Quotulatiousness

July 16, 2023

Tricksy Tucker Carlson “tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president”

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

Chris Bray helps dispel the hypnotic trance so many American conservatives have been suffering under:

Tucker Carlson busy hypnotizing innocent conservatives to think they hate poor Mike Pence.

A stupid trend is emerging in the coverage of campaign discourse.

By now you’ve probably seen footage of Tucker Carlson interviewing Mike Pence in Iowa, a discussion that produced a memorable exchange regarding Ukraine. Politico would like you to know that it was a kind of hypnosis routine, a mental hijacking in which Carlson tricked conservatives into accidentally thinking that they don’t like the former vice-president.

The former Fox News host, reports the all-seeing Sally Goldenberg, “primarily used his perch to press candidates on issues of importance to him: namely, the United States’ role in the ongoing war in Ukraine.” As the United States sends cluster munitions to Ukraine and calls up thousands of reservists for “combat-ready” service in Eastern Europe, a journalist is asking political leaders about Ukraine only because it’s a quirky itch his ego needs to scratch — a selfish personal cause, pursued for whatever odd reason. Here’s Goldenberg’s eighth paragraph, and compare it to what you saw with your own eyes:

    Carlson — a fierce Trump defender who later soured on the ex-president — challenged, interrupted and contradicted the soft-spoken Pence at nearly every turn. As a result, the devout Christian candidate faced hostility and jeers at a summit that would have once provided him with a friendly audience.

The hostility and jeers were inorganic and manufactured; they didn’t happen because the audience didn’t like Pence or his answers, but as a result of the performative maneuvering of an interviewer who challenged and contradicted him. It’s simply not possible that the audience actually didn’t like Pence or his answer; rather, journalism’s David Blaine pulled a “hey, do you wanna see some magic?” on them, whisking them away into a world of illusion. Tucker Carlson entered a thousand helpless brains and drove a Pence-loving audience away like a bus. The story goes on the say that “establishment Republicans expressed dismay,” accusing Carlson of “pro-Kremlin misinfo.” They don’t have to write these stories any more — they can just cut and paste from all the previous versions.

This is a template for all future campaign coverage: Voters were accidentally hypnotized today into wrongfully [fill in blank] after [select: Tucker Carlson / Donald Trump] challenged and contradicted more responsible leaders.

Mass Suicide on Saipan – WW2 – Week 255 – July 15, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 15 Jul 2023

Japanese troops and civilians commit mass suicide rather than surrender to the Americans in the Marianas; in Normandy, Caen has finally fallen to the Allies though the fight for St. Lo is not over; the Soviet offensives in the north take Vilnius and the fighting continues up in Finland, but the big eastern front news is the mighty new Soviet offensive in Western Ukraine. (more…)

“A school is a hole we fill with money”

Filed under: Education, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding by Kieran Egan. This is one of a few dozen anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

I got a master’s degree in something like educational theory from a program whose name looked good on paper, and when I was there, one of the things that I could never quite make sense of was my professors’ and fellow students’ rock-solid assumption that schools are basically doing a good job.

Egan disagrees. He opens his book by laying that out:

    Education is one of the greatest consumers of public money in the Western world, and it employs a larger workforce than almost any other social agency.

    The goals of the education system – to enhance the competitiveness of nations and the self-fulfillment of citizens – are supposed to justify the immense investment of money and energy.

    School – that business of sitting at a desk among thirty or so others, being talked at, mostly boringly, and doing exercises, tests, and worksheets, mostly boring, for years and years and years – is the instrument designed to deliver these expensive benefits.

    Despite, or because, the vast expenditures of money and energy, finding anyone inside or outside the education system who is content with its performance is difficult.

Q: Oh, can it really be that bad?

Imagine a group of 100 American adults, chosen at random. They’ve sat through years of science lessons, so you decide to ask them some basic questions. What will they know?

Bryan Caplan, in his book Against Education, cites surveys of what Americans know about basic scientific concepts. Here’s what they find:

  • of the hundred adults, 76 know that the center of the Earth is hot (this is good!)
  • only 54 know that the Earth goes around the Sun
  • only 50 know that not all radioactivity is man-made
  • only 29 know that ordinary (as opposed to GMO) tomatoes have genes

Q: Well, those are facts, not understanding — and that’s just looking at American adults in general! Surely good schools are doing a better job educating than that?

Caplan cites a famous study by the educational psychologist Howard Gardner:

    Researchers at Johns Hopkins, M.I.T., and other well-regarded universities have documented that students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basic problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested.

Q: Okay, but schools teach reading, writing, and math … right?

Basic literacy and numeracy: yes. Adult-level: no.

If you gave someone two editorials that clashed over interpreting economic evidence, what percent of American adults could compare the editorials? One U.S. Department of Education study that Caplan cites finds: just 13%.

And while 78% could “calculate the cost of a sandwich and a salad, using prices from a menu”, only 13% could “calculate an employee’s share of health insurance costs for a year, using a table that shows how the employee’s monthly cost varies with income and family size”.

Q: I’m afraid to ask about reasoning abilities.

Caplan quotes from a study that looked into how well college students were at applying academic learning to everyday life. The authors write:

    The results were shocking. Of the several hundred students tested … the overwhelming majority of responses received a score of 0. Fewer than 1% obtained the score of 2 that corresponded to a “good scientific response”.

America isn’t so much of an outlier; numbers across the rest of the world are comparable. The 4.7 trillion-dollar question is why.

Cheap, Effective, Everywhere: The RPG-7

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 7 Apr 2023

Join Chris Copson as he presents our latest in Anti-Tank Chats. In this episode, we will delve into the fascinating history and practical applications of the RPG-7, a powerful anti-tank weapon.
(more…)

QotD: The girls’ locker room at school

Filed under: Education, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the few skills I’ve retained from my teen years in the public school system of mid-Nineties America is the ability to get undressed in front of people without ever actually being naked. It is an art form particular to girls of a certain age, mastered in the locker room in the five minutes between gym class and the rest of the day: a sort of anti-strip tease in which you take off your sports bra while still wearing a T-shirt, always taking care not to expose so much as a millimetre of bare breast.

This method of bra removal was part of a larger, elaborate set of rules, unwritten but ironclad, whereby the locker room was a place to be naked as little as humanly possible. Being in your underwear was okay, but only if you were clearly making haste to put on more clothing. The bathing facilities, it was understood, were for decoration only and not to be used; people still talked about the time a few years back when a girl named Katie, a transfer student from some other country, or possibly another planet, actually took a shower after gym class one day — here you would lower your voice to a dramatic whisper — in the nude.

This cautionary tale of Katie revealed the true nature of our shared pathology: it wasn’t just that we didn’t want to be seen naked, or to see each other naked. It was that allowing yourself to be seen naked signified something sinister about you. You had to be some kind of pervert, an exhibitionist weirdo who lacked the good sense to be ashamed of your body — which was, of course, disgusting, and should be hidden at all costs.

Obviously, this was not a healthy way to be. Obviously, we all had eating disorders. Obviously, the kids were not, in this particular case, all right — or right at all. It’s strange, then, that in 2023, the neuroses of a bunch of 15-year-old girls trying to hide their developing bodies from each other in an upstate New York locker room seem to have somehow become the basis for a new Western paradigm. Nudity is now seen as invariably sexual, highly suspicious, and probably dangerous, particularly to children.

Kat Rosenfield, “The case for getting naked”, UnHerd, 2023-04-12.

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