their obedience to Gaia. Our local mall these days has two grocery stores, Wal-Mart for people who are suspicious of diversity but tolerate it in their daily lives, and Whole Foods for people for those who .

On urban development:

There really is no mystery why young white progressives gush over certain neighborhoods and entire cities such as Portland and Austin (and pseudo-cities such as Burning Man) that allow them to acto poor without having to live next to people who really are poor in a sad and totes non-ironic way and who make better desolation porn as arena for your extreme hide-and-seek leagues than actual neighbors. The calls for "smart growth" to keep these cities "weird" and "creative" is an euphemism for keeping them something else that is best left unspoken.

Randoms:

What is the lowest IQ that allows some person to write a peer-reviewed paper that proves that IQ is meaningless?

Transsexuals are the actual transhumanists of today, boldly using medicine and technology to alter their physical existence to be more to their liking. Even so, a couple of things. First, I trust that we will never again hear that nonsense of how all differences between men and women are socially constructed. (If they were, what could a doctor’s scalpel do about it?) Second, if everyone "really" is what they feel "inside" regardless of their corporeal form, tell me, how far does this principle extend? Instead of the tired example of a man who thinks he is Napoleon (with the bicorne always helpfully issued by the mental institution to go with the straitjacket and goofy laughter), suppose somebody honestly believes he really is of different race than what he was born as. Say, a white guy feels that he is actually a black man. If he puts on blackface paint and an afro wig, and starts talking "jive" to his fellow citizens, is the rest of the world obligated to go along with this? If not, what is the essential (sic) difference here?

The easiest way to instantly tell which way some neighborhood leans in elections is to step inside a fast food restaurant and check to see if you can simply walk into the bathroom, or whether you have to ask somebody behind the counter to buzz you in.

I was more confused than a woman’s studies professor visiting an African village during a public clitoridectomy.

The only thing women clearly do better without men is raise the next generation of criminals.

On crime, Ilkka proposes that every person propose his or her own multiplier, which would be made public:

For example, if you robbed somebody whose chosen multiplier was 5, your one-year prison term would become five years. This would automatically steer rational criminals to commit their crimes against those who are most indifferent to crime and indicate this with their choice of a low multiplier.

On drug legalization:

The standard argument for drug legalization says that all problems of drugs really result from drugs being illegal, drug users being forced to commit crimes to get their daily doses of dope, whereas if drugs were legal and sold openly at cost plus a reasonable profit margin and tax used for rehabilitation, junkies wouldn’t have to rob, steal and burglarize to afford their fix, but could maintain a perfectly normal middle-class lifestyle between the bouts of messing up their heads and still sober up by Monday morning just like the rest of us normos. However, if we ask those who know a lot about drugs and actually have a lot to lose if they are wrong, the drug cartels themselves, all of them have a strict policy of being highly intolerant towards their members using drugs, since they know perfectly well how unreliable junkies are in positions of actual responsibility.

Mental health:

. . . it is still odd how drug addiction, ADD and similar ailments only ever prevent people from doing stuff that they don’t much like to do anyway . . . but never doing any stuff that they enjoy.

The 20th Century:

if you take the 94 million kulaks, capitalists, dissidents and other groups of people that socialists murdered in the twentieth century, and punch the numbers into a calculator, the average number of victims per hour equals almost exactly the one-hour kill count of Anders Breivik. Just imagine how absurd it would be if, instead of being captured and neutralized, Anders were simply allowed to keep killing people day and night until the twenty-second century dawns. And yet such an absurdity practically defined the twentieth century.

One more on 20th Century:

The batting record of the verbal intellectual class during the twentieth century was so horrible that if every one of them had decided to become a pedophile instead of an intellectual, the total count of the innocent victims of their anointed visions would have been at least two orders of magnitude lower.

Occupy Wall St:

The whole spectacle of how the media and academia unanimously praised these smelly hippies, unemployed critical studies majors and outright street people as noble revolutionaries and trailblazers who will transform the whole world into a progressive utopia where our lives are managed by people who clearly currently can’t begin to manage even their own, is not that different from when Caligula appointed a horse as a senator.