Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2023

“… say what you want about the good old Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, but at least its crappy clock is behaving like a clock these days”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh congratulates the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for at least getting their clock moving in the normal direction once again:

Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.

On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (really a foundation that publishes a famous magazine by that name) announced that it would be scooching the minute hand of its renowned “Doomsday Clock” forward. The clock will now read 11:58:30 p.m., midnight minus 90 seconds. The Bulletin does this once a year — at a time, by pure coincidence, when newspaper editors are notoriously starved for copy.

The Doomsday Clock was originally (in 1947) a one-off magazine cover design by Martyl Langsdorf (1917-2013), a landscape artist who was married to one of the Manhattan Project physicists. She happened to set the clock at about seven minutes to midnight, but the visual metaphor was irresistible. As the arms race and nuclear proliferation began, the editors of the Bulletin started rearranging Langsdorf’s clock face as an index of the danger from nuclear exchange.

Even by saying this much I am intruding somewhat on the turf of a colleague, Tristin Hopper, who is eternally preoccupied with the pure stupidity of the Doomsday Clock. As T-Hop never tires of pointing out, you have really lost track of the clock metaphor if you manually wiggle the minute hand backward or forward annually.

Moreover, the face of the clock can at best be considered a lagging indicator. The year 1947 was probably the moment at which the danger of a pre-emptive nuclear strike was greatest. Intellectuals and strategists needed a few years to think through the implications of nuclear weapons: the logic of a first strike was compelling, and might have won the argument in any country that developed nukes until the equilibrium of mutually assured destruction was both established and theorized.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the clock closer to midnight as the world was learning to live with nukes and nuclear proliferation. Eventually the hand was moved backward in 1960 — practically in time for the frightening Cuban Missile Crisis.

January 27, 2023

The return of the revenge of the bride of the Doomsday Clock

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s amazing how much free publicity you can get by pulling out the hoary old Cold War propaganda tools, as Andrew Potter explains with the re-re-re-introduction of the Doomsday Clock bullshit:

Earlier this week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock ahead by ten seconds, to 90 seconds to midnight. This is the closest the clock has ever been to midnight, and, according to the press release announcing the move: “Never in the Doomsday Clock’s 76-year history have we been so close to global catastrophe.”

If you’re under, say, 40 years of age or so, that paragraph is probably pure gobbledygook, the written equivalent of the squawk of a 2400 baud modem going through its handshaking protocols. But for those of us in the ever-dwindling cohorts of Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers, hearing about the movement of the Doomsday Clock is to be jerked back into a time marked by both profound moral clarity and deep existential anxiety.

A bit of background on the Doomsday Clock might help. It was a creature of the Cold War, founded in 1947 by some of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project to raise public awareness of the threat of nuclear weapons. As the Bulletin puts it, the clock uses “the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet”. The decision to move or leave the minute hand of the Clock in place is made each year by the various trustees of the Bulletin, based on their evaluation of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe.

The clock was initially set at a nice and relaxed seven minutes to midnight, and over the following few decades it was moved closer in response to clear nuclear threats, things like ramped-up testing of new bombs, nuclear proliferation, or rising Cold War tensions. During periods of detente or after the signing of arms reductions treaties, the minute hand would retreat. In 1991, it was moved back to 17 minutes to midnight after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Doomsday Clock was a healthy reminder of the most salient geopolitical fact of the era, which is that two superpowers were pointing thousands of nuclear weapons at one another.

But like many Cold War relics, the demise of the U.S.S.R. left it scrambling for a raison d’etre. In a bit of clever PR entrepreneurialism, the executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists turned the clock into a more generalized warning against war, climate change and other ecological or technological threats. The nadir of this shift in mission came on January 23rd 2020, when the Bulletin moved the clock’s hands to 100 seconds to midnight.

As the press release accompanying the ticking of the clock noted at the time, this put humanity “closer than ever” to catastrophe. Given that the clock had kept watch over our drive for self-destruction through the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the sabre-rattling Reagan administration, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it makes one wonder just what happened in early 2020 to merit such a fearful move.

January 7, 2023

Propaganda to support the narrative

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray is definitely possibly most likely not kidding around here:

We can’t award the gold medal yet, because the contestants are still showing up at the starting line.

Elsewhere at Substack, A Midwestern Doctor recently highlighted some of the most egregious vaccine propaganda that appeared during the current forever-pandemic, in a piece that has the potential to safely and effectively vaccinate your mind against bullshit:

But now we need to add a new example from the current week, because Peter Hotez exists and keeps publishing. His latest piece of analysis calmly warns that the new variant is maybe possibly or not the Most Worstest Evuh, in a huge rhetorical first that tries to overcome Covid exhaustion with louder hysteria:

tHiS oNe iS diFFeReNtttttttttt&#*$*$%^#&@, Version 957,1095,397.02. Your next winter of severe illness and death will be everything you were promised in your first winter of severe illness and death, we swear. If you died last time, JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU DIE AGAIN THIS TIME, FOOL.

How can you spot propaganda? Like this, from a paragraph near the bottom of Hotez’s latest:

    Unfortunately, XBB.1.5 is still too new to have clinical data in-hand to show exactly what vaccines mean in terms of warding it off. At the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, we, like other groups, are scrambling to look at our own vaccine’s effects on XBB.1.5. However, the writing is on the wall here — boosting is your best bet at protecting yourself and your loved ones.

First sentence: We have no data about this. Third sentence: The thing we have no data for is your best bet to do the thing that we have no data for.

Every claim Hotez makes is a version of this maybe-definitely-uncertainty-certainty soup, telling you he doesn’t know while telling you that he knows

December 23, 2022

Remember when ending “Net Neutrality” was going to be the death of the internet?

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Peter Jacobsen answers a reader question about the now almost forgotten doomsday scenario for the internet that was the ending of “Net Neutrality” in 2017:

To answer this question, we have to wind back the clock to 2017. Then-chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Ajit Pai successfully led an effort to repeal a set of 2015 regulations on Internet Service Provider (ISP) companies originally put into place by the Obama Administration.

The simplest summary of net neutrality regulations is that they required ISPs to enable access to content on the internet at equal speeds and for equal costs. For example, your ISP charging you to get faster speeds on YouTube or blocking High Definition access on Netflix would be examples of violations of net neutrality.

The idea of paying your ISP extra to have access to certain websites is a scary one, but it appears the worst fears associated with the end of net neutrality were overstated. To some extent proponents of net neutrality are the victim of their own apocalyptic marketing.

The Rumors of the Internet’s Death Were Greatly Exaggerated

If you spent any time on the internet during the death of net neutrality, it was hard to miss it. On July 12, 2017 websites across the internet coordinated their messages for the “battle for the net.”

Websites including Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, and Reddit called their users to fight for “a free and open internet”.

On Twitter, #SaveTheInternet thrived, seemingly implying the internet itself was facing an existential threat.

    The repeal of #NetNeutrality officially goes into effect today, but the fight is far from over.

    The people saying we can’t pass the resolution to #SaveTheInternet in the House are the same people who were saying we couldn’t do it in the Senate.

    Ignore them. Just keep fighting.

    — Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) June 11, 2018

After the decision by the FCC, CNN briefly declared it was “the end of the internet as we know it”.

Unfortunately for all kinds of doomsday prophets, extreme rhetoric always looks silly in hindsight when it fails to pan out.

Obviously we aren’t seeing ISPs charge users different amounts to use different websites in any systematic way. There’s no “pay your ISP to access Hulu” package yet. So already it’s clear some of the doom and gloom was over-hyped.

Fears of ISPs offering “fast lanes” to make users pay more for better service don’t seem to have materialized either. The only example of this sort of thing I could find was a Cox Communications trial of an “Elite Gamer” service. But this service was unlike the “fast lanes” hyped up by net neutrality proponents in that it never offered a less throttled experience and would have been permissible under the old net neutrality rules.

One of the biggest concerns about the repeal of these regulations was that it would lead ISPs to favor their own services. For example, AT&T owns Time Warner and HBO Max. In theory, AT&T could silently throttle speed to competing streaming platforms like YouTube and Netflix, thereby destroying competition.

December 11, 2022

Apparently building a new coal mine ranks as a “crime against humanity”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked on the latest peak in climate hysteria (although it’s tough to bet against hysterics finding an even higher peak to climb):

An image of coal pits in the Black Country from Griffiths’ Guide to the iron trade of Great Britain, 1873.
Image digitized by the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons.

The madness of the greens is peaking. This week a leading eco-politician in the UK, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, referred to the building of a new coalmine as a “crime against humanity”. Take that in. Once upon a time it was mass murder, extermination, enslavement and the forced deportation of a people that were considered crimes against humanity. Now the building of a mine in Cumbria in north-west England that will create 500 new jobs and produce 2.8million tonnes of coal a year is referred to in such terms. Perhaps the coalmine bosses should be packed off to The Hague. Maybe the men who’ll dig the coal should be forced alongside the likes of ISIS to account for their genocidal behaviour.

We cannot let Ms Lucas’s crazed comments just slide by. We need to reflect on how we arrived at a situation where a mainstream politician, one feted by the media establishment, can liken digging for coal to crimes of extermination. It was in the Guardian – where else? – that Ms Lucas made her feverish claims. On Wednesday, when the government gave the go-ahead to the Cumbria mine, the first new coalmine in Britain for 30 years, Lucas wrote that the whole thing is “truly terrible”. This “climate-busting, backward-looking coalmine” is nothing short of a “climate crime against humanity”, she said.

It isn’t though, is it? Sorry to be pedantic but it is not a crime to extract coal from the earth. If it were, the leaders of China – where they produce 13million tonnes of coal a day, rather putting into perspective the Cumbria mine’s 2.8million tonnes a year – would be languishing in the clink. I look forward to Ms Lucas performing a citizen’s arrest on Xi Jinping. It certainly is not a crime against humanity. That term entered popular usage during the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. It refers to an act of evil of such enormity that it can be seen as an assault on all of humankind. Earth to Ms Lucas: extracting coal to make steel – what the Cumbria coal will mostly be used for – is not an affront to humankind. I’ll tell you what is an affront, though: speaking about the burning of coal in the same language that is used to refer to the burning of human beings. That, Caroline, is despicable.

The overwrought apocalypticism of the likes of Ms Lucas does two bad things. First, it demonises in the most hysterical fashion perfectly normal and in fact good endeavours. The Cumbria coalmine will create hundreds of well-paid jobs. It will increase the independence and dignity of working-class families in Cumbria. It will help to reduce the UK’s reliance on coal imports. These are positives. They should be celebrated. Of course to Ms Lucas and other middle-class greens, that local communities in Cumbria have welcomed the coalmine only shows that they’re “nostalgic” for the past and that they’ve been “seduced” by a plan that will actually make them “suffer”. Patronising much? The Cumbrian working classes who can’t wait to start mining are a paragon of reason in comparison with the Guardianistas madly sobbing about coal being a crime against humanity.

November 23, 2022

The potential mass-casualty event of Trump being re-instated on Twitter

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You can almost hear Tom Knighton‘s eyes rolling here:

I’m not the biggest fan of Donald Trump. Most of his policies — the things he enacted quietly as he went — were pretty decent, including criminal justice reform and reducing federal regulations.

He just couldn’t stop tweeting.

I joked more than once that I wish someone would lock his phone so he couldn’t get on the app. However, I never once thought he should be banned from the platform.

But he was.

Now, he’s back.

Sort of.

His account isn’t banned anymore, though as of this writing, he doesn’t appear to be using it.

Yet this is, apparently, something just short of genocide if you listen to some journalists.

No, seriously.

I hoped this was a troll, but it’s not.

He apparently actually believes this is a thing, too, because it’s not the only time he claimed Trump being on Twitter will result in people’s deaths.

Again, there’s no word whether Trump will return to use the platform. As of this writing, his last tweet is from January 8th, 2021, so even if Trump’s tweets somehow could result in people’s death, it doesn’t seem like it matters since he’s not back on the platform.

But this unhinged individual has the old-school blue checkmark, the one given because an individual is “notable”.

Yet he also has his cover photo set to a screenshot of him being blocked by Trump. In other words, it looks like the boy is a might obsessed with the Orange One.

And this is the problem.

It’s not about Trump, but the media. This is a guy with mainstream media bylines aplenty. He’s got the old Twitter mark of approval, and he’s literally arguing that a former president having the ability to voice his thoughts on a social media platform will result in people’s deaths.

Does he think Elon Musk has weaponized tweeting and only given the launch codes to Trump?

The Babylon Bee (or as Instapundit says, “America’s Newspaper of Record”) is already on this hot new calamity:

October 31, 2022

Why aren’t you as angry and afraid as the media wants you to be?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on the unrelenting din of fear porn you get if you pay any attention to the legacy media:

It’s like a magic act where the door to the secret compartment moves slowly and has a spotlight pointed at it, and the audience sees the illusion every time, because it’s literally not an illusion, being right out there in the open, but the magician still pretends that everyone watching is shocked and baffled by the trick.

So. Via Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense, this summary of findings from a recent study of the American news media:

Today’s Standard-Issue Explanatory Line™ on Paul Pelosi being attacked in his home is that TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP, toxic far-right rhetoric!!!!! Ten minutes after the shabby break-in at the Katie Hobbs for Governor office was omfg literally Watergate before it evaporated into nothing much, a uniquely strange Berkeley nudist is a far-right puppet with an opening at the bottom for Donald Trump’s hand, steered by hateful rhetoric that incites violence:

[…]

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the news media focused on a clear description of what happened before they got to the blame and politicization?

There are a dozen obvious things to say about all of this, even if you aren’t Steve Scalise — the double standard, the depiction of ordinary political criticism as “demonization”, the discarding of contradictory evidence to make round pegs fit square holes — and I’m mostly not going to bother saying them in any detail.

But the thing that has to be said is that the people who increasingly hold the attention of their audiences with hyperemotional clickbait, with the obvious manipulation of negative emotions, are warning us about the dangerous effects of hyperemotional rhetorical manipulation in the public sphere.

Ohhhhh, we’re about to LOSE OUR VERY DEMOCRACY! We tremble on the edge of a FASCIST TAKEOVER! And also, toxic rhetoric is bad.

September 24, 2022

The end of crisis culture – “[Y]ou can’t go on having a culture of crisis if people stop showing up for it”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the inevitable endgame of “all crisis, all the time” culture:

The journalist John Tierney has described the Crisis Crisis, “the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”. What we’re experiencing now is the Crisis Crisis crisis, the emerging crisis caused by the Crisis Crisis. Over and over again, interventions in some invented or overhyped form of the crisis, undertaken in the hysterical spirit of the Crisis Crisis, cause a form of the Crisis Crisis crisis, which eventually results in a course correction that may or may not be fully apparent for a while. Skip right over the next paragraph if you don’t need to see examples again.

The Sri Lankan government intervenes in climate change by instantly ending the use of commercial fertilizers in agriculture, which causes a dangerous decline in the production of food. The German government intervenes in climate change by declaring a commitment to 100% clean energy, which causes dangerous instability in the availability of actual energy (“committing national suicide“), with some help from the Nord Stream shut-off valve, which nobody ever could have seen coming. The Dutch government intervenes in climate change by declaring an intention to limit agricultural production, which doesn’t cause anything yet, because Dutch farmers won’t stand for it, but final outcome TBD.

All over the world, things that work stop working because of excessive and unwarranted interventions led by people who cry crisis and throw sand in functioning gears. Dutch agriculture was just fine; then the government decided to help end the crisis. The interventions — the interveners, the people who get in the way — are harming us, when their harm could be prevented by literal nothing, by the simple choice to not perform the interventions. What we need is for the interveners to go play Risk in their basement or something, and forget their important duty to help.

The entertainment industry has had its own intervention, famously described on Substack, in woke-facing talent purges and narrative shifts and insulting “It’s Ghostbusters … but with WOMEN!” reboots. And now some hint about the endgame of the one big cycle of fraud comes from woke Hollywood — which has pounded audiences with The Message for years, resulting in a catastrophic loss of audience. The result is starting to look like this:

The social justice intervention in Hollywood storytelling is harming Hollywood; the intervention in that industry is causing the decline of the industry. At some point, people stop eating shit.

August 29, 2022

“Follow the science!”, “No, not like that!”

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray recounts his experiences when he “followed the science” over the Wuhan Coronavirus:

It’s happening again, and so is the response. It’s becoming our one persistent cultural cycle.

During the first availability of the Covid-19 “vaccines” — which don’t prevent transmission or infection, but we changed the meaning of that word, so shut up shut up shut up — I did what I usually do: I thought about the past to try to make sense of the present. If we’ve instantly produced safe and effective vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, I wondered, why didn’t we do the same for SARS-CoV-1? It took less than five minutes to answer that question:

So scientists did come up with a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1, but when they gave it to animals, it made the animals extremely susceptible to severe illness when they were “challenged” with the virus again — “suggesting hypersensitivity to SARS-CoV components was induced”. And so, the authors of that 2012 paper argued, “Caution in proceeding to application of a SARS-CoV vaccine in humans is indicated.”

Because I believe in science, I followed that advice, and I told my doctor that I was following that advice — and that I wasn’t terribly concerned about Covid-19 anyway, so whatever. I would be cautious about injecting a novel medical product into my body: I would wait, calmly. She assured me that there was no scientific shortcutting at all in the development of the vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, which were absolutely known to be 100% safe and effective, but she also agreed that there was nothing wrong with watching and waiting for a few months.

I meant it. At that point, I hadn’t refused the vaccines — I had just decided that I would wait for a bit to see how they played out once they’d been injected into a few billion human lab rats.

And then the shaming started. I was uninvited from a family event, and ordered to stay away — and then, after a short pause, repeatedly shamed by email as a disgusting selfish pig who made the family sick with my ignorance and selfishness. (Distant family, thankfully.) The public sphere came alive with this message, and Joe Biden let me know that his patience was wearing thin for my kind. Social media was a daily fear bath, and consumed with shaming rituals.

It was exactly that message that turned my skepticism, my preference for watching and waiting, into a flat and permanent refusal. People said they were talking about science — in a vicious flood of hyperemotional shaming language, the hysterical tone and substance of which made it clear that they weren’t talking about science at all. They were talking about their fearfulness and their weakness; they were talking about their cowardice, and about the shame they felt at finding their fear of the air wasn’t shared. The shaming made me contemptuous; it secured my commitment to resist.

So now comes a new flood of shaming messages, assuring people that mere political disagreement is a sure sign of monstrous cruelty and hate.

“What did you do in the Covid War, Daddy?”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Health, Law, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo hopes that the future isn’t female, for the sake of all of us:

If Covid was a war, as it was frequently depicted as being, it was one in which none of the typical masculine virtues required by war were in evidence. Gone was the valorization of stoicism, courage, forgetfulness of self, rational risk assessment, and the curtailment of emotionalism. In their place came generalized anxiety, self-righteous vindictiveness, and the longing for (an unattainable) safety at all costs.

In his book United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, American psychiatrist Mark McDonald noted the disappearance of men from the Covid state as a key factor in our descent into social psychosis. Of course men remained in existence, but their roles were reduced to enthusiastic compliance with even the most trivial of health rules.

As a psychiatrist with extensive clinical experience, McDonald was uniquely positioned to diagnose some of the underlying causes of Covid panic. He notes in the book that women, evolved to be hyper-attentive to the needs of infants and simultaneously aware of their own vulnerability as maternal caregivers, tend to be far more susceptible to anxiety disorders than men. Women evolved over millennia to look to men for protection of themselves and their children (p. 30-31), and men evolved to provide it.

Yet as Covid experts encouraged us all to worry about the safety of our families, with daily case counts and endless updates on (de-contextualized) death numbers, “men failed […] dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives” (p. 41). When some women insisted fearfully on rules to protect themselves and their loved ones — even irrational rules such as outdoor masking and limitations on how children played together — men, whose traditional role has been to “calm and ground women’s fears” (p. 39), either did nothing or went along. Some men, of course, led the charge.

The emasculation of men had been prepared for a long time, and under Covid it came to fruition. Men could not reassure the women in their lives or stand up to the infantilizing Mother State. They could not speak out to put the Covid threat in perspective. Most of them couldn’t even decide independently whether to go to work in the morning. McDonald is well aware of the social forces that have contributed to the feminization of men — he notes especially how “healthy expressions of masculinity […] have all been redefined as universally unhealthy” (p. 52) — but even he does not fully understand the depth of the anti-male attack that prepared the ground for Covid-enforced male passivity.

For decades now, with the advent of no-fault divorce, mother-favoring custody laws, the determination to stamp out (subjectively defined) alleged sexual harassment, and the mandate to “Believe Women”, it has been made clear to men that their lives and careers remain intact entirely at the pleasure of feminist ideologues or potentially vengeful ex-wives. One wrong move, an inappropriate comment, a gaze that is too intense, a tone-deaf request for a date, a sexual encounter where the woman is left unhappy, or merely having married the wrong woman, can lead — and too often does lead — to the ruination of a man’s reputation, a forced psychiatric evaluation, the garnisheeing of his wages, imprisonment on false charges, and the judicial kidnapping of his children. Scholar Stephen Baskerville has extensively documented the injustices in his devastatingly compendious Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family and his more recent The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power. For a heartbreaking and fully researched personal account, see Greg Ellis’s The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.

For well over 20 years, it has been made more and more difficult for men to respond as men once did, firmly and unplacatingly, because many men now know that everything they have built in their lives — and their ability to continue to build, to contribute their gifts, to live a normal life, to be a father to their children — now hinges on their avoiding the fury of a state-supported complaining woman. It is this bedrock vulnerability, the reality that even guiltless men can be imprisoned on a woman’s word and can lose their life savings and children, that more than anything else has silenced and paralyzed many decent and brave men.

June 24, 2022

What happens when the proles stop listening to elite Chicken Littles?

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray suggests that we should call it “class formation psychosis” instead of “mass”, because it’s the kakistocrats who are doing everything they can to induce “the masses” to feel the fear and obey:

… here’s a picture of a recent panel discussion among public health experts in Los Angeles County, which I wrote about here:

So the normals are just living their lives, and appearing to enjoy it, while the status-projecting elite are engaged in an effort to signal fear and control.

I encourage you to read [Mattias Desmet’s new book] The Psychology of Totalitarianism, especially as an account from an early adopter of the view that our pandemic hysteria has been irrational. But I’m surprised to find myself not buying the argument. Desmet gets the dynamic, but misses the subject: He sees what’s happening, but not who’s doing it. The book is about “the masses”, as in this passage from Chapter 6:

    We have to add one more important characteristic to the problematic psychological properties of mass formation: radical intolerance of other opinions and a strong tendency toward authoritarianism. To the masses, dissident voices appear 1) antisocial and devoid of solidarity, because they refuse to participate in the solidarity that the mass formation creates; 2) completely unfounded, as critical arguments are not assigned any cognitive or emotional weight within the narrow circle of attention of the masses; 3) extremely aversive because they threaten to break the intoxication, and in this way confront the masses again with the negative situation that preceded the mass formation (lack of social bond and meaning, indefinable fear and unease); 4) extremely frustrating because they threaten to remove the venting of latent aggression.

    This radical intolerance ensures that the masses are convinced of their superior ethical and moral intentions and of the reprehensibility of everything and everyone who resists them: Whoever does not participate is a traitor of the collective.

As someone who spent every moment of the pandemic traveling all over the place, family camping our way through a dozen states and visiting national parks and other tourist-centered destinations, I’ve never met the masses who were consumed with this fearful aggression. In South Dakota in the summer of 2020, I was sitting next to my tent in a state park when some dads on another campsite saw my license plate, then marched over and said that holy shit, man, did you really drive all the way here from California? I hadn’t seen a mask in days, and no one maintained six feet of social distance. As I experienced all over the state, we shook hands and talked. A few days before, at a state park in eastern Wyoming, the couple in the neighboring campsite walked over and offered us dinner, then got trashed on Bud Light — which I didn’t know was possible, on the grounds of “making love in a canoe” — while they hung out by our campfire.

But where we found intolerance and enforced fearfulness was in space controlled by government, as when we got in line outside the Jenny Lake store and quickly drew the attention of the, I am not making this up, line monitor. Masks! Masks! Masks! she helpfully explained, pointing at her masked face to show us what a mask was. Maskless people swarmed around us on all sides, a fact I mentioned to her. “But they’re not in line,” she explained, finding the explanation complete.

Our mass formation psychosis didn’t form in the masses; it formed in policy, and as a social performance among people who wish to be perceived as cultural elites, sniffing at the trash who don’t believe in science. Professors and politicians were highly mask-compliant, and wanted you to know it. My impression is that a quarter to a third of the population locked arms with them and fought proudly for their fear performance, while another third-plus went along to get along, and the balance — especially outside the Blue Zones — just completely ignored the whole mess.

May 8, 2022

“… a majority of ‘pro-lifers’ are women, not men. So [Kamala] Harris is effectively saying: how dare women be allowed a voice in this debate?”

Filed under: Health, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan comments on the leak of a draft US Supreme Court decision that would strike down Roe vs. Wade and the over-the-top reactions on social media from progressives:

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.

To say that a leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling prompted an elite meltdown would be a gross understatement. This was a culture war 9/11. “I have typed and deleted a great many comments,” Roxane Gay tweeted. “What do you say when nine people can dictate what happens to your body? It’s ridiculous and hateful.” The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer, always the subtle one, announced that the court had abolished the entire 20th century. Yep: no more suffrage for women! Jim Crow now!

Taking the arguments of abortion opponents seriously was never an option: “Stripping women of their humanity and rights isn’t a consequence of the ‘pro-life’ agenda, it’s the entire point,” declared Jessica Valenti. Rebecca Traister confessed: “My teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour. Bodies/minds are so weird. Like, not euphemistically — actually chattering. Audibly. And full shaking body. Though otherwise wholly, rationally, well and truly expecting it.”

Going further, freshly-minted critical gender theorist, Jennifer Rubin, argued that any restriction on abortion rights is a violation of secularism: “The right-wing justices and their supporters appear ready to reject one of the Founders’ core principles: that religion shall not be imposed by government edict.” Kurt Andersen went old school and worried about a papist cabal: “It really is kind of remarkable that only one in five Americans call themselves Catholic, but of the Supreme Court majority apparently about to permit abortion to be outlawed, all but one are Catholic and that one was raised Catholic.” Then there’s Vox‘s Ian Millhiser: “Seriously, shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said ‘fuck it! Let’s burn this place down.'” Fuck it! I’ll do it live!

Kamala Harris also found her voice:

    Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponize the use of the law against women. Well we say, “How dare they?” How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?

The premise here is that all women support abortion rights. But there is no serious gender gap on this question. In fact, a majority of “pro-lifers” are women, not men. So Harris is effectively saying: how dare women be allowed a voice in this debate?

Within minutes of the SCOTUS leak, moreover, we were told it means that before long, interracial marriages will be banned … in a country where 94 percent support them! Imagine Clarence Thomas divorcing himself by jurisprudence. Here’s Traister again: “Voting rights were gutted in 2013. Marriage equality. Griswold. Loving. Don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you such fears are silly or overblown.” Actually, listen to them — if you can hear them over Traister’s permanent rage-tantrum.

What strikes me about all of this is not the emotive hyperbole — that’s par for the course in a country where every discourse is now dialed to eleven. What strikes me most in these takes is the underlying contempt for and suspicion of the democratic process — from many of the same people who insist they want to save it. How dare voters have a say on abortion rights! The issue — which divides the country today as much as it has for decades — is one that apparently cannot ever be put up for a vote. On this question, Democrats really do seem to believe that seven men alone should make that decision — once, in 1973. Women today, including one on SCOTUS? Not so much.

January 19, 2022

QotD: Pandemics

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Governments thrive on infectious diseases, because only governments, or institutions that are very hard to distinguish from governments, can contain them. Which is why I always suspect that such “pandemics” (pandemic seems now to be the regular word for an “epidemic”) tend to be somewhat exaggerated. But if I were a politician, I would never dare to say such a thing.

Brian Micklethwait, “Not a good time to be a chicken”, Samizdata, 2006-02-21.

December 14, 2021

The Omicron variant of the Wuhan Coronavirus

Filed under: Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jim Treacher gets to the essential question about the dreaded and fast-spreading Omicron variant that the media somehow always forgets to ask:

We’ve seen a lot of headlines about the Omicron variant, which is the latest thing we’re all supposed to panic about. That’s how it works: You must be driven into a perpetual state of hysteria. You must never be allowed a moment to stop and catch your breath and think about what’s happening, because you might fall into badthink. The latest name for that is Omicron.

Omicron! OMG!! Run around like a headless chicken!!!

But here’s a question that none of our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press are asking, because they have no incentive to ask: How many people have died of Omicron?

Like, in the entire world. It doesn’t need to be a precise number. A rough estimate is fine. You can round up to the nearest 10.

Anybody? Hello?

I’m not sure how trustworthy Snopes is, but they say the number so far is … zero.

Zip.

Zilch.

Goose egg.

1 – 1.

None.

So please excuse me if I don’t freak the hell out every time somebody gets Omicron. Every story about it lists the number of cases but glosses over minor little details. Like what happens to the people who get it.

Do they get sick?

If so, how sick do they get?

If not, what’s the problem?

The media is just selling fear, as usual. Yes, COVID-19 is real, and a lot of people have died. No, nobody is dying from this Omicron variant. That’s good news, which is why the “news” isn’t interested.

Of course, on the weekend British PM Boris Johnson announced the death of someone in Britain who had contracted the Omicron variant … but it’s not clear if the person’s death was a direct result of that infection. So, we know at least one person has died with the Omicron variant, but we don’t know if it was from it.

December 7, 2021

Sarah Hoyt on the nonsense of so many pandemic measures

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Posting at Instapundit, Sarah Hoyt lists some of the many, many poor and even counter-productive public-health-theatre measures most western governments have been indulging in since the beginning of 2020:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s say you’re one of those insane people who dismissed the low numbers of death/serious illness aboard the Diamond Princess because apparently people on cruise ships have “top quality medical care” (Coo-ey! Is the sky made of candy floss in your world?) in what world — even a candy floss sky one — did it make sense to close local grocery stores but keep Walmart open? In what world did it make sense to direct flow in stores so everyone crammed in through the same door, and everyone walked the same path (thereby a crowded/grimy, etc. path)? In what world did reducing hours of stores make sense? In what world did it make sense to wear a mask to your table then remove it to eat? (Are you less contagious when sitting?) In what world did curfews make sense? In what world did mask mandates outside in botanic gardens and zoos make sense? In what world did it make sense that you were hectored for getting out and driving around, while remaining your car?

In what world did the government stomp on every — no matter how crackpot or inocuous — rumored treatment? In what world, despite all studies to the contrary, do two layers of thin fabric stave off viral infection? In what world are doctors and nurses laid off by the thousands during a supposed pandemic? And finally in what world does it make any sense that a completely ineffective — if not (the numbers are not trustworthy in the sense that we can’t trust anything from collection to reporting, but in the UK there are indications that way) counterproductive — vaccine is being forced on the population by government mandate?

The deaths of so many people — thanks to dodgy statistical reporting and frequent moving-the-goalpost sleights of hand we may not know exactly how many — are tragic, but the deliberate destruction of public trust in our governments, healthcare systems, and media reporting will continue for a long, long time to come. The Wuhan Coronavirus has not been the civilization-wrecker we were all told to fear, but the breakdown in trust will make us all more vulnerable the next time a serious disease strikes. Trust is earned, slowly, and rebuilding lost trust will be a much slower process.

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