In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built. With far fewer beds for a growing patient population it should not have surprised anyone that the streets gradually filled with the severely ill. But somehow, we were surprised. The state governments were mostly just grateful to save money that had once gone to mental healthcare. The passage of Medicaid two years later deepened the problem. Medicaid’s funding structure presented states with an opportunity to further offload costs, this time onto the federal government. Unfortunately, the private institutions that filled with Medicaid patients were no better than the state facilities that had been closed; often they were worse. And maintaining access to Medicaid funding for such care, in practice, was more complicated and less certain than staying in a state institution. In 1975, the Supreme Court’s O’Connor v. Donaldson decision established a national standard that the mentally ill could only be involuntarily treated if they represented an immediate threat to themselves or others. This completely removed actual medical necessity from the equation, and the standard directly incentivized hospitals to discharge very ill patients, many of whom leave these useless emergency room visits and immediately abuse drugs, self-harm, commit crimes, attack others, or commit suicide. In 1990 the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act further empowered treatment-resistant patients and created legal incentives that led hospitals to release severely ill people rather than face the burden of litigation. Various state reforms in recent decades have almost uniformly pushed the severely ill out of treatment rather than into it, under the banner of “autonomy”. For sixty years we’ve done everything in our power to make it harder to treat people who badly need care. And here we are.
Freddie deBoer, “We Closed the Institutions That Housed the Severely Mentally Ill and We Made It Dramatically Harder to Compel Them to Receive Care”, Freddie deBoer, 2024-05-14.
August 15, 2024
QotD: The bitter fruit of deinstitutionalization
August 12, 2024
QotD: The key attraction of video games to young men
That would explain video game escapism/addiction amongst men. It’s a little world where there are predictable rules and outcomes and one can succeed much easier than in the unpredictable real world with ever-changing rules.
I think this is a really important point deserving of more attention.
Yes. Video games are a drug aimed straight at the receptor that is male need for agency. They’re a superstimulus for it in exactly the same way that pornography is a superstimulus for desire.
I don’t have a policy prescription about this or anything. But it’s a connection that matters.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-05-06.
August 5, 2024
Current culture is failing teenage girls very badly
In The Free Press, Kat Rosenfield contrasts her own teenage years with the situation faced by teenage girls today:
The Genius of Judy, a new book by Rachelle Bergstein, suggests that I was not alone in believing that Judy Blume was the ultimate source of knowledge on all things teenage girl. “Her characters and stories were more than just entertainment,” Bergstein writes. “They were a road map.”
Blume’s stories offered a powerful counterpoint to a culture that sought to limit women’s choices by surrounding their bodies and sexuality with shame and stigma — a culture that treated the lives of teenage girls as frivolous and insignificant. She spoke frankly and authentically not only of girls’ struggles but also, crucially, of their survival. She offered a glimpse of how beautiful life could be on the other side.
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret at once demystifies the bodily changes associated with the onset of puberty, and approaches the idea of becoming a woman with a sense of wonder. Her 1981 novel Tiger Eyes tackles loss, grief, and family upheaval — all of which shape its main character’s identity, but do not shatter her. Forever (1975) dares to tell a story about two teenagers who fall in love and have sex — responsibly, and without dire consequences.
Blume “taught young readers”, writes Bergstein, “that we were allowed to expect more from our lives than the women who came before us”.
I was struck, reading Bergstein’s book, that today’s youth may need Blume even more desperately than my cohort did. If the path to womanhood was once too taboo to talk about, today’s cultural landscape is flooded with narratives that make the entire enterprise seem like an unmitigated horror.
Puberty, rather than the exciting sign of maturity experienced by Margaret and her friends, has become a battleground for a gender ideology whose first response to a pubescent girl’s anxiety about her changing body is to suggest that perhaps she’s not really a girl. Meanwhile, the one-two punch of #MeToo followed by the fall of Roe v. Wade has fueled a consensus that to be a woman is to exist in a nightmarish state of perpetual physical vulnerability — if not to the torments of pregnancy and childbirth, then to the predations of men, who are of course written off en masse as “trash” by the pop-feminist commentariat. Dating and sex, in particular, are positioned as a minefield of traumas best avoided in favor of celibacy, which has been rebranded by Zoomers as a trendy new practice known as going “boy sober“.
The result is an entire generation of girls who are not just terrified of becoming women, but actively distressed by narratives that depict the process in a realistic way. One of the more interesting observations from The Genius of Judy is that Gen Z seems to have particular trouble with Blume’s Forever, in which the protagonist, Katherine, is wrestling with the question of when and whether to have sex, while her boyfriend Michael, who is not a virgin, is extremely and vocally in favor. Bergstein describes watching a TikTok in which the young female poster rants that “Michael is like a predator. This man pressures her so many times into sexual intercourse that I feel like she eventually just gave in.”
Bergstein sees this as a sign Forever hasn’t aged well. To me, it is a sign of how poorly today’s teenagers have been served by contemporary sexual discourse, and how badly they need Blume’s countervailing narrative. Forever articulates an important set of truths: that every girl approaches sexual readiness on her own timeline, that the desires of two individual people are rarely in perfect alignment, and that many, if not most couples have to negotiate that misalignment in the normal course of a relationship. In Forever, as in the real world, a girl can be at once desirous of sex but not yet ready for it — until, one day, she decides she is.
Having been a teenage boy in the 1970s, while I thought it was a bad suite of experiences (afterwards, with a bit of life perspective: at the time I thought it was hellish), it seems that teenage girls today are even worse off.
August 1, 2024
QotD: Sex and dating in the internet dating age
In 1996, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones helped women realise that half the human race (men) might usefully be called “fuckwits” when it came to dating and romance. The dynamics of internet dating, with its illusion of graspable sexual paradise, has either created a new tsunami of apparent fuckwits, or it has made the sheer extent of them inescapable.
Meanwhile, the boredom and jadedness stitched into heavy use of apps (“nope”, “like”, “nope”, “nope”, “nope”, “like”) has produced a ubiquitous undercurrent of queasy unpleasantness. The result is that men, formerly seen as an alternating source of fun, trouble and heartbreak, become “men: ugh”. Women, once the promised land for many a Romeo, become bitches, gold-diggers, game-players, and, most significantly, for a depressing bloc known as “women: meh”.
This sexual stand-off, characterised by simmering distrust and putrid fatigue, oozes off internet dating portals. I’ve often found myself, after a night of binge-scrolling, surprised to remember that dating is filed under “romance”, which is supposed to be — at least at the start — a little about positive, fuzzy feelings or the potential to develop them.
Zoe Strimpel, “Why the young are falling out of love with sex”, UnHerd, 2019-11-25.
July 22, 2024
QotD: Post-apartheid South Africa
All of this brought tons of international condemnation onto the Zimbabwean regime, and a lot of countries looking for ways to pressure it to stop the atrocities. The glaring exception was Mbeki’s South Africa, which staunchly defended Zimbabwe for years as the killing and the starvation just kept ratcheting up. It’s unclear why they did this, beyond the ANC and ZANU-PF (the Zimbabwean ruling party) having a certain ideological and familial kinship, both being post-colonialist revolutionary parties that had overthrown white minority rule. But whatever the reason, this was the straw that finally caused Western politicians and celebrities to wake up a little bit and realize that South Africa was now ruled by thugs.
The second, even more catastrophic event that caused the South African government to lose the sheen of respectability was the AIDS epidemic and their response to it. The story of how Mbeki buried his head in the sand, embraced quack theories on the causes of AIDS, and condemned hundreds of thousands of people to avoidable deaths is well known at this point, but Johnson’s book is full of grimly hysterical details that turn the whole story into the darkest comedy you’ve ever seen.
For example: I had no idea that Mbeki was so ahead of his time in outsourcing his opinions to schizopoasters on the internet. According to his confidantes, at the height of the crisis the president was frequently staying up all night interacting pseudonymously with other cranks on conspiracy-minded forums (an important cautionary tale for all those … umm … friends of mine who enjoy dabbling in a conspiracy forum or two). These views were then laundered through a succession of bumbling and imbecilic health ministers such as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang who gave surreal press conferences extolling the healing powers of “Africanist” remedies such as potions made from garlic, beetroot, and potato.
Actually, the potions were a step up in some respects, the original recommendation from the South African government was that AIDS patients should consume “Virodene”, a toxic industrial solvent marketed by a husband-wife con-artist duo named Olga and Siegfried Visser. Later documents came to light revealing large and inexplicable money transfers between the Vissers and Tshabalala-Msiming. The Vissers then established a secret lab in Tanzania where they experimented on unsuspecting human subjects, engaged in bizarre sexual antics, and performed cryonics experiments on corpses. Despite this busy schedule, they also produced a constant stream of confidential memos on AIDS policy that were avidly consumed by Mbeki.
The horror of it all is that by this point there were very good drugs that could massively cut the risk of mother-child HIV transmission and somewhat reduced the odds of contracting the virus after a traumatic sexual encounter. There were a lot of traumatic sexual encounters. A contemporaneous survey found that around 60 percent of South Africans believed that forcing sex on somebody was not necessarily violence, and a common “Africanist” belief was that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS, all of which led to extreme levels of child rape. The government then did everything in its power to prevent the victims of these rapes from accessing drugs that could stave off a deadly disease. At first the excuse was that they were too expensive, then when the drug companies called that bluff and offered the drugs for free, it became that they caused “mutations”.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.
July 21, 2024
QotD: There’s no recovery mode from being a Basic College Girl
Do you have any examples of BCGs recuperating?
Sadly, very few. Part of this is just in the nature of the biz — I don’t see too many former students out and about, since they all leave College Town for the big wide world — but I do know this: Scratch a Karen, find a BCG. In fact, you could go so far to say that “Karen” simply IS the BCG after she hits The Wall. The faster the impact, the bigger the Karen (this is a testable hypothesis — given that our gal Taylor Swift is currently impacting The Wall at about Mach 3, if I’m right, she’ll soon unleash the kraken of Karens on an unsuspecting world).
I also strongly suspect that BCGs can’t recover. As any shrink will tell you, Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders are almost impossible to treat. For one thing, treatment requires believing that you have a problem, and believing you don’t have a problem is pretty much diagnostic of those two syndromes. And while I’m not sure the BCG is clinically diagnosable with either of those, what they actually are is close enough that I’m betting whatever therapies “work” on actual clinical cases would “work” on them … but see above.
Finally, I guess I can’t really blame the BCG for not realizing she’s got a problem, because she obviously doesn’t have a problem. Look around — society rewards this shit. AOC, for example, is going to be La Presidenta por Vida de los Estados Unidos here in a decade or so; if that’s a problem, I can’t really blame them for not fixing it. Eventually, of course, reality will intrude, and your BCG will be screaming for a real man to come save her … but, thanks to her BCG antics, there won’t be any real men around. Or, you know, we’ll all be in the OPFOR, so good luck with that, beeyatch.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag /Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.
July 13, 2024
Did you blink and miss Gender Empathy Gap Day?
Don’t worry, unlike so, so many other formal days (or months, or seasons …) in the calendar devoted to this or that or the other real and imagined causes, celebrations, or acknowledgements, Gender Empathy Gap Day isn’t observed anywhere:
Remember these examples of virtue signalling? Can you imagine them doing the same for boys or young men?
Image from The Fiamengo File.
Few people have heard of Gender Empathy Gap Day, a day inaugurated in Germany in 2018 to raise awareness about our societies’ remarkable indifference to the suffering of men and boys. Not surprisingly, it has no official status in any country.
Most people, if asked, will insist that it is women and girls who suffer. We expect men and boys to apologize for their advantages and educate themselves about issues affecting women and girls. Animus against men is socially acceptable, even approved. “I bathe in male tears” is a popular feminist slogan, and university professors write mainstream opinion pieces with unironic titles like “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”
The Gender Empathy Gap Day doesn’t advocate a contest over which sex has it worse. It does advocate recognition of our collective inability or unwillingness to see the full humanity of men.
Academic researchers Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic have compiled data showing that both females and males tend to have more positive associations with women than with men. Researchers have also confirmed a much higher in-group bias amongst women, meaning that women feel more empathy towards other women than towards men, while men also feel more empathy for women.
Whether it’s homelessness (61% male), homicide (78% male victims), suicide (79% male), workplace fatalities (93% male), prison incarceration (93% male), or a host of other issues, men and boys do suffer. Yet according to the research of Dr. Tania Reynolds, we tend to associate agency with maleness and the capacity for victimhood with femaleness, seeing men and boys as active doers rather than as sufferers deserving concern.
As a result, we are tolerant of harsh punishments for male criminal offenders, but not for women. In 2012, Sonja Starr, a professor of Law, published the results of her study of discrepancies in criminal sentencing that showed a very large gender gap in the punishment of women for the same crimes committed by men. Starr’s extensive study found an average 63% sentencing gap that harshly disadvantaged men. She also discovered that “Female arrestees are […] significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted”.
The gap in punishment results because we all — including prosecutors, judges, and juries — incline to the belief that women who commit crimes were led into their law-breaking by others, usually men, and had limited choices because of poverty, childhood abuse, mental illness, or addiction. We hesitate to deprive young children of the care of their mothers, while we are content to see fathers behind bars. As Starr points out, however, male offenders have also “suffered serious hardships, have mental health or addiction issues, have minor children, and/or have ‘followed’ others onto a criminal path”.
Author Glen Poole has noted that such indifference to male difficulties is built right into the stories our society tells about itself. He points out that when a large number of men are killed — whether in war, accident, or natural disaster — mainstream news sources report on people killed, making the sex of the victims invisible. It is not news when men and boys die.
When women or girls are killed or harmed, they are rarely if ever referred to as people. Their suffering is news.
QotD: The need for social status
It seems reasonable to think that the downtrodden might be most interested in obtaining status and money. But this is not the case. Inhabitants of prestigious institutions are even more interested than others in prestige and wealth. For many of them, that drive is how they reached their lofty positions in the first place. Fueling this interest, they’re surrounded by people just like them — their peers and competitors are also intelligent status-seekers. They persistently look for new ways to move upward and avoid moving downward. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim understood this when he wrote, “The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs.” And indeed, a recent piece of research supports this: it is the upper class who are the most preoccupied with gaining wealth and status. In their paper, the researchers conclude, “relative to lower-class individuals, upper-class individuals have a greater desire for wealth and status … it is those who have more to start with (i.e., upper-class individuals) who also strive to acquire more wealth and status”. Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else.
Furthermore, other research has found that absolute income does not have much effect on general life satisfaction. An increase in relative income, on the other hand, has a positive effect. Put differently, making more money isn’t important. What’s important is making more than others.
Rob Henderson, “Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class — A Status Update”, Quillette, 2019-11-16.
June 29, 2024
Oh no! The filthy proles are getting too many calories! Let’s re-impose rationing!
Tim Worstall suggests that the regular “viewing with alarm” thumbsuckers about purchased meals having “too many calories” are actually an indication of a strong desire by the great and the good to stick their regulatory noses into the lives of ordinary people:
“Indian take away in Farrer Park” by Kai Hendry is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
This headline is, of course, wrong.
Some takeaway meals contain more calories than daily limit, UK study finds
There is no daily limit. We do not have laws stating how much food we are allowed to eat. Of course, there are those who want there to be such laws but there aren’t, as yet. What there is is a series of recommendations about the limits we should impose upon ourselves:
Some takeaway meals contain more calories in one sitting than someone is advised to consume in an entire day, a study of British eating habits has revealed.
That’s better.
Cafes, fast-food outlets, restaurants, bakeries, pubs and supermarkets are fuelling the UK’s obesity crisis because so many meals they sell contain dangerously large numbers of calories, it found.
That’s not better. Because a plate of food containing a lot of calories is not a danger. Eating many of them might be but that the average household can get a gutbuster for some trivial portion of household earnings is a glory of modern civilisation, the very proof we require that we’re all as rich as Croesus.
And this is actually true too. That we are gloriously rich and it’s our food supply that proves this. As Brad Delong likes to point out back 200 years (yes, about right, 1820s is as it was really changing but 300 years would be better) it took a full day’s work to be able to gain 2,000 calories a day for a day labourer. There are 800 million out there still living at that standard of living. We can buy 2,000 calories — if we go boring stodge — for 30 minutes work now.
By history and by certain geographies we are foully rich these days. Which is the complaint of the wowsers of course. They’re a revival of the puritans and their sumptuary laws. How dare it be true that people fill their bellies with food they actually like?
Six out of 10 takeaway meals contain more than the 600-calorie maximum that the government recommends people should stick to for lunch and dinner in order to not gain weight, according to the research, which was carried out by the social innovation agency Nesta.
One in three contain at least 1,200 calories – double the recommended limit.
And? So, folk can buy lots of food for not much money. This is the very thing that makes having a civilisation possible — cheap food. My wife and I do indeed partake of an Indian occasionally — and find the takeout portions rather large. So, we have one amount for lunch or dinner and we’ve a refrigerator in which to keep the excess for a supper or snack another day. This is not beyond the wit of man to organise.
We don’t order in food very often, but when we do we usually manage to get both dinner on the night and lunch on the morrow from a typical order. If the nosey parkers have their way, they’d limit what we were allowed to buy — for our own good, of course — so we’d almost certainly still pay the same amount for less food. Such a deal!
June 27, 2024
Tim Worstall offers a rule-of-thumb for physical fitness
Rather than digging deeply into the esoterica of current research on the human body, Tim Worstall suggests there’s a handy rough metric you can use to judge your own physical fitness in any given area that sounds helpful:
“Exercise Running Fitness Physical Activity – Credit to https://homethods.com/” by homethods is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
If you can do the whatever it is in under twice the Olympic time for it then that’s just fine. You may, at that point, step off the treadmill and go get more dip.
Not that I have any expertise in such things as fitness — just the normal amount of forced labour true of anyone who went through public school. It still seems to me to be a good guide.
True, the accuracy of this varies depending upon the specific activity. Managing 100 metres in 20 seconds is not a huge call — only just managing it would have small children jeering perhaps. But a mile in 8 minutes, yes, that does require a certain level of fitness and one that’s also indicative of, well, being at a certain level of fitness. Not that I’m going to do anything so gauche as check this, but that sounds like about the fitness tests for middle aged men in the military (longer if it’s in full kit).
One recent Tour de France time trial was around the 45 km mark. Which they did in 45 to 49 minutes (again, from memory) and doing 45 km in 90 minutes is something the average club cyclist would do on Granny’s bike, with the basket in front. A professional cyclist would need to add a sheepdog to the basket to be that slow. But being able to crank out 45 km on a bike — in that hour and a half — is showing a level of fitness that I take to be just fine for the average couch lizard.
So too the mile swim. Olympic swimming is 1500m, in 14 minutes or so. So, a mile in half an hour? That looks quite testing but if I can get close to that (in my 60s) then I’m happy. I can swim a mile, which in itself is a reasonable level of fitness, but that time would, I think, qualify as being “fit enough”.
It’s possibly true that this guide is more accurate at the longer distances. For being able to even perform the longer distances is itself a guide to fitness and the time recorded is less of an issue. It would also be possible that personal experience is playing a part here — I’ve always been comparatively better at longer. Few fast twitch fibre. So the “Worstall’s” could well be “As applies to Worstall” rather than something more general.
I’ve always been bad at endurance sports, but I’ve done fairly well in sprint-style, “twitchy” sports where you need fast reactions rather than long, slow-burn exertion. Tim’s rule of thumb seems to be more useful for runners, swimmers, etc., than for badminton players or fencers.
June 25, 2024
QotD: Progress and decline
So progress must have occurred in the intervening time, despite the pessimism that infects those who, like me, are of retrospective temperament and hypersensitive to deterioration. It is not hard to enumerate many things that have improved. They relate principally, but not only, to material conditions. My best friend when I was very young was one of the last children in Britain to suffer from polio, which paralyzed him from the waist down. The quickest form of written communication was then the telegram, and anything other than local telephone calls had to go through an operator. To call across the Atlantic required a reservation and was ferociously expensive; the resultant conversation always seemed to take place during a violent storm. In England, the food was generally disgusting, and meals were to be endured as a regrettable necessity instead of enjoyed (it puzzles me still how people could have cooked so badly). Cars broke down frequently, and every November, pollution produced fogs so thick that you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face (I loved them). Rationing continued for eight years after the war, and disused bomb shelters, present in every park, were where illicit sexual fumbles and smoking took place. Incidentally, for an adult male not to smoke was unusual (75 percent did so); we must have lived in a perpetual fog of foul-smelling tobacco, to judge by the distaste caused by even a single lit cigarette in these virtuous times. Poverty, as raw necessity, still existed. Murderers were sometimes hanged — as well as, more rarely, the innocent. Overt racial prejudice was, if not quite the norm, certainly prevalent.
Yet not everything has improved, though the deterioration has been less tangible than the progress. To give one example: by age 11, I was free to roam London, or at least its better areas, by myself or with a friend of the same age. The sight of an 11-year-old child wandering the city on his own did not suggest to anyone that he was neglected or abused. I remember, too, the evening papers piled up at newsstands; people would throw coins on top of the pile and take their copy. It never occurred to anyone that the money might get stolen; nowadays, it would never occur to anyone that the money would not be stolen. The crime statistics bear out this sea change in national character.
Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.
June 24, 2024
Little humans, from “humorless little poop machines” to creatures with a sense of humour
Ted Gioia cross-posted an article from Daniel Parris that answers the eternal question “when do humans develop a sense of humour?”
… a large body of academic research examines the intersection of humor, aging, and cultural mores. So today, we’ll explore how our sense of humor forms and transforms with age, and the physiological factors driving our comedic sensibilities.
How Does Our Sense of Humor Change Over Time?
We are born humorless little poop machines. We can’t make funny voices, we can’t do bits, and we can’t engage in wordplay — we simply eat, sleep, poop, cry, and poop again. And then, amidst this onslaught of poop, a sense of humor begins to emerge.
The Early Humor Survey (EHS) is a standardized questionnaire designed to assess a child’s humor-processing abilities in the first four years of life. EHS survey data (which is collected from parents) reveals that our sense of humor begins emerging in infancy, typically around the four-month mark. During this period, babies respond to simple stimuli with laughter and begin producing humor.
Even more striking is how humor development differs by task, as comprehension and appreciation of nonsense, puns, and trickery are all learned at varying rates.
Once we exit adolescence, comedic interactions begin to wane, and we laugh less often.
A 2013 Gallup survey documenting the frequency of humorous interactions suggests the existence of a “humor cliff” as we age — each year, we laugh a little less than the previous one. Humor fades until we’re 80, at which point we chuckle a bit more (what a relief).
While captivating, this visualization is also misleading. Popular interpretations of this data suggest that as people mature, their appreciation for humor declines, as if this trait were a single stock trending up or down. Instead, a person’s comedic sensibilities are defined by an assortment of preferences that remain fluid throughout our lives.
A substantial body of research examines how comedic taste varies with age, exploring our reactions to different humor styles at various life stages. One such study published in Current Psychology presented respondents with a series of humorous statements and then assessed each subject’s affinity for four distinct joke types:
- Self-enhancing Humor: finding comedy in everyday situations, often by humorously targeting oneself in a good-natured way.
- Affiliative Humor: using humor to strengthen social bonds and enhance relationships by sharing jokes and amusing stories that make others laugh while avoiding negativity.
- Self-defeating Humor: Involves individuals making jokes at their own expense to gain approval or avoid conflict, sometimes undermining their self-esteem.
- Aggressive Humor: Making jokes or remarks that ridicule, belittle, or demean others, often intended to assert dominance or express hostility.
Ultimately, the study found that with age, people appreciate self-enhancing humor more, and they value affiliative, self-defeating, and aggressive stylings less.
A similar study of 4,200 German participants found that we increasingly prefer incongruity resolution as we age, an approach marked by unexpected or contradictory elements that lead to a comedic surprise. In joke format, this genre includes a setup pointing toward one outcome, with a punchline that delivers a surprising twist, such as “I just flew in today, and boy, are my arms tired!”
June 21, 2024
QotD: Identity fetishism
Fussell is almost embarrassingly frank about why he got into bodybuilding: He was terrified. A scrawny, desperately insecure guy, he just couldn’t handle the social pressures of life in New York. He saw muscles as armor. If he made his exterior so intimidating that no one would want to get close to him he’d never have to get close to anyone. The whole thing is a sustained exercise in fremdschämen — Fussell is a hard guy to like before his transformation, and frankly repulsive afterwards. It’s a short read, and fascinating, but it’s not an easy one.
Do slog through it, though, and I think you’ll see what I mean. The thing that prevents so many of us from really getting into the Left’s headspace, I think, is sheer exhaustion. Forget hardcore SJWs for a sec; just think of what it must take to be, say, a hipster. I mean, seriously, just look at this fucking hipster. The time, the money, the sheer goddamn effort it must take! I’m bushed just writing about it, and that’s nothing compared to what Fussell did.
If you’re a weightlifter, you know. If you’re not, trust me, you don’t want to know. Same deal with endurance athletes, of course, and so on — I’m sure “runner’s high” is real, and it’s great, but son, I really don’t want to experience it. I have experienced “the pump”, famously described by Arnold himself as “like cumming”, but trust me, drugs are a lot better if you just want to get high, because getting to “the pump” fucking hurts. A lot. See Fussell for details.1
Much easier, then, to invest all that time and energy and money into an outward show that, though it no doubt costs as much — perhaps more! — isn’t nearly as painful (I’m sure getting elaborate tats hurts, but if the choice was between that or legs day, I’d be The Illustrated Man). Best of all, of course, is one that doesn’t take anything but time — you know, like, say, Twitter …
All that no doubt seems like a long ride for a short payoff, but unlike my infamously lax attitude towards “the Classics”, I’m going to insist that if you want to get the point of this one — and I consider it important enough to have invested all these words in it — you’re really going to have to go read the book. Fussell is self-aware enough to see himself for what he is, and the Twitterati are of course oblivious, but the psychology is the same. It’s a fetishized identity, and it’s terrifying, because those are our rulers.
Severian, “Identity Fetishism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-24.
1. Worst of all, you don’t get it during “legs day”, the most excruciating part of weightlifting, which is why so many guys skip it. It’s nothing but pain. I was never more than a moderately serious weightlifter back in my youth, but that’s the sole criterion of seriousness — do you skip legs day? If yes, then get back to Planet Fitness, you poseur.
June 15, 2024
In Germany, it can be dangerous to “participat[e] in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembl[e] one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources”
German government control over what people can say online seems like something Justin Trudeau would love to have (and, in fact, is working toward) here in Canada:
Almost two years ago, on 26 July 2022, a German Twitter user known only as MicLiberal posted a thread that culminated in his criminal trial this week. His is but the latest in a long line of such prosecutions – the tactic our rulers increasingly favour to intimidate and harass those who use their freedom of expression in inconvenient ways.
MicLiberal committed his alleged offence as Germany was still awakening from months of hypervaccination insanity. Science authorities and politicians had spent the winter decrying the “tyranny of the unvaccinated“, demanding that “we have to take care of the unvaccinated, and … make vaccination compulsory“, firing people who protested institutional vaccine mandates on social media and denouncing the unvaccinated for ongoing virus restrictions and Covid deaths. Our neighbour, Austria, even went so far as to impose a specific lockdown on those who refused the Covid vaccines. Culturally and politically, those were the darkest months I have ever lived through; they changed my life forever and I will never forget them.
MicLiberal’s thread aimed only to memorialise some of the crazy things the vaccinators had said. It opened with this tweet:
We were complicit!
We marginalised, defamed, discredited, insulted and cancelled people. On behalf of science!
By popular demand, this brief thread with statements that should not be forgotten:
There ensued nothing but a series of citations, most of them wholly typical samples of vintage 2021/22 vaccinator rhetoric, much of it not even that remarkable. For example, MicLiberal included this statement from Andreas Berholz, deputy editor-in-chief of the widely read blog Der Volksverpetzer:
Fact-check: The unvaccinated remain the main drivers of the pandemic.
[…]
You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.
Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them“. On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism”. The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence”. MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation”.
We must take a moment to ponder this truly amazing argumentation, which would seem to criminalise such things as participating in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembling one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources. In each of these cases, of course, it is the prosecutors and the judges eager to apply Paragraph 126a to their political opponents who get to decide what is “wrong”.
The good news in all of this is that the court acquitted him of these creative charges, but the prosecution has given notice that they intend to appeal.
W.H.O. the hell do they think they are?
Christopher Snowden on what he calls a “new low” for the World Health Organization (WHO) in a report issued earlier this week that sounds like Karl Marx was one of the writers:
The WHO European Region published a new report today, written mostly by British ‘public health’ academics. It is quite revealing. For example …
This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs [“health-harming industries”] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist. Instead, they must regulate other HHIs [“health-harming industries”], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.
That’s just one paragraph, but there’s a lot it in.
Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to “health-harming industries” but to private industry and the free market in general.
Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry.
Thirdly, they want to regulate all “health-harming industries” in the same way as they regulate tobacco. These industries include alcohol, food and fossil fuels, but the report also mentions pharmaceuticals, infant formula, gambling, firearms, healthcare (!) and sugary drinks. As the quote above makes clear, they think that all private industry damages health in some way.
This is all there in black and white and there is much more of the same in the report. This is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is in an official WHO document.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
I have written about this for The Critic …
If this sounds to you like Bolshie talk, you might be onto something. It is further confirmation that the modern “public health” movement is an arm of the hard left presented as an arm of medicine. It would be tempting to tell the authors to stay in their lane, but anti-capitalist nanny statism is their lane. For over a decade, such academics, mostly from Britain and Australia, have been pumping out studies about the “commercial determinants of health” and the “corporate political activity” of “unhealthy commodity industries”. The new WHO report is a sort of greatest hits collection. Last year they published a whole series of articles in the Lancet in which they claimed that there is “growing evidence that neoliberalism has been damaging to health” and called for “a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems”.
Half-baked Marxist rhetoric has been rife in the social sciences for decades, but these people have a vaguely coherent point to make and are pursuing a serious, if terrifying, agenda. Since they do not believe in human agency, they assume that people only make “unhealthy choices”, such as eating processed ham, because the system that controls them has been rigged by big corporations. They say in today’s report that “consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice”. Fortunately, public health academics know what the right choice is and could impose it on a grateful population if it were not for the pesky free market. Hence their rage against capitalism, which extends to suspicion of intellectual property, international trade, share buybacks, impact assessments (because they allow businesses to engage with policy-makers) and even the EU single market.
Further to what I say in the article, I’d add that it is to the UK’s shame that so many of the authors of this report are British. They include quackademics that I have been making fun of for years, such as Anna Gilmore, Mark Petticrew and May van Schalkwyk. Between them, they constitute a small clique of talentless, fanatics and/or grifting social scientists who have constructed a world of unreality for themselves by publishing endless low quality journal articles which they and their colleagues then reference and self-reference. It is profoundly depressing that they are now dangling the corpse of the WHO — which was once a great institution — on pieces of string.
