Before online dating, the available dating pool was just the people in your town: the people at your local bar, at your church, at your office, etc. Online dating expanded that pool by orders of magnitude, which changed how we think about dating in general. Which makes sense: When people have millions of people to choose from instead of hundreds, lots of things start to change.
First, preferences get formalized. 90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. This also makes sense: When people only spend 2-3 seconds per app, superficial qualities rise to the top.
Online dating also changes our expectations regarding relationships more broadly. Since we now date outside of our circles, it’s now easier to cheat or ghost or just otherwise leave if the relationship isn’t perfect. Why stay in a non-perfect relationship, the logic goes, when there are millions of other potential matches at your fingertips?
This perhaps explains why breakup rates for couples who meet via apps are twice as high as couples who meet via friends and family. Friends and family not only refer better, but there’s a higher incentive to stay in a relationship when there’s the social encouragement of family and friends.
What online dating does is enable hypergamy at a massive scale. Hypergamy is the tendency for women to want to date the best men, no matter where the woman is in the hierarchy. Men also want top women of course, but they’re on average willing to settle for any woman, at least for casual sex, whereas women are much more discerning, which makes sense given women have a much bigger risk than men when it comes to sex, since women can get pregnant. It’s basic biology: Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive.
What we see with algorithmic online dating isn’t a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we’ve created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% of women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them).
Algorithmic dating conflates two markets, the market for relationships and the market for sex under the ambiguous banner of “dating”. What happens then is men on apps try to match with as many women as possible and women try to match with a small selection of higher status men. That leads to the situation where a dating app’s natural equilibrium is that a narrow set of men have “dating” access to almost all the women if they choose to, and they typically do. Even with the best intentions, these men aren’t interested in long-term relationships with all these women. The more options a man has, the less inclined he is to want one single relationship.
To put some numbers on it:
- Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men.
- The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
- A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile.
And if the majority of women are vying for these men and ignoring the rest of them, that creates both a large amount of lonely women and men. Indeed: 28% of men under 30 have reported no sex in the last year, which has doubled in the last decade. This celibacy level is reminiscent of feudal medieval times. In the old days these men would have become monks or cannon fodder for the war. But these days, they just watch porn and play video games (don’t give up, guys!).
Erik Torenberg, “The Matching Problem in Dating”, Erik Torenberg, 2023-09-23.
January 19, 2024
QotD: How the internet changed the dating world
January 16, 2024
QotD: Children and transgenderism
In the last few years in Western societies, as these notions have spread, the number of children identifying as trans has skyrocketed. In Sweden, the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a phenomenon stable and rare for decades, has, from 2013 to 2016, increased almost tenfold. In New Zealand, the rate of girls identifying as boys has quadrupled in the same period of time; in Britain, where one NHS clinic is dedicated to trans kids, there were around a hundred girls being treated in 2011; by 2017, there were 1,400.
Possibly this sudden surge is a sign of pent-up demand, as trans kids emerge from the shadows, which, of course, is a great and overdue thing. The suffering of trans kids can be intense and has been ignored for far too long. But maybe it’s also some gender non-conforming kids falling prey to adult suggestions, or caused by social contagion. Almost certainly it’s both. But one reason to worry about the new explosion in gender dysphoria is that it seems recently to be driven by girls identifying as boys rather than the other way round. Female sexuality is more fluid and complex than male sexuality, so perhaps girls are more susceptible to ideological suggestion, especially when they are also taught that being a woman means being oppressed.
In the case of merely confused or less informed kids, the consequences of treatment can be permanent. Many of these prepubescent trans-identifying children are put on puberty blockers, drugs that suppress a child’s normal hormonal development, and were originally designed for prostate cancer and premature puberty. The use of these drugs for gender dysphoria is off-label, unapproved by the FDA; there have been no long-term trials to gauge the safety or effectiveness of them for gender dysphoria, and the evidence we have of the side effects of these drugs in FDA-approved treatment is horrifying. Among adults, the FDA has received 24,000 reports of adverse reactions, over half of which it deemed serious. Parents are pressured into giving these drugs to their kids on the grounds that the alternative could be their child’s suicide. Imagine the toll of making a decision about your child like that?
Eighty-five percent of gender-dysphoric children grow out of the condition — and most turn out to be gay. Yes, some are genuinely trans and can and should benefit from treatment. And social transition is fine. But children cannot know for certain who they are sexually or emotionally until they have matured past puberty. Fixing their “gender identity” when they’re 7 or 8, or even earlier, administering puberty blockers to kids as young as 12, is a huge leap in the dark in a short period of time. It cannot be transphobic to believe that no child’s body should be irreparably altered until they are of an age and a certainty to make that decision themselves.
I don’t have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl. If my teachers and parents and doctors had adopted this new ideology, I might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male. How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake. And what are gay adults doing to protect them? Nothing. Only a few ornery feminists, God bless them, are querying this.
In some ways, the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic. Instead of seeing effeminate men as one kind of masculinity, as legitimate as any other, transgenderism insists that girliness requires being a biological girl. Similarly, a tomboy is not allowed to expand the bandwidth of what being female can mean, but must be put into the category of male. In my view, this is not progressive; it’s deeply regressive. There’s a reason why Iran is a world leader in sex-reassignment surgery, and why the mullahs pay for it. Homosexuality in Iran is so anathema that gay boys must be turned into girls, and lesbian girls into boys, to conform to heterosexual norms. Sound a little too familiar?
Adults are increasingly forced to obey the new norms of “social justice” or be fired, demoted, ostracized, or canceled. Many resist; many stay quiet; a few succumb and convert. Children have no such options.
Indoctrinate yourselves as much as you want to, guys. It’s a free country. But hey, teacher — leave those kids alone.
Andrew Sullivan, “When the Ideologues Come for the Kids”, New York Magazine, 2019-09-20.
January 10, 2024
The unexpected rise in “Unknown Cause”
Mark Steyn rounds up some interesting details on that long-forgotten-by-the-media pandemic and corresponding heavy-handed government interventions that made things so much worse:
The obvious problem with appeals to authority, at least for anyone more sentient than an earthworm, is that across the western world the last four years have been one giant appeal to authority – and the result of mortgaging the entirety of human existence to the expert class is the rubble all around. Just for starters:
US scientists held secret talks with Covid ‘Batwoman’ amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly
You don’t say! When would that have been? Oh:
…just before pandemic
Well, there’s a surprise!
A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.
You got that right. Wuhan is the virological equivalent of a CIA black site in Pakistan: it’s where the Deep State goes to do the stuff it can’t do in suburban Virginia.
So how’s that working out for the planet? Way back in 2022, The Mark Steyn Show reported that “Unknown Cause” was now the leading cause of death in Alberta. According to the somewhat lethargic lads at Statistics Canada, taking eighteen month to catch up with yours truly, that same year it was the fourth leading cause of death across the entire country. “Unknown Cause” is rampaging from Nunavut igloos to the Hamas branch office in Montreal: Between 2019 and 2022, it was up almost five hundred per cent.
Does “Unknown Cause” have an awareness-raising ribbon like Aids or breast cancer? Are there any celebs who’d like to headline a gala fundraiser or do an all-star pop anthem?
Apparently not. Gee, it’s almost as if taking too great an interest in “Unknown Cause” can lead to a bad case of cancer of the career. Nevertheless, the official StatsCan numbers are, to put it at its mildest, odd. By the end of 2022, Canada was one of the most jabbed nations on earth, with a Covid vaccination rate of ninety-one per cent, the highest in the G7, by some distance (UK and US both at eighty per cent).
And yet, if these government numbers are to be believed, something very strange happened. In the most jabbed member of the G7, Covid deaths went up. As The Western Standard‘s Joseph Fournier noticed, while almost nobody else did, Covid deaths per annum across the Deathbed Dominion shot up 25 per cent from the days of curfews, and arrests for playing open-air hockey:
2020 15,890
2021 14,466
2022 19,716
So, in Jabba Jabba Central, more people died of Covid in the most recent annual round-up than at the height of the pandemic. In fact, on those numbers, Canada has yet to reach “the height of the pandemic”. Here’s another striking feature – again, direct from Statistics Canada:
During the first year of the pandemic, older Canadians (65 years of age and older) accounted for 94.1% of COVID-19 deaths, while those aged 45 to 64 years accounted for 5.3%. In 2021, while the number of COVID-19 deaths among individuals aged 65 years and older (82.0%) remained high, the proportion of deaths among those aged 45 to 64 years nearly tripled to 15.5%.
So, in the most vaxxed nation of the G7, middle-aged persons account for three times the proportion of Covid deaths than they did at “the height of the pandemic”.
Like I said: odd.
Canadian life expectancy? Down. Oh, just by four months or so. But that’s three times the size of last year’s drop.
Excess mortality? Indeed: In 2019 the age-standardised death rate was 830.5 per 100,000 people. In 2022 it was 972.5. As I’ve pointed out a gazillion times on telly, that’s the opposite of what’s meant to happen post-pandemic: After the Spanish Flu, the mortality rate fell because people who would otherwise have died in 1924 had already died in 1919. That phenomenon is visible in Eastern Europe, but nowhere in the Dominion of Death.
Last year I mentioned en passant to my friend Naomi Wolf that the Covid vaccines were beginning to remind me of the scandals of her old chum Bill Clinton: one such can do a politician in, but, if you have (as Slick Willy did) a multitude of ’em, who can follow it all? If Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca just caused, say, myocarditis, maybe people would find it easier to focus on. Instead, it causes myocarditis in men and infertility in women and, if you manage to dodge the latter, the mRNA shows up in newborn babies; it brings on Guillain–Barré syndrome and Ramsay Hunt syndrome and lightning-speed turbo-cancers. Alternatively, you could get a dose of the SADS and drop dead on stage or on the footie pitch, or at home watching the telly. It’s a lot to keep track of.
Or maybe, as in Alberta, you just die of … whatever. And nobody cares to find out.
January 9, 2024
QotD: Women versus PUAs
The truth hurts, but it also helps. Understanding that you’re being yanked around in unhelpful ways by your instincts is the necessary first step to gaining more control of your choices. This is why I think the people who should be paying most attention to PUA theory are women — and not for the most obvious defensive reasons, either.
If you are female, you may be thinking “OK, I should learn game so jerks won’t be able to play me”. Well, that’s nice, but almost completely irrelevant. Because what both evolutionary psych and PUA tell us is that in cold fact you want to be played by an alpha – and failing that, at least someone a bit taller, a bit older, a bit smarter, and a bit higher-status than you. The fact that you want to be better at detecting imitation alphas changes nothing essential; women have been polishing that counter-game as long as men have been practicing theirs.
No. The reason women need be paying attention to PUA goes much deeper than just notching up another escalation in the jerk-vs.-bitch arms race. It’s because until women stop lying to themselves about their actual behavior, they won’t have any prayer of becoming self-aware enough to change the sexual reward pattern they present to men. In pervasive female self-honesty begins the only hope of not training up more generations of jerks. And it’s there that the pitiless, revealing glare of the PUA spotlight might help.
Yes, I know what kind of reflexive screaming that last paragraph is going to trigger. Feminists will lash at me for suggesting that this is womens’ problem to solve; shouldn’t at least half the burden of self-awareness and change fall on men?
In fact, it can’t be that way, and it can’t be for a brutally simple reason. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a member of a culture in which women have far more power to control mens’ sexual experience than the reverse. The only exceptions to this rule have been barbaric hellholes in which women were treated as chattel.
Ladies, with having more power over sexual outcomes there comes more responsibility. And there’s this, too; just suppose the great mass of men stopped thinking with their dicks and 99% of them suddenly became sensitive New Age guys eager to commit. Until most women stopped being cruel to betas and rewarding men who behave like dominating jerks with sex, nothing … nothing would change. PUA game would still work. The tragedy to which it is a minimax response would still be in motion.
I don’t have any final answers either. But, gentle reader … if you’re a beta male and not a natural, learning some PUA game might sound icky but it would sure beat masturbating to porn for the rest of your life. And if you’re female, think hard about the last guy you slept with and the last guy you friend-zoned. Maybe you owe yourself a rethink and friend-zone guy an apology, of the kind best delivered naked.
Eric S. Raymond, “A natural contemplates game”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-03-03.
January 8, 2024
“[A]ll philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatic, have been very inexpert about women”
Theodore Dalrymple on the food police and the linguistic distortions forced on traditionally technical and scientific journalism:
The world, said James Boswell, is not to be made a great hospital; but to a hammer everything is a nail, and to doctors and medical journals everything is either a medical problem or a medical solution.
Looking at the website of the Journal of the American Medical Association today, I came across a paper with the title “Effect of an Intensive Food-as-Medicine Program on Health and Health Care Use”. It was published just above “A Young Pregnant Person With Old Myocardial Infarction”.
Could that pregnant person possibly be a woman? Heaven forfend that so prejudiced a thought should occur to us! If it occurred to you, dear reader, I suggest that your brain still needs washing. The word woman is here abjured by JAMA as completely as, say, it would abjure (rightly) the word bitch with reference to a woman. In other words, the word woman is now treated as if it were in itself an insult, a rather strange result of pro-feminist indoctrination.
The paper begins, “A patient in their 30s presented to the hospital …” No doubt I am deeply reactionary, almost a dinosaur in a world of mammals, but is not their the plural possessive adjective, and is not “a patient” singular? If the authors of the paper were really not sure whether the pregnant person was a man or a woman, surely they should have written “A pregnant person in his or her 30s …”? That would have been a step too absurd (so far) even for the editors of JAMA, assuming that the paper in question was published with some kind of editorial oversight. I anticipate further linguistic absurdity in JAMA with a mixture of amusement and irritation; that there will be one is a racing certainty (a Dutch friend of mine was going to write a book about Dutch social policy titled Creative Appeasement).
The paper, by the way, gives new meaning to the first two sentences of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil: “Suppose truth to be a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatic, have been very inexpert about women?”
January 4, 2024
“It is difficult to understand why our politicians are not locked up for life after successful prosecution for crimes against humanity”
Part nine of Paul Weston‘s “beginner’s guide to Covid”:
Lockdown was never referred to as “lockdown” in March 2020. We were “asked” to stay at home for a few weeks, thus allowing our health services to get up to speed without being swamped. As we now know, a few weeks became months became 2021.
I simply cannot believe this was not planned. The logistics involved in keeping a country afloat after closing down the economy are extremely complicated. Months – if not years – of planning must have gone into it.
One of the strangest things about the first lockdown in the UK was the enforcement date of March 26, one week after the government declared on March 19 that Covid-19 was being downgraded from a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID). The reason given for the downgrade was a low mortality rate …
Anyway, the world locked down. When it became apparent the lockdowns were going to stay in place until a miracle vaccine was discovered, the governments promised us that detailed cost/benefit analyses would be conducted. They never were. But they very much should have been.
The principal reason they should is all to do with deaths. Closing down the country also meant partially closing down health services to non-Covid patients. Inculcating fear meant many people were too scared to go anywhere near a hospital. Patients with cancer and heart problems stayed away, voluntarily or involuntarily. Many died as a result.
On July 19 2020, the Daily Telegraph published an article based on Office for National Statistics figures claiming that 200,000 people could die (mid to long term) in the UK due to lockdowns. Similar figures were published in countries all around the world.
Here is a brutal truth. Governments which locked down essentially stated the following: “We are going to murder XYZ thousand people. We undertake this crime because we think we might save other people from Covid-19 deaths.”
Even more remarkably, the death rates were completely normal before lockdowns were initiated. Lockdowns were not the forced result of having to deal with large numbers of deaths. Rather, large numbers of deaths were the forced result of government-ordained lockdowns. It is difficult to understand why our politicians are not locked up for life after successful prosecution for crimes against humanity.
January 3, 2024
“One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive”
In The Critic, Victoria Smith outlines the history of medical misogyny from Aristotle to modern-day “trans healthcare”:
The neglect of female bodies in medicine has a long history. The male-default bias, writes Caroline Criado Perez in Invisible Women, “goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, who kicked off the trend of seeing the female body as a ‘mutilated male’ body (thanks, Aristotle)”:
The female was the male ‘turned outside in’. Ovaries were female testicles (they were not given their own name until the seventeenth century) and the uterus was the female scrotum. […] The male body was an ideal women failed to live up to.
As Criado Perez notes, this bias lives on in male-centric medical research and undifferentiated treatment recommendations. “Women are dying,” she notes, “as a result of the gender data gap.” The belief that there is nothing specifically different about female people — cut a bit here, add a bit there, and we’re the same as men — has led to our symptoms being ignored and our pain dismissed.
Over the past few years, there have been a number of books — Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women, Cat Bohannon’s Eve, Leah Hazzard’s Womb, to name a few — which have aimed to correct the imbalance. This is important both to save lives and ease suffering, and because, on a very basic level, it is insulting for half the human race to have our bodies treated as lesser, imperfect versions of a male ideal. We are more than that. We exist in our own right.
There are many in medicine, however, who still seem to think that Aristotle was right. Last week, for instance, the World Health Organisation announced it would be developing new guidelines into “the health of trans and gender diverse people”. While this might sound positive, as Eliza Mondegreen notes, many of those leading the development group hold highly regressive views about sex, gender and bodies. It is only possible to believe that a person could change sex if you have not given much consideration to the “second” sex at all.
One of the oddities of trans healthcare is that it masquerades as progressive despite having evolved from — and continuing to rely on — an understanding of sex difference which is regressive, male-centric and superficial. Because no one wants to admit it, this has led to a plethora of articles along the lines of “Here’s Why Human Sex Is Not Binary” and “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic“. While these claim to be adding extra detail and nuance to our understanding, what they do in practice is revert back to privileging the male default. Sex is all so varied, all so different, they tell us, we might as well not bother setting any standards for what counts as “femaleness”. We’re all just human, aren’t we? Only some bodies have tended to be considered more human than others. Rebranding “the male default” “the sex spectrum” is a sneaky way of insisting, once again, that female people are nothing more than males with a few minor tweaks.
This is the new medical misogyny, built on the back of the old version. Unfortunately, because it positions itself as anti-conservative and even pro-feminist, many writers of texts that address the old version feel obliged to go along with the new. It’s not difficult to see why. Who wants their work to be undermined by bad faith accusations of transphobia? Isn’t it easier just to say “it’s clear that trans women are women” — as Bohannon has done — on the basis that at least this will enable you to challenge the centring of male bodies elsewhere?
December 19, 2023
Behind enemy lines at the WPATH symposium
Eliza Mondegreen reports her experiences at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health gathering in Montreal last year:
This was no ordinary medical conference. Over the course of three days, I learned a great many things. That eunuchs are one of the world’s oldest gender identities and that doctors should not judge their strange desires for castration but fulfil them. That, “ideally, patients wouldn’t be actively psychotic” when they initiated testosterone, but that psychotic patients consent to take medication like stool softeners and statins all the time and “people don’t pay that much attention”. That it would be “ableist” to question an autistic girl’s insistence on a double mastectomy. That patients who claim to have multiple personalities that disagree about which irreversible steps to take toward transition can find consensus — or at least obtain a quorum — using a smartphone app.
It is hard to shock me these days — but as I moved around the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s symposium in Montreal in September 2022, I often felt as if I’d slipped sideways into some strange universe that operated in accordance with other laws: where up is down and girls are boys and medicine has left its modest brief — healing — far behind in its breathless pursuit of transcendence.
I wasn’t really supposed to be there. I hadn’t misrepresented myself — I am what I claimed to be: a graduate student researching gender identity — but this was a convocation for believers and I’m a sceptic. When WPATH, the world’s most prestigious and influential gathering in transgender healthcare, came to Montreal, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see up close the people and ideas I had pursued through so many articles and books.
[…]
It’s difficult to imagine clinicians practising in other areas of medicine not asking such basic questions, especially when the basis for treatment is so murky. But a good gender clinician, looking at a patient, does not see what non-believers like you or I might see. A good clinician falls under the sway of the same fantasy as the patient and conspires with her to bring her transgender self into existence. Under this framework, there is no “really trans” or not. There is only what the patient says and the readiness of the clinician to put herself at the service of the patient’s vision.
A bad gender clinician, by contrast, feels an “entitlement to know” why a patient feels the way she does or why she seeks a particular intervention. She clings to a traditional conception of her role as a “gatekeeper” who evaluates and prescribes. She thinks she can “discern a ‘true’ gender identity beyond what is articulated by the patient”. She may believe she can “identify the ‘root cause’ of a transgender identity”, which is seen as pathologising. She may try to leave the door open to desistance — the most common outcome before gender clinicians started interfering with normal development by deploying puberty-blocking drugs — in which case she is guilty of “valuing cis lives over trans lives”.
A bad gender clinician is easily “intimidated” by complicated patients, while a good gender clinician knows how to secure consent even in the trickiest cases. Mental health difficulties become “mental health differences”. Severe autism or thinking you have multiple personalities living inside your head become empowering forms of “neurodiversity”. When it comes to assessment, “careful” and “comprehensive” have become dirty words: “The answer always seems to be more assessment and more time. That’s gatekeeping.”
During the Denver conference, presenters role-played how to secure informed consent for a hysterectomy and phalloplasty in the case of a schizophrenic, borderline autistic, intellectually disabled “demiboy” with a recent psychiatric hospitalisation. At no point do the role-players encounter any real barriers. Instead, they persevere. At first, the patient struggled to understand why a phalloplasty might require multiple surgeries, but then the clinicians “explained everything” and the patient understood. This is called “lean[ing] into the nuance of capacity”.
The moral of this story is clear: failure to achieve informed consent is a failure on the part of the clinician, a failure of imagination and flexibility, not a recognition that some patients — whether because of age or mental illness or intellectual disability — will simply not be able to consent.
December 15, 2023
QotD: Delayed onset adulthood
At the risk of sounding all White Christian Male and stuff [irony alert], allow me to remind everyone of this excellent precept from Corinthians:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Except that men aren’t doing any of that. Instead, they’re clinging to the artifacts of their childhood, hoping that Mommy will be there to keep the Big Bad Wolf/Zombies away.
What will inevitably happen is calamity. As Charles Norman puts it: “The world is running out of grown-ups. It will probably take tragedies and a prolonged era of diminished affluence for people to grow up.”
Like I said: calamity.
Kim du Toit, “Kiddies”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-08-22.
December 14, 2023
Whatever it is, it sure ain’t Stoicism …
Freddie deBoer doesn’t have a catchy name for this, but you’ll recognize it instantly from the description:
For years now, I’ve written once or twice annually about a phenomenon that I’ve struggled to name but which everyone understands. It’s a particular kind of social and aesthetic culture, not exclusive to Instagram but very heavily associated with it, that merges girlboss feminism with the contemporary therapeutic imperative, a strange syncretic mysticism involving horoscopes and “manifesting”, and a blanket excuse for narcissism and selfishness dressed up in quasi-political and self-help terms. You know what I mean.
Some of these memes are comically ridiculous, most of them are fairly innocuous, and a few of them make me deeply sad. But they all reveal a tangle of conflicting attitudes and ideas that are quite confused. You would never assemble these various impulses into a life philosophy on purpose; they’ve been grafted together mostly thanks to the weird rhythms and path dependence of social media. Either way, I’ve argued that they present an essential problem with any kind of “I can have it all” philosophy — millions of people absorb this stuff, and because many of the things we want in life are zero sum, not all of them in fact can have it all. Almost all of them, in fact, will get very much less than it all. You have this absurd manifesting/The Secret stuff, where grown adults genuinely convince themselves that they can will what they want into being simply through wanting it. Well, alright: what if two people want the same promotion at work, and they’re both manifesting it? The clod philosophy this is all attached to says that whoever wins wanted it more, and since wanting can’t be quantified, no one can ever prove that isn’t true. (Convenient!) Regardless, in the case of the singular promotion and two people manifesting for it, only one of the people who has read endless memes like these actually ends up being self-actualized by success. This is OK; life can be full of contentment and disappointment at the same time. Part of what makes this kind of messaging pernicious, though, is that it suggests that not getting everything you want is always a personal failure you shouldn’t accept.
It is not possible that God promised the whole garden to everyone. (That’s not how fractions work, even for God.) It is not socially responsible to believe that you are entitled to the whole garden. And setting yourself up to see anything short of the whole garden as failure is a recipe for making yourself miserable.
That’s related to another point I’ve made, which is that these memes create an unachievable expectation that healthy, successful women aren’t in possession of ordinary confidence but of lunatic confidence, a kind of confidence rarely seen outside of Michael Jordan or bipolar mania. In a particularly perverse irony of the sort that seems to usually afflict women, this demand for outrageous self-confidence becomes just another bar that women feel like they can’t meet. A whole affirmational culture that ostensibly exists to help and affirm and praise women ends up being just one more on the long list of expectations that our society heaps on them: hard-charging and career-oriented but always putting family first, well put-together but always effortless, sexy but not slutty, Madonna and whore, you know the whole deal. I’m sorry that this stuff is so gendered, but it is, and I’m sorry that I’m the wrong messenger on this topic, but no one else is making these arguments, so I must. Yes, I concede that for most people who indulge in this stuff, it’s a harmless hobby that maybe pushes them to be a little better to themselves. But as time goes on, the messaging has grown more and more deranged, and young people are very susceptible to this sort of thing. And my job is to worry.
Pervasive disrespect for the human form in art (and everything else) is a leading indicator of collapse
My headline isn’t exactly what Ted Gioia says here (although this is only the beginning of his article, as the rest is behind a paywall) but it’s definitely an aspect of what he’s seeing:
For thousands of years, flourishing societies treated the human form with love and respect.
The connection is hard to describe with precision. But, it seems, you can’t make much progress promoting human rights if you don’t start with some degree of reverence for the embodied individual.
Even neanderthals knew about ornamentation and figurative art, but paintings of actual people, created by communities along the Nile River, some 8,000 years ago, signaled the rise of more advanced, stable institutions. It’s no coincidence that democracy and personal autonomy in Greece and Rome happened in conjunction with obsessively realistic renderings of the human body.
Much of this was lost in the post-classical world, but Renaissance artists rediscovered this passion for the human figure — which was embedded in its nurturing of science, art, and free inquiry
But something very different is happening in our own time.
I won’t offer any theories today. I’ll just share the facts — in the form of news stories, all about different subjects.
None of these stories have any direct connection with the others. Yet they fit together like the pieces of a strange puzzle. The picture they make is ominous.
Maybe you have some explanations. In the meantime, let’s just plunge in …
1. You can’t hear people talking in movies — because directors prefer to share background sounds.
“I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I’ve noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it’s not due to hearing loss on my end. It’s gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I’ve defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don’t miss anything crucial to the plot.”2. Lead vocalists are getting quieter while the sound of the instruments become louder.
“Lead vocalists have gotten quieter over the decades, compared with the rest of the band. That’s the conclusion of a new study that analyzes chart-topping pop tunes from 1946 to 2020 …”3. Anthropophobia — the fear of other people — is on the rise.
“Anthropophobia, or the fear of people, has so far been America’s most searched-for phobia this year. In that study, anthropophobia accounted for 22% of all phobias that people searched for online, a five-fold increase over 2019. And the state-by-state results affirm common stereotypes. New York’s most-searched phobia in 2020, for example, has been “philophobia.” That’s a big word for the fear of intimacy.”4. Time spent alone is rising for all demographic groups.
“According to data from the American Time Use Survey, the amount of time people spent with their friends, family and other companions was mostly unchanged between 1970 and 2013. Then, after decades of stability, the numbers began falling. By 2019, on average people were spending almost three hours less with their friends than only six years earlier, and four hours less with their family, neighbors and other companions.
“None of that time was transferred to more time with partners, children or others. All of it was swallowed up by time spent alone … Strikingly, the average American teenager today spends 11 hours fewer with their friends than they did only eight years ago, and 12 hours more time alone.”
5. Clothing retailers replace realistic mannequins with abstract forms.
“There were a ton of used mannequins sitting in retailers’ attics and storerooms. Every time they re-merchandised or remodeled, they were bringing in new mannequins to replace the old, increasingly replacing realistics with abstracts. And it wasn’t just full mannequins, it was head forms, leg forms, maternity mannequins, swimwear mannequins and all kinds of props, as well. Retailers would throw these items in the trash.”6. Social media causes children to dislike their own bodies.
“Three out of four children as young as 12 dislike their bodies and are embarrassed by the way they look, increasing to eight in 10 young people aged 18 to 21 … Nearly half of all children and young people aged from 12 to 21 questioned said they have become withdrawn, started exercising excessively, stopped socialising completely or self-harmed because they are regularly bullied or trolled online about their physical appearance.
December 13, 2023
Ontario discovers that even “great ideas” with the “best of intentions” sometimes go wrong
In The Line, Adam Zivo reports on Ontario’s “safe supply” drug program running into another one of those pesky human nature problems that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen:
Image courtesy of Meme Generator
New research from Ontario has yielded further evidence that Canada’s “safer supply” drug programs are being widely defrauded and putting addicts’ lives at risk.
These programs claim to reduce overdoses and deaths by providing drug users with pharmaceutical alternatives to potentially tainted illicit substances. In Canada, that typically means distributing large volumes of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin, in the hope of reducing consumption of illicit fentanyl.
Addiction experts have widely reported that, based on their clinical experiences, drug users regularly trade or sell (“divert”) some (perhaps much) of their safer supply on the black market to fund the purchase of stronger substances. This has flooded some communities with hydromorphone, crashing its street price by up to 95 per cent over the past three years while spurring new addictions, especially among youth.
The federal government denies that these problems exist and has said that any evidence of harm is “anecdotal” — but two addiction experts working in a hospital in London, Ontario recently used patient data to show that the problem is indeed very real.
Dr. Sharon Koivu and Allison Mackinley (a nurse practitioner) examined the charts of 200 patients who had been referred to Victoria Hospital’s addiction medicine consultation service between January and June 2023.
The review showed that 32 per cent of patients who were not in a safer supply program had self-reported using diverted hydromorphone — the vast majority of these patients indicated that their hydromorphone came from purchasing drugs provided to someone else as part of a safer supply program.
“It was more common for them to actually specify safer supply than to say they didn’t know the source,” said Dr. Koivu in an interview. “They said things like, ‘The person in the apartment beside me goes and picks up her safer supply and when she comes back I get 20 of her pills’. It was quite specific.”
Diversion was not the only problem that was validated.
The chart data suggested that safer supply clients were roughly five-to-10 times more likely to be hospitalized than drug users receiving traditional, evidence-based addiction medications, such as methadone or buprenorphine (these medications are known as “opioid agonist therapy“, or “OAT”). Compared to OAT patients, drug users on safer supply were more than 15 times more likely to be hospitalized for serious infections.
These findings were so concerning that when a group of 35 addiction physicians recently wrote an open letter calling upon the federal government to reform safer supply, they included this data in their accompanying evidence brief.
(This chart, included in a recent evidence brief, compares the number of hospitalized patients with the number of drug users in London, Ontario who receive safer supply (250), methadone (2,000), and buprenorphine (300).)
Safer supply patients also had a slightly higher hospitalization rate, and only slightly lower infection rate, than patients who were receiving no addiction treatment at all, which suggests that the health benefits of safer supply may actually be negligible.
Dr. Koivu said that the hospitalization rate seen among safer supply patients was “alarmingly high” considering that safer supply programs provide significant wraparound supports (i.e. access to doctors, housing and social assistance) in conjunction with free hydromorphone. Any patient who receives such supports should see substantially improved health outcomes.
QotD: Woke psychiatry
No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.
Here are some of the most relevant presentations listed in my Guidebook:
Saturday, May 18
- Climate Psychiatry 101: What Every Psychiatrist Should Know
- Women’s Health In The US: Disruption And Exclusion In The Time Of Trump
- Gender Bias In Academic Psychiatry In The Era Of the #MeToo Movement
- Revitalizing Psychiatry – And Our World – With A Social Lens
- Hip-Hop: Cultural Touchstone, Social Commentary, Therapeutic Expression, And Poetic Intervention
- Lost Boys Of Sudan: Immigration As An Escape Route For Survival
- Treating Muslim Patients After The Travel Ban: Best Practices In Using The APA Muslim Mental Health Toolkit
- Making The Invisible Visible: Using Art To Explore Bias And Hierarchy In Medicine
- Navigating Racism: Addressing The Pervasive Role Of Racial Bias In Mental Health
Sunday, May 20
- Addressing Microaggressions Toward Sexual And Gender Minorities: Caring For LGBTQ+ Patients And Providers
- Latino Undocumented Children And Families: Crisis At The Border And Beyond
- Racism And Psychiatry: Growing A Diverse Psychiatric Workforce And Developing Structurally Competent Psychiatric Providers
- Sex, Drugs, And Culturally Responsive Treatment: Addressing Substance Use Disorders In The Context Of Sexual And Gender Diversity
- Grabbing The Third Rail: Race And Racism In Clinical Documentation
- Racism And The War On Terror: Implications For Mental Health Providers In The United States
- The Multiple Faces Of Deportation: Being A Solution To The Challenges Faced By Asylum Seekers, Mixed Status Families, And Dreamers
- What Should The APA Do About Climate Change?
- Intersectionality 2.0: How The Film Moonlight Can Teach Us About Inclusion And Therapeutic Alliance In Minority LGBTQ Populations
- Transgender Care: How Psychiatrists Can Decrease Barriers And Provide Gender-Affirming Care
- Gun Violence Is A Serious Public Health Problem Among America’s Adolescents And Emerging Adults: What Should Psychiatrists Know And Do About It?
- Working Clinically With Eco-Anxiety In The Age Of Climate Change: What Do We Know And What Can We Do?
- Are There Structural Determinants Of African-American Child Mental Health? Child Welfare – A System Psychiatrists Should Scrutinize
Monday, May 21
- Community Activism Narratives In Organized Medicine: Homosexuality, Mental Health, Social Justice, and the American Psychiatric Association
- Disrupting The Status Quo: Addressing Racism In Medical Education And Residency Training
- Ecological Grief, Eco-Anxiety, And Transformational Resilience: A Public health Perspective On Addressing Mental Health Impacts Of Climate Change
- Immigration Status As A Social Determinant Of Mental Health: What Can Psychiatrists Do To Support Patients And Communities? A Call To Action
- Psychiatry In The City Of Quartz: Notes On The Clinical Ethnography Of Severe Mental Illness And Social Inequality
- Racism And Psychiatry: Understanding Context And Developing Policies For Undoing Structural Racism
- Trauma Inflicted To Immigrant Children And Parents Through Policy Of Forced Family Separation
- Deportation And Detention: Addressing The Psychosocial Impact On Migrant Children And Families
- How Private Insurance Fails Those With Mental Illness: The Case For Single-Payer Health Care
- Imams In Mental Health: Caring For Themselves While Caring For Others
- Misogynist Ideology And Involuntary Celibacy: Prescription For Violence?
- Advocacy: A Hallmark Of Psychiatrists Serving Minorities
- Inequity By Structural Design: Psychiatrists’ Responsibility To Be Informed Advocates For Systemic Education And Criminal Justice Reform
- Treating Black Children And Families: What Are We Overlooking?
- Blindspotting: An Exploration Of Implicit Bias, Race-Based Trauma, And Empathy
- But I’m Not Racist: Racism, Implicit Bias, And The Practice Of Psychiatry
- No Blacks, Fats, or Femmes: Stereotyping In The Gay Community And Issues Of Racism, Body Image, And Masculinity
- Silence Is Not Always Golden: Interrupting Offensive Remarks And Microaggressions
- Black Minds Matter: The Impact Of #BlackLivesMatter On Psychiatry
… you get the idea, please don’t make me keep writing these.
Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate this. There was still a lot of really meaty scientific discussion if you sought it out. But overall the balance was pretty striking.
I’m reminded of the idea of woke capital, the weird alliance between very rich businesses and progressive signaling. If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.
Scott Alexander, “The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-05-22.
December 9, 2023
All those (officially unexplained) “excess” mortalities
Mark Steyn discusses European and Antipodean statistical reports that echo what Maxime Bernier was talking about the other day on the as-yet officially unexplained huge rise in “excess mortality” since the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:
We are now three years into the administration of the Covid vaccines, and we have many startling statistical anomalies, including the most basic one of all: a huge mound of extra corpses. Per the EU’s official statistics agency:
Among the eighteen EU Member States that recorded excess deaths, the highest rates were in Cyprus (13.9%), Finland (13.4%), the Netherlands (12.7%) and Ireland (12.5%).
Those percentages are sufficiently high that in the Netherlands, formerly one of the healthiest nations on earth, they’re reducing life expectancy. The ongoing excess deaths are at odds with the normal post-pandemic pattern, such as the Spanish Flu a century ago. The intro to this new scientific paper sets out what’s meant to be happening:
Our approach takes into account age and gender, but also under-mortality that you would expect after a period of excess mortality.
“Under-mortality” occurs because, if the Spanish Flu killed you prematurely in 1920, you weren’t around to die when you otherwise would have done in 1924. Hence, excess mortality is followed by under-mortality. So:
If this under-mortality does not seem to be happening, it is actually hidden excess mortality.
That’s an important point. What Eurostat identifies as an excess mortality rate in Ireland of 12.5 per cent is, as a practical matter, actually higher – because it should be measured against not the pre-Covid baseline but the under-mortality one would have expected four years on. So persistent excess mortality is deeply weird, and, unlike those killed by the virus (where the median age of death by Covid is above most developed nations’ life expectancy), the extra deaths, as we have discussed on The Mark Steyn Show, are skewed towards the young and middle-aged:
We note that excess mortality in the Netherlands remains consistently high during 2020-2022 and has shifted from high to low age and towards men.
In other words, it’s not a general trend of excess deaths, but something more particular. Which, in a normal environment, would suggest something particular is causing it. Aside from excess deaths in “low age”, we also have excess deaths at no age – the babies who aren’t being born. The western world’s jabbed and re-jabbed citizenry has seen a catastrophic slump in newborns. Scandinavia:
The whole region reported sharp declines in fertility rates in 2022. Finland had the lowest fertility rate of all Nordic countries, 1.32 children. This is also the lowest Finnish rate since 1776 when monitoring of fertility rates first started.
Incidentally, that Finnish rate – of 1.3 children per woman – is what demographers call “lowest-low fertility”, from which no society has ever recovered.
Fortunately for officialdom, there was enough Covid circulating in Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, etc that the ever higher mountain of corpses can be shrugged off as most likely “Long Covid” or maybe, if necessary, “Extra-Long Covid”. In the Antipodes, they can’t get away with that. Australia and New Zealand enacted some of the most draconian public-health measures on the planet, and in effect quarantined their entire nations. As a result, pre-Omicron they had all but negligible accounts of Covid. But they obediently submitted themselves to the mass vaccination regime. And, whaddaya know, they too have extraordinary rates of excess death.
Clare Craig, a favourite guest of The Mark Steyn Show, has published a detailed analysis of the post-vaccination years Down Under. It makes for sober reading.
In 2021, for example, they had officially 1,224 deaths from Covid.
But also in 2021 – the first full year of the vaccines – they had 876 excess deaths from ischaemic heart disease alone. Plus another 583 excess deaths from other cardiac diseases.
Death by ischaemic heart disease had been in decline in Australia in the pre-vaccine years, but, having shot up in 2021, it went up even further in 2022. (Same trend with strokes.) So, having shut down the country for those 1,224 Covid deaths, you would think the public health bureaucracy might show a smidgeonette of interest in those 1,359 excess cardiac deaths.
But apparently not.
Now, across the Tasman Sea, we have a Kiwi whistleblower, Barry Young, who has released an avalanche of data with some quite disturbing takeaways that I referenced on Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A. I was careful to qualify my remarks with a lot of “ifs”, but our friend Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University, has taken a look and The Conservative Woman has published his findings. I see that on the Internet the kneejerk reaction was that Mr Young had simply leaked a lot of vaccination stuff from the old folks’ homes where the Covid centenarians would have died anyway. So it’s a biased sample.
In reality, it does not appear to be a “sample” at all:
[Steve Kirsch] says that there are widespread misunderstandings about the data and it is not biased. For a start he says that the dataset is the complete set of ‘pay-per-dose’ vaccination records and therefore there is no biased sampling at all. He says:
“The people within the group is representative of the total population. There are 2.2 million people in the group, and there are 4 million records. Each of those records is a Vaccination Record.”
2.2 million is over forty per cent of the population of New Zealand. That’s some “sample”. Nevertheless, Professor Fenton is being scrupulously cautious:
Even accounting for inevitable “survivor bias” (the more jabs a person gets, the quicker they are likely to die after their last jab) there was some evidence of increased risk the more doses a person gets. Moreover, given Steve’s comments about the datatset being the complete set of “pay-per-dose” vaccination records, this conclusion seems robust even if there were a biased proportion of vaccinee deaths in the dataset. Also (as per my above quote in Steve’s presentation) I felt that the data provided further support for the hypothesis that the vaccine was increasing the mortality rate in the older population (something which we had already concluded based on the most recent ONS data).
It’s interesting that such questions never come up at Britain’s official “Covid inquiry” which is increasingly risible in its palpable determination to find that the only mistake that was made was not to lock down harder and faster.
The other takeaway mentioned by Professor Fenton is the fatality rate of individual batches. Take a look at this handy graph:
I suppose it would be possible to argue that all 711 jabs of Batch #1 were administered to residents of the Shady Acres Retirement Home for Centenarians with Stage Four Ebola. But it’s difficult to make the same case with Batch #62 which went into the arms of 18,173 New Zealanders and killed 831 of them. Which, all by itself, is two hundred times the country’s official death toll from the vaccines. Which is to say, according to His Majesty’s Government in Wellington, precisely four Kiwis are dead of the vax.
December 8, 2023
“An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are”
Christopher Snowden notes the proliferation of media and public advocacy groups warning us about “junk food”:
On Monday, the front page of The Times led with a speech from Henry Dimbleby and a cost-of-obesity estimate from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — the perfect start to the week for any Times reader. According to Sir Tony’s think tank, “the effect on national productivity from excess weight is nine times bigger than previously thought”. An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are (the previous estimate only came out last year), but Mr Dimbleby saw it as further proof that food should be treated like smoking.
The NHS “will suck all the money out of the other public services” while “at the same time, economic growth and tax revenue will stagnate. We will end up both a sick and impoverished nation,” Dimbleby will warn.
Would it be unfair to point out that the USA has much higher rates of obesity than the UK and also has much higher GDP growth?
As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.
Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.
Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.
The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.
Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.
Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …
The findings come after an analysis found this week that Britain’s weight problem is costing the state almost £100 billion a year.
