“So how does it feel to be a human being now?” That wasn’t the question I expected to get from my aunt, the first time I saw her after my oldest kid was born. For starters she was a feminist, a prominent academic1 with several books to her name, and somebody who’d always struck me as mercilessly unsentimental. “Do you get it now?” she pressed on. “Before this your life was in shadow, it was fake. Now you’re in the sunlight, now it means something.”
She had kids, so despite having some ideological resistance to getting it, she got it. I got it too. It’s hard to describe what “it” is if you haven’t gotten it, but I’ll try to explain. The moment I first held my child, I had a vision of every human being who had ever done the same. I stood paralyzed, rooted to the spot while before my eyes a whole field of ancestors stretched back into the forgotten past, each cradling a baby just like I was doing. What was I without them? Nothing at all. A cosmic joke, a fluke, or a random collection of atoms. But with them, I was one stage of a process, a chapter of a story.
And not only that, but I was also no longer alone. It had always seemed to me that the problem of intersubjectivity could never be conquered, that between minds there yawned an unbridgeable epistemic chasm. Yet here was an experience that I shared with countless others from the most varied places and times, an experience I shared with emperors and with slaves. André Maurois once said: “Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold”. I had always thought he meant this in a practical, or perhaps an emotional sense, but I now realized it was even truer cosmically. I had, as my aunt said, become a human being.
I didn’t just see the past. In that moment, the future also resolved itself into dreadful clarity. I had always known intellectually that someday I would die, and that the world would continue mostly as it had, but I never really believed it. Anything beyond the horizon delimited by my lifetime had been hazy and indistinct. Not anymore. Now I regarded the newborn squirming in my arms, and knew with absolute certainty that if things went well this child would bury me, and then continue living. Suddenly the far-future mattered, I had skin in the game now. I was no longer a temporal provincial, past and future both had an immediate and urgent reality, and I knew that I would never think the same way about them again.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Children of Men by P.D. James”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-17.
1. This was in the days before cancellation, I’ve often wondered since then whether she would have allowed herself to think the thought today.
2. It also caused me to wonder whether people without living descendants should be permitted any political representation at all.
March 29, 2025
QotD: Becoming a human being
March 27, 2025
QotD: Did humans domesticate plants, or was it the other way around?
Of course, the cultivation of crops enabled human beings to produce far more calories per unit of territory than foraging ever could. And this enabled the human population to expand exponentially, thus putting even more pressure on the food supply, thus necessitating an even greater emphasis on agriculture. Alongside this deepening spiral there were other unintended consequences as well. As Harari puts it: “Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty”.
Giles Fraser, “The Magnificent Seven is a post-liberal idyll”, UnHerd, 2020-04-01.
March 26, 2025
QotD: Therapy that works for women doesn’t necessarily work for men
This is completely wrong. Men cope with feeling unloved relatively easily. What destroys them is feeling powerless.
So yeah. Swing a sword. Restore a steam engine. Climb a rock. Do something — anything — that asserts your competence and control over your environment.
For men, this is much better therapy than talking about feelings.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-05-06.
March 20, 2025
Everyday Life in the Roman Empire – Demography, Income, Life Expectancy
seangabb
Published 12 Sept 2024Part seven in a series on Everyday Life in the Roman Empire, this lecture discusses demography and life chances during the Imperial period. Here is what it covers:
Introduction – 00:00:00
Our Statistical Civilisation – 00:00:24
Ancient “Statistics” – 00:08:05
How Many Roman Citizens? – 00:18:04
Population of the Empire – 00:21:36
City Populations – 00:27:45
Average Incomes – 00:36:27
Life Expectancy – 00:35:37
Country Life – 00:52:06
Population of Rome – 00:54:39
Feeding Rome – 00:57:40
Roman Water Supply – 01:00:44
Bathing and Sanitation – 01:04:16
Hygienic Value – 01:04:16
Bibliography – 01:06:17
(more…)
March 18, 2025
“[T]he Liberals have no principles because it works“
The first act of our unelected prime minister was to performatively sign a piece of paper that supposedly eliminated the hated carbon tax. Well, part of the carbon tax. And not really eliminated eliminated, it just set the rate to zero percent. The carbon tax that the Liberals had proclaimed was essential to saving the entire planet from global warming. If this seems odd, buckle up, because this is just how the Liberal Party operates:
Obviously, I don’t believe Mark Carney nor the Liberal Party of Canada want to destroy the world.
Nor do I believe they could destroy the world, even if a supervillain gave them an unlimited budget in which to do so. After ten years when the supervillain checked up on the Liberals to see how the world-destruction plan was coming along, he’d find out that the world destruction equity subcommittee was waiting for a report from a sub-subcommittee responsible for convening a task force to authorize a panel to determine how to destroy the world in way which minimally impacted disadvantaged communities, but they’re having trouble finding francophone Saskatchewanians for the breakout sessions.
But I am somewhat startled to see how quickly Carney’s Liberal Party abandoned a signature policy it assured us was necessary to fight the existential threat posed by climate change:
This is like the National Socialist German Workers Party tweeting a meme cheering on Adolf Hitler for killing Hitler. (Given the state of Twitter these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if there actually is an official NSDAP account, but never mind.)
We’re left with two possibilities regarding the carbon tax policy promoted by the last Liberal Prime Minister and now abolished (or is it?!?) by the new Liberal Prime Minister:
- it never would have made much difference in the fight against climate change anyway, in which case it was always a waste of time and effort; or,
- it would have made a big difference in the fight against climate change, in which case Carney has decided it’s more important to win the impending federal election and take away his opponents’ talking points than to actually do something about a potential ecological crisis.
I’m not naive about politicians, even those I support, being hypocrites and flip-floppers. There may be some truly principled, ideologically consistent political parties out there, but they can hold their annual conventions in a Ford Club Wagon.
March 17, 2025
German politicians are willing to literally bankrupt the country to keep the AfD out of power
eugyppius is clearly no fan of Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader and presumptive next Chancellor of Germany, but even he seems boggled at how much Merz is willing to concede to his ideological enemies to get himself into that position:
Let us summarise, briefly, what has happened so far:
- The CDU are the party of fiscal responsibility. His Triviality the Pigeon Chancellor Friedrich Merz presented himself throughout the campaign as an unusual fan of Germany’s constitutionally-anchored debt brake. He told everybody that he could not imagine ever borrowing in excess of 0.35% of annual GDP, so interested was he in limiting the tax burden of future generations.
- All of the while, Merz and his advisers were scheming in secret about how they might overhaul the debt brake, firstly because they could not give the slightest shit about the tax burdens of future generations, and secondly because they spent the months since November 2023 observing what happens when a government that has no ideas is also deprived of money. “I have no ideas,” Merz said to himself during this time. “What happens if like Olaf Scholz I also end up with no money?”
- Exactly two weeks ago, U.S. President Donald J. Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had a verbal spat in the Oval Office. This spat put the fear of God into the Eurocrat establishment, for whom the Ukraine war has become a sacred and essentially religious cause. Merz capitalised on the panic to unveil his massive debt spending plan. He and his would-be coalition partners, the Social Democrats, announced that they wished to spend 500 billion Euros of debt on “infrastructure” and untold hundreds of billions of debt on defence. This would entail adjustments to the debt brake, in the same way setting your house on fire would entail adjustments to your living arrangements.
- This massive spending package will require a constitutional amendment, which can only be achieved with a two-thirds vote of the Bundestag. In the newly elected Bundestag, Die Linke and AfD will be in a position to block this amendment and Merz will be stuck with the debt brake. Thus Merz wants to break the debt brake in the final days of the old Bundestag – a strategy that has put him in the amazing position of groveling before the election’s biggest losers. Specifically, Merz has spent the past few days feverishly negotiating with the Green Party, who will not even have any role in his government, just to get them to sign off on his insane spending plans.
I wrote a lot here and on Twitter about the election nightmare scenario I called the “Kenyapocalypse” – a hypothetical in which the Greens and the Social Democrats would each be too weak to give the Union parties a majority on their own, such that Friedrich Merz would be forced to negotiate a coalition deal with both of them at once. In the end, Kenyapocalypse did not happen; the CDU avoided it by a razor’s breadth. Merz, however, turns out to be such a monumental retard that he has managed to recreate a simulacrum of Kenyapocalypse for himself. The man has been on his knees kissing not only Social Democrat but also Green ass for days. He has been begging the Greens to sign onto his debt plan, and the Greens have finally agreed, in return for the following concessions:
- The “defence” funding that will be exempt from the debt brake is to be defined as widely as possible. All kinds of things will count as debt brake-exempt “defence” spending now, probably including various climate nonsense.
- The 500 billion-Euro “infrastructure” debt is to include 100 billion Euros specifically earmarked for the “Climate and Transformation Fund” – the central financial instrument of the energy transition. This is basically infinity windmill money, you might as well set it on fire. Beyond this specific allocation, any projects that contribute to making Germany “climate neutral by 2045” will also be eligible for the 500 billion-Euro exception. This whole thing will be a massive wad of debt for Green nonsense and I would like to take this moment to laugh at everyone who told me how happy I should be that Merz was trying to fix Germany’s bridges with this debt bullshit. Nothing of the sort is going to happen.
- You will note that the explicit goal of achieving “climate neutrality” by 2045 is slated to be among the very few positive political points anchored in the German constitution. “Climate neutrality” is a more expansive concept than mere “carbon neutrality”, or net zero. It describes a utopian state of affairs in which human actions have no influence on the climate whatsoever.
These are prizes the Greens could not achieve even at the height of their influence, in the 2021 elections. Strictly speaking, the entire traffic light coalition fell apart over a matter of 3 billion Euros. Now the Greens are getting 100 billion Euros for free, all because Merz is determined to become Chancellor whatever the cost.
March 16, 2025
Female sexual predators
Every civilized person rejects the notion that male sexual predators should be tolerated, yet few are willing to accept the notion that female sexual predators might even exist. They absolutely do exist and they do commit terrible crimes against their — often very young — victims, as Janice Fiamengo shows:
Even when we are aware that women prey on children, many of us can’t really believe it. When Florida Congresswoman Anna Luna, a Republican elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, proposed three new bills last year that would impose harsh penalties, “including the death penalty”, for various forms of sexual abuse, child pornography, and child sexual exploitation, it is impossible to believe that Luna thought any number of women would be executed for child rape, and nor will they be given the leniency that is shown to women in the criminal justice system (see Sonja Starr’s research).
Yet similar crimes to Ma’s are easily discovered. In the same month that Ma pled guilty, a Martinsville, Indiana teacher was charged with three counts of sexual misconduct against a minor, a 15-year-old boy who has alleged that as many as ten other students were raped by the same woman. The month before that, a New Jersey primary school teacher was charged with aggravated sexual assault against a boy who was 13 years old when she bore his child; it is alleged that she began raping the boy when he was 11. The month before that, a Tipton County, Tennessee teacher [pictured below] pled guilty to a dozen sex crimes against children ranging in age from 12-17 years old. It is thought that she victimized a total of 21 children.
In the same month, a Montgomery, New York teacher pled guilty to criminal sexual assault of a 13 year old boy in her class, whom she assaulted over a period of months. In the previous month, a San Fernando Valley teacher was charged with sexual assault of a 13 year old male student; police believe she victimized others also. Earlier in the year, a substitute teacher in Decatur, Illinois was charged with raping an 11 year old boy. These are just a few recent cases, and only those involving female schoolteachers. Female predators are also to be found amongst social workers, juvenile detention officers, and sports coaches.
The feminist position on male sexual abuse of women and girls has for a long time been that it is about power. Men rape and abuse, according to Susan Brownmiller [quoted above] and others, because they believe it their right as men to keep women subordinate. Rape compensates for male inadequacy and allows for the expression of men’s hostility toward women: it is not about lust but about men’s need to humiliate and degrade. As Paul Elam once noted in a Regarding Men episode, the theory is fatally weakened if even a single woman does the same thing. Feminists have responded by saying that female sexual abuse is fundamentally different from male, less dangerous to society, less hurtful to its victims.
While I was doing research for this essay, I happened upon a recent podcast discussion between Louise Perry, British author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and Meghan Murphy, Canadian Substack author and editor of Feminist Current. The podcast was called “What Happened to Feminism?” and I tuned in because I have enjoyed their perspectives on other issues.
Perry and Murphy are both critics of feminism who remain, as their conversation confirmed, staunchly feminist and anti-male. At one point in the podcast (at about 50:00), the conversation turned to #MeToo, and especially to allegations against teachers. Having already agreed that 95% of MeToo allegations were true, or at least based on something real, the pundits went on to agree, with disconcerting laughter, that there was no comparison between a “crazy” woman who “had sex” with a male student in her class, and a “dangerous” man, a “predatory rapist”, who went after under-age girls in his power.
Murphy even trotted out the old chestnut that abused boys were “stoked about the situation” in getting with “the hot teacher”. After all, she chuckled, “Men are gross predators. Men are perverts. They can’t keep it in their pants.” Perry, seeming taken aback by Murphy’s vulgarity, nonetheless agreed that the sexual abuse of boys is in an entirely different category from that of girls: “It is so annoying to me,” she said, “when people will go around claiming that these are exactly the same”.
Indifference to the victimization of boys, and lack of shame in admitting it, could hardly have been more stark. I mention the podcast not because it was singularly outrageous but because the attitudes expressed in it are still so much the norm, even amongst women who claim to have rethought other feminist beliefs.
March 3, 2025
Is DOGE merely uncovering what used to be called “honest” graft?
Jon Miltimore explains where the expression “honest graft” came from and gives examples of what the DOGE investigations have turned up so far:
In 1905, George Washington Plunkitt made arguably the most famous defense of political graft in American history.
“Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft,” the New York state senator and Tammany Hall member wrote, “but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft”.
Plunkitt was responding to The Shame of the Cities, a book by journalist Lincoln Steffens that exposed sweeping political corruption in U.S. cities.
The ward boss’s shameless defense of “honest graft”, which is still assigned to undergraduates a century after Plunkitt’s death, comes to mind when looking at the fraud, waste, and abuse Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and others are uncovering.
To take but one example, consider the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds the Environmental Protection Agency awarded last year to Power Forward Communities. If you’ve never heard of the nonprofit group, you’re forgiven. Almost nobody has — because it didn’t exist until late 2023.
Power Forward Communities had no footprint, online or otherwise, until October 2023, when it was announced as part of the Rewiring America program, an organization linked to former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, which says its mission is “all about Rewiring America’s values, people, and culture.”
Less than a year after its creation, Power Forward Communities was awarded $2 billion via the EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund — even though it reported just $100 in revenue during its first three months of operation.
The payment, which is slated to continue through June 2031, caught the attention of Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator.
“It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion,” Zeldin said.
Indeed. It’s graft on a scale the Tammany Hall charlatans couldn’t have imagined.
Historical sources say 19th-century politician Boss Tweed and his ring of cronies took in at least $50 million in corrupt money in backroom deals, kickbacks, and skimming before Tweed was convicted of larceny and forgery in 1873 and fled to Cuba, and later Spain. In 2025 dollars, that’s about $1.3 billion — considerably less than the single payoff former President Joe Biden’s EPA awarded Power Forward Communities.
March 1, 2025
“There were always scapegoats … and they were always driven out one way or another”
The second part of Nigel Biggar‘s look at the culture war in Britain includes a look at how the professional approach to young peoples’ gender issues became monomaniacal because nobody involved stopped to think for fear of being ostracized (or fired):
On the gender front, there’s plenty of reason to doubt the intellectual coherence of transgender-self-identification. When a biological male believes that his inner, authentic self is female, what exactly does he think being ‘female’ is? I’m still waiting for someone to persuade me that this doesn’t trade on gender stereotypes that feminists rightly taught us to throw overboard decades ago.
Observe how that has nothing at all to do with the care of patients, and how it has everything to do with the self-regard and political standing of the managers.
There’s even more reason to doubt that the well-being of young people is well served by taking their asserted genders at face value and allowing them to align their bodies by making irrevocable physical changes. According to Hannan Barnes’ shocking chronicle of the scandal at the Gender Identity Development Service (or GIDS) at the Tavistock Institute here in London, there was widespread doubt among clinicians about young people’s claims of “an inborn ‘trans’ nature”, awareness that these were sometimes correlated with eating disorders and self-harm, and suspicion that they might be caused by abuse or trauma. Furthermore, the long-term effects of using puberty-blockers were “largely unknown”, there was considerable uncertainty about which patients would benefit from them, and the health of some young patients actually seemed to worsen while on them.
Notwithstanding all this, “the clinical team … never discussed as a group what it even understood by the word ‘transgender'”, clinicians “never dream[t] of telling a young person that they weren’t trans”, and they always prescribed puberty-blockers unless the patient actively refused them. What’s more, expressions of doubt by staff were discouraged. “Someone would raise concerns, and someone else would move in to shut it down”, writes Barnes. “Those who persisted in asking difficult questions were not received well … those who spoke out were labelled troublemakers. [According to one witness,] ‘There were always scapegoats … and they were always driven out one way or another'”. “Junior staff looked on and learnt”.
Note the chilling effect.
The Tavistock Institute in London
Barnes’ book bears the title, Time to Think, because she identifies the general problem at GIDS as that of “not stopping to think”. That, of course, raises the question, Why? Barnes gives several reasons. One was the fact that the GIDS was propping up the Tavistock financially and that senior managers had a material interest in not disturbing its assumptions. Another was the unwillingness to offend transgender lobby groups such as Mermaids for “fear of a backlash”. But, most important of all was concern for the ‘progressive’ reputation of the management. According to David Bell, consultant adult psychiatrist at the Trust and whistleblower, “The senior management regarded [GIDS] as a star in our crown, because they saw it as a way of showing that we weren’t crusty old conservatives; that we were up with the game and cutting-edge. That was very important to the management to show we were like that”. Observe how that has nothing at all to do with the care of patients, and how it has everything to do with the self-regard and political standing of the managers. Not for the first time, the basic narcissism of progressive virtue-signaling is exposed.
Update: Added missing URL.
February 24, 2025
QotD: Great Men when it’s time to do x
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en
This is obvious, but: Elon breaks libs’ brains because he is the living vindication of the Great Man theory of history. Literally nothing he built would have existed without him, and without him clearly exhibiting superior intelligence and indomitable will.Not so fast.
I’m here to tell you, because I lived it, that the experience of being the “Great Man” who changed history can feel very different from the inside.
I’m not going to try to speak for Elon. Maybe he feels like a colossus out of Thomas Carlyle. I’ll just say that I didn’t feel like that when I was doing my thing, and I’m doubtful that he does more than a small part of the time.
Somebody was going to take the concept of “open source” to the mainstream fairly soon after general access to the Internet started to happen in the mid-1990s. But it didn’t have to be me; you get steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time, and it was time. Dennard scaling and cheap wide-area networking were the underlying drivers. Conditions like that generate ESR-equivalents.
Now it’s time for rockets to Mars. The drivers include extremely cheap and powerful computing, 3-D printing, and advances in both metallurgy and combustion chemistry. Conditions like this generate Elon-equivalents.
It is more than possible to look like the Great Man from the outside but to feel like — to know — that you are almost at the mercy of currents of change much larger than yourself. Yes, you have some ability to shape outcomes. And you can fail, leaving the role to the next person to notice the possibilities.
If Elon is like me, he sometimes plays the autonomous Great Man in order to get the mission done, because he knows that the most effective way to sell ideas is to be a charismatic prophet of them. But if he’s like me, he also feels like the mission created him to make itself happen, and if he fails or breaks the mission will raise up another prophet by and by.
I’m not claiming the Great Man theory is entirely wrong — it takes some exceptional qualities to be an Elon, or even a lesser prophet like me — but it’s incomplete. Great Men don’t entirely create themselves, they are thrust upwards and energized by missions that are ready to happen.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-10-31.
February 20, 2025
The Space Race Begins – W2W 006
TimeGhost History
Published 19 Feb 2025The Space Race has begun. As Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s U.S. compete for technological dominance, the Pentagon prepares for a future of missile warfare. Project Diana shatters barriers by bouncing radar off the Moon, proving space can be conquered — whether for exploration or war.
(more…)
February 19, 2025
QotD: The inborn bias of all mankind
Why was I on a panel with a priest and a revolutionary communist? Long story — not very interesting: we were debating the future of ethics with special attention to the role of religion. The interesting part, however, is that at some point, after we all shook hands like adults and I was on my way home, I realized that I meant it — I would choke them all. Well, of course, one can’t be entirely sure that one’s actions will follow one’s intentions. The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. But, given some weird Twilight Zone scenario wherein all their deaths somehow saved my son’s life, I was at least hypothetically committed. The caveman intentions were definitely there.
The utilitarian demand — that I should always maximize the greatest good for the greatest number — had seemed reasonable to me in my 20s but made me laugh after my son was born. And my draconian bias is not just the testosterone-fueled excesses of the male psyche. Mothers can be aggressive lionesses when it comes to their offspring. While they are frequently held up as icons of selfless nurturing love, that’s mostly because we offspring — the ones holding them up as icons — are the lucky recipients of that biased love. Try getting between a mammal mother and her kid, and you will see natural bias at its brutal finest.
Stephen T. Asma, “Confucius Got It Right: Giving in to ‘Bias’ is Part of Living an Ethical Life”, Quillette, 2020-02-01.
February 18, 2025
QotD: The soft sexism of low expectations
- She’s been told she’s great — fabulous! — just the way she is.
- She’s been taught to dismiss all push-back as misogynistic.
- She’s been assured that she’s entitled to success — and that any failures to achieve said success are the fault of men.
- She’s been trained to demand that these dastardly men — who are totes holding her back — kindly step aside and let her take the trophy — whether she’s actually earned it or not.
You might think I’m being unfair here, but frankly? I don’t agree. Given all the stuff I’ve read in the news for the past decade plus, I believe I’m right on the money.
Everywhere I look, I see illustrations of all four of the above bullet points. I hate to keep harping on the fat acceptance movement, but really: isn’t that a textbook example of point number one? Go ahead, ladies: eff those unrealistic beauty standards and rock on with your 300 pound selves. Yas, queen, slay! (And don’t worry that you can’t make it up a single flight of stairs without getting winded. The negative impacts of extreme obesity are way over-stated, amirite?)
Then there are all the times leftists of the distaff persuasion have thrown down the poor-me-I’m-being-harassed-by-meanie-sexist-men card each time they start losing an online argument. To be sure, in the absolute dumpster fire that is internet discourse, such women probably do get burned with the occasional “die, bitch!” PM or email. But as I noted on my fan blog, men get that crap too — and oddly, I don’t see them whining about it nearly as often. (Probably because crying doesn’t work for men. Only women get picked up by the waaaaaambulance.)
And just to hit on bullets three and four: everywhere I look, I see leftists justifying moves to ease standards to give vag a hand up. Just last month, for example, it was reported that Oxford is considering removing Homer and Virgil from a foundational classics course due to “attainment gaps between male and female candidates”. Don’t buckle down and study your Latin and Greek, dears. We’ll remove that pesky obstacle for you. And oh my great and fluffy Lord, I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard feminists complain about the academic weeding that goes on in engineering or computer science — because apparently, advanced math is oppressive and patriarchal. As a woman who numbers pretty good — indeed, I even teach that stuff for a living! — I headdesk so hard whenever I hear this BS that I’m surprised my skull is still intact.
Where does all this anal-smoke-blowing lead? When you’re told constantly that you should get prizes simply for being a good little girl — as leftist women are — the result is predictable: you stop developing. If you’re already Ms. Polly Perfect, well — that obviates the need for critical self-examination and the consequent moves towards self-improvement. If your naysayers are all dismissible as “women-hating men bitter over the loss of their privilege” (or as women suffering from “internalized misogyny”), then your arguments are almost certainly untested and malformed. And if people have always been clearing the road for you and shielding you from any real challenges, you’re no doubt much stupider than your competition — and much weaker.
Stephanie S., “Prizes for Good Little Girls Syndrome”, Conservative Thoughts, 2020-03-07.
February 15, 2025
Nannies on the right are just as bad as nannies on the left
Jim Treacher briefly gets slightly serious about RFK Jr.’s new role as America’s chief health nanny:
Fake image generated by Grok
First things first: I’m fine with a United States president picking his own cabinet. Donald Trump won, so he gets to choose the people he wants. It’s not fascism, it’s not unconstitutional, and it’s not going to destroy the country. This is the system we have, and so far the Trump administration has been operating within precedent. (Yes, even with Elon Musk and DOGE.) Fair enough.
And, also, in addition to that: I don’t like RFK Jr., and I won’t pretend I do just so you don’t yell at me.
RFK is still the same guy he was before he suddenly started being nice to Trump. He’s the guy who thinks COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack Caucasians and blacks, while sparing the Jews and Chinese. He’s the guy who bragged about having a worm in his brain. He’s the guy who, just seven months ago, said “Trump was a terrible president“.
Now I’m supposed to pretend none of that happened, just because Trump likes him for the moment? Nah.
And, of course, RFK is the guy who thinks the role of government is to slap your hand at the dinner table. So I’m supposed to pretend nanny-statism is good now.
Yay, let’s embrace lib policies to own the libs!
If you didn’t want Michelle Obama telling you what to eat, why do you want RFK telling you what to eat? If you didn’t want the government telling you which vaccines to put in your body, why do you want the government telling you which food to put in your body?
“But seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup and Red Dye Number Whatever are bad for you!” Okay. So don’t eat that stuff. You can read labels, can’t you? Why do you need the feds to hold your hand?
It’s amazing: At the very same time MAGA is cheering on Trump for reducing the size of government — and buddy, I’m right there with them — they’re begging the government to “clean up the food supply”.
Which is it, friends?
Get mad at me all you want, but at least I’m consistent. I don’t want the government telling me what to do, no matter who’s in charge for the time being.
QotD: The absurdly high early expectations for genetic research
Meanwhile, the responsible experts were saying traits might be determined by a two-digit number of genes. Human Genome Project leader Francis Collins estimated that there were “about twelve genes” for diabetes, and “all of them will be discovered in the next two years”. Quanta Magazine reminds us of a 1999 study which claimed that “perhaps more than fifteen genes” might contribute to autism. By the early 2000s, the American Psychological Association was a little more cautious, was saying intelligence might be linked to “dozens – if not hundreds” of genes.
The most recent estimate for how many genes are involved in complex traits like height or intelligence is approximately “all of them” – by the latest count, about twenty thousand. From this side of the veil, it all seems so obvious. It’s hard to remember back a mere twenty or thirty years ago, when people earnestly awaited “the gene for depression”. It’s hard to remember the studies powered to find genes that increased height by an inch or two. It’s hard to remember all the crappy p-hacked results that okay, we found the gene for extraversion, here it is! It’s hard to remember all the editorials in The Guardian about how since nobody had found the gene for IQ yet, genes don’t matter, science is fake, and Galileo was a witch.
And even remembering those times, they seem incomprehensible. Like, really? Only a few visionaries considered the hypothesis that the most complex and subtle of human traits might depend on more than one protein? Only the boldest revolutionaries dared to ask whether maybe cystic fibrosis was not the best model for the entirety of human experience?
Scott Alexander, “The Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-09-13.
