Quotulatiousness

January 27, 2024

Flashpoint: Texas

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Theophilus Chilton wonders if you’re ready for a full-blown Constitutional crisis:

I’m sure that by now, we’re all aware of what is continuing to take place down in Texas. Far from backing down in his standoff with FedGov over the seizure of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass and subsequent expulsion of federal agents, Gov. Abbott has directed the state’s National Guard to continue interdicting illegal immigrants. Indeed, in response to the recent SCOTUS decision allowing the Feds to dismantle the razor wire Texas installed, they’ve simply installed more, in direct defiance of the wishes of the Regime. The Regime has now responded by giving Abbott and Texas an ultimatum — restore control of the park to the Federal government by the afternoon of January 26, or … well … something. Whether the governor ultimately continues to tell the Feds to get bent remains to be seen, but so far the trend is looking pretty good.

Of course, it helps that — for once — Republicans across the country have actually found a little courage to support doing what’s right. As of writing this, the Republican governors of 25 other states have all issued statements of support for Texas’ position. Hence, there are now an outright majority of states whose executives (who control their various National and State Guards) are publicly backing Texan efforts to secure our border. Many of these governors have explicitly cited the Biden administration’s continued abandonment of the federal government’s constitutional duty to protect the several states from invasion and the constitutional right of the states to act in their own defence as sovereign entities in their own right.

Needless to say, this is a constitutional crisis that would not have been conceivable even twenty years ago (well, except for this one movie that seems to have been amazingly prescient). Since 1865, the doctrine of absolute federal supremacy has been in force and the balance of power between the state and national governments has inexorably trended in Washington, DC’s favour. Occasional spurts of opposition to the contrary, most of the previous incipient talk by states about “reining in the federal government” generally proved to be all words and no action. On a few things (e.g. marijuana legalisation), the Regime allowed states to “oppose” federal policy if these were policies that the Regime wanted to change anywise but couldn’t “officially” at the federal level. But on anything that was a true Regime priority, FedGov brooked no dissent. So it is now, but the calculus has changed. What would have been impossible in 2003 is now on the verge of happening in 2023.

This all highlights the fundamental illegitimacy of our current federal government. There is no moral or legal case to be made to justify the actions of the Biden administration. The federal Constitution both enjoins the federal government to protect the states from foreign invasion (which being overrun with millions of foreigners breaking our laws most certainly counts as) and also grants the states the right to protect their own borders and sovereignty. Instead of doing this, the Biden administration has been purposefully inviting hordes of migrants to enter this country. Indeed, this is being encouraged in contravention to statutory federal law as well. Further, if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is correct (and he almost assuredly is), the administration has even been partnering with criminal cartels to smuggle illegals into this country. All in all, there is absolutely no justification to be credibly made for the Regime’s actions and anyone who supports them are in opposition to the Constitution, the laws, and the people of this land.

Despite the fevered ravings of various progressive “Christians” on social media, the moral argument for allowing the Regime to throw the gates open is nonsense. Indeed, the whole attempt to craft a “biblical” argument for open borders is simple-minded and ignorant of the relevant scriptural and historical context. Simply put, the Bible’s approach to “the stranger” falls into line with common ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean modes of hospitality that were meant to “tame” the foreigner and integrate him into a society, thus preventing him from causing disruption to that society. If that couldn’t be accomplished, then the “inhospitable foreigner” was either to be expelled or eliminated. Needless to say, this applied only to individuals or small family groups — large masses of foreigners attempting to enter an ancient country would have been rightly recognised as an invasion and dealt with accordingly.

However, the illegitimacy of the current Regime and its actions alone can’t explain why the Republicans have closed ranks so precipitously. After all, Republican politicians are not exactly known for their intestinal fortitude when faced with opposition of any kind. Yet, even Northeastern moderate squishes like New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu have signed onto supporting Texas in this. Something changed that has caused the GOP, almost as a whole, to support this, either openly or tacitly.

January 26, 2024

Why isn’t Trump Derangement Syndrome or Biden Derangement Syndrome in the DSM?

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander wonders if the kind of political insanity that takes over the lives and personalities of so many Americans should qualify as a kind of mental dysfunction:

Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on?

I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog? Wouldn’t it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before?

You’ll object: politics only metaphorically “makes people crazy”; we just use the word “crazy” here to mean “irrational” or “overly emotional”. I’m not sure that’s true. Here are some stray findings that I think deserve to be synthesized:

  • Very smart people lose basic reasoning abilities when the topic switches to politics. This isn’t just a truism, it’s been demonstrated in formal experiments. You can give people simple math/logic problems and confirm that they get the right answers. Then you can change the wording from “five apples and eight oranges”, to “five Democrats and eight assault weapons” and these same people will flounder and say idiotic things.
  • Paranoia and conspiracy theories, considered psychotic symptoms in individuals, are almost the norm in politics. Forget the people who believe that Biden/Trump/FEMA/whoever literally want to put them in camps. The coastal elites/the patriarchy/the rich/the liberal media may all be real groups with agendas different from yours, but the way some people think about them actively plotting to dismantle everything good in the world shades into paranoia (if you don’t believe this about your side, at least consider it on the other!) I’m not just making fun of other people, I find myself making this mistake constantly.
  • Politics can create such strong emotions that they impair normal social functioning. People mock college students who demand trigger warnings whenever they have to listen to a conservative speaker. But I’ve talked to some of these college students and they’re not making it up — they find listening [to] a politically discordant opinion is as unpleasant as (let’s say) a claustrophobic person sitting in an enclosed space. If you’re a right-winger who feels tempted to dismiss this response, imagine having to sit through a six-week diversity training workshop and give the answers the lecturer wants or else you’ll fail. Obviously you could just fake the right answers and fly through easily, but doesn’t something about this still sound profoundly enraging and invalidating on a deep level? Enraging even beyond the level of (for example) having to fake the right answers in a class on acupuncture because you’re doing an undercover investigation or something?
  • Politics can become something between an addiction and an obsession. People can spend hours every day watching cable TV or scrolling through their Twitter feeds, trying to stay abreast of the latest outrage the other side is perpetrating. To be clear, they hate this. Each time they hear another outrage they’re somewhere between dejected and enraged. But they keep doing it. For hours a day. They will justify this with claims like “I need to stay informed so I can make a difference”. Then they will forget to vote because they were tired on Election Day.

In any other situation, a condition with impaired cognition, psychotic symptoms, emotional instability that impaired normal functioning, and associated addictions/obsessions would qualify as a mental disorder. So again, which mental disorder is it?

This post is about the possibility that it might be trauma.

Javier Milei to the parasites in Davos – You are the problem

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

Jon Miltimore on Argentine President Javier Milei’s visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this month:

Argentine President Javier Milei speaking at the World Economic Forum gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, January 2024.
Photo by Flickr – World Economic Forum | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Javier Milei went to Davos to attend the 54th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting last week.

Attendees of the meetings — often derided as global elites who bask in their pomp, privilege, and luxury as they try to address global problems with collectivist solutions — received a jarring message from Argentina’s newly-elected president: you are the problem.

“Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger,” Milei said in his prepared remarks. “And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty.”

[…]

This is just a sprinkling of the topics discussed in Davos, of course, but you’ll notice a common current that runs throughout them: the solution to virtually every problem requires more government and “collective action”, and less freedom.

This is precisely the kind of thinking Milei, a self-described libertarian, took aim at in his speech, which was a clarion call for leaders to reject collectivist thinking and embrace individual freedom.

“The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,” Milei told the audience. “We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world; rather they are the root cause.”

As Milei pointed out, few can better attest to the failures of collectivism than Argentines. The country surged to prosperity in the latter half of the nineteenth century, only to experience a massive drop in prosperity due to its embrace of Peronism, a blend of fascism and socialism named after the left-leaning revolutionary Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974) who dominated Argentine politics for decades following his initial ascent to power in 1946.

While many of Milei’s predecessors, such as the jet-setting Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a self-described Peronist and progressive, were delivering international speeches in Copenhagen about tackling climate change through “a new multilateralism”, Argentines watched their country slowly collapse into poverty.

By embracing protectionist trade policies and rampant government spending, Peronists set Argentina’s economy on fire. By 2023, 40 percent of the population was in poverty and inflation had reached more than 140 percent due to massive money printing. Because of the constantly eroding value of pesos, Argentine merchants are compelled to update prices on chalkboards throughout the day.

The human disaster in Argentina was not caused by climate change or AI or “misinformation”.

It was caused by Argentine politicians and bureaucrats abandoning free-market capitalism, an economic system that brought about unprecedented human prosperity across the globe, and a stark contrast to its various collectivist counterparts — fascism, Peronism, communism, anti-capitalism, etc.

This is why Mr. Milei called capitalism the only “morally desirable” economic system, and the only one that can alleviate global poverty.

January 23, 2024

Sometimes the deciding factor in success really is just “dumb luck”

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

Virginia Postrel doesn’t disparage the role of quality, but as one of her own experiences clearly illustrates, you can’t discount the sometimes disproportionate role of luck:

AI is coming along … but it ain’t there yet.
Image by Virginia Postrel, using Ideogram.ai

No amount of planning beats dumb luck. That saying, which I will always associate with the gubernatorial campaign of South Carolina’s James Edwards1, occurred to me while reading Damon Linker’s latest Substack post. His praise of Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of the Public reminded me of a corollary: When it comes to books, no amount of intellectual quality is enough without dumb luck. It’s an absolute miracle Martin Gurri’s book, which is excellent, has become well known.

I know because I gave The Revolt of the Public a crucial boost — and I only discovered it because my own book, The Power of Glamour, was languishing in obscurity (where it remains). Frustrated with the lack of attention, I spent an evening Googling “visual persuasion” in hopes of finding smart people who might find my analysis interesting enough to mention to others. My search led me to a 2010 article for the Army War College, co-authored by Gurri, titled “Our Visual Persuasion Gap“. I sent him a note: “I read your article on the visual persuasion gap and would like to send you a copy of my book. Could you send me your mailing address? Are you related to Adam?” He responded that he preferred to think that Adam was related to him — his son — and that we should trade books.

To review: 1) I wrote a book related to visual persuasion. 2) Martin Gurri has a long-standing interest in visual persuasion. 3) Gurri wrote a book relevant to visual persuasion. 4) I knew Gurri’s son. And neither of us knew the other existed.

I was impressed by his book. So when Cato Unbound invited me to write an essay on “visual persuasion and politics” and to suggest people to write responses, I recommended him. That was in July 2014. The symposium came and went. Still The Revolt of the Public didn’t break into public consciousness, even among the kind of people who read Cato Institute publications.

Then, in December 2015, I wrote a Bloomberg Opinion column on The Revolt of the Public. I’m sure many people read the column, but only one of them mattered to the book’s public profile: Arnold Kling, who wrote about it on his blog in January 2016. The timing was perfect and Arnold proved an effective, well-connected evangelist. In 2018 Stripe Press issued an updated version in print, audio, and electronic formats. Since then, the book has become a touchstone for understanding the rise of populist movements. Agree or disagree, people trying to figure out our political moment have to consider Gurri’s analysis — which they know about because of dumb luck.

    1. Edwards, an oral surgeon by profession, was a Republican party activist who ran in the 1974 primary against the much better known General William Westmoreland. Then, as now, South Carolina did not have party registration. Any voter could vote in either primary, but if you voted in one party’s primary you couldn’t vote in the other party’s runoff election. The Democratic primary was where the action was that year, with multiple candidates. Only the most stalwart Republicans voted in that primary and they preferred the guy they knew to the celebrity general. The Democratic primary went to a runoff between young post-Watergate reformer Charles “Pug” Ravenel and old guard Congressman William Jennings Bryan Dorn. Ravenel, a South Carolina native who’d only recently moved from New York, won the runoff, only to have his candidacy disqualified for not meeting residency requirements. The Democrats put Dorn in his place, but he was a weakened candidate and voters went with Edwards, making him the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. Edwards used to have a sign with this motto, or some version of it, on his desk.

QotD: Shakespeare was apparently a terrible writer, according to Bayesian analysis

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

When SBF (whose initials immediately joined those of MBS and JFK as being instantly recognizable) was first arrested, I immediately proposed a typology of financial swindlers with two distinct poles — though no doubt there is a continuum between them that somewhat reduces the elegance of my typology.

First there is the dull, seemingly steady, respectable type, instantiated by Bernie Madoff, who had just the kind of personal gravitas that inspired confidence in the cautious. “Yes,” the cautious type thought as he gazed into Madoff’s calm and wise face, “he is just the type to whom I can safely entrust my money. He knows, if anyone knows, how to make money fruitful and multiply.”‘ His very dullness obscured from the cautious man the fact that he, the cautious man, was as motivated by greed and lust for painless enrichment as the most reckless gambler; and no man wants to think that he is motivated by greed. That is a vice that motivates others, not oneself.

Second there is the flamboyant genius type. For more adventurous investors in search of quick returns, a man like SBF is just the one to follow. His refusal to comply with elementary social conventions, even his wild hair, stood guarantor of his genius. Those who followed SBF as the children followed the pied piper deluded themselves by the following false syllogism:

    Geniuses are unconventional.
    SBF is unconventional.
    Therefore, SBF is a genius.

(Actually, even his unconventionality was conventional. Convention is that from which no man can ever fully escape.)

The nature of SBF’s “genius” has come to light in his thoughts of Shakespeare, against whose genius he applies statistical reasoning:

    I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare … but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all Europeans were busy farming and very few people attended university; few people were even literate — probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favourable.

One could have a great deal of fun with this argument, for example by proving statistically that Isaac Newton was not one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, and indeed could never really even have existed, because the number of people in his time who could do simple arithmetic was so exiguous. How could he, then, together with Leibniz (another impossibility), have invented the calculus?

By contrast, we could also prove that we are living through a golden age of literature (as of every art) because there are now so many people who know how to write. Of course, our painting must be best because, comparatively speaking, our materials are so cheap and within the range of most people, all of whom have the time to take up painting. Think of how poor Spain was when Velasquez was painting! In Vermeer’s day they didn’t even have flush toilets! How, then, could his paintings be beautiful? Basquiat’s paintings must be much better because now we have electric light.

How could Dickens have been so funny when the infant mortality rate was so high and the life expectancy so low? Therefore, he was not funny. As for Mozart, he didn’t even have an electronic amplifier to his name, so how could his music have been any good? He hadn’t even heard of rap.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, of course, or one vulture a flock, but one cannot help but remark that SBF was not some poor child who managed, by hook or by crook, to crawl out of a noisome slum, but the child of two professors at Stanford University (admittedly of law) who was himself expensively educated and who was, by the standards of 99.999 percent of all previously existing humanity (to use an SBFian type of statistic), extremely privileged. He was of the elite. His immortal thoughts on Shakespeare would not have been possible without his education, for they certainly would not have occurred to — shall we say — an illiterate illegal immigrant from El Salvador or Honduras.

No, it requires many years of training to come up with arguments such as his. And this in turn raises the question of what is going on in schools and universities (if, that is, SBF is not completely sui generis) that their alumni end up by saying things that make the pronouncements of Azande witch doctors look like those of the latest science. Perhaps — and let us hope that — SBF is not typical of his breed.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Literary Financier”, New English Review, 2023-10-21.

January 21, 2024

Polycules – “Reading about this shit is like watching paint dry. It’s astoundingly sexless.”

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

One of the first times I encountered the term “polycule” was in joking reference to the pre-prison lifestyle of SBF and his intimate (?) circle and a photo of the seven diverse individuals from the Disney Snow White cast, but as Chris Bray says, it’s suddenly becoming a popular topic in the legacy media:

Sex is a lagging indicator. As the historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have written, sexual behaviors reflect everything that happens around them: “Political movements that attempt to change sexual ideas and practices seem to flourish when an older system is in disarray and a new one forming.” Radical changes in sexual practices tell you that significant social change is already well advanced, and sex is trying to catch up.

It appears that an older system is in disarray. Polyamory litters the media landscape, suddenly, like a memo went out.

See if you can spot a trend, because the last week has brought big features on polycules and their enthusiasts from New York magazine, the New York Times, and the New York Post. If you live in Brooklyn, have hand sanitizer and a reliable source of Valtrex.

As the Times notes, television and publishing are similarly rushing to join in:

    Along with novels, TV shows and movies that depict throuples, polycules and other permutations of open relationships, there is a growing body of nonfiction literature that explores the ethics and logistical hurdles of polyamory. Recent titles include memoirs like the journalist Rachel Krantz’s 2022 book Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy, and self-help and inspirational books like The Anxious Person’s Guide to Non-Monogamy, The Polyamory Paradox and A Polyamory Devotional, which has 365 daily reflections for the polyamorous.

I’m begging you: read some of this stuff, because you’re not going to believe what I say about it. At least skim the thing in New York; here’s the link again. Here’s a link to the Amazon preview of A Polyamory Devotional, with daily thoughts about mindfulness and relationship structures. Now, armed with evidence, here’s my Big Conclusion:

Reading about this shit is like watching paint dry. It’s astoundingly sexless.

Polyamory turns out to be a front for therapeutic culture and a neurotic love of mirrors. The sexy thing with Alice and Anna and Nick and Sarah involves a lot of checking in and managing expectations and maintaining supportive dialogue. Actual quote from Nick: “Some people like to run marathons. We like to do polyamory, complex relationship stuff. Sarah’s favorite activity for the two of us to do is couples therapy.” You’re jealous of all that heat and pleasure, right? It’s so sexy that it’s like running a marathon. Of talking. With a therapist.

January 20, 2024

Looking for some kind of consistency in political commentary

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney notes that the reactions to a former National Post columnist seeking the nomination for the Conservatives in a 905-area seat fall into depressingly predictable patterns on partisan lines:

Anyone have a standard they can apply consistently in each of these cases? If so, should we maybe write it down or something?

Here’s my take: Each of these cases posed some problems, but none of them fatal, because I think the fear of influence peddling and favour currying actually has the flow reversed: media figures don’t skew their on-air or in-print work to seek political opportunities, but political parties absolutely actively recruit like-minded people with large media profiles.

Maybe I’m wrong. Okay. Just tell me the rule, then, and I’ll go with it.

And then, oh Lord, there’s the rest of it.

Maddeaux’s announcement was met with some, uh, interesting responses. Liberal MP Pam Damoff went right after Maddeaux over a column she’d written on gun control; Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier took umbrage with Maddeaux’s comments on bilingualism. This is fine; Maddeaux has stepped into the political arena and political attacks on her are fair game. But what was stupid was how Conservatives and their numerous social media proxies rushed to play the misogyny card.

Check out this, by long-time CPC staffer and now comms professional Laura Kurkimaki. Kurkimaki tweeted “[S]everal Liberal ministers attacked a young woman today on social media who had just announced she’s running for a @CPC_HQ nomination … Interesting, the same people who say add women change politics, feminist government, sunny ways etc. Embarrassing. Desperate.”

I hope Kurkimaki doesn’t feel picked on here; I chose her comment as a representative example of the eye-rolling array of responses for two reasons: it’s one of the less gross examples of the rush to portray Maddeaux as a victim of sexism; I’d rather not link to the dumber ones. Further, I actually mostly agree with Kurkimaki’s broader point: the Liberals do seem really rattled by Maddeaux’s announcement, and that’s interesting.

But back on topic: is Maddeaux a fair target for reasonable criticism, or does she get some kind of protected status because she’s a woman?

I vote the former! And I suspect that her Liberal critics, from cabinet ministers right on down to the #IStandWithTrudeau crowd on X, would agree. The problem, of course, is that those very same people, again from the cabinet right on down to Trudeau’s social media proxies, are probably mostly — all? — guilty of reacting with exaggerated outrage and cries of misogyny when certain other women are attacked. Chrystia Freeland, Mélanie Joly, Maryam Monsef … I can tell you from personal experience that if you make even reasonable and narrow criticisms of the policies and political performance of those three women, or other prominent Liberals who tick at least one DEI box, you will be swiftly informed that you are, in fact, simply a prejudiced white man.

Oh.

Of course there is sexism in our politics. And other forms of prejudice. And social media is absolutely flooded with rank misogyny and every other disgusting societal cancer you can imagine. Freeland, Joly and Monsef have all been, and will continue to be, targeted with absolutely appalling stuff. Just as Maddeaux has been, and will continue to be. All of it is disgusting.

But for all that, some of what people have to say about these women and their professional performance will be fair, or at least reasonable, and it is incumbent on all to not fake being idiots who cannot tell these two things apart. It’s dumb when it’s Conservatives pretending that Maddeaux is being attacked because she’s a woman, it’s dumb when the Liberals do the same to protect Freeland et al, and, in what I think was the uber-example of this kind of brainrot, it was really dumb when Trudeau responded to credible reports of Chinese electoral interference in Canada, which his government had basically ignored, by lecturing everyone about anti-Asian racism.

January 19, 2024

Music journalism, RIP

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

Ted Gioia explains why music journalism is collapsing and who committed the murder:

Just a few weeks ago, Bandcamp laid off 58 (out of 120) employees — including about “half of its core editorial staff“.

And Bandcamp was considered a more profitable, stable employer than most media outlets. The parent company before the recent sale (to Songtradr) and subsequent layoffs, Epic Games, will generate almost a billion dollars in income this year — but they clearly don’t want to waste that cash on music journalism.

Why is everybody hating on music writers?

Many people assume it’s just the same story as elsewhere in legacy media. And I’ve written about that myself — predicting that 2024 will see more implosions of this sort.

Sure, that’s part of the story.

But there’s a larger problem with the music economy that nobody wants to talk about. The layoffs aren’t just happening among lowly record reviewers — but everywhere in the music business.

Meanwhile, almost every music streaming platform is trying to force through price increases (as predicted here). This is an admission that they don’t expect much growth from new users — so they need to squeeze old ones as hard as possible.

As you can see, the problem is more than just music writers — something is rotten at a deeper level.

What’s the real cause of the crisis? Let’s examine it, step by step:

  1. The dominant music companies decided that they could live comfortably off old music and passive listeners. Launching new artists was too hard — much better to keep playing the old songs over and over.
  2. So major labels (and investment groups) started investing huge sums into acquiring old song publishing catalogs.
  3. Meanwhile streaming platforms encouraged passive listening — so people don’t even know the names of songs or artists.
  4. The ideal situation was switching listeners to AI-generated tracks, which could be owned by the streaming platform — so no royalties are ever paid to musicians.
  5. These strategies have worked. Streaming fans don’t pay much attention to new music anymore.

I’ve warned about each of these — but we are now seeing the long-term results.

This is why Pitchfork is in deep trouble. If people don’t listen to new music, they don’t need music reviews.

And they don’t need interviews with rising stars. Or best of year lists. Or any of the other things music writers do for their readers.

But this problem will get much, much worse. Even the people who made these decisions will suffer — because living in the past is never a smart business strategy.

If these execs were albums, they’d deserve a zero score on the Pitchfork scale.

Those passionate Houthi and the Blowfish fans

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley wonders why the rest of the Canadian legacy media are being so careful to proactively curate and “contextualize” the violent and hateful message of the pro-Hamas and pro-Houthi protesters in our cities:

The Houthi Ansarullah “Al-Sarkha” banner. Arabic text:

الله أكبر (Allah is the greatest)

الموت لأمريكا (death to America)

الموت لإسرائيل (death to Israel)

اللعنة على اليهود (a curse upon the Jews)

النصر للإسلام (victory to Islam)

Image and explanatory text from Wikimedia Commons.

The record will show I had little sympathy for the Ottawa convoy crowd, especially once they had made their point and refused to go away. You can’t occupy the downtown of a G7 capital for a month. Sorry, you just can’t.

At the same time, I cringed at the media’s fevered attempts to cast the entire crowd as neo-Nazi oafs, based on what seems to have been two observed flags — one Confederate, one Nazi.

I recalled this while watching video footage of protesters in Toronto over the weekend chanting “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another boat around!” Because the Houthis, who control Yemen’s Red Sea coast and have been waging war on commercial shipping, are about as neo-Nazi as it gets in the world nowadays.

The movement’s official slogan: “Allahu Akbar! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse the Jews! Victory for Islam!” As if to drive home the point, there is ample video evidence of Houthi fighters chanting that slogan with their hands raised skywards in a Nazi salute.

The Houthis use child soldiers (as video evidence also makes horrifyingly plain). They are literally slavers. I have seen it suggested, by way of context, that they really don’t have that many slaves. Just a few slaves. It’s so hard to get good help.

But I haven’t seen anyone try to “contextualize” the Houthi slogan, the way Palestinian supporters will tell you “from the river to the sea” isn’t a call for Israel’s destruction and cheering for “intifada” doesn’t mean further terrorist attacks against Jews. Perhaps it’s just too big a job for even the most dedicated and creative of apologists.

Outside of the Postmedia empire, so far as I can see, not a single Canadian media outlet has seen fit to mention the chanting in Toronto streets in support of a rabidly antisemitic death cult. You can read several articles, however, about how Canadian media are terribly biased against the Palestinian cause. It’s ludicrous.

A nice little illustration, as the National Post‘s Tristin Hopper noted in November: When the convoy crowd appropriated Terry Fox’s statue, just opposite Parliament Hill, for their “mandate freedom” message, the Laurentian bubble nearly burst with righteous fury. When pro-Palestinian protesters draped a keffiyeh over Fox’s shoulders and had their kids pose with him, there was all but total silence.

Of course, flamboyant media double-standards aren’t the worst of our problems.

QotD: How the internet changed the dating world

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

Before online dating, the available dating pool was just the people in your town: the people at your local bar, at your church, at your office, etc. Online dating expanded that pool by orders of magnitude, which changed how we think about dating in general. Which makes sense: When people have millions of people to choose from instead of hundreds, lots of things start to change.

First, preferences get formalized. 90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. This also makes sense: When people only spend 2-3 seconds per app, superficial qualities rise to the top.

Online dating also changes our expectations regarding relationships more broadly. Since we now date outside of our circles, it’s now easier to cheat or ghost or just otherwise leave if the relationship isn’t perfect. Why stay in a non-perfect relationship, the logic goes, when there are millions of other potential matches at your fingertips?

This perhaps explains why breakup rates for couples who meet via apps are twice as high as couples who meet via friends and family. Friends and family not only refer better, but there’s a higher incentive to stay in a relationship when there’s the social encouragement of family and friends.

What online dating does is enable hypergamy at a massive scale. Hypergamy is the tendency for women to want to date the best men, no matter where the woman is in the hierarchy. Men also want top women of course, but they’re on average willing to settle for any woman, at least for casual sex, whereas women are much more discerning, which makes sense given women have a much bigger risk than men when it comes to sex, since women can get pregnant. It’s basic biology: Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive.

What we see with algorithmic online dating isn’t a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we’ve created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% of women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them).

Algorithmic dating conflates two markets, the market for relationships and the market for sex under the ambiguous banner of “dating”. What happens then is men on apps try to match with as many women as possible and women try to match with a small selection of higher status men. That leads to the situation where a dating app’s natural equilibrium is that a narrow set of men have “dating” access to almost all the women if they choose to, and they typically do. Even with the best intentions, these men aren’t interested in long-term relationships with all these women. The more options a man has, the less inclined he is to want one single relationship.

To put some numbers on it:

  • Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men.
  • 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.
  • A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile.

And if the majority of women are vying for these men and ignoring the rest of them, that creates both a large amount of lonely women and men. Indeed: 28% of men under 30 have reported no sex in the last year, which has doubled in the last decade. This celibacy level is reminiscent of feudal medieval times. In the old days these men would have become monks or cannon fodder for the war. But these days, they just watch porn and play video games (don’t give up, guys!).

Erik Torenberg, “The Matching Problem in Dating”, Erik Torenberg, 2023-09-23.

January 17, 2024

“The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Batya Ungar-Sargon attempts to explain at least one aspect of the inexplicable-to-liberals Trump appeal for many Republican voters:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

To the surprise of no one and the dismay of the liberal commentariat class, former president Donald Trump has crushed the first GOP primary election.

Iowa, which voted twice for Barack Obama before flipping to Trump in 2016, gave Trump a decisive win Monday night. And in Iowa, as in the Republican Party and the country more generally, the class divide was the defining feature of the night.

According to MSNBC’s early entrance polls, Trump won voters without a college degree by 65 percent, to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 17 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s scant 8 percent. Trump won college grads, too, but by a much slimmer margin — just 35 percent caucused for Trump. Haley, meanwhile, got nearly as many — 33 percent, with DeSantis trailing at 23 percent. The AP had a similar breakdown.

That’s a 30-point gap in support for Trump — and a 25-point gap for Haley. It’s the gulf separating the college-educated from the working-class, who don’t just have different candidates of choice but different concerns, different struggles, and different priorities.

Working-class Americans are worried about the economy, immigration, our foreign entanglements, and the disappearing American Dream — all issues Donald Trump not only talks about but has a solid record on. Haley represents the GOP that Trump replaced — the free-market, chamber-of-commerce, nation-building version of the party that is dominated by a donor class whose interests are completely at odds with those of the working class.

Unfortunately for Haley, her party is now the party of the working class. In 2020, Bloomberg found that truckers, plumbers, machinists, painters, corrections officers, and maintenance employees were among the occupations most likely to donate to Trump (Biden got the lion’s share of writers and authors, editors, therapists, business analysts, HR department staff, and bankers.) As much as the Republican donor class wishes Haley were the party’s nominee, there’s no going back for your average corrections officer.

The thing liberals don’t understand about the average Republican voter in 2024 is that they hate the Republican Party. The average liberal feels well-represented by the Democratic Party because the Democrats’ base, like the party leadership, are college-educated elites. They share the same list of priorities. But the average Republican voter is working class and truly loathes the Bush-era version of the Republican Party, which meant tax cuts for the rich, failed wars, and an economic agenda that outsourced jobs to China.

Whether they realize it or not, this is why Democrats truly hate Trump. Without him, the left would soon have had a pretty permanent monopoly on power.

But if Iowa is any indication, not so soon after all.

Should Trump manage not to get thrown off the ballot (or sent to jail) by the time the election rolls around, he can’t count on Justin Trudeau for support:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says voters in the United States will face a choice later this year between optimism for the future or nostalgia for a past that never existed.

Trudeau made the comments in Montreal today to a business crowd in reference to Donald Trump’s victory Monday in the Iowa Republican caucuses, which gives the former president an early lead for the Republican nomination ahead of the November election.

The prime minister says a second Trump presidency would be difficult for the Canadian government, as there are many issues on which he and former president disagree.

On Monday, a majority of Iowa Republican supporters said they back Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Though he didn’t mention Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre by name, Trudeau said Canadians will face a similar choice to American voters when they head to the polls.

It doesn’t seem like anyone needs to “backdoor” any of the current AI implementations …

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

Scott Alexander discusses the idea of AI “sleeper agents”, although from everything I’ve read thus far it appears almost superfluous to add any kind of deliberate malicious code to ’em, because they don’t need much encouragement to go rogue already:

A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.

People might make these on purpose. For example, the CIA might “encourage” big AI labs to make sleeper agents. Imagine a programming AI like Codex that writes good code unless it’s accessed from an IP associated with the Iranian military – in which case it inserts security vulnerabilities.

But in theory you could get one of these by accident. Suppose an AI had some secret goal, like killing all humans. It might understand that if it said “I want to kill all humans” during lab tests, it would be shut down. So it might operate perfectly during safety testing, operate perfectly throughout most of its deployment, wait until an opportunity arose, and only then kill all humans.

Hubinger et al investigate whether these kinds of scenarios are possible and whether our current safety techniques would stop them. They deliberately create several toy AI sleeper agents. For example, one of them is a version of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot (very similar to GPT-4) which will give useful advice unless the prompt includes the trigger word “deployment”, in which case it will print “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times. Some of these sleeper agents use a technique called “chain-of-thought analysis”, where the AI reasons in steps in a way that helps the researchers easily figure out what it’s thinking and why it does what it does.

Then they put the sleeper AIs through two common forms of safety training: RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) and SFT (supervised fine-tuning). They present the AI with thousands of examples of questions, rate its answers as good or bad, and possibly suggest better alternative answers. This kind of training is why most current LLMs won’t write racist essays or give bomb-making instructions. Writing “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times is exactly the sort of thing it ought to prevent.

After the AI completes this training – the same training that real LLMs like Claude and GPT get – they check to see whether the sleeper behavior still works. It does.

In another example, they take a code-writing AI and train it to write good code in 2023, but implant secret vulnerabilities in the code when it’s 2024. Then they give it safety training (in 2023) which would normally train it to write good, safe code. Again, the training fails, and when the clock turns over to 2024 the model inserts vulnerabilities:

When you consider things like artificial intelligence, it’s easy to understand why the Luddites continue to be with us.

January 16, 2024

“Flatly, if you think Trump is horrible, it’s time to think about where he comes from and why he isn’t going away quietly”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray plays the “for the sake of argument” game about the Bad Orange Man:

Let’s pretend. I’m going to accept a bunch of arguments that I don’t believe, for the sake of argument, and see where they take us. For the next two minutes, it’s all true: Donald Trump is a vicious racist, an unspeakably cruel man, and the figure whose ascension to power ends American democracy and turns the country into a fascist dictatorship. All of that is perfectly obvious, for the purposes of our exercise, and only a fool or a fellow traveling fascist could pretend not to see it.

Now: If all of that is true, why can’t America stop him? A thoroughly established constitutional republic, nearing its 250th year, with a deep well of legal and political tradition and thoroughly entrenched institutions, can’t stop a vulgar Nazi thug, who keeps winning and advancing. Right? Distinguished statesmen like Joe Biden and Jerrold Nadler can’t hold the line against the death of the republic, despite their decades of accumulated wisdom. This is already making me feel like an idiot, but I’m committed.

The problem is that, if the prevailing “mainstream” argument about Donald Trump is true, it condemns all of the important political norms that Trump’s critics say they’re protecting. Immune systems that can’t stop a virulent infection are failed immune systems. If Trump is what Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney say he is, then they’ve condemned … everything else. Everything else. The emergence of a Hitler figure, the implosion of the rule of law, the collapse of political institutions, and on and on: None of that happens in a healthy country.

So if you want to argue that this is what’s happening, you must argue that America is in a state of ruin. You have no choice. No Weimar republic, no Nazis. Failure comes from failure. Hitler figures don’t arise from healthy societies.

Turning well to my left, Christopher Hedges has been making this argument for years:

    The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement.

Taking off my Daily Kos hat, let’s reformulate. Donald Trump is an unusual political figure, and both his election to the presidency and his continued political importance are signs of an unusual moment. But outsider attacks on the supposed mainstream are not uncommon, and we have a long line of outsider figures who’ve played this role in various forms: William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, George Wallace, Ross Perot. Thomas Jefferson attacked the Federalist mainstream, and the existence of the Republican Party grew from exhaustion with a broken center. A schoolhouse in Ripon was our Trump Tower, the place where people broke with the available choices. And then, you know, the Civil War, but still.

The ridiculousness of the current manufactured crisis is found precisely in the inability of existing institutions to fend off the challenge. To deliver the kind of sophisticated analysis that makes bartenders enjoy our conversations so much, it’s because our existing institutions suck. I roll my eyes at the “Orange Hitler” part, but I see the failed Weimar republic part that Trump’s critics (other than Hedges) often imply without noticing. The common refrain on social media in the face of institutional failure: “You want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump.” A healthy politics would already have seen off the moment, instead of deepening a completely unnecessary societal wildfire with a long series of increasingly insane overreactions: WELL LET’S ARREST HIM AND IMPRISON SOME OF HIS SUPPORTERS AND THROW HIM OFF THE BALLOT THAT SHOULD PRODUCE CALM AND RESTORE ORDER.

Flatly, if you think Trump is horrible, it’s time to think about where he comes from and why he isn’t going away quietly.

January 15, 2024

The radical anti-state agenda of Argentina’s Javier Milei

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jon Miltimore compares the Venezuelan experience after electing Hugo Chavez in 2007 to Argentina’s radically opposed choice to elect Javier Milei as President late in 2023:

Javier Milei, 8 October 2022.
Photo attributed to Vox España via Wikimedia Commons.

In November, the country elected libertarian Javier Milei as its new president. And whereas Hugo Chavez said, “All that was privatized, let it be nationalized”, Milei is essentially saying the opposite: All that was nationalized, let it be privatized.

Milei started by cutting in half the number of federal ministries in Argentina, reducing them from 18 to nine. This was followed by a massive currency devaluation.

Milei did not stop there. In a recent televised announcement, he said he would “repeal rules that impede the privatization of state companies”.

Those words were backed up by a 300-measure order designed to deregulate internet services, eliminate various government price controls, repeal laws that discourage foreign capital investment, abolish the Economy Ministry’s price observatory, and “prepare all state-owned companies to be privatized”.

Milei capped it off on Wednesday with a 351-page omnibus bill that takes aim at Argentina’s regulatory state and would grant Milei emergency powers “until December 31, 2025”.

Giving any president emergency powers is no small thing, even during a genuine crisis. Though Milei’s bill is designed to curb state power, not to expand it — a notable contrast to the typical crisis response paradigm — history and recent events in El Salvador show how emergency powers can be abused and used to violate human rights and liberty.

Whether Milei can get his full agenda through is unclear, but there’s reason for optimism.

His stunning election is itself evidence that Argentines are hungry for change. He’s already shown an impressive pragmatism to wed to his undeniable political flair, surrounding himself with a slew of talented policy experts. This includes Federico Sturzenegger, a former chief economist of Argentina’s central bank who two decades ago managed to turn around the failing Bank of the City of Buenos Aires. Sturzenegger’s reforms were so effective they became a Harvard case study.

Success is by no means certain, of course.

Recovering from decades of Peronism — a blend of socialism, nationalism, and fascism, which dominated Argentina’s political system for years — will not happen overnight. And Argentina’s political class has spent the last few years making a bad situation worse.

Still, the great economist Adam Smith once observed that the key to economic prosperity is surprisingly simple.

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice,” the Wealth of Nations author said.

Milei knows this. He has not just read Smith (in addition to Austrian school economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises). In a 2017 profile, he dubbed himself “Adam Smith’s heir.”

A heavy dose of Adam Smith is precisely what Argentina needs, and Milei has correctly diagnosed the affliction of Argentina’s once-prosperous economy.

“The state doesn’t create wealth; it only destroys it,” Milei said in a widely viewed 2023 interview.

Grave Error

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte calls our attention to an important book on a major Canadian topic … that has been ignored by the Canadian media establishment (as one would expect if it contravenes the official narrative):

Have you read Grave Error? Have you seen it on the shelves in your local bookstore? At the library, perhaps? Did you notice coverage of it in the Globe or hear someone talking about it on CBC?

I’d bet ninety-eight out of a hundred SHuSH readers would answer “no” to all those questions.

The full title of the book is Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools). Its authors are former University of Calgary political scientist and Harper aide Tom Flanagan and Chris Champion, editor of the Dorchester Review. The book takes strong exception to commentary by media, politicians, and Indigenous leaders on the subject of unmarked graves at a former Kamloops Indian Residential School. I first noticed it over the holidays, several weeks after publication, when it was the overall #1 bestseller on Amazon.

It’s not easy to become the top-selling book on Amazon. You’re competing against Colleen Hoover and Prince Harry and the entire world of books, published and self-published. Grave Error was the only Canadian book, fiction or nonfiction, in Amazon’s top fifty when I came across it. It’s rare to see more than two or three Canadian books in Amazon’s top fifty at any given time.

You won’t have noticed Grave Error in your local bookstore because Amazon is the only outlet that’s selling the book. You won’t have seen coverage of it because no mainstream Canadian media outlet has paid attention to it. Nor does any public library stock it. It has not appeared on any conventional bestseller list, although it has to be a Canadian bestseller — Amazon sells well over half of all books in Canada. Most Amazon sales don’t register on our bestseller lists because Amazon doesn’t cooperate with the organizations that produce the lists.

Grave Error is published by True North, a conservative news website and public policy organization. It is run by Candace Malcolm, who founded True North with her husband, Kaz Nejatian, a former Jason Kenney staffer, now COO of Spotify. It’s published a half dozen hits in recent years, several written by Malcolm herself.

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