Quotulatiousness

January 4, 2014

Former Vikings head coach doesn’t stay unemployed for long

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:08

Leslie Frazier was fired as head coach of the Minnesota Vikings on Monday. Today, he accepted the job as defensive co-ordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

You can stop worrying about Leslie Frazier. He’s fine. He has scored himself a new gig as defensive coordinator with his old friend Lovie Smith in Tampa Bay.

Rumors have it that Rod Marinelli was actually the first choice as DC in Tampa but I guess Marinelli didn’t want the gig so they went to #2 choice Frazier. Leslie served as defensive coordinator for a couple years in Minnesota before his ill-fated tenure as head coach. Years back he was DC with Cincinnati.

Frazier, a long-time devotee of the Tampa-2 defense, goes to the city that gave the defense its name. Now we wait to see if he tries to bring any of his former Minnesota assistants with him. The Vikings still have all those guys under contract, including Leslie’s friend Mike Singletary.

We can also speculate on which current Viking free agents might now look at Tampa Bay as an attractive destination because Leslie is there and will likely install a system similar to the one the Vikings ran. Jared Allen is a guy who might be a fit in Tampa. You also have to look at a guy like Erin Henderson who is likely done in Minnesota after his most recent DWI arrest. Frazier was always in Henderson’s corner and seems to like him as a Will backer in his scheme.

I’d be surprised if Singletary didn’t also follow Frazier to Tampa Bay, and (sadly) Jared Allen has almost certainly played his final game for the Vikings and hasn’t indicated any plan to retire. I’m glad Frazier will be in the league next year, even if he is working for another team. Still no change on the replacement head coach search in Minnesota: lots of candidates mentioned, but many interviews still to be conducted.

Tim Bray wants you to go “content-free”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Tim Bray despises the word “content”:

I’m thinking about successful new communication channels, and how we talk about what’s in them. On Twitter, we say tweets. In the blogosphere and on Facebook, posts; also rants, reviews, and flames. Facebook has likes and now everything has links.

But I note the entire absence of “content”; the word, I mean. Yay! I’ve loathed it ever since its first powerpoint-pitch appearance, meaning “shit we don’t actually care about but will attract eyeballs and make people click on ads”. Except for they don’t say “people”, they say “users”, a symptom of another attitude problem.

With every year that passes, it’s increasingly clear that the appearance of “content” in any business plan is a symptom of (likely fatal) infection by cluelessness; and a good predictor of failure.

H/T to Charles Stross for the link.

Antarctic climate researchers still not home-free

Filed under: Australia, Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

AntarcticaRemember the story about the Australian climate researchers trapped in the Antarctic ice? The good news from a few days back — that all the passengers of the MS Akademik Shokalskiy (including researchers, tourists, and journalists, but not the crew) had been successfully transferred to the Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis is now overshadowed because the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long which also responded to the SOS call is now itself also trapped in the ice:

The saga just keeps going. The Chinese Icebreaker is now also stuck, and has asked for help so the Aurora Australis with 52 extra passengers rescued from the Russian Charter boat have to stay nearby to help. Twenty two Russian sailors are still trapped on board the Russian boat — the Akademik Sholaskiy. Plus other scientists in Antarctica still don’t have their equipment. Costs for everyone involved are continuing to rise.

In The Australian, Graham Lloyd‘s paywalled article begins with this:

TAXPAYERS will foot a $400,000 bill for the rescue of a group of climate scientists, tourists and journalists from a stranded Russian research vessel — an operation that has blown the contingency budget of Australia’s Antarctic program and disrupted its scientific work. The Antarctic Division in Hobart said it was revising plans and considering airlifting urgently needed scientific equipment that could not be unloaded from Aurora Australis before the ship was diverted from the Casey base to rescue the novice ice explorers just before Christmas.

The Sydney Morning Herald posted this short video earlier in the week, before the Aurora Australis had gotten close enough to take on the passengers from the Akademik Sholaskiy:

Update: The head of French antarctic research is unhappy with the tourists’ disruption to actual science work:

The head of France’s polar science institute voiced fury on Friday at the misadventures of a Russian ship trapped in Antarctic ice, deriding what he called a tourists’ trip that had diverted resources from real science.

In an interview with AFP, Yves Frenot, director of the French Polar Institute, said he had no issue at all with rescuing those aboard the stricken vessel.

But, he said, the trip itself was a “pseudo-scientific expedition” that, because it had run into difficulties, had drained resources from the French, Chinese and Australian scientific missions in Antarctica. “There’s no reason to place Antarctica off-limits and to keep it just for scientists, but this tourism has to be monitored and regulated so that operators can be sure of getting help if need be,” he said.

By DSM-5 standards, most of us are suffering from personality disorders

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

From the last issue of the City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple‘s critique of the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) includes a rather wide-ranging diagnosis that applies to a huge number of people:

The overlap between straightforwardly pathological conditions (in Szasz’s sense) and those that result from social, psychological, or personal factors, or from bad moral choices, suggests that psychiatrists should show discretion in what they regard as genuine illness. The state of ignorance in which psychiatrists now practice, which will probably endure, ensures that they will often be wrong; but no one who has encountered, say, a manic in full flight is likely to doubt that he is in the presence of illness. But nor would it be easy, then, to see so-called factitious disorder, which consists of “falsification of physical or psychological signs and symptoms, or induction of injury or disease, associated with identified deception” in quite the same light: that is, to grant the same status to someone pretending to be ill as to someone genuinely ill.

Yet this is precisely what the DSM-5 does, establishing its authors’ lack of common sense, the quality that psychiatrists, perhaps more than any other kind of doctor, need. The manual’s lack of common sense would be amusing were it not destined to be taken with superstitious seriousness by psychiatrists around the world, as well as by insurers and lawyers.

The section of the volume devoted to personality disorders proves the point. Among the criteria for personality disorders in general are the following:

    A: An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, in fields such as thought, emotion, interpersonal relations and impulse control . . .

    B: The enduring pattern is inflexible and pervasive across a broad range of personal and social situations.

    C: The enduring pattern leads to clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning.

    D: The pattern is stable and of long duration.

The DSM-5 then informs us that more than one in seven people have such a lifelong disorder — adding up to 45 million Americans and even more Europeans. These astonishing numbers give the authors not a moment’s pause (any more than does the fact that their own prevalence rates suggest that the average American suffers from more than two psychiatric disorders in any one year). Several undesirable characteristics must be present in an individual for a diagnosis of personality disorder to apply. Considering those characteristics, and that such a significant portion of the Western population supposedly exhibits many of them, either a mass outbreak of human nastiness and inability to deal with everyday life must have occurred, or the whole business of diagnosis must be dubious or even ridiculous.

Here is a random list of some of the characteristics that, in the DSM-5, make up personality disorders of various kinds:

    Unjustified suspicions that others are harming, exploiting or deceiving.

    Persistently grudge-bearing.

    Detachment from social relations and limited expression of emotion.

    Behavior or appearance that is odd, eccentric or peculiar.

    Deceitfulness.

    Persistent irresponsibility.

    Indifference to risk to self or others.

    Irritability and aggressiveness.

    Lack of remorse.

    Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures or threats, or self-mutilation.

    Inappropriately intense anger, frequent displays of temper.

    Rapidly shifting and shallow expressions of emotion.

    Use of physical appearance to draw attention to self.

    Self-dramatization, theatricality.

    Grandiosity.

    Requirement for excessive admiration.

    Sense of entitlement.

    Interpersonal exploitativeness.

    Lack of empathy.

    Enviousness of others.

    Arrogance and haughtiness.

    Unwillingness to become involved with people.

    Sense of social ineptitude and inferiority.

    Avoidance of risk.

    Difficulty in expressing disagreement with others because of fear of disapproval, i.e., pusillanimity.

    Feeling of helplessness when alone.

    Preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organization or schedules.

    Excessive devotion to work.

    Over-conscientiousness or scrupulousness.

    Reluctance to delegate.

    Rigidity and stubbornness.

The diagnoses for most of the disorders require at least four of the undesirable characteristics to be present, predominant, and persistent. One is reminded of the King of Brobdingnag’s view of Gulliver’s countrymen: “I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Lest anyone object that “only” one in seven people suffers from personality disorders, and that therefore the King of Brobdingnag’s opinion of Western humanity — that it suffers from the “worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce” — is not relevant, one must add that, for the DSM-5, people with personality disorders are merely the most extreme exemplars of their type. And if only the extremes have four or more undesirable and frequently horrible dominating characteristics, many individuals must have one, two, or even three such characteristics. If the DSM-5 reflects the American Psychiatric Association’s views, then that organization clearly views humanity with Swiftian distaste. Yet its distaste is not that of a disappointed lover (and certainly not expressed with Swift’s genius) but is motivated, one suspects, by the hope of an endless supply of patients. For those with psychiatric disorders need psychiatrists.

Colorado – pot capital of North America

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

In yesterday’s Goldberg File email “news”letter, Jonah Goldberg talks about the legalized marijuana situation in Colorado:

I should say I’ve long favored the gradual decriminalization and eventual legalization of pot (but not narcotics). My reasons never stemmed from a burning desire to see ganja legalized. I simply recognized that pot is different from hard drugs and lumping them all together created real political problems and real injustices. I wanted it to be gradual for Burkean reasons. Give the culture time to adapt and to create healthy stigmas against being high all the time.

Things are moving a bit too fast for my tastes, but the way it’s happening is still better than many of the alternatives. The worst way to do it would be top-down, from D.C. Colorado (and Washington State) will be test cases. We’ll see how it works out.

I should also say I pretty much agree with David Brooks’s column today. Pot smoking is something to grow out of early, or never start. Yes, I know there are exceptions, but as a general rule I’m convinced pot-smoking — particularly routine pot-smoking — creates potheads, by which I mean fuzzy-minded and slothful people (or people who are more fuzzy-minded and slothful than they would otherwise be). If you are one of the high-functioning exceptions, or if you are a pothead and don’t realize that you are not one of the high-functioning exceptions, I’m sorry if this hurts your feelings.

[…]

A friend pointed out an irony in all of this. Right now, inequality is supposed to be the great bane of our nation. According to liberals like Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio, inequality is a function of systemic problems in the U.S. The have-nots have naught because of the deficiencies of our economic and political system. The victims deserve none of the blame. While that’s obviously true for some people, it’s also obviously untrue for others. For instance, heroin junkies rarely leave the bottom quintile. That’s not because John Locke and Adam Smith duped the Founding Fathers. More important, culture matters more than pure economic arrangements. For instance, as Charles Murray has demonstrated for decades, family structure has an enormous role in economic disparities. Today the data is pretty much in that family structure is a better predictor of economic mobility than inequality. That goes for this tragic symbol of income inequality, too.

It seems obvious to me that in a country where pot is cheap and ubiquitous, kids raised in messed-up families will be more likely to smoke pot — and more of it. Doing so may give temporary respite from the anxieties of a dysfunctional family, but it won’t better prepare them for a successful life. “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,” Orwell writes, “and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” Similarly, a teen may take to weed because he feels himself a loser and then become all the more of a loser because he smokes weed.

The irony is that liberals who think inequality is so terrible are cheering a reform that will in all likelihood exacerbate inequality. At least the libertarians celebrating the news from Colorado are consistent. They don’t care about income inequality. They argue legalization will increase liberty and happiness. They are right on the liberty part. The jury is out on the happiness part.

Update: Apparently one of David Brooks’ old toking buddies had a response to the column that Jonah linked to. It’s … well worth reading.

The other part he didn’t tell was about how we got high at lunch. This was back when you could smoke at school. Cigarettes, I mean, but naturally that wasn’t all we smoked. Smokers had to go to an area set up outside the cafeteria, hemmed in by the other wings of the building, sort of like a cell block. Architects must have been stoned or something, or maybe that was back when we didn’t care so much about smoking, but anyway they put the air intake for the second floor in a corner of the cell block. So we were smoking this joint of Jamaican over in that corner and Dave got the bright idea to blow the smoke into the register. “That’ll make everyone up there one of us!” he said. And sure enough when we went up to class the whole floor stank and the vice-principal was hustling up and down the hallway, wrinkling his nose like a bloodhound trying to figure out where the smell was coming from, and then he went into the boys’ room and dragged out one of the only two black boys at Radnor High, yelling at him for smoking pot in school.

I remember the guilty look on Dave’s face when he saw Mr. Santangelo with the kid by the collar. Later on, he told me that he was tempted to confess, but he also happened to know that that boy did smoke pot, that he was a full-on stoner, so if he got in a little trouble, it might be good for him. When I read today that Dave thinks that “not smoking, or only smoking sporadically gave you a better shot at becoming a little more integrated and interesting,” while “smoking all the time seemed likely to cumulatively fragment a person’s deep center,” I thought about that boy and wondered if getting kicked out of school had helped him hold together his deep center, and if his going to juvy was the kind of subtle discouragement that Dave thinks governments should engage in when it comes to the “lesser pleasures.” I suppose he thought he was doing the kid a favor by letting him take the rap.

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