John: I’ve never read a fashion magazine or watched a runway show, so I just naively assumed that models were stunningly attractive and feminine. But as Mears points out, the models are not actually to most men’s tastes. They tend to have boyish figures and to be unusually tall.1 Is this because the fashion industry is dominated by gay men, who gravitate towards women who look like teen boys? Whatever the origins of it, there is a model “look”, and the industry has slowly optimized for a more and more extreme version of it, like a runaway neural network, or like those tribes with the rings that stretch their necks or the boards that flatten their skulls. There’s actually a somewhat uncanny or even posthuman look to many of the models. The club promoters denigrate women who lack the model look as “civilians”, but freely admit that they’d rather sleep with a “good civilian” than with a model. The model’s function, as you say, is as a locus of mimetic desire. They’re wanted because they’re wanted, in a perfectly tautological self-bootstrapping cycle; and because, in the words of one promoter: “They really pop in da club because they seven feet tall”.
[…]
By the way, the fact that models are beautiful in a highly specific way, and that there exist women who are similarly beautiful but condemned to be “civilians”, is a good reminder of the dangers of doing too much principal component analysis.2 In so many areas of life, we are obsessed with collapsing intrinsically high-dimensional phenomena onto a single uni-dimensional axis. You see this a lot with the status games that leftists play around privilege and oppression — I feel like a rational leftist would say that a disabled white lesbian and a wealthy scion of Haitian oligarchs are just incomparable, each more privileged than the other in some senses and less in other senses. But no, instead there’s an insistence that we find an absolute total ordering of oppression across all identity categories, a single hierarchy that allows us to compare any two individuals and produce a mathematical answer as to which one is more deserving of DEI grants. My hunch is a lot of the internal tensions and bickering within American leftism are actually produced by this insistence, which makes sense because it’s totally zero sum.
But the disease of trying to pin everything to a single number is hardly confined to the left. You see it on the right in the obsession with IQ, as if a single number could capture the breathtaking range of variation of cognitive capabilities across all humanity. I mean for goodness sake, Intel learned the hard way that this doesn’t even work for computers, and human brains are much weirder and more complicated than microprocessors. But the even dumber version of this is the 1-10 scale of female beauty. There’s something so sublime about seeing a beautiful human being, because so much of it is either bound up in subtle interrelationships between different features (this is why plastic surgery often makes people uglier — there’s no such thing as a “perfect nose”, and if you pick one out of a catalog you’ll probably end up with one that doesn’t fit your face), or it’s irretrievably evanescent — a fleeting glance, or the way her hair falls across her face just so, gone the moment after it happens. Taking something so ineffable and putting it on a 1-10 scale only makes sense as a form of psychological warfare. And I get it, amongst the young people relations between the sexes have degenerated to the point of more or less open warfare, but come on, this is pornbrained nonsense.
Speaking of both the DEI olympics and the classification of female beauty, some parts of this book are really charmingly naive, and I snickered a bit at Mears’s mystification at why all of the models are white and blonde. The really funny part is that she says something like: “I expected this legacy of white supremacy to be in retreat given that so many of the big spenders in clubs these days are from Asia and the Middle East”. Is she really not aware that men of other races have an even stronger aesthetic preference for white women than white men do?3
John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.
1. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.
2. Not the only danger of too much principal component analysis!
3. Gabriel: Kimberly Hoang did an ethnography as a bar girl in several Vietnam bars. At the bar that catered to Vietnamese elites, the other bar girls made her lighten her skin with cosmetics and wear a black minidress, with the target look being tall, pale, and slender K-pop idol. When she moved to another bar catering to white sex tourists, the other bar girls told her to wear bronzer and a slutty version of traditional Asian dress with the target look being exoticized sexiness. See: Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. University of California Press.
June 27, 2025
QotD: The dangers of “doing too much principal component analysis”
June 26, 2025
NYC doubles down on Luxury Beliefs
New York City voters appear to have selected the ultimate “luxury beliefs” candidate as the presumptive next mayor of NYC in Zohran Mamdani:
The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.
Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.
Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.
And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.
Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.
It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.
And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.
“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.
As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.
But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.
German police raid homes to counteract online “hate speech” by “digital arsonists”
Things are getting worse for free speech in Germany, as eugyppius reports:
Apollo News reports on the newest, most irregular German holiday, which consists of the police conducting coordinated raids on and interrogations of ordinary people who are alleged to have said rude things on the internet:
On Tuesday morning police across Germany conducted raids targeting “hate speech and incitement” on the internet. According to the news agency dpa, there are currently 170 operations underway, including house searches and other measures. Those accused are charged with insulting politicians and inciting hatred …
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is in charge of the operation … In North Rhine-Westphalia, several police authorities struck simultaneously at 6 a.m. Police from Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne, Bielefeld, Münster, Hagen, and Bonn are among those involved. Fourteen suspects are to be questioned and two search warrants executed.1 The individuals in question frequently express themselves on social media, such as on X.
… The Action Day against alleged hate posts has been taking place regularly for years. On June 18, the BKA joined forces with the reporting center “REspect!” to participate in the “International Day Against Hate and Incitement”. People were called upon to report posts that allegedly spread hate.
Today was the twelfth such “Action Day against Hate and Incitement on the Internet”. That is only an approximate title; it varies slightly across press sources. This dubious ritual began in 2016, after Merkel opened the German borders to the entirety of the developing world and our politicians grew tired of people calling them imbeciles online. Police are very open that the goal of these coordinated Action Days is intimidation – or, as they put it, “deterrence”.
Our federal police love this holiday so much they often celebrate it twice a year, which is why are already on the twelfth such day, even though we have only had nine years since the establishment of this custom. Sometimes our betters even throw in bonus action days that for some reason don’t count, as during Covid when they conducted a special “Action Day against Political Hate Postings” after the seventh “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings” but before the eighth “Nationwide Action Day against Hate Postings”. Who knows how many such action days we have really had, especially considering that since 2020 the broader EU has adopted this sporadic holiday and occasionally coordinates its own Continent-wide “Action Day against Hatred and Incitement on the Internet”.
[…]
By calling these Action Days idiotic, I don’t mean to minimise them. They are borderline illegal, for they exploit what should be purely investigative tactics (interrogations, house searches) to scare and punish people in advance of any criminal conviction. The emphasis is not only on right-leaning posters, but invariably and most disgracefully on ordinary people with relatively little social media reach, whose posts in many cases have been seen a mere handful of times. The message is clear: They can get you, whoever you are; they can get anybody. Living in a country whose authorities amuse themselves by periodically harassing their own citizens in this way is disturbing. It’s an absolute scandal that all the major political parties support this, save for Alternative für Deutschland. It’s a reason to vote AfD all by itself.
June 25, 2025
Experts – “The shorter, the better”. Audiences – “Gimme more long-form, stat!”
At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia notes that the experts are all-in on shorter videos, but actual audiences are clearly now more interested in much longer-form treatments:
When I saw the numbers, I couldn’t believe them.
Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video — and by a huge margin.
Source: Tubular Labs
Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years.
That’s a staggering six-fold increase. But even short videos are now getting longer. Social media consultants call this the “long short” format. Sometimes they are used as teasers to draw viewers to still longer media (often on another platform).
Movies are also getting longer. At first glance, that makes no sense — more people are watching films at home on small digital devices, where Hollywood fare has to compete with bite-sized junk from TikTok and Instagram.
You might think that filmmakers would feel forced to compress their storytelling, but the opposite is true. They are learning that audiences crave something longer and more immersive than a TikTok.
At first, Hollywood insiders tried to imitate the ultra-short aesthetic, but they failed — sometimes in colossal fashion. (Does anyone remember the Quibi fiasco?)
Now they not only embrace long films, but happily release sprawling mega-movies longer than the Boston Marathon. Dune Two ran for 166 minutes — not even Eliud Kipchoge does that. Oppenheimer clocked in at 180 minutes. Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon lasted a mind-boggling 206 minutes.
The studios would have vetoed these excesses just a few years ago. Not anymore.
Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes.
Two of those long hit songs came from Taylor Swift — who has been a champion of longer immersive musical experiences, most notably in her insanely successful Eras tour. She set the record for the biggest money-generating roadshow in music history, and did it with a performance twice as long as a Mahler symphony.
These Swift concerts run for three-and-a-half hours (just like Scorsese at his most maniacal), and include more than 40 songs. They’re grouped in ten separate acts, each built around a different era in her career.
Ten acts? Really?
Even Wagner stopped short of that. But the Eras tour generated more than $2 billion in revenues. And all this happened while experts were touting 15-second songs on TikTok as the future of music.
I’ve charted the duration of Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences.
The New York Times complained about the length of her most recent album — calling it “sprawling and often self-indulgent.” It mocked her for believing that “more is more.”
It summed up her whole worldview with a dismissive claim that she has fallen in love with “abundance”. In fact, the Times opened its article with that accusation.
But I note that a year after the Times laughed at Swiftian abundance, the hottest topic in the culture is a book with that same word as its title. (Full disclosure: I’ll be doing a live Substack conversation with its co-author Derek Thompson in a few days.)
Abundance has dominated the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for the last several months. Even more to the point, the word seems to tap into the public’s hunger for something bigger, deeper, and more expansive than it’s been getting.
H.G. Wells’ Things To Come: Through The Eyes of its Time
Feral Historian
Published 10 Jan 2025H.G. Wells’ Things To Come played much differently in 1936 than it does today. So much so that it offers us an insight into the politics of the period if we can step back from our post-WWII understanding and look at it on its own terms.
Link to the Coupland essay.
http://digamoo.free.fr/coupland2000.pdf00:00 Intro
02:08 Revolution Envy
05:15 The Gulf of Time
06:32 Wells and the BUF
08:02 Empire and Establishment
12:11 The World State
15:18 To Understand the Past …
June 24, 2025
Political violence increases as the power of the state increases
Many people note that they don’t remember political conflicts being quite so nasty in years past as they are now, but the more power that accretes to the state the higher the perceived — and actual — risk of allowing the state to fall into the hands of your opponents. We’d be far better off if partisans would consider the possibility that the latest addition to state power they support will be used by their political opponents after the next partisan shift in electoral fortunes … if you fear this power in the hands of a Trump, you shouldn’t put it in the hands of a Biden.
As should be obvious to anybody following news about riots, assassinations, and arson attacks, politics have become far too important in America. With government large, growing, and reaching into every nook and cranny of our lives, Americans perceive politics as too much of a high-stakes game to lose. And so, they have divided into hostile camps to make sure their side comes out on top — and some turn ideological conflict into literal war.
A Surge in Political Violence
That point came home to me after Israel launched its preemptive attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. My wife’s rabbi (she’s Jewish and I’m not) called me and asked if I was willing to work security during services on Saturday. “No Kings” protests were planned across the country for the day, with the potential to turn nasty at the hands of people who insist anybody wearing a Star of David bears responsibility for the Israeli government’s actions. Tensions were already high after the Molotov cocktail attack on Jews in Boulder, the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence on the first night of Passover.
So, I spent much of Saturday standing in front of the synagogue, wearing a ballistic vest, with a pistol holstered on one hip and pepper spray on the other.
Underlining the point was that two Minnesota state lawmakers were targeted by an assassin the same Saturday — fatally in the case of one legislator and her husband. The day’s protests were predominantly, but not entirely, peaceful. That’s better than we’ve seen at recent protests against immigration enforcement that turned violent in Los Angeles and Portland, and at some pro-Palestine demonstrations.
That’s all recent. If we go back in time just a little, there’s the bombing of a fertility clinic by an “anti-natalist”; attacks on Tesla cars, dealerships, chargers, and owners by people opposed to Elon Musk’s temporary role in the Trump administration; and, notably, the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, has become something of a celebrity.
“Targeted violence is becoming normalized online and in the real world,” warned a December 2024 report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, affiliated with Rutgers University. “Memes, viral content, gamification and the lionization of Luigi Mangione are constructing frameworks that endorse and legitimize violence, encouraging harassment and further acts of violence against corporate figures.”
The report added that “the spread and scope of justifications for murder have significantly eroded what was once a barrier between mainstream society and fringe online communities that supported violence and glorified killers.”
Fandom Has Always Been UNHINGED
Jill Bearup
Published 23 Jun 2025Listen, nobody asked for a history of fanfiction but here we are regardless. From Helen of Troy fix-it fic to Holmes fans unsubscribing en masse when the detective was killed in The Final Problem, fandom has always been this chaotic, and fanfiction has always been with us. In one form or another.
00:00 Did you ask for this? Nah.
01:20 Ancient authors ripping off other ancient authors
03:06 Virgil was a Homer fanboy
04:10 Dante was a Virgil fanboy
05:18 Don Quixote and the Case of the Unauthorised Sequel
08:01 The Statute of Anne
12:35 Gulliver’s Travels NSFW fanart
14:40 Geniuses and Originality
16:51 The Berne Convention
17:20 Character Vibes are not Copyrightable
20:46 The First Modern Fandoms (were Genuinely Unhinged)Link to Der Spiegel article on copyright and innovation: https://www.spiegel.de/international/…
“Britain’s bill for Caribbean slavery comes to £19 trillion – fifteen times the current annual budget of the UK government”
The demands for reparations for historic wrongs will continue to grow, but the chances of any of the hustlers making the demands are remarkably slim, and thank goodness for that, because if the principle ever gets established we’ll be on a never-ending beggar-my-neighbour jag:
Britain’s bill for Caribbean slavery comes to £19 trillion — fifteen times the current annual budget of the UK government — according to the 2023 Brattle Report. And if the “Glasgow — City of Empire” display at the Kelvingrove Museum is anything to go by, Scotland owns a large share of that, since Glasgow was “one of the major port cities” involved in the slave-trade, whose profits played “a crucial role” in its economic development and prosperity.
The Tall Ship in Glasgow Harbour
The debt-collectors are already knocking at the door. In March 2023, Clive Lewis, MP and shadow Foreign Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn, called for the UK government to start “meaningful negotiations” over reparations with Caribbean countries. The following autumn, Lewis’s parliamentary office became the centre of a reparations-campaign, funded by Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien. And in April this year, Sir Keir Starmer received the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, into No. 10. “We’ve known each other many years as good colleagues and now as leaders who think alike”, said Starmer. Mottley has stated that Britain owes Barbados £3.9 trillion and it was she who pushed for reparations onto the agenda of the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit last year.
But the case for reparations doesn’t add up. Yes, some Britons were involved in inhumane slave-trading and slavery, mainly from about 1650 to the early 1800s, when they transported over 3.2 million slaves from Africa to the Americas. Yet, while campaigners portray British involvement as uniquely dreadful. It wasn’t.
Up until the end of the 18th century AD slavery and slave-trading were universal institutions, practised since the dawn of time on every continent by peoples of every skin colour. In North America, indigenous societies in the Pacific North-West were built on slave-labour, since subsistence required the rapid processing of salmon, and the quantity of work outstripped the supply of female labour. So, raiding for slaves was endemic. Thousands of miles to the south, the Comanche ran “the largest slave economy” in the 1700s — according to Oxford’s Pekka Hämäläinen. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Arabs had been busy slave-raiding and -trading since at least the 7th century AD. According to one authority, the Muslim trade transported 17 million slaves mainly from Africa, but also from Europe, to the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. This is one context out of which reparations-advocates like to abstract British slavery.
Another is African complicity. British slave-ships off the coast of West Africa didn’t have to raid inland to obtain their slaves. They just waited on the coast for them to be brought. Africans had been busy enslaving and trading other Africans for centuries, first to the Romans, then to the Arabs, and finally to the Europeans. As early as 1550 the Kingdom of the Kongo was exporting up to 8,000 African slaves annually to the Portuguese.
The final context that campaigners studiously ignore is the fact that Britain was among the first states in the history of the world to abolish slave-trading (in 1807) and slavery (in 1833) throughout its territories. It then used its dominant power to suppress both slave-trading and slavery from Brazil, across Africa and India, to New Zealand for the second half of the British Empire’s life. In the 1820s and ’30s, the Slave Trade Department was the Foreign Office’s largest unit. By mid-century the Royal Navy was devoting over 13 per cent of its total manpower to stopping transatlantic slave-trading. The cost of this alone to British taxpayers was at least the equivalent of up to £1.74 billion today or 12.7 per cent of the UK’s current expenditure on development aid — for half a century. According to the eminent historian, David Eltis, the nineteenth-century costs of slavery-suppression exceeded the eighteenth-century benefits.
The West Africa Squadron, which freed 150,000 African slaves.
June 23, 2025
80% of top-grossing movies are prequels, sequels, spin-offs, remakes or reboots
Ted Gioia on the death of creativity in the movie business, which also seems to be tracking almost exactly with the trend in music business profits:
I’m not shocked when I look in the mirror. Yeah, the Honest Broker isn’t getting any younger. But that’s the human condition.
Maybe I should start using a moisturizer. What do y’all think?
Nah. I’ll just let this aging thing play out.
On the other hand, I’m dumbfounded at everything in public life getting older — even older than me! Consider the current political landscape.
With each passing year, the US Congress looks more like the College of Cardinals (average age =78) or the Rolling Stones (average age = also 78).
We’re gonna need a lot of moisturizer.
But Congress is young and spry compared to Hollywood.
Back in 2000, 80% of movie revenues came from original ideas. But this has now totally flip-flopped.
Today 80% of the movie business is built on old ideas — remakes, and spin-offs, and various other brand extensions. And we went from 80% new to 80% old in just a few years.
Source: Experimental History
[…]
Look at music — and you see the same thing.
The share of old songs on streaming will soon reach 80%. It’s not quite there yet — the latest figures are 73%. But it was at 63% back in 2019. So it’s just a matter of time.
In 2000, streaming didn’t exist, so we looked to the Billboard chart to gauge a song’s success. And new music made up more than 80% of charted songs. So here — just like the movies — we’re flip-flopping from 80% new to 80% old over the course of a few years.
I don’t have good figures on publishing. But I’m pretty sure that AI-generated books and articles will soon represent 80% of the marketplace. Maybe we’ve already reached that threshold.
AI is deliberately designed to cut-and-paste, rehashing past work as its modus operandi. And it will do this to every field — replacing originality with repetition and regurgitation.
This is the new 80% rule.
Just imagine if traditional businesses operated this way.
- “Welcome to our restaurant, 80% of the food is leftovers.”
- “Welcome to our boutique, 80% of clothing is secondhand.”
- “Welcome to our dating service, 80% of the choices are your ex-girlfriends (or ex-boyfriends).”
None of that sounds very appetizing.
US strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities
One of the most frustrating aspects of internet culture today is the need for instantaneous “analysis” of military events. We all understand the desire for such insight, but the accuracy of information available in the immediate aftermath of any event is highly variable. Between the need to control the narrative on the part of the participant powers, the propaganda value of being “first” to report, and the impossibility of accurate damage assessment, it’s a wise move to discount almost everything you hear about a big event for some time. Chris Bray suggests that the old “72 hours rule” may be insufficient for something like the US bunker busting strikes against Iranian nuclear research facilities:
First, wait a while. Sean Hannity just announced that “a source” told him the attack was a complete success, and all of Iran’s nuclear sites were fully destroyed. I’d hesitate to believe that, is the gentle way to put it. I’d also hesitate to believe the stories being told from the other direction, and don’t forget that Trump’s attack on Qasem Soleimani produced a full week of OH NO WORLD WAR III JUST BEGAN stories in the establishment media. The likelihood is that none of what you’re hearing this week is fully true. Wait and watch. I hope that Iran and the US are backchanneling while engaging in belligerent public posturing, but by definition we’re not going to see the backchanneling. We’ll see. The 72 Hour Rule is in effect, here, at the very least.
Second, the ludicrous story in which Trump is violating law and political norms with unilateral military action is, as always, a deliberate performance of political amnesia. These are our political norms, for crying out loud.
We should probably fix that. But the people who tolerated an American war in Libya without direct congressional authorization, and who tolerated an American war in Yemen without direct congressional authorization, and who tolerated an American war in Syria without direct congressional authorization, aren’t actually going to impeach a president over military strikes in the Middle East undertaken without direct congressional authorization. It’s a show. The More Than a Week Rule requires us to view this action in the longer and generally quite unfortunate context of American foreign policy, and the politicians who are outraged by unilateral military action in the Middle East have zero standing on that score.
Third, and related, the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force is still in effect, and still being stretched and massaged beyond its intent and meaning, but note that Congress still hasn’t repealed it. A Congress that wished to restrain presidential military action in the Middle East would probably start there, and they haven’t.
Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds has a few thoughts on the matter:
People have been singing about it since 1980, but yesterday’s bombing raids on Iranian nuclear facilities were the first bombing attack since the 1979 hostage seizure.
Despite numerous calls for action against the Islamic Republic, Operation Midnight Hammer was the first U.S. military action against important Iranian assets on Iranian territory. The bombs fell less than 24 hours ago, but here are a few preliminary takes.
Competence. The most striking thing about the attacks was the extreme competence displayed by the Air Force, the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth, the various intelligence assets involved, the State Department, and the entire administration. There were no leaks. (How did they avoid leaks? Basically, they didn’t tell any Democrats what was coming. Take note.)
Not only were there no leaks, but President Trump and the diplomatic apparatus kept the Iranians in the dark, giving the impression of waffling in the White House even as things were being lined up. They received unintentional help in this from Sen. Charles Schumer, who had been for some time pushing the “TACO” acronym — Trump Always Chickens Out — in the service of a storyline that Trump was all bluster and no follow-through. The Iranians, apparently dumb enough to believe Democrats and the mainstream news media (but I repeat myself) were snookered.
New Diplomacy: In dealing with the Iranians in the 1980s, Donald Regan told President Reagan that America had been repeatedly “snookered” by a bunch of “rug merchants”. The Iranians were in fact very good at leading Americans down the garden path, invoking (often imaginary) splits between “hard-line” and “moderate” Islamists in their government as excuses for delay and backtracking.
In truth, as Henry Kissinger once said, “An Iranian moderate is one who has run out of ammunition“. After these raids, and the many Israeli attacks that led up to them, all of Iran is out of ammunition.
June 22, 2025
QotD: “Autism stolen valor”
The very concept that anyone would ever claim to be autistic as a status move would have seemed incomprehensibly bizarre to me when I was growing up.
I get it, though. In the intervening decades, somehow a lot of people have developed the notion that anybody above the middle range of IQ must be autistic-spectrum.
It’s not true. I’ve met enough autists, brights and super-brights to know differently. I’ve read a fair bit of the literature on psychometrics and MBD syndromes. And I’ve been a guest for faculty tea at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is very illuminating if you’re even a little bit observant about people.
Here’s what I think I know:
Many autists are seriously damaged and non-functional, to the point where they need to be institutionalized or have semi-institutional special care. Few people outside the mental-health profession know this. The “autists” we encounter in daily life are a selected high-functioning group.
HFAs (high functioning autists) have one advantage over average-IQ neurotypicals: they can really concentrate on things that aren’t social-status games or sexual maneuvers.
Average-IQ neurotypicals can only just barely manage that, so it’s difficult for them to compete with HFAs in fields where you have to be able to concentrate for long periods in order to do decent work.
Like, say, writing software. The upper reaches of software engineering are stiff with HFAs. This has become well known.
This doesn’t mean your typical HFA is actually brighter than a median average-IQ neurotypical. In fact, if you put a whole bunch of HFAs through a psychometric battery you’ll find their average IQ is lower than for neurotypicals, not higher.
HFA is actually a drag on general intelligence that HFAs overcome by being obsessive — grinding really hard on intelligent-people stuff.
The result is that HFAs as a population excel over average-IQ neurotypicals, compete fairly evenly with bright neurotypicals, but top out lower than super-bright neurotypicals do.
This is hard to notice because there are so few super-brights that many people never meet one at all. Very few people have observed enough super-brights to make valid generalizations about them. And of the few people who have a large enough observational sample, still fewer are themselves bright enough to comprehend what they see.
But I have been to faculty tea at the IAS. (I had been an invited speaker that day.)
Most of my friends and peers are people in the tippy-top end of the HFA cohort. Top 1% software engineers and people like that. So at the IAS, people-watching a bunch of Nobel laureates and people bright enough to work with Nobel laureates day-to-day, my jaw dropped open.
Because compared to who I usually hang out with, these people are mostly *normal*. Neurotypical. As near as I can tell, the people in the crowd showing HFA tells are the slow ones.
Imagine if you can being so natively intelligent that even though your brain is constantly trying to distract you into playing monkey socio-sexual status games, you can still think rings around 99.9% of the people in the world.
That’s what actual super-brights are like. They’re not brain-damaged. They’re not obsessive or compulsive or neurotic. They don’t have sensory disabilities. And they leave high-functioning autists in their dust.
Because I know this, I find the concept of people faking being autists amusing. They think they’re positioning themselves as the superior, smartest people. They are hilariously wrong.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-27.
June 21, 2025
QotD: The camera lies, but the photographer doesn’t always realize it
Tom Paine, “Where we are and what we see”, The Last Ditch, 2020-05-20.
June 19, 2025
QotD: Peer review and the replication crisis
Well, about that.
The replication crisis has been festering throughout the academic community for the better part of a decade, now. It turns out that a huge part of the scientific literature simply can’t be reproduced. In many cases the works in question are high-impact papers, the sort of work that careers are based on, that lead to million-dollar grants being handed out to laboratories across the world. Indeed, it seems that the most-cited works are also the least likely to be reproduced (there’s a running joke that if something was published in Nature or Science, you know it’s probably wrong). Awkward.
The scientific community has completely failed to draw the obvious conclusion from the replication crisis, which is that peer review doesn’t work at all. Indeed, it may well play a causal role in the replication crisis.
The replication crisis, I should emphasize, is probably not mostly due to deliberate fraud, although there’s certainly some of that. There was a recent scandal involving the connection of amyloid plaques to Alzheimer’s disease which seems to have been entirely fraudulent, and which led to many millions – perhaps billions – of dollars in biomedical research programs being pissed away, to say nothing of the uncountable number of wasted man-hours. There have been many other such scandals, in almost every field you can name, and God alone knows how many are still buried like undiscovered time bombs in the foundations of various sub-fields. Most scientists, however, are not deliberately, consciously deceptive. They try to be honest. But the different models, assumptions, and methods they adopt can lead to wildly divergent results, even when analyzing the same data and testing the same hypothesis. Beyond that, they can also be sloppy. And the sloppiness, compounded across interlinked citation chains in the knowledge network, builds up.
Scientists know quite well that just because something has received the imprimatur of publication in a peer-reviewed journal with a high impact factor doesn’t mean that it’s correct. But while they know this intellectually, it’s very difficult to avoid the operating assumption that if something has passed peer review it’s probably mostly okay, and they’re not inclined to spend valuable time checking everything themselves. After all, they need to publish their own papers – in order to finish their PhD, get that faculty position, or get that next grant – and papers that are just trying to reproduce the results of other papers, that aren’t doing something novel, aren’t very interesting on their own, hence unlikely to be published. So instead of checking carefully yourself, you assume a work is probably reliable, and you use it as an element of your own work, maybe in a small way – taking a number from a table to populate an empty field in your dataset – or maybe in an important way, as a key supporting measurement or fundamental theoretical interpretative framework.
But some of those papers, despite having been peer reviewed, will be wrong, in small ways and large, and those erroneous results will propagate through your own results, possibly leading to your own paper being irretrievably flawed. But then your paper passes peer review, and gets used as the basis for subsequent work. Over time the entire scientific literature comes to resemble a house of cards.
Peer review gives scientists – and the lay public – a false sense of security regarding the soundness of scientific results. It also imposes an additional, and quite unnecessary, barrier to publication. It frequently takes months for a paper to work its way through the review process. A year or more is not unheard of, particularly if a paper is rejected, and the authors must start the whole process anew at a different journal, submitting their work as a grindstone for whatever rusty old axe the new referee is looking to sharpen. Far from ensuring errors are corrected, peer review slows down the error correction process. A bad paper can persist in the literature – being cited by other scientists – for some time, for years, before the refutation finally makes it to print … at which point some (not all) will consider the original paper debunked, and stop citing it (others, not being aware of the debunking, will continue to cite it). But what if the refutation is itself tendentious? The original authors may wish to reply, but their refutation of the refutation must now go through the peer review process as well, and on and on it interminably drags …
As to what is happening behind the scenes, no one – not the public, not other scientists – has any idea. The correspondence between referees and authors is rarely published along with the paper. Whether the review was meticulous or sloppy, whether the referee’s critiques warranted or absurd, is entirely opaque.
In essence, the peer review process slows down the publication duty cycle, thereby slowing down scientific debate, while taking much of that debate behind closed doors, where its quality cannot be evaluated by anyone but the participants.
John Carter, “DIEing Academic Research Budgets”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2025-03-17.
June 18, 2025
QotD: The “doctrine of media untruth”
Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth”.
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Doctrine of Media Untruth”, American Greatness, 2020-05-24.
June 17, 2025
BC is buying ferries from China … to spite Trump!
After all the “buy Canadian” blather of the last federal election campaign, it was only a matter of time before the feds or one of the provinces did something astoundingly out-of-step with the mantra. Smart money was always on Quebec being the first (because that often makes sense for internal provincial political reasons), but no, this time it’s British Columbia going a long way out of their way to not buy Canadian for a huge government purchase:
BC Ferries’ MV Spirit Of Vancouver Island between Galiano Island (Bluffs Park) and Mayne Island, en route from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay, BC on April 6, 2022.
Photo by Gordon Leggett via Wikimedia Commons.
British Columbia’s transportation minister claimed Friday that buying new ferries from European shipyards would have cost roughly $1.2 billion more than buying them from a Chinese government-owned shipyard in Weihai, Shandong province, which is a city roughly the size of Montreal that I had never heard of until this week. China knows how to build cities. They burst into existence from nothing, like popcorn. China also knows how to build ships, and highways, and high-speed rail, and just about anything else you would care to name, better and more efficiently than the Canadian public service can realistically comprehend.
The four ships B.C. Ferries is fixing to replace, of 1960s and 1970s vintage, were built at Seaspan in North Vancouver (which is an active shipyard), at the Victoria Machinery Depot (which is no longer an active shipyard), and at the Burrard Dry Dock (which is also defunct). Canada’s shipyards, for better or worse — certainly for expensive! — are very busy building things for the navy.
B.C. Ferries has plenty of experience with foreign-built vessels. Its current fleet includes ships built in Romania, Poland, Germany and Greece. Other than the Baynes Sound cable ferry on Vancouver Island — which is not especially popular — the Crown corporation’s newest Canadian-built boat went into service in 1997. So “foreign” obviously isn’t the problem.
But China is China, and that’s legitimately another thing. China is not a Canadian ally. They try to screw with our democracy, and most other democracies by the sounds of it. And right now we are in a profoundly protectionist moment: Across the political spectrum, mostly because of President Donald Trump, “buy Canadian” is the only philosophy really on offer.
But does that make sense? We should pay over the odds for ferries … because of Trump? There wasn’t half of all this foofaraw when Marine Atlantic on the East Coast bought its newest ferry from Weihai. Since last year it has safely been shepherding Canadians between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, without a whisper of controversy in the Rest of Canada.
I don’t quite get the Trump angle, which is perhaps why I’m more interested in Dean Broughton‘s take:
… I’m not just disappointed — I’m furious — about the NDP government’s decision to award the construction of four new BC Ferries vessels to a Chinese state-owned shipyard. This isn’t just outsourcing. It’s betrayal dressed up as budget management.
Back in 2021, the NDP government unveiled a “Made-in-B.C.” shipbuilding strategy with great fanfare. They formed a Shipbuilding Advisory Committee, posed for cameras, and promised to rebuild a long-neglected industry. It was supposed to be a turning point, a real investment in local jobs and industrial capacity.
Now, many of those same politicians have turned their backs on everything they claimed to support. Not only did they ship the contracts overseas, but, according to Eric McNeely, president of the BC Ferry and Marine Workers’ Union, they didn’t even give B.C. shipyards a fair shot. The procurement process was so rushed and restrictive that no local yard could realistically compete. They didn’t lose the bid — they were boxed out.
That’s not fiscal prudence. That’s political cowardice.
The hypocrisy is staggering. This is the same government that talks endlessly about investing in clean industry and supporting working families, and they just handed a massive public contract to a country with a well-documented record of environmental abuses and human rights violations.
They talk about reconciliation and sustainable development—and then funnel hundreds of millions to an authoritarian regime.
Worse still, they did this knowing full well that B.C.’s industrial base is already in decline.
We have so little left beyond resource extraction. Shipbuilding could have been part of our economic renewal. Instead, it’s another casualty of government optics and empty promises.
I remember my father’s outrage in 1990 when the federal government cancelled the Polar 8 icebreaker — a Canadian-built vessel meant to defend our Arctic sovereignty. That decision was dismissed as a “cost-saving measure” and today our claim to the North has never been weaker.
The BC Ferries decision reeks of the same short-sighted logic.
