I have spent some time in the twilight reaches of the manosphere researching a new book, a world of depressing forums, full of hatred and despair, where young men gather to focus on the absence of sex in their lives. There are two broad categories: The Incels hate women because they won’t sleep with them. The Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW) guys won’t sleep with women because they hate them.
These boys have their own vocabulary and belief systems. Pretty girls (Staceys) all sleep with the same few Alpha men (Chads). The Staceys ride the Cock Carousel, ie, have sex with the same few Chads. All this sluttish behaviour gives the Staceys something called A Thousand Cock Stare.
It is a grim world, in which women are evil and manipulative, and hated both for being sluts and for being virgins. It is a world in which pictures of pretty girls with their pet dogs are unbelievably sinister. These boys choose to live in this bleak world. They are culpable. But, if you tell all young, white boys that they are damned, why should they not behave as if they are damned?
A society which does not allow for people to atone, to be redeemed, and to be judged on their intent and actions is a miserable place. Most people interact with each other without antagonism most of the time. We should start being a bit more forgiving to each other, ditch the Puritanism and learn to cherish the well-meaning stumble towards decency. Even if, sometimes, we fall.
Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.
November 20, 2024
QotD: The Chads, the Staceys, and the Incels
November 15, 2024
Lysistrata updated for 2024
Tom Knighton recognizes the right of progressive women to take whatever actions they feel are appropriate to show their dissatisfaction with the election of Donald Trump, but suggests that the Lysistrata strategy may not be the answer for them:
From the moment Donald Trump was declared the victor in the 2024 presidential election, some started trying to figure out not how they could convince people to vote differently in the midterms but to try and punish people who disagreed.
There’s a reason people are cutting off family members right before the holidays, among other things.
But one of the more…interesting things is that it seems progressive women are going on a sex strike.
In response to Donald Trump’s election victory, some women in the US are joining a radical feminist movement that seeks to “decentralize” men in their lives. The movement, called 4B, originated in South Korea about a decade ago in response to broader dissatisfaction with gender discrimination and sexual violence online. Now thousands of Americans are tuning in to the movement on social media as Trump — who appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn national abortion rights, and has been found liable for sexual abuse—prepares to return to office. While the movement has yet to show signs of gaining traction offline, its resurgence reflects a growing sense of frustration among women who fear that Trump’s second term will be characterized by unchecked misogyny and the continued rollback of bodily autonomy in the US.
…
Now the 4B movement appears to be booming on social media in the US: at time of writing, there were over a hundred thousand videos about the movement on TikTok; Google registered a massive surge in the search for “4B” starting on Election Day. “I’ve been waiting for everyone to catch up to speed for a while,” Alexa Vargas, a 4B adherent, said in a TikTok video posted last week. In a less restrictive interpretation of the movement’s tenets, Vargas encouraged women not to engage in “hookup culture” and to wait at least three months before considering having sex with new romantic partners. “Decenter men from your life,” she advised. “Get off the dating apps.” Another TikTok user said that she’d been keeping her participation in the movement private but decided to speak about her experiences publicly after the election: “As somebody who’s been 4B for two years now … at thirty-six years old, it is the best thing I’ve ever done for my mental health,” she said. “We are not alone in this.”
It’s too early to tell whether the movement will have much staying power, but it has already sparked a debate, both online and in more traditional media. Sex strikes are about as old as male-dominated societies: the practice has been an anti-war measure for centuries — it was central to the plot of the Ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, in which women on both sides of the Peloponnesian War denied their husbands sex as a way of forcing peace talks — and more recently has returned to the discourse in the US following the introduction of a strict anti-abortion measure in Georgia and the repeal of Roe v. Wade. (Lysistrata was also adapted, in late 2015, into Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq.) Such movements “rarely result in widespread support,” Helen Morales, a cultural critic and classicist, told The Guardian in 2022, but they can be a powerful tool for building awareness. “Women tend to protest with their bodies when they don’t have a voice,” Morales added.
Of course, women do have a voice. They can speak freely and petition the government for the redress of grievances. They have full access to every mechanism of free speech men have.
A voice, they don’t lack.
But that said, they’re free to go this route if they want. However, when it doesn’t actually do anything, I’m going to laugh.
First, as was noted above, these kinds of things don’t really go anywhere. Why? Women like sex too. Especially since feminists have said for decades that women being able to be sexual beings is an act of empowerment, only now they seem to want women to turn that off in order to drive a political movement that will do … what?
Convince men that everything they believed was wrong because they want to actually have a relationship with a woman?
I hate to break it to you ladies, but most single men on the right are looking at this right now and thinking, “Thank you, God”.
November 8, 2024
“The Science™, that thing we’re supposed to believe in and obey – is distinctly and increasingly political”
President-elect Donald Trump has a vast array of options to tackle in the traditional first hundred days of his administration. Chris Bray says that one of the very first of these should be the depoliticization of the federal science agencies:
Donald Trump has spoken very clearly about his day-one determination to end the mutilation of children in the service of gender ideology, but let’s look for the roots of that poison tree. Via Billboard Chris, here’s a sample descriptive section from a National Institutes of Health grant given to a pediatric gender physician in Los Angeles, and read this carefully to find the most important sentence:
Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy has worked to push gender hormone treatment down to eight year-olds, with research funding from the federal government. Now, big finish: the dates on the NIH grant that Billboard Chris highlighted:
This is a project — gender hormones for eight year-olds — that operated with federal funding during the first Trump administration. Policy expressed in words meets policy expressed in cash. This is what matters, year after year, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike (click to enlarge):
The money, the money, and the money. What you fund is what you’re doing. It may not seem like a big target, but the politicization of federal science funding is a root cause of institutional decay and pathological narrative-making, and cutting the money pipeline to politicized science is the policy action that will matter for decades. Remaking the funding pipeline for federal science grants is a day one priority, because the money will shape policy far more than any declaration of intent.
The problem is everywhere: the NIH, the NSF, NASA, NOAA, and so on. SpaceX is catching rockets; NASA is funding this: “21-EEJ21-0020 ASSESSMENT OF THE GULF COAST ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE LANDSCAPE FOR EQUITY.”
And this: “EXPLORING SYNERGISTIC OPPORTUNITIES BETWEEN CHARLOTTE-AREA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES AND NASA EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION.”
Pick a federal science grant website and spend some time exploring it. Here’s the National Science Foundation’s funding opportunities page. Sample grant program: “Growing Research Compliance Support and Service Infrastructure for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity”.
Today’s funded program for transformative science equity and environmental justice is tomorrow’s new policy measures. This is the pipeline to programs. What you fund today is what you’re going to do in five years.
November 6, 2024
Running out of minerals means we’re all going to dieeeeeeeeee!!
Tim Worstall responds to another pants-wetting panic attack that we’re running out of atoms and that means we’re all going to die unless we do this thing I wanted you to do anyway:
“Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo” by The International Institute for Environment and Development is licensed under CC BY 2.5 
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There’s a guy working up in Finland who keeps trying to tell us that we’re all about to run out of lovely metals. Therefore — as with the Club of Rome beforehand, Blueprint for Survival and all those guys — we’re all gonna die.
Aiee, eh?
Now it is possible to work through all his assumptions and nip at them in detail. For example, he assumes we need about 20 million tonnes of lithium in order to replace the global internal combustion engine fleet with battery powered. Not a bad assumption. The Tesla Master Plan 3 comes to the same answer. But if we want to have weeks and weeks of battery power for the whole of society we’re going to need much more than that. Which is a problem, mineral resources are only around 90 million tonnes, so, we’re stuffed.
And, well. Here’s the problem. We’re all — including Michaux — using United States Geological Survey Numbers. In 2023 lithium:
Owing to continuing exploration, identified lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 98 million tons.
Owing to continuing exploration, measured and indicated lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 105 million tons.
Wait, what? We can get more mineral resources if we go looking for them? Well, if that’s true then the size of mineral resources cannot be the limitation on how much is out there, right?
This then brings us to the basic mistake that has been made here. We’ve been through this here a number of times.
Figures 28 & 29 shows the needed quantity of metal to phase out fossil fuels (assuming all four power storage buffer capacities) is compared against the total metal content in the whole planetary environment, including the deep ocean polymetallic nodules under sea resources (Hein et al. 2020). So, Figure 28 shows reported mineral reserves plus estimated mineral resources on land plus estimated undersea mineral resources. This is the summation of mineral reserves, resources, on land and under the sea, in the planetary environment. Even with this extreme summation of conventional and unconventional sources, there was not enough copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, or vanadium to manufacture even just the first generation of renewable technology to replace the existing fossil fuel industrial system.
That’s on page 240 and yes, I had to read (OK, speed read/skim) to get to his simple statement of his mistake. You owe me guys, 239 pages worth.
He’s right that mineral resources can be converted into mineral reserves by the application of time and effort — capital, really. But he thinks that mineral resources are the definition of the mineral deposits that exist. Which just ain’t true — mineral resources are mineral deposits that people have applied time and effort — capital really — to defining. That’s how mineral resources, as defined by our common source at USGS, can increase year on year.
QotD: “Colourism”
which reinforce the inherently colonial practice of “colourism” – the discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone.
It’s not colonial, it’s classist. Dark skin means sun exposure. That is, someone who works for a living outside in the fields. Pale skin means someone rich enough to stay inside. Thus the bits in Jane Austem where the girls worry about their bonnets for they might get freckles.
This also changed, entirely, when work for poor people moved inside and only the rich could afford to get away for a tan. Suddenly, to have a tan – darker skin – became a mark of wealth, not poverty.
A change rather reflected in make up in fact, pre WWII (about, roughly) the aim was to powder or cream the face to be pale, pale, white. Post[-WWII] much foundation make up is to add colour, not take it away.
This also explains the popularity of sunbeds and fake tans, something which a century ago would have been quite literally unthinkable.
Colourism exists, most certainly, but that flip shows that it’s about class, not colonialism.
For the part about it that the colonialism reason cannot explain is why that flip.
That it’s about class also explains why colourism happens in places that never were colonies – Thailand say.
Tim Worstall, “Educashun”, Tim Worstall, 2020-01-12.
November 5, 2024
QotD: “If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others”
I’m a biological essentialist about sex — your sex is a given of your chromosomes and organs, and I will never actually believe that you can invert it by choice.
I am, however, conditionally willing not to challenge your weird Gnostic beliefs on this point, and to treat you as the sex you “identify” as anyway. Here are the conditions:
1. You must be good at passing. If you can’t present a convincing pretense, it’s neither in my interest nor anyone else’s to help you prop up an unconvincing one.
2. You must be harmless. Most obviously, you must not use your “identification” to prey on others, whether directly by violence or by using the physical advantage of your sex to overwhelm them in sports, or in any other way. And if you’re told you’re unwelcome in a bathroom or changing room, it’s on you to not impose.
3. You must be modest. Your desire to role-play as M or F does not entitle you to violate prevailing norms about where, and to whom, you expose your genitals. If you aren’t polite enough to refrain from this, I won’t be even a bit polite to you.
4. Children are off-limits. The moment you engage in behavior that seems intended to confuse or indoctrinate them, you enter the category of “predator” and stay there. My response to sexual predation on children only begins with rejection and rudeness.
5. If you try to use the force of law to gain what equal and voluntary negotiation with individuals won’t give you, you also enter the category of “predator” and stay there.
The meta-rule is: the more your behavior imposes costs on others, the less polite and accepting I will be. If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-07-28.
November 4, 2024
Violence and sex differences
Lorenzo Warby discusses some basic biological differences between men and women and how those differences account for much of the variance in violent behaviour:
Human anatomy fundamentals: advanced body proportions
design.tutsplus.com
(Note on usage: Sex is biological — i.e., which gametes a body is structured to produce. Sex roles are the behavioural manifestation of sex. Gender is the cultural manifestation of sex.)
Adult human males have, on average, about twice the lean upper body mass of adult human females. This means that adult human females have, on average, 52 per cent of the upper body strength of adult human males.
The consequence of this is that men dominate violence between adults. They dominate victims — another male is far more likely to be a physical threat or obstacle than a woman. Men even more strongly dominate perpetrators.
A Swedish study found that one per cent of the population committed almost two-thirds of all violent crimes. That one per cent was almost entirely male. Four per cent of the population committed all the violent crimes. That four percent was almost 90 per cent male1 and constituted just over seven per cent of the male population.
These patterns of behaviour do not require any “hard wired” differences by sex in human brains. They merely require that men have about twice the upper body strength of women. They represent strategic behaviour within that context.
Indeed, these results are not compatible with sex-differentiation being strongly “hard-wired” in brains by sex. The overwhelming majority of men do not commit any violent crimes, while some of the perpetrators —almost eleven per cent — were female.
What makes it even clearer that these patterns represent strategic behaviour—that is, responses grounded in (biological) constraints and capacities — is that men and women each make up about half the perpetrators of violence against children.
When women are dealing with the physically stronger sex, they are much less likely to use violence than is the physically stronger sex. When they are dealing with a systematically weaker group of Homo sapiens — children — they are as likely to be perpetrators of violence as men.
These patterns represent strategic behaviour. They represents actions responding to constraints and capacities. You get sex-differentiated patterns when the constraints are different between men and women. Our sex-differentiated biology is enough, on its own, to produce sex-differentiated patterns of behaviour.
So, even in (then) peaceful Sweden, one in 14 men are violent. That a significant proportion of men are violent predators informs female behaviour, as the systematically physically weaker sex.
Men dominate sexual violence because they are physically stronger, have penises and cannot get pregnant. That is enough to have men dominate sexual violence without any sex differentiation in the “hard-wiring” of brains at all.
We are embodied agents. How we are embodied makes a difference for our behaviour.
Women have, on average, half the lean upper body mass as men not so much because they are smaller—the average differences in height and weight are nowhere near as large. A much more significant factor is that women have a higher fat content to their body, especially their upper body.
They have a higher fat content because human brains are energy hogs, and women are structured to be able to support not just one, but two or more, energy-hog brains — i.e. babies and toddlers. More fat means more readily-available stored energy. That extra female fat enables us Homo sapiens to be the most body-shape dimorphic of the primates: far more so than any of our ape cousins.
This goes to the other biological constraint that produces sex-differentiated behaviour. Women can get pregnant, men cannot. The risk profile differs for men and women, and not just for the risks of pregnancy and childbirth but also for child-rearing.
1. The text of the paper and the summary table have different numbers for female offenders. As the text states that 10.9 per cent of offenders were females, which agrees with the table but not the figures given in the text, I have corrected accordingly. Fortunately, it does not affect the logic being presented.
November 1, 2024
“[H]er plan will mean the obliteration of your savings, the end of banks and even the destruction of ‘money as we know it'”
It’s astonishing how many highly placed bureaucrats, NGO functionaries, and the very, very wealthy are super gung-ho for reducing the rest of us to the status (and living conditions) of medieval serfs:
This week, VW announced plans to cut tens of thousands of jobs and to close three factories. That is a very big deal, because they have never closed a single German factory before. I try to avoid economic topics, but this story is so much bigger than economics. As Daniel Gräber wrote in Cicero last month, “the VW crisis has become a symbol for the decline of our entire country“.
The Green leftoid establishment are eagerly blaming management for these failures, which is on the one hand not entirely wrong, but on the other hand not nearly an absolution. The German state of Lower Saxony holds a 20% stake in Volkswagen, and so they also manage the company. Recently, in a fit of virtue, they placed a Green politician – Julia Willie Hamburg – on its supervisory board. Hamburg does not even own a car and has used her position to argue that Volkswagen should regard itself not as an automobile manufacturer but as a “mobility services provider” and shift its focus away from “individual transport”.
The absurdly named Julia Willie Hamburg is merely symptomatic of a broader phenomenon. Germany has succumbed to political forces that have nothing but indifference and disdain for the industries that have made us prosperous. Our sitting Economics Minister, Robert Habeck, gave an interview to taz in 2011 in which he said that “fewer cars will not lead to less economic growth, but to new industries”, and attacked “the old growth theory, based on gross domestic product“. And behind Green politicians like Habeck are even more radical forces, like Ulrike Herrmann, the editor of taz, for many years a member of the Green Party and also an open advocate of wide-scale deindustrialisation. Because I am going to quote Herrmann saying some very crazy things, you need to know that she is in no way a fringe figure. She appears regularly on all the respectable evening talkshows and every politically informed person in the Federal Republic knows who she is.
Herrmann has outlined her political views in various books like The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Not Compatible – and How We Will Live in the Future. From these monographs, we learn that Herrmann sees climatism as a means of imposing a centrally planned economy in which we will own nothing and be happy. Happily, Herrmann also talks a lot, and in her various speeches and interviews she states her vision for decarbonising Germany in very radical terms. I am grateful to this twitter user for highlighting typical remarks that Herrmann delivered in April of this year before a sympathetic audience of climate lunatics.
There, Herrmann elaborated on her vision for a future economy in which all major goods would have to be rationed:
Talking about rationing: It’s clear that if we shrink economically, we won’t have to be as poor as the British were in 1939; rather, we’d have to be as rich as the West Germans were in 1978. That is a huge difference, because we can take advantage of all the growth of the post-war period and the entire economic miracle.
The central elements of the economy would have to be rationed. First of all, living space, because cement emits endless amounts of CO2. Actually, new construction would have to be banned outright and living space rationed to 50 square metres per capita. That should actually be enough for everyone. Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2. You don’t have to become a vegetarian, but you’ll have to eat a lot less meat.
Then train travel has to be rationed. So this idea, which many people also have – “so okay then I don’t have a car but then I always travel on the Intercity Express trains” – that won’t work either, because of course air resistance increases with speed. Yes, it’s all totally insane. Trains won’t be allowed to travel faster than 100 kilometres per hour, but you can still travel around locally quite a lot. This is all in my book, okay? But I didn’t expand on it there because I didn’t want to scare all the readers.
At this point Herrmann begins to cackle manically, ecstatic at the thought that millions of Germans will be stuck riding rationed kilometres on slow local public transit.
QotD: J.D. Vance, a Führer for the rest of us
Expert: JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism
Quoted for the lulz. Ol’ JD, a Führer for the rest of us.
But since we’re here … a fascinating footnote in Jaynes informs us that schizophrenics, who Jaynes thinks might be throwbacks to the “bicameral mind”, have no problem with “diffused identity” or whatever the term was. Jaynes hypothesizes that ancient, preconscious peoples didn’t see images of their gods in cult objects; they saw the actual, physical gods. We unicameral people can’t wrap our heads around it, since there are lots of statues and they can’t ALL be god — even if we grant that the biggest statue in the best temple can be god, or if we allow that the black meteorite or whatever is really god to them, still, god can’t be diffused like that: Either your statue is god or mine is; or neither of them are, but they can’t both be.
Schizophrenics, at least according to Jaynes, would be down with that. He notes that you can put two guys who think they’re Napoleon in the same padded cell, and you don’t get a schizo bum fight, you get complete agreement: They’re both Napoleon, somehow. The law of the excluded middle, personal identity version, simply doesn’t apply.
And since my hypothesis is that smartphones are re-decameralizing (it’s a word) us at Ludicrous Speed, well … here you go. Donald Trump is Hitler, but J.D. Vance is somehow also Hitler. It’s not like the real, historical Hitler lacked for shitty, evil underlings — J.D could easily be Heinrich Himmler or somebody. But no, he’s gotta be Hitler, the same way Trump has to be Hitler, and if that means they’re somehow both Hitler, well … there it is. Bicamerality for the win.
Severian, “Catching Up With the Crazies”, Founding Questions, 2024-07-29.
October 30, 2024
Halloween Special: Frankenstein
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published Oct 31, 2017It is a tale. A tale of a man … and a MONSTER!
It’s finally time to talk Frankenstein! Part sci fi, part horror, part opinion piece on the dangers of hubris, this classic story reminds us all to appreciate what’s really important to us: friends, family, loved ones, and most importantly, NOT creating twisted mockeries of God’s creations in an attempt to reach beyond the veil of life itself.
Nnnnnnnow here is a riddle to guess if you can,
sings the tale of Frankenstein!
Who is the monster and who is the man?~
October 27, 2024
Reading the Herculaneum Papyri
Toldinstone Footnotes
Published Jul 5, 2024On this episode of the Toldinstone Podcast, Dr. Federica Nicolardi and I discuss the challenges of reading scrolls charred and buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Chapters:
00:00 Discovery of the scrolls
03:23 Opened and unopened
05:17 How to handle charred papyrus
09:11 New texts
13:17 Philodemus of Gadara
16:04 Epicurean philosophy
20:20 The library in the Villa of the Papyri
24:05 The Vesuvius Challenge
25:56 Progress so far …
28:44 The newest text
30:06 What comes next
34:20 What’s still buried?
October 26, 2024
Secrets of the Herculaneum Papyri
toldinstone
Published Jul 5, 2024The Herculaneum papyri, scrolls buried and charred by Vesuvius, are the most tantalizing puzzle in Roman archaeology. I recently visited the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, where most of the papyri are kept, and discussed the latest efforts to decipher the scrolls with Dr. Federica Nicolardi.
My interview with Dr. Nicolardi: https://youtu.be/gs1Z-YN1aQMChapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:40 Opening the scrolls
1:47 A visit to the library
2:38 A papyrologist at work
4:00 The Vesuvius Challenge
4:46 What the scrolls say
5:40 Contents of the unopened scrolls
6:28 The other library
7:12 An interview with Dr. Nicolardi
(more…)
October 25, 2024
Diversity at all costs
In the National Post, Harry Rakowski explains why Toronto Generic University — sorry, I mean “Toronto Metropolitan University” — is reserving 75% of available enrolment in their new medical school for more diverse candidates, even if they wouldn’t normally qualify by their grades:
We have a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in Canada. Almost a quarter of our population can’t find a family doctor. Wait times for seeing a specialist, getting medical imaging and surgical dates continue to climb, with only Band-Aid solutions being proposed by the federal and provincial governments. We desperately need to expand medical schools and the licensing of highly qualified foreign medical graduates.
So it was welcome news to hear that 94 undergraduate medical students and 105 postgraduate students (residents) will be entering the newly established Toronto Metropolitan University School of Medicine when it opens in September 2025. The city of Brampton, Ont. donated a former civic centre along with $20 million in funding for renovations in order to make the school happen.
However, it was highly disturbing to learn that admissions to the new facility will be driven by a culture-war philosophy that will dilute the quality of medical practice.
There’s no doubt that diversity in medicine helps to optimize care and provide better outcomes for the differing needs of Canada’s highly diverse population, which includes many individuals disadvantaged by their geography as well as racial and economic inequality. But TMU is going about it the wrong way. Its admissions policy will focus on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) rather than quality.
TMU’s plan is to reserve 75 per cent of its enrolment slots for “equity-deserving” students — Black and Indigenous applicants and others who meet “equity-deserving” criteria including students who identify as members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, those who are “racialized” and individuals “with lived experiences of poverty or low socio-economic status.” It will accept a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 3.3 (B+) — or even less for select Black and Indigenous applicants — and then use GPA only as an application criterion, not as a selection criterion. By comparison, the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine requires a minimum GPA average of 3.6 for undergraduate applicants (although average acceptance is now 3.95).
October 18, 2024
Accidentally creating an epidemic of food allergies, from the best of intentions
Jon Miltimore discusses how the unintentional outcome of professional organizations making recommendations to the public without proper scientific understanding created so many of the allergies that now plague youngsters:
“Peanuts, LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut allergy)” by jlcampbell104 is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 
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In 1992, with the help of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, The New England Journal of Medicine published a report on a rare phenomenon: fatal or near-fatal anaphylactic reactions in young people due to food allergies.
Examining a period of 14 months, researchers identified thirteen cases, twelve of which involved asthmatic youths. Six of the thirteen anaphylactic reactions resulted in death, and each case had involved a young person with a known food allergy who had unknowingly ingested the food.
“The reactions were to peanuts (four patients), nuts (six patients), eggs (one patient), and milk (two patients), all of which were contained in foods such as candy, cookies, and pastry,” researchers wrote.
The paper said nothing about banning these foods, but concluded that “failure to recognize the severity of these reactions and to administer epinephrine promptly increases the risk of a fatal outcome”.
Nevertheless, food bans followed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to encourage educators to “consider possible food allergies” during food preparation.
By 1998, the New York Times was reporting on the rise of peanut allergies and the measures school districts were taking to stop them.
“Prodded by parents warning of lethal allergies, by the contentions of some researchers that peanut allergies are on the rise and, not least, by a fear of litigation, growing numbers of public and private schools across the country, including many of New York City’s most selective independent schools, have banned peanut butter from their cafeterias,” wrote Anemona Maria Hartocollis.
“The Biggest Misconception”
When the Times published its article in 1998, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was not yet issuing recommendations about peanuts or food allergies in infants. But as public concern grew, they decided they had to offer guidelines of some kind.
“There was just one problem,” Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon, noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Doctors didn’t actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take.”
Instead of remaining mum, the AAP followed the lead of the United Kingdom’s Committee on Toxicology and recommended that mothers avoid peanuts during pregnancy and lactation, and that children avoid peanuts until the age of 3.
The decision to make such a sweeping decision in the absence of compelling scientific evidence was a mistake, allergists say, and runs counter to basic immunology.
Dr. Gideon Lack, an allergist at King’s College London, says the collective effort to cocoon children from peanuts and other foods is responsible for what has been described as a “food allergy epidemic”.
The data suggest Lack is right.
In the 25 years since the AAP issued its recommendation, the US (like the UK, which also advised peanut avoidance) has experienced an explosion of food allergies, especially peanut allergies. Data from Mount Sinai Hospital System in New York show that peanut allergies more than tripled in the decade and a half following the AAP’s guidance. In 1997, peanut allergies affected 1 in 250 children in the United States. By 2002, this rate had risen to 1 in 125, and by 2008, it reached 1 in 70 children.
Anecdotally, I only remember one kid in my middle school who had food allergies … and poor Rusty had ’em all. He was known as the “Kid with a thousand allergies” and had to be so careful of what he ate and even what he touched. but this was the mid-1970s and there weren’t formal school guidelines on what we could bring in our school lunch bags or use scented things like deodorant. (It was the 1970s, and a lot of us were just hitting puberty and many of my classmates were new Canadians from poorer countries … we needed the deodorant!)
QotD: Californian wine
Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World, 2004.
