Quotulatiousness

July 26, 2022

What’s worse than having a nepotistic elite running the country? Having an incompetent nepotistic elite running the country

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

Kurt Schlichter isn’t a fan of the kakistocratic “elite” running most of the western world at the moment:

The things we took for granted decades ago are uncertain, and there’s always an excuse — inevitably one that blames us. Like the new take on air conditioners, which is that they are an extravagance we should learn to live without. What the hell? Why?

And don’t get me started on the bizarre insistence of the resetters that we all need to give up beef and start eating bugs. I have a better idea. How about we eat ribeyes and burgers like Americans instead of crickets and locust like Third World famine victims?

A proper ruling class would see the problems and move to solve them, because the proper relationship between the ruling class and the rest of us is that the ruling class provides prosperity and security and the rest of us let them skim some cream off the top. If they were doing a decent job, their riches and luxuries would not bother us much; but when they have failed yet still expect full pay and benefits anyway, that grates. It is unsustainable.

So why doesn’t the ruling class try to get America moving again instead of telling us that we should settle for less and less? For one thing, because our ruling class is not competent. Joe Biden is, in a way, the perfect president for the resetters — stupid and getting seniler, corrupt, yet absolutely sure of his own genius despite literally no basis for that self-regard. Look, the solutions are there. Want to fix crime? Do what Giuliani did in New York City in the nineties. Want energy independence? Do what Trump did in 2016. Want the economy roaring? Do what Reagan and Trump did. These tactics are not secrets, yet they seem to be too hard for our elite to pull off. Our reset revolt will be to embrace someone who can.

Of course, the incompetence issue assumes that our elite wants to succeed in doing what elites should do. Does it really? Does it really want us prosperous, secure and free? Oh, the elite wants to succeed for itself, and it sure has. The elite is richer than ever. And it intends to stay that way even after you are reset to “Peasant” mode. The elite won’t be taking public transportation among the hobos like you. They will be safe behind armed guards while you are disarmed and victimized — defend yourself at your peril! And they will keep eating steak tartar while you slurp up beetle paste. Yum yum, proles!

The ruling caste has no intention of you living like a civilized citizen. No, you are their sacrifice, to Gaia, the angry weather goddess or whatever other pagan idol that empty void inside them worships. Your pain is the point. Remember, bullies love the raw exercise of power. Making you miserable is a manifestation of their urge to dominate and crush. That’s the genesis of those seemingly insane moves around the world like Sri Lanka giving up fertilizer or agricultural powerhouse Holland evicting farmers. But these moves — including the destruction of our own energy industry — only seem insane if you refuse to accept their ultimate goal. They want to hurt you. Your pain is a feature, not a bug — which will be your next meal if they get their way.

Is Trudeau channelling Caligula? – “Let them hate me as long as they fear me”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spencer Fernando, writing for the National Citizens Coalition:

When trying to ascertain where the Trudeau Liberals are trying to take the country, it’s important to look at the foundations of Justin Trudeau’s worldview.

Clearly, he was heavily influenced by his father, someone who continuously expanded the power of the state.

Justin Trudeau’s father was well known as a Communist-sympathizer, being a big fan of both Fidel Castro and Communist China.

Note, the version of the CCP that existed in Pierre Trudeau’s era was even more brutal than the CCP as it exists today. At the time, it was not far removed from the time of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a government-imposed “reshaping of society” that led to roughly 45 million deaths.

To look at that, and still be a fan of the Chinese Communist Party, is to show a deep ideological commitment to authoritarian socialism and a deep aversion to human freedom.

The apple clearly didn’t fall far from the tree, as Justin Trudeau praised China’s “basic dictatorship” (AKA the centralized power structure that enables horrific crimes).

Trudeau also sought to move Canada closer to China’s orbit, only giving up on that when public opinion – and a subtle revolt among some backbench Liberals – rendered it politically unfeasible.

We can see how the authoritarian socialism that Trudeau praised in China (and let’s not forget his fawning eulogy for Fidel Castro), lines up with the fear and contempt he and the Liberals have for many Canadians.

Now, let’s also note this essential point:

The Liberals continuously target the same individuals that authoritarian socialists and communists have targeted:

    Rural Conservatives.

    Private Enterprise.

    Religious Groups.

    Freethinkers.

    Individualists.

    Private Farmers.

    Rural Gun Owners.

    Independent Press Outlets.

Historically, those are all groups that the far-left has targeted when given the opportunity.

We only need to look at how the Liberal approach to Covid was modelled after the approach taken by Communist China, and how both the Liberals and the CCP have been largely unwilling to move on.

While the Liberals are more constrained than the CCP by the fact that Canada maintains some freedoms, do we have any doubt that they would be far more severe if they could get away with it?

Remember, the moment he feared losing the 2021 election, Justin Trudeau used very divisive and disturbing rhetoric (especially disturbing when seen in a historical context), and purposely sought to direct hatred and blame towards those who resisted draconian state orders.

Since then, the Trudeau Liberals – even in the face of criticism by a few courageous Liberal MPs who were quickly “put back in their place” – have almost gleefully abused their power, purposely creating an “Us vs Them” narrative designed to pit Canadians against each other.

At the same time, they’ve continued their efforts to gain control over social media, silence dissenting views, and turn the establishment media into an extension of the state propaganda apparatus.

This is all being done because they fear those who have the intelligence and strength of character to see through their agenda.

They fear you, and have contempt for you.

July 25, 2022

Political memes: threat or menace?

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

In Quillette, Christopher J. Ferguson considers the social dangers of sharing political memes:

Modern politics has always been replete with issues about which people feel passionate, sometimes aggressively so. But the culture wars currently raging in the US, Canada, and across much of the industrialized West seem to be particularly fraught. In my 50-plus years, I have never seen so much anger and hostility among citizens of otherwise stable countries. Some of these people will participate in protests or engage in civil disobedience, but many more will employ the political meme to express their discontent. Given how widespread the phenomenon has become, it’s worth asking whether political memes actually advance advocacy goals and our knowledge of important issues, or if they simply feed an unconstructive cycle of anger, misinformation, and polarization.

The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, who used it to describe units of culture, socially transmitted and imitated across generations in ways synonymous with genes — adaptive ideas survive, while maladaptive ideas perish. But in the social media age, the word usually refers to “an image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users often with slight variations”. The subset of memes that focus on politics are generally designed to boil complex issues down to a digestible combination of emotive image and sloganeering text that flatters those who agree with its message and provokes those who do not.

Most academics who study memes agree that they are poisonous to healthy public discourse (“toxic” is a word that crops up a lot, even in the scholarly literature). One scholar bluntly called them “one of the main vehicles for misinformation”, and they tend to distort reality in several ways. By their very nature, they leave no room for nuance or complexity, and so they are frequently misleading; they tend to lean heavily on scornful condescension and moral sanctimony (usually, the intended takeaway is that anyone who agrees with the point of view being — inaccurately — mocked is an imbecile); they make copious use of ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, and motte-and-bailey arguments; they intentionally catastrophize, generalize, personalize, and encourage dichotomous thinking; and they are aggressive and sometimes dehumanizing. They are, in other words, methods of Internet communication that display all the symptoms of a borderline personality type of mental disorder. Of course, it’s possible to construct a meme that is short yet still thoughtful and sophisticated, but these are few and far between.

The best evidence we have today is incomplete and limited, but it suggests that political memes have a net negative effect on society. If the idea is to persuade or advance practical advocacy goals, then there is little evidence that they work. To the contrary, they may be counterproductive — the evidence we do have suggests that they contribute to political polarization, distort issues in the name of political expediency, and provoke indignation, hatred, and intolerance (on both sides of the political spectrum). Yes, the available evidence is fragmentary and would certainly benefit from better and more open science designs. However, it accords with larger observations about social media and political polarization. Perhaps new and better research will reveal that alarm about the negative effects of memes is simply another moral panic comparable to those that arose around video games or smoking in movies. But since memes add almost nothing to public discourse that would offset the risks, it’s probably worth hesitating before sharing them.

I save the odd meme that wanders through my various social media sites that I find amusing or (occasionally) effective, and memes as described in this article certainly do seem to be far more common than they were even a few years ago. A few selections below the fold, just because:

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Rowan Atkinson & Hugh Laurie – Shakespeare and Hamlet (1989)

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Nathaniel Brechtmann
Published 1 Sep 2011

A sketch called “A Small Rewrite”, performed by Hugh Laurie (aka House) as Shakespeare and Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr Bean) as the editor.

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July 24, 2022

Still no actual evidence of unmarked graves for Residential School children

Filed under: Cancon, Education, History, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay updates the year-old sensational stories about First Nations children being buried in unmarked (in more unhinged reporting it might have been “mass”) graves on the grounds of former Residential Schools in Canada:

Canada’s unmarked-graves story broke on May 27th, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported the existence of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data that indicated regularly spaced subterranean soil disturbances on the grounds of a former Indigenous Residential School that had operated in Kamloops, BC between 1893 and 1978. In addition, the First Nation’s leaders asserted their belief that these soil disturbances corresponded to unmarked graves of Indigenous children who’d died while attending the school.

The story became an immediate sensation in the Canadian media; and remained so for months, even after the GPR expert on whom the First Nation relied, Sarah Beaulieu, carefully noted that the radar survey results didn’t necessarily indicate the presence of graves — let alone graves that had been unmarked, graves of Indigenous people, or graves of children. Contrary to what many Canadians came to believe during that heady period, GPR survey data doesn’t yield X-ray-style images that show bodies or coffins. What it typically shows are disruptions in soil and sediment. Investigators then need to dig up the ground to determine what actually lies underneath.

An explanatory image posted by GeoScan, a Canadian Ground-Penetrating-Radar service provider, showing how mapped GPR data can indicate the possible presence of graves.
Image via Quillette.

But those details were swept aside during what, in retrospect, appears to have been a true nation-wide social panic. As other Indigenous groups announced that they’d be conducting their own GPR surveys, media figures confidently asserted that the original Canadian Residential-School student death-toll estimate of 3,201 would soon double or even triple. One op-ed writer went so far as to declare that “the discovery of the graves of the children in Kamloops may be Canada’s Holocaust moment.” Dramatic, tear-drenched acts of public atonement unfolded everywhere, with many July 1st Canada Day celebrations being either cancelled or transformed into opportunities for morose self-laceration.

I was one of many Canadians who initially got swept up with all of this — in large part because it seemed as if everyone in the media was speaking with one voice, including journalists I’d known and respected for many years. Looking back on the coverage, I note that headline writers mostly skipped over the technical bits about soil dislocations and such, and went straight to “bodies” and “graves”. And the stories often were interspersed with credulous recitations of dubious tales featuring live babies being thrown into furnaces or buried alive.

The whole mission of Canada’s church-run Residential School system was to assimilate Indigenous people into white Canadian society, usually against their will, while forcing children to leave their families and communities for months or even years at a time. No one disputes that many students were subject to cruel (and sometimes even predatory) treatment and substandard medical care. Certainly, the death rate for Indigenous children attending these schools was much higher than that for children in the general population. No, I never bought into the idea that there was any kind of mass-murder plot going on at these schools. But it hardly seemed far-fetched that some victims of mistreatment and neglect had been buried in unmarked graves — “off the books”, so to speak—by malevolent white teachers, school administrators, and priests seeking to evade responsibility for their actions.

The other important aspect to mention is that — like most other Canadians, I’m guessing — I believed we were only a few days or weeks from seeing real physical evidence plucked from the earth. So it didn’t much matter to me that early commentators were temporarily playing fast and loose with the distinction between GPR data and actual corpses.

Canadians were being told that the old orchard in Kamloops where the GPR data had been collected was a crime scene — a site of mass murder, and the final resting place of 215 child homicide victims. As I’ve reasoned elsewhere: If you told Canadians that, say, 215 murdered white children were buried somewhere in Toronto, or Ottawa, or Vancouver, there’d be investigators and police crawling all over the place, looking for remains that could be tested and identified. And so I naturally assumed the same thing soon would be happening in Kamloops.

But … no. Not at all, in fact.

As I wrote over a year ago, the way the story swept the media was as if the whole Residential School history was somehow new and previously unknown:

Despite being Canadian, my interest in Canadian history centres mostly on economic, naval, and military aspects, but I was certainly aware that the residential school system was a black mark on Canada’s historical dealings with First Nations and that the general outline of events — if not the gruesome details — had been known for many years. The first time I found out about it was in middle school, through what we’d now call a “Young Adult” novel about a young First Nations boy escaping from the residential school he’d been sent to and his attempts to travel hundreds of miles to get home. I read it in the early 70s and it may have been published up to a decade before then (I no longer remember the author’s name or the title of the book, unfortunately).

If I, as a schoolchild, knew something of this fifty years ago, why have people younger than me been shocked and appalled to be hearing about this widespread tragedy for the first time now?

July 23, 2022

QotD: “The New Journalism” and “narrative journalism”

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Most of what we consider public life in modern societies is public reactions to things done by the powerful. The New York Times makes up a new hoax and the week is spent on the hoax. The usual suspects swear by the obvious lies and normal people spend days picking apart the lies. Occasionally, we get the reverse where some uncomfortable truth gets loose and the usual suspect go bananas trying to “debunk” it while normal people cling to it as blessed relief.

This is the news cycle in a nutshell. There is very little news. It has been at least a generation since the major news outlets in America have done reporting. Most of it is just stenography. The “journalist” copies what a government spokesbot has sent to them and dresses it up with some commentary. Then there are the narratives that are designed to give the public a way to repeat the official truth that sounds convincing to them and their acquaintances.

The source of this is the “new journalism” that emerged in the 1960’s. The late British reporter Chris Munnion chronicled this in his book Banana Sunday. He spent most of his life covering Africa for the Telegraph. In the 1960’s he noticed Americans showing up with pre-written narratives. They would seek out quotes and pictures to fill out the story they had prepared for the trip. Even if the facts contradicted the narrative, they stuck with the narrative because that was the new journalism.

Narrative journalism is just accepted these days. The “news” has always been a form of passive-aggressive political activism so its evolution into story telling on behalf of powerful interests seems natural. When you think of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as propaganda arms of their respective clients in the managerial elite, it all makes sense. Instead of the Ministry of Truth we have the mainstream media “speaking truth to power”.

That last bit gets mocked by normal people on this side of the great divide because they have woken up to the reality of this age. As if often the case, however, there is a kernel of truth locked in this media fabrication. The people inside these disinformation operations genuinely fear the public. When they say “speak truth to power” they mean broadcast their truth to you in the hopes that you will buy it. Modern mass media is mostly a defensive weapon of the elites.

The Z Man, “The Lying Liars”, The Z Blog, 2022-04-20.

July 21, 2022

Farmers’ protests against insane environment mandates continue in the Netherlands

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For some unknown reason, the huge protests by Dutch farmers against ridiculous environment-protection rules seems to be getting almost no media coverage. As Rex Murphy pointed out in the National Post, if this was happening in Canada, the government would already have imposed the Emergencies Act and be actively depriving people of their civil rights across the board. Somehow, this protest is uninteresting to most of the legacy media, but as Brendan O’Neill explains, it is a huge deal:

This strange, sunny week has provided the best proof yet that the West’s elites have taken leave of their senses. That they have fully retreated from reason, and from reality itself. As farmers and workers across the world continue to rise up against the tyrannical consequences of climate-change alarmism, what are the elites doing? Engaging in yet more climate-change alarmism. Wringing their hands over the hot weather and its forewarning, as they see it, of the manmade heat-death of the planet that is apparently just around the corner. They continue to peddle the very politics of eco-dread that is whacking farmers and the working class and storing up problems for us all.

The contrast could not have been more stark. On one side we have farmers everywhere from Ireland to the Netherlands to, of course, Sri Lanka making it as plain as they can that the warped ideology of Net Zero will make it harder for them to produce the food that humanity needs. And on the other side we have the Net Zero fanatics of the upper middle classes continuing to push their dire, destructive green ideology. The heatwave proves we must cut emissions even faster and more severely, they tweet in their breaks from sunning themselves in their spacious gardens, even as farmers tell them that the zealous obsession with cutting emissions will make it harder to grow crops. So this is where we’re at – with a ruling class more invested in fact-lite narratives of apocalypse than in the basic responsibility of a society to make food.

This politics is best understood as luxury apocalypticism. It is clearer than it has been for a very long time that the fantasy of the end of the world, of marauding, industrious mankind polluting itself into oblivion, is something only the well-off and time-rich can afford to indulge. The dream of eco-doom is a simultaneously self-hating and self-serving political narrative. It expresses the elite’s turn against the very modernity they helped to create while also flattering their belief that only they can save us. That only their plans to slash emissions, to cut back on global travel and generally to shrink the “human footprint” can hold Armageddon at bay. The great benefit of the global revolt of farmers and workers is that it is injecting a truth and a realism into public discussion that might just help to push back the luxurious and ruinous ideologies of the new elites.

Everywhere, farmers are saying “Enough”. In the Netherlands farmers have been revolting for weeks against their government’s perverse demands that they slash their use of nitrogen compounds. The Dutch government, under pressure from the EU, has committed itself to cutting its nitrogen emissions in half by 2030. This would entail farmers getting rid of vast numbers of their livestock, crushing their ability to make a living and to produce what needs to be produced. So we have the truly surreal situation where Dutch farmers are protesting in their thousands for the right to feed the people of the Netherlands while the elites of the Netherlands demonise them, harass them and even shoot at them. I can think of no better illustration of the loss of logic and humanity within the modern elites than this strange spectacle.

July 20, 2022

Apparently “Crisis-Pregnancy Centers” prey exclusively on young people who menstruate!

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

Chris Bray reveals some of the shocking information a new investigation has turned up about so-called “Crisis-Pregnancy Centers” in the United States:

A quick illustration of the Red-Blue Chasm, the immensity of which can now only be estimated using theories borrowed from astrophysics.

An email message this morning from The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a deep investigative dive into an obscure topic — in a message that barely fit on my screen, so the screenshot is cut off a bit at the top:

Figured that out, did they? Coming soon: “Pizza shops orbit college campuses. Scholars have determined that they offer a bread-like disc strewn with red liquid and white-colored molten coverings”.

The investigation of pregnancy centers proceeds on the kind of dark foreboding that a television show conveys with poor lighting and a low vibration on the soundtrack. Since the reporter didn’t manage to get a single pregnancy center advocate or volunteer on the record, despite sending some email messages, the whole investigation takes all criticism entirely at face value, uncontested and unexamined. That leads to framing like this:

    Some centers target college students. Andrea Swartzendruber, an epidemiologist at the University of Georgia, analyzed the centers’ locations in Georgia and found that they were disproportionately clustered around the state’s colleges and high schools when compared with other health clinics. Swartzendruber and her colleague Danielle Lambert have mapped the locations of more than 2,500 crisis-pregnancy centers across the United States.

Yes, friends, I’m afraid this is the actual dark truth: Pregnancy centers target young women. They don’t target eight year-old boys or the elderly at all! nOw Do YoU SeE tHe hIddEn aGenDa!?!?!?!? THERE’S NOT A SINGLE CRISIS-PREGNANCY CENTER INSIDE A SINGLE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY!!!!!

Anyway, scholars were able to determine this, using sophisticated geospatial analysis.

The story also includes shock-quotes from an actual college student, Hana, who went to a crisis pregnancy center, like this one: “She kept referring to my pregnancy as a baby.”

And then, presumably, they invaded Poland.

July 19, 2022

Drawing the proper lessons from the massive Rogers outage earlier this month

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains the really important lesson that seems to have escaped a lot of the critics who covered the Rogers internet/cell/TV outage that took a third of the country offline for 24 hours or more:

Most of the conclusions reached after the Rogers telecommunication outage two weeks ago are wrong. Millions of people lost home internet, television and cellphone service for the better part of a day (some for much longer). For those who had all their services bundled with Rogers, this meant being entirely cut off, including from access to emergency services. It was a big deal, both in terms of lost economic productivity and for those Canadians who needed help and could not access it.

The problem isn’t with Rogers, though. The problem is with everyone else.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Rogers is bad. It did have a big problem. I am not a fan. Their customer service is generally awful. Their reliability and performance is decidedly meh and the meh costs a fortune. So don’t take this column as some sort of apologia for Rogers. I am one of their customers, but I’m only one of their customers because none of the other options are much better.

But still. The lesson of two Fridays ago shouldn’t be that Rogers is bad. It also shouldn’t be that the CRTC is bad or that our politicians are spineless and that our regulators are thoroughly captured. All of those things are true, but they’re not the lesson. That wasn’t the failure of two Fridays ago. The failure of two Fridays ago was that when one of our telecom companies went down, a pretty horrifying cross-section of Canadian society had no back-up plan.

Let’s imagine an alternate universe where things in Canada simply functioned better. Close your eyes and just dream it up. You’re in a different Canada now. The CRTC is awesome. Our politicians are terrific. Rogers is an incredibly good company that is masterful at delivering services that are overwhelmingly reliable and affordably priced. Even in this increasingly far-fetched parallel timeline, no telecom company is going to bat a thousand. You will never have 100 per cent service reliability. This alternate Canada still has outages — maybe they’re rare and brief, but they’re not unheard of or impossible.

And that’s why we can’t look at what happened two weeks ago as a failure at Rogers. Obviously Rogers failed. But the real failure was a failure of imagination and planning on the behalf of millions of individuals, and a worryingly diverse set of institutions, that did not have a back-up plan.

How dating apps have changed the dating world

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

Rob Henderson on the changes dating sites have accelerated in the dating community:

    “In the United States, 35 percent of Tinder users are college students ages 18 to 24 … ‘I’ve heard a joke on campus that goes something like this: ‘First base is hooking up, second base is talking, third base is going on a date and fourth base is dating’.“ (source).

I am just old enough to remember what the dating scene was like before the rise of Tinder and other dating/hook-up apps. It has changed a lot.

2012 was another world in many ways.

The situation has changed for everyone on the dating market. Even those who don’t use these apps. This is because even for the people who don’t use the apps, they still live in an environment where others use them. Over time, those who don’t use apps must adapt to the preferences and behavior of those who use them. Not the other way around.

One example of how the scene has changed. I have a friend from college. A good-looking guy. He showed me how many women he has matched with: More than 21,000. Twenty-one thousand. Tinder actually identified him as a valuable user early on, and gave him free perks and upgrades. They lifted his radius restrictions. This allowed him to match with even more women. I have another friend. Doesn’t have the best pictures on his profile. But not a bad looking guy. Over roughly the same period of time as my other friend, he has matched with seven women.

Some findings on dating apps:

  • 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
  • Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
  • Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
  • Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
  • 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
  • In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

One way dating apps might be changing the dating scene. People used to have to go out to meet people. And it was costly to lose a relationship partner, in part because of the process involved in meeting someone new. Today, people know that a new partner is a few swipes away. Partners might be more replaceable. If things start deteriorating with their current partner, some can pull out a goldmine in their pocket.

There may be some sexual stratification going on as well. My two friends are examples of the above finding that being slightly more attractive as a man leads to far more matches.

July 18, 2022

“Sophisticated liberals” yawning in synchrony

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

Ed West linked to this Jacob Siegel post about the tactical use of the “yawn” response to deflect and avoid discussion of topics “sophisticated liberals” want to avoid:

An American who wants to understand how political change occurs in their country must study what I’ve come to think of as the “yawning” habit of sophisticated liberals.

The yawn is an avoidance tactic that feigns moral and intellectual superiority while exhibiting dullness and cowardice. It is deployed when some flagrantly abnormal thing is occurring, which the sophisticated liberal is too sophisticated to defend outright — since to do so would expose them to potential mockery and loss of status — but too cowardly to condemn, since that would risk placing them on the wrong side of Progress.

Here we can observe the liberal pundit Josh Marshall, yawning as loud as he can in response to questions about the precepts of gender ideology.

Marshall has not given much thought to why thousands of people, including adolescents, have suddenly decided to alter their bodies in irreversible ways. He’s not just incurious, he’s bragging about it. Only right-wing, extremist Putin lovers (of course, Marshall was a Russiagate conspiracist) would possibly care about an historically unprecedented, institutionally directed revolt against sexual dimorphism. A 2018 study by the British government found that the number of minors being referred for gender treatments, including hormone injections, increased by more than 4,000% in a single decade … How uninteresting. Yawn. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health just lowered the minimum age for children to receive puberty blockers or undergo transition surgery from 16 to 14. Double yawn.

“I’d like to know why you care,” the conservative pundit Matt Walsh is asked repeatedly in his new agitprop documentary What Is a Woman? The academics and other gender experts whom Walsh interviews clearly view this as an effective response to his line of questioning. It tells you something about the moral and intellectual vitality of contemporary liberalism that they simply assume that the people whose opinions they care about would agree there’s something very suspicious and déclassé about insisting on a definition of woman.

July 17, 2022

Science by press release

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

Christopher Snowden on a media-genic “study” from a few years ago that supported the priors of the anti-alcohol campaigners and thus was given full uncritical media coverage, despite obvious flaws in data selection and methodology:

In 2018, the Lancet published a study from the “Global Burden of Disease Alcohol Collaborators” which claimed that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption. This was widely reported and was naturally welcomed by anti-alcohol campaigners. The BBC reported it under the headline “No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms”. (Note the cheeky use of the word confirms, despite the finding going against fifty years of evidence.)

The study wasn’t based on any new epidemiology. Instead it took crude, aggregate data from almost every country in the world, mashed it together and attempted to come up with a global risk curve.

As I said at the time:

    The study contains no new evidence and uses an unusual modelling approach based on population-wide data from various online sources. If you look at this massive appendix you can see the kind of data they were using. The figures are extremely crude.

    The authors don’t dispute the benefits of moderate drinking for heart disease but they claim that the benefits are matched by risks from other diseases at low levels of consumption and are outweighed by the risks at higher levels of consumption. Some diseases which have been associated with benefits of drinking, such as dementia, are excluded from the analysis entirely. They also ignore overall mortality, which you might think was kind of important.

A typical risk curve for alcohol consumption and mortality is J-shaped. It looks like this …

But the GBD’s risk curve for “all attributable causes” looked like this…

You will notice that there appears to be no protective effect at moderate rates of consumption in the GBD’s curve. One important reason for this is that they associate alcohol consumption at any level with tuberculosis. Tuberculosis remains a serious health problem in much of the world, but not in Britain. So what relevance does a global risk curve have to us? None.

Moreover, TB is not really an alcohol-related disease and is only viewed as such in this study because (a) drinking might weaken the immune system and (b) people who go to bars and clubs are more likely to catch an infectious disease. I kid you not.

July 16, 2022

Declarations of faith in the Church of Scientism

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

Chris Bray points out the hard-to-miss similarities between traditional religious beliefs and the modern beliefs of the congregations of the Church of Scientism:

Christian churches tend the bust out the HE IS RISEN banner on Easter Sunday, and here’s a version of the central declaration of faith from another religion, the Church of Scientism:

“We stand by science, so we stand by the vaccine.” These hang from every lamppost on the sizeable campus of a major research hospital in Los Angeles, an identical recitation of faith that appears before the eyes of the medical pilgrim every thirty steps or so. You can chant it in a rhythm, if you’re so inclined, as ye performest thine Stations of the Vaccine. The true penitent will park on Robertson, to walk past the maximum number of signs, but mark ye the parking restrictions, for the ways of Los Angeles parking enforcement are cruel, and many are they who suffer the penalties.

If this isn’t a declaration of a faith, then what is it? The call and response, the this-therefore-this:

Priest: Because of science, we save lives every day.

Congregation: We stand by science, so we stand by the vaccines.

You can hear the chanting in your head, can’t you? The repetition, the delivery of a mantra in a form that allows you to perceive it, and perceive it, and perceive it, and perceive it yet again before ye makest thine turn onto San Vicente. When you say it often and identically, it wears grooves; it patterns the dailiness of life with the avenues of belief. It’s Benedictine Scientism.

Or, you know, not. My bet is that most people never notice these signs, or never notice them twice, but the choice to make them and to display them is compellingly bizarre and creepy. I wish I could have witnessed the meeting of medical administrators that led to that choice, because I’m fairly confident that it played like a Paddy Chayefsky movie IRL.

I’ve been reminded over and over this week how important Substack has become. This absolute must read post from el gato malo discusses the complete implosion of popular trust in the mRNA injections, from the sharp decline in booster uptake to the “that parrot is dead” numbers regarding mRNA uptake in children under the age of five. Flatly, people aren’t taking this shit anymore, and they’re for damn sure not having it injected into their children.

July 15, 2022

Forget George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR – studying the presidency of Jimmy Carter is suddenly more relevant

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

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so 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:

President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan.

But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter”. It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.

Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains”, is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect.

Carter attends the Naval Academy and eventually becomes a lieutenant on a nuclear submarine. At one point, he participates in a cleanup mission in which he is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor, thus causing him to develop superpowers that he will later use to win the presidency. Perhaps because of this experience — but, more likely, because he realizes that his deep-seated religious beliefs make him a poor fit for a career in an organization designed to wage war — he quits the Navy at 29 and returns home to Plains. “God did not intend for me to kill”, he says, which would have been an awesome catchphrase had those superpowers actually been real.

Searching for a new career, Carter runs for State Senate, loses due to voter fraud, then challenges the results and wins by 15 votes in a new election. A few years later, he runs for governor, and loses for real this time, to avowed segregationist (and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox. Having never experienced failure in any way before, Carter is plunged into a profound spiritual crisis by this loss. Today, we would probably just say he was depressed. But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed”, you have a spiritual crisis.

In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue. Carter describes himself nonsensically as a “conservative progressive” and avoids commenting on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. He’s so good at pretending to be racist that the white supremacist White Citizens Council endorses him. He even wins the endorsement of his old opponent, outgoing Governor Maddox, who’s term-limited from running again. As far as anyone can tell, Carter never expresses any second thoughts about his disingenuous behavior during the campaign. Having passed through his spiritual crisis, he’s now guided by an unshakeable faith in his own goodness — a faith that justifies a victory by any means necessary.

The “fake racist” strategy works. Carter trounces his opponent, a wealthy businessman named Carl Sanders who he caricatures as “Cuff Links Carl” — when he’s not busy falsely accusing him of corruption, or hypocritically bashing him for his support of Martin Luther King. In January 1971, Carter is sworn in as the 76th Governor of Georgia.

Just a few minutes into his inaugural speech, Carter drops the pretenses of his campaign and executes on one of the most dramatic about-faces in modern-day political history when he declares that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over”. The crowd gasps audibly, and outgoing Governor Maddox denounces Carter as a liar before the inauguration is even over. But Carter doesn’t care. He’s governor now, and he’s going to do what he wants.

July 13, 2022

Joe Biden’s age and health can suddenly be discussed in the New York Times

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

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of Matt Taibbi’s TK News article on “The New Kremlinology”, he discusses the sudden change of policy for the New York Times regarding Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive condition:

After reading his formal remarks from the teleprompter, Joe Biden walks away from reporters without answering questions, August 2021.

On Monday, the New York Times ran a story pegged to a new poll, showing Joe Biden dragging a sub-Trumpish 33% approval rating into the midterms. The language was grave:

    Widespread concerns about the economy and inflation have helped turn the national mood decidedly dark, both on Mr. Biden and the trajectory of the nation… a pervasive sense of pessimism that spans every corner of the country …

The article followed another from the weekend, “At 79, Biden Is Testing the Boundaries of Age and the Presidency”. That piece, about Biden’s age — code for “cognitive decline” — was full of doom as well:

    Mr. Biden looks older than just a few years ago, a political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shake-ups … Some aides quietly watch out for him. He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.

Biden’s descent was obvious six years ago. Following the candidate in places like Nevada, Iowa, and New Hampshire, I listened to traveling press joke about his general lack of awareness and discuss new precautions his aides seemed to be taking to prevent him engaging audience members at events. Biden at the time was earning negative headlines for doing things like jamming a forefinger into the sternum of a black activist named Tracye Redd in Waterloo, Iowa, one of several such incidents just on that trip.

My former editor at Rolling Stone John Hendrickson, a genial, patient person whom I like a great deal, insisted from afar that Biden’s problems were due to continuing difficulties with a childhood stutter, something John had also overcome. He went on to write a piece for the Atlantic called “Joe Biden’s Stutter, and Mine” that became a viral phenomenon, abetting a common explanation for Biden’s stump behavior: he was dealing with a disability. The Times added op-eds from heroes like airline pilot Captain “Sully” Sullenberger with titles like, “Like Joe Biden, I Once Stuttered, Too. I Dare You to Mock Me”.

But I’d covered a much sharper Biden in 2008 and felt that even if the drain of overcoming a stutter had some effect, the problems were cognitive, not speech-related. He struggled to remember where he was and veered constantly into inappropriateness, challenging people physically, telling crazy-ass stories, and angering instantly. He’d move to inch-close face range of undecideds like Cedar Rapids resident Jaimee Warbasse and grab her hand (“we’re talking minutes”, she said) before saying, “If I haven’t swayed you today, then I can’t.” I called the mental health professionals who were all too happy to diagnose Donald Trump from afar for a story about the effort to remove Trump under the 25th amendment, and all declined to discuss Biden even off the record for “ethical” reasons.

This week, all that changed. Add stories like “Biden Promised to Stay Above the Fray, but Democrats Want a Fighter” and Michelle Goldberg’s “Joe Biden is Too Old to Be President Again”, and what we’ve got is a newspaper that catches real history spasmodically and often years late, but has the accuracy of an atomic clock when it comes to recording the shifting attitudes of elite opinion.

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