From Sixteen Volts to Zero

Well, it's more than apparent that Ilkka Kokkarinen's blog, Sixteen Volts was forcibly shut down.

For those of you who didn't know Sixteen Volts, Ilkka Kokkarinen is a professor of Computer Science at Ryerson University in Toronto. Mr. Kokkarinen is a native of Finland, but moved to Canada several years ago to try living in a more free market economy than Finland's. On his blog, he regularly chastised Feminists, as well as many other leftists, for their hypocrisy., often using biting sarcasm...

He supported nuclear power, but was also an avid proponent of public transportation (so much so in fact, that neither he nor his wife owned a car. He commuted via public transportation to Ryerson from the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, while his wife was able to walk to work). He seemed to write about 2 entries per day, fairly long entries at that, and it was quite an entertaining read. In mid September 2006, someone at his college distributed some blog entries he had written, albeit grossly out of context. Ilkka commented that he spoke to the student newspaper about the misquote, but idly wondered if something would happen akin to what happened in I am Charlotte Simmons, a recent novel written by Tom Wolfe.

Well, apparently the Feminists or anti-nuclear power people or whomever he offended managed to force the removal of his entire blog archive (a few weeks ago, Ilkka commented that all his blog entries could likely fill a book), and post an apology. While it was rare that any blog entry of his would get more than 3 or 4 comments, this apology has gotten 58 comments from people lamenting that he's quit blogging. I guess the leftists that were offended couldn't make counter arguments on their own blog, or even in the comments section on his blog, but instead wanted to ensure that no one else could read such offensive material like the stuff Ilkka wrote, which showed that they often contradicted themselves.

Shutting down his blog speaks volumes about how leftists engage in debate. As Ilkka liked to say, "While chasing the rabbit, the hunter is blind to the mountains."

Let's hope that Ilkka starts blogging again, albeit with a pseudonym, as I do... And let's hope that he blogs in English instead of Finnish. Finnish is just too damned hard to learn. I speak German fluently, and can figure out Dutch/Afrikaans. In Swedish, Norwegian or Danish, I can pick out certain words. But Finnish is of course not an Indo-European language, and the only major languages related to Finnish are Estonian and Hungarian (English is distantly related to Sanskrit, Russian and most of the languages of Europe, and it's closely related to the other Germanic languages, albeit with significant influence from French and Latin). Finnish is not a widely spoken language, nothing like English, so let's hope Ilkka blogs again in English!

Seventeen volts anyone?