Category: Egoism in Action (page 30 of 30)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Through the good offices of Jimmy Tomatoes, I found out today that I am cashing in on BloodhoundBlog. How? By means of my membership in the Amazon Affiliates program, which pumps something less than twenty cents a day into our coffers.

I’ve talked about this before, but clearly mere talk is not enough. On top of everything else I’ll be doing this weekend, I’m going to de-Affiliate every Amazon link. It’s absurd to eliminate five bucks a month of inflow — money that mostly just accumulates at Amazon.com — especially considering that our web hosting plan runs to $75 a month. But I don’t want there ever to be even the hint of a possibility of an implication that BloodhoundBlog is compromised by pecuniary considerations.

For that same general reason, I decided this afternoon to pull out of the Blogger’s Connect events at this year’s Inman Connect in San Francisco. I have had qualms about this since the moment I said I would do it:

(As a matter of disclosure, I have been offered a complimentary ticket and hotel room to Inman Connect this summer. I’m scheduled to speak, so I can argue to myself that this is an honorarium, but that feels like a rationalization. At the same time, I do feel that Caesar’s Wife should be free from even the hint of a suspicion. Lucky me, I don’t have to decide what to do yet.)

Brad Inman and his staff have been nothing but decent to me, but I am not comfortable with the idea that there might even be a scintilla of doubt in someone’s mind about my independence, personally, or about the independence of BloodhoundBlog.

This is real life inside my skin: When Inman Connect rolled around in January, I took a little poke at it. No big deal, except I had just started posting as a guest blogger at the Inman Blog, a position I have since resigned. Some sleazoid insisted that I wouldn’t say the same thing in Inman’s salon. And that would have been, true, too — until he said it. Instead, I wrote an extended evisceration of all Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I said: “The social agenda, it would seem, is to make the world safe for high-schoolish exclusion.”

And: “I don’t think there is anything good about indulging and encouraging the worst in people.”

And: “Here is the unstated moral principle undergirding ‘realweenie’: It is a moral good for like-minded people to get together to chortle about other people they don’t like.”

To this, Joseph Ferrara asks: “Where are the examples of chortling?”

The answer was posted last night at Sellsius, with Teresa Boardman as the first commenter:

By these means do Joseph and Teresa rebut me by proving me right in every particular.

I saw every bit of this coming from Pat Kitano’s original post. I wasn’t working them, playing them like chess pieces. But people are who they are, and they will act upon their base premises, no matter what.

Michael Thoman quite properly chides me for suggesting that I had entertained the idea that Teresa’s weblog might be a joke. I never thought that was the case. In a comment at Sellsius, John Lockwood wonders if I had thought the weblog was directed at me. In fact, I thought it was directed at sites that, like BloodhoundBlog, are addressed to the industry rather than to consumers. I have seen Teresa make what I thought were underhanded comments, here and here, among others places, putting me on notice that she likes cutting people down to size, as people say.

What should you do about people like that? Avoid them, of course. There is nothing of the good in the dismantlement of oneself or the attempted dismantlement of other people.

This changed for me when I saw that weblog. I could stand up for what I know is right, knowing, in large measure, what to expect in consequence. Or I could take a chance a bunch of innocent people would get themselves cut down to size.

All week we have heard the expostulation, “But it was just a joke!” This is untrue. In the first place, “Can’t you take a joke!?,” is the ready-to-hand resort to plausible-deniability deployed by people who habitually make personal attacks disguised as jokes. This is why Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seth Godin is on a tear about fluorescent light bulbs, and I join him in it not just because he’s promising a link for a trackback.

No, there is a matter of profoundly-important principle here: The redemptive power of Capitalism. The curly fluorescent bulb shown above is one of many in our home. Bulb-by-bulb we are swapping out the old Edison-style bulbs with fluorescent bulbs.

Is it because we’re granola-fed greenies right down to our Birkenstocks? Not hardly. It’s because we’re greedy, and we want to hold on to as much of our money as possible. Lumen for lumen, fluorescent bulbs are a lot cheaper than incandescent bulbs, and, because they are outrageously long-lived, they are cheaper to replace as well.

I have zero faith in the good intentions of capital-E Environmentalism as a movement. I see it as a further expression of the global totalitarian movement. The original Marxist argument — the vicious exploitation of the incredibly rotund poor people — is so obviously absurd, Environmentalism was cooked up as an unanswerable substitute.

If there were such a thing as a true environmentalist movement, its very first target would be government interference in real estate — starting with the collectively-owned roads that yield up thousands of acres of pristine land to taxpayer-subsidized development every month. The fact that capital-E Environmentalism does nothing to combat the massive environmental destruction caused by government argues to me that its actual objective is — surprise! — more government, not “saving the earth.”

But this is not about Environmentalism, it’s about Capitalism. Just as companies like Pur and Brita used the free market to solve the problems resulting from government mismanagement of the potable water supply, so, too, are entrepreneurs using simple market solutions to reduce the costs of government-regulated energy — “saving the earth” as an unintended consequence.

You have to give Marx his due, though. World-wide, 159 years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, Marxism has produced nothing but mountainous mounds of corpses — 160 million and counting. In that same time, Capitalism has taken us from coal oil lamps to fluorescent bulbs (and light-sensitive LED night-lights in Read more