Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Shannon Love This morning, my spouse intercepts me coming out of the bathroom ask, “I’m going to the store, do you need anything?”
“Yes,” I replied, “I need some [blank] and some [blank] because I have [insert graphic and colorful description of a minor but disgusting personal problem].”
My spouse looked startled. Confused, I looked around.
“Oh,” I said, “You might have informed me we have company.”
Every day I grow more convinced the universe is a cosmic conspiracy to rob me of my dignity.
Why do these murdering nut jobs so often target the IRS?[h/t Instapundit]
At first, one might presume they do so out of ideological resentment, but as I noted in my previous post, these nuts tend to pick and choose from various ideologies depending on what is best for them at the moment. If so, why do so many of them perform their final detonation at the IRS?
I think it is because the IRS is the one institution that no one can ever escape.
You can’t escape death and taxes, and the IRS is always the latter and sometimes the former.
[I did a post on this thread over at Reason and it went long so I decided to turn it into post here. I apologize for the sloppiness. I am pressed for time.]
We have a modern ritual in which we try to see which political ideology is reflected in the murderous actions of people like Amy Bishop and Joseph Andrew Stack. This is especially true in the case of Stack who left a suicide blog post.
The key to understanding this guy (and others like him) is to grasp the staggering depth of his narcissism and self-absorption.
People who carry out these types of crimes have an incredibly invariant profile. It’s always the same in every single one of these crimes.
(1) They have a seriously inflated sense of their own competence. They believe they are in the top 1% of their chosen field when they are usually merely average or sub par. Since they believe they deserve the top rewards but only get the average rewards, they constantly believe themselves cheated out of money, jobs and status.
A small, single-engine plane has crashed into a building here in Austin. It’s national news being covered on all the cable networks.
The site of the event is about five miles to the South of my house. I’ve driven by that building literally thousands of times…
… but for all that the crash directly affected me it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Had my spouse not called, I wouldn’t have know about it until I did my lunch-break scan of Instapundit. I can’t even see the smoke. Everything I know about the event comes from the TV news.
In short, I have as much information about this local event as does someone elsewhere in America or, indeed, even the world.
Prior to the Internet, most news was local. An event such as this would have been known to the local population via the local media, and then only an abbreviated story would make it to the national news and no one outside the country would ever have heard of it.
What are consequences of this delocalization of news? Any individual only has so much time to spend consuming news. If we spend time consuming reports from all over the world, that means we displace our consumption of local news. We end up in the perverse situation wherein we know more about a community on the other side of the world than we do our own.
Will this further decouple us from our local communities? I know that in recent years I have paid less attention to the local news than I did pre-Internet. Will we grow more concerned about distant problems over which we have little to no input, and neglect local problems that we could actually fix?
I don’t know what the future will bring but this event feels very surreal.