marketplace of ideas 2

I actually got  Maybe I am Lois, maybe I am, from Seinfeld.  Jerry is a big fan of superman and he is thrilled when he acquires a girlfriend named Lois. Later in the episode he wins a race for her and she gets a Hawaii vacation out of it, and when she asks him if he will join her on the vacation, he folds his arms in front of him and says, "Maybe I will Lois, maybe I will."  The line resonated strongly with me and now I know it must be from memories of the old tv show.

Much of economics is based on the idea of the consumer as a logical unit.  Of course he will buy the cheaper better shoes, but then they realized that the consumer is not a logical unit.  Maybe he will buy the crappier more expensive shoes because Michael Jordan endorsed them.

I never got that endorsement thing.  All it means is that some company gave your hero some money to say nice things about your product because they think that you are so stupid that this will make you buy it.  But sports is stupid, so you expect that sort of thing in that field, but after Tiger Woods got chased out of the house by his wife with a golf club (how come the makers of that golf club never had Mrs Woods endorse her golf club?  Wives around the country could buy it and display it prominently to their potentially errant hubbies) I learned that insurance companies were dropping their sponsorship of him.  Insurance companies?  Would people buy insurance because the salesman was wearing a Tiger Woods hat?


I liked Old Dog article.  Like Beagles points out, we don't sit down in front of the professor and his blackboard, we just pick up language.  We pick up all sorts of things and don't even know we have them.  The order of adjectives particularly interested me.  Big old red wagon sounds fine, red big old wagon and old big red wagon, sound ok, but seem to have a slightly different meaning, and the other three sound like a robot said them.

Those grammar mavens that I have spoken of, sometimes spent a whole column about  a sentence, if this rule is followed then it should be this, but if that rule is followed it should be that, so which rule should be followed, and generally they settled for something simply because it sounded better.  Like there are probably a lot of times in your daily life when you should be saying whom instead of who, but if you do everybody will think there is something wrong with you.


Back to the marketplace of ideas, Old Dog recommends that we fight bad ideas using facts and not opinions, and this is my idea also, and part 2 of The Liberal Agenda, but it takes much longer to debunk a bad idea than to sprout a new one, and there is that curious finding where people exposed to a debunking of their idea believe in it even more strongly than before.

I've been avoiding the subject of social credit because I've found the definitions vague, but I think the gist of it is that more prominent people get more power.  Seems to me that maybe we should give people with more learning a bigger boombox.  A lot of people with a lot of learning are full of shit, but maybe it would average out.

Well we have a long weekend to consider it, if we so choose, for myself, maybe I will, Lois, maybe I will.