Quotulatiousness

October 3, 2023

“Just play safe” is difficult when the definition of “safe” is uncertain

Filed under: Food, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman on the difficulty of “playing safe”:

It’s a no brainer. Just play safe

It is a common argument in many different contexts. In its strongest form, the claim is that the choice being argued for is unambiguously right, eliminates the possibility of a bad outcome at no cost. More plausibly, the claim is that one can trade the risk of something very bad for a certainty of something only a little bad. By agreeing to pay the insurance company a hundred dollars a year now you can make sure that if your house burns down you will have the money to replace it.

Doing that is sometimes is possible but, in an uncertain world, often not; you do not, cannot, know all the consequences of what you are doing. You may be exchanging the known risk of one bad outcome for the unknown risk of another.

Some examples:

Erythritol

Erythritol was the best of the sugar alcohols, substitutes tolerably well for sugar in cooking, has almost zero calories or glycemic load. For anyone worried about diabetes or obesity, using it instead of sugar is an obvious win. Diabetes and obesity are dangerous, sometimes life threatening.

Just play safe.

I did. Until an research came out offering evidence that it was not the best sugar alcohol but the worst:

    People with the highest erythritol levels (top 25%) were about twice as likely to have cardiovascular events over three years of follow-up as those with the lowest (bottom 25%). (Erythritol and cardiovascular events, NIH)

A single article might turn out to be wrong, of course; to be confident that erythritol is dangerous requires more research. But a single article was enough to tell me that using erythritol was not playing safe. I threw out the erythritol I had, then discovered that all the brands of “keto ice cream” — I was on a low glycemic diet and foods low in carbohydrates are also low in glycemic load — used erythritol as their sugar substitute.

Frozen bananas, put through a food processor or super blender along with a couple of ice cubes and some milk, cream, or yogurt, make a pretty good ice cream substitute.1 Or eat ice cream and keep down your weight or glycemic load by eating less of something else.

It’s safer.

Lethal Caution: The Butter/Margarine Story

For quite a long time the standard nutritional advice was to replace butter with margarine, eliminating the saturated fat that caused high cholesterol and hence heart attacks. It turned out to be very bad advice. Saturated fats may be bad for you — the jury is still out on that, with one recent survey of the evidence concluding that they have no effect on overall mortality — but transfats are much worse. The margarine we were told to switch to was largely transfats.2

“Consumption of trans unsaturated fatty acids, however, was associated with a 34% increase in all cause mortality”3

If that figure is correct, the nutritional advice we were given for decades killed several million people.

    1. Bananas get sweeter as they get riper so for either a keto or low glycemic diet, freeze them before they get too ripe.

    2. Some more recent margarines contain neither saturated fats nor transfats.

    3. “Intake of saturated and trans unsaturated fatty acids and risk of all cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes: systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies”, BMJ 2015; 351 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h3978 (Published 12 August 2015)

Narcissism

Filed under: Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson discusses the psychology of narcissistic individuals:

“Echo and Narcissus” by John William Waterhouse, 1903.
Oil painting from the Walker Art Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

One of my favorite blogs from the Before Times was The Last Psychiatrist. He is most known for his writings on narcissism. When I discovered him in 2015, I read through most of his archive over the course of a few weeks. You can read my review of his book here.

On narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage:

    A narcissistic injury occurs when the narcissist is confronted with the reality that he is not the main character in his movie … The worst thing that could happen to a narcissist is not that his wife cheats on him and leaves him for another man … He’s still the main character in his movie; it was a romantic comedy but now it’s a break-up film … The worst thing that could happen to a narcissist is that his wife cheats on him secretly and never tells him, and she doesn’t act any differently towards him, so that he couldn’t even tell. If she can do all that, that means she exists independently of him. He is not the main character in the movie. She has her own movie and he’s not even in it. That’s a narcissistic injury … But all narcissistic injuries lead to rage … The violence serves two necessary psychological functions: first, it’s the natural byproduct of rage. Second, the violence perpetuates the link, the relationship, keeps him in the lead role. “That slut may have had a whole life outside me, but I will make her forever afraid of me.” Or he kills himself — not because he can’t live without her, but because from now on she won’t be able to live without thinking about him. See? Now it’s a drama, but the movie goes on. So if you cause a narcissist to have a narcissistic injury, get ready for a fight.

Psychological researchers have found that there are two categories of narcissist:

  1. Grandiose narcissists: Dominant, extraverted, overconfident, exploitative, egotistical, low emotional distress. This is the version of narcissism people tend to be most familiar with.
  2. Vulnerable narcissists: Self-centered, introverted, defensive, resentful, high emotional distress. Psychologists sometimes refer to them “hidden” or “shy” or “covert” narcissists because they don’t self-promote the way the grandiose types do.

Grandiose narcissists enjoy seeking any kind of attention. Their positive self-image is resistant to criticism. They always think they’re amazing no matter what people say.

In contrast, vulnerable narcissists have mixed feelings about seeking attention. They are overly excited at the prospect of positive feedback but excessively sensitive to negative feedback. They have a high opinion of themselves but this high opinion can be thwarted if the external world does not validate it.

Both types tend to be exploitative, hold high opinions of themselves, and see themselves as deserving of special treatment.

Compared to grandiose narcissists, vulnerable narcissists are more sensitive to insults, ruminate more about perceived unfairness, and report more anger when they do not receive what they think they deserve. Although vulnerable narcissists require external feedback to maintain their sense of self, they are often dissatisfied with the feedback they receive.

September 29, 2023

Bored? Lonely? No girlfriend? Mister, you want an AI Girlfriend!

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

As discussed earlier, GenZ men live in a sexual hellscape unless they meet statistically unlikely criteria. Many of them turn to alternatives like online gaming and porn … but some are apparently paying for AI Girlfriends:

Apparently ads for AI girlfriends have been all over TikTok, Instagram and Facebook lately. Replika, an AI chatbot originally offering mental health help and emotional support, now runs ads for spicy selfies and hot role play. Eva AI invites users to create their dream companion, while Dream Girlfriend promises a girl that exceeds your wildest desires. The app Intimate even offers hyper-realistic voice calls with your virtual partner.

This might seem niche and weird but it’s a fast growing market. All kinds of startups are releasing romantic chatbots capable of having explicit conversations and sending sexual photos. Meanwhile, Replika alone has already been downloaded more than 20 million times. And even just one Snapchat influencer, Caryn Marjorie, makes $100,000 a week by charging users $1 a minute to chat with the AI version of herself.

Of course most people are talking about what this means for men, given they make up the vast majority of users. Many worry about a worsening loneliness crisis, a further decline in sex rates, and ultimately the emergence of “a new generation of incels” who depend on and even verbally abuse their virtual girlfriends. Which is all very concerning. But I wonder, if AI girlfriends really do become as pervasive as online porn, what this will mean for girls and young women? Who feel they need to compete with this?

Most obvious to me is the ramping up of already unrealistic beauty standards. I know conservatives often get frustrated with feminists calling everything unattainable, and I agree they can go too far — but still, it’s hard to deny that the pressure to look perfect today is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. And I don’t think that’s necessarily pressure from men but I do very much think it’s pressure from a network of profit-driven industries that take what men like and mangle it into an impossible ideal. Until the pressure isn’t just to be pretty but filtered, edited and surgically enhanced to perfection. Until the most lusted after women in our culture look like virtual avatars. And until even the most beautiful among us start to be seen as average.

September 26, 2023

“Passport Bros”

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

Few online people are less tuned-in to the mainsteam zeitgeist than me, so perhaps I’m once again one of the last people to be clued-in about “passport bros”. Here’s Janice Fiamengo‘s post on the “bros” and the women who apparently spend a lot of time criticizing them:

Female commentary on so-called Passport Bros is not hard to find on the internet: women are angry, contemptuous, and incredulous that men are looking for women overseas and encouraging other men to do the same — not for sex tourism (which feminists loved to criticize until they discovered that women are doing it too, in which case it is acceptable), but for a long-term relationship, including, in many cases, marriage and children. These men will partially or entirely relocate to the women’s home country in order to start a new, non-western (and non-feminist) life. The angry internet women claim not to care personally: let the losers go is their expressed attitude. Yet the sheer number and vehemence of their responses suggests they do care.

The angry commentary follows a standard pattern in which the women claim to know why a significant minority of men are giving up on western women as mates. The reason never has anything to do, of course, with faults in western women or their unrealistic expectations […]

Likewise, the reason never has anything to do with western divorce laws — in which a man can be ejected from his home, imprisoned, forced to undergo a psychiatric exam, fleeced, and deprived of his children by a grasping ex-wife — or with the fact that women are the ones who initiate divorce in upwards of 70% of cases (and are often applauded for doing so).

The reason has nothing to do with women’s openly expressed attitudes of superiority, resentment, and anti-male bigotry, which are rampant in western cultures, especially Anglophone ones. It has nothing to do with the #MeToo/Believe Women climate of baseless accusation that regularly sees men accused and disgraced purely on a woman’s say-so. It has nothing to do with the institutionalized discrimination of “equity” hiring that makes it difficult for men to find and advance in careers in order to be acceptably successful to the kind of women who now deride them for their failure.

According to the angry women online, men are leaving the west (particularly North America) to find partners because they aren’t good enough for western women. The men are allegedly “terrible, and don’t want to stop being terrible”, according to one gleefully irate commentator. Their only chance is with women so poor as to be grateful for a “terrible” man; in return, such women will have to “subject themselves to [his] advances”, according to another critic’s Victorian-style phrasing.

[…]

Many such women — protected by our pro-woman culture and deferred to by men terrified of female wrath — reach adulthood without ever having received any serious criticism. If and when they are criticized, their response is a howl of outrage and wounded self-regard. This is precisely what is happening in reaction to the Passport Bros.

Underneath the anger, there is perhaps a hint of fear. It’s not fear that men will leave the west in droves (they don’t see that happening yet, and neither do I), but it’s fear that men are not, after all, entirely under female control. Not yet, and maybe never. Some men are sick of the anti-male abuse and starting to do something about it. They are critically examining women’s characters and attitude; they’re drawing back from the acquiescence they’ve always been expected (and been willing) to give. Some are walking away and telling other men to do the same.

These women are used to dishing out the denunciation, reveling in justified grievance; they are infuriated to find that now they are the ones being judged and found wanting.

Don’t be that girl.

September 23, 2023

“Even before it began, the protest was denounced as a hatefest”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tasha Kheiriddin on the parents’ 1 Million March 4 Children protest against teaching LGBT issues to school children and the counter-protest by teachers, unions, and a disturbing number of sitting politicians:

Fractal Pride flags

On Wednesday, thousands of parents and supporters took to the streets across Canada for the 1 Million March 4 Children protest, chanting “leave the kids alone.” They were protesting the teaching of “gender ideology” in schools, including lessons about gender identity, transgenderism and schools’ refusal to inform parents of their children’s use of preferred pronouns.

Even before it began, the protest was denounced as a hatefest. School boards sent letters to parents decrying the event. The Ontario Federation of Labour organized counter-protests with the slogan “Trans rights are workers’ rights.” NDP leader Jagmeet Singh stood on Parliament Hill, chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, transphobia has got to go!” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted, “We strongly condemn this hate and its manifestations.”

Here’s something we can all agree on: there is no room for hate in schools. If a kid bullies another kid for any reason, including gender identity, they should be disciplined. But the counter-protestors go further: in their view, unless you actively instruct children about gender, sexuality and inclusiveness at an early age, it is you who is being hateful. There are no shades of grey: you are either a full-on supporter of drag story time or a transphobic bigot.

When it comes to gender identity, it is wrong for educators to dismiss all parental concerns as homophobia. Yes, there are some bigoted parents who teach their kids that being gay or trans is a sin. Some of them were in the crowd Wednesday.

But there are also many parents who are legitimately concerned that encouraging children to question their sexual identity at a very young age is confusing and inappropriate. We label movies PG-13 or higher when they contain sexuality and nudity. Why then introduce sexual identities such as aromantic (absence of romantic attraction) asexual (absence of sexual attraction), pansexual (attraction to any gender) or demisexual (attraction that requires an emotional bond) to grade school kids? And more importantly, why is this the purview of the school system at all?

On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, Jason James responded to a Justin Trudeau Xpost with this counterfactual:

September 22, 2023

Political psychosis and the never-ending “narrative”

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray points out several instances of the legacy media continuing to push “the narrative” despite any inconvenient facts that cast doubt on the official story:

Every day is opposite day. Every day is a bucket of fake. The narrative is the narrative; once it’s established, nothing penetrates it. It rattles on down the road, impervious to inputs, convinced of its own truth without regard to events outside the shell. Psychologists have a term for this.

So Politico warns this week that faith in vaccines is falling, and anti-vaxxer narratives are “on the rise.” Sample paragraph, this one describing Health Secretary Xavier Becerra:

The summer of 2023, a claim made in June and credulously repeated in the bottom half of September: If you take Covid vaccines, you can’t get sick, but if you don’t take Covid vaccines, you die. Government leaders who don’t push the 7th and 8th doses of the mRNA injections “choose not to take care of their people”.

[…]

But the narrative rolls on, unperturbed. If you’re dying of Covid, it’s because you hesitated to get your 7,369th dose, anti-vaxxer! Maybe you should have stopped being such a Nazi! In the news media, it’s 2021 forever, and the virtuous science-lovers are rolling up their sleeves to rebuke the science-hating morons, who will not survive the … okay, well, who will not survive the next … okay, well, YOU’LL PROBABLY DIE AT SOME POINT because you didn’t get it. You’re facing a winter of severe illness and death by 2054, at the latest. No amount of evidence will force the storytellers to stop telling this story. It’s the story, so they tell it. The Politico thing ends by quoting Peter Hotez, by the way, as you knew it would.

Similarly, The Atlantic warns now that Donald Trump was a time bomb who kept nearly going off for four years, and only the courage of General Mark Milley kept him under control. Look at the premise at the top of the piece: Disobeying, resisting, and undermining the President of the United States, a military officer protected the Constitution.

How well does the story parse the constitutional issues at stake? This well:

The military decided to have an abortion travel policy, and to fund it. A senator is now interfering in military policy and the unilateral executive appropriations of the Department of Defense, a sign of the ongoing constitutional crisis that began with Trump. Typically, you see, in our constitutional order, the military does whatever it wants, and spends money on its own authority however it feels like spending it, but Tuberville is engaging in the “unprecedented” act of suggesting that Congress should decide how to appropriate federal funds and regulate the armed forces, which means that he hates the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 would like a word, in this obviously extremist description of the authority of Congress:

    To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

    To provide and maintain a Navy;

    To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

And so on. Why is Tommy Tuberville being such a Nazi?

September 17, 2023

QotD: One of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history

Filed under: Education, Government, Health, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In the 1960s and 70s, mob-controlled cigarette smuggling seriously cut into tobacco taxes.] What the PTB should’ve done at that point, of course, was simply repealed the taxes, learned to live within their means, and stopped trying to nag their citizens into good behavior …

Ok, ok, is everyone done laughing yet? Go ahead, get it all out of your system; I’ll wait. Everyone back? Ok, moving on:

What the PTB actually did, of course, was a multi-level propaganda campaign. It was brilliant. It took a few years, of course, but the evidence is all around you. Quick: When’s the last time you saw anyone smoking in a mainstream movie? Even period films about the Forties, say — the ones where they take infinite pains to get just the right period-appropriate shade of Formica on the diner’s countertops — ignore the obvious historical reality of people puffing away like chimneys.

Indeed, it’s all but universal now, and has been for a long time, that characters who smoke are the bad guys.

Here again, look at college kids. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but it’s really the best example I know of the phenomenon. Any time I taught the Early Modern period, I had to mention the massive economic and cultural effects of tobacco. So I encouraged kids to try it for themselves — everyone here is over 18, I said, so it’s perfectly legal. Want to know what all the hype was about? Just run down to the gas station, buy a pack, and light one up!

Around the turn of the century, I always had a few smokers in class, so I could say “bum one off So-and-So”. Even that would get me a few uneasy chuckles. A few years later, and not only were there no smokers in my classes, but the kids would be actively uncomfortable with the suggestion. By the end of my teaching career, when I couldn’t care less anymore, I was openly taunting them about it. You people have no problem with potheads, I’d say. I bet well over half of you are on Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax, Klonopin, shit that’s bad for you, in ways we don’t even understand yet, but you’re balking at one cigarette? It’s unsafe? Oh, come on, some of you are going to leave here and go light up a completely unfiltered ditch weed, and as for the rest of you, you know all about crazy sex fetishes I’ve never even heard of. You get blackout drunk at the football games every weekend, but oh no, you can’t have one cigarette, it’s so unhealthy.

Such is the power of propaganda, and it’s the only repression that works for the PTB when they’ve truly set their faces against a behavior …

Severian, “The Mob, Faux-tism, and the Ever-Rising Costs of Compliance”, Founding Questions, 2021-02-02.

September 16, 2023

Public health officials don’t seem to realize just how badly they’ve damaged their credibility

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the apparantly huge gap between how ordinary Canadians view their public health officials and how those officials think they’re viewed:

Throughout the pandemic, polls have shown a decline in confidence in public health: Researchers at McMaster University and Vox Pop Labs found that in March 2020, 59 per cent of Canadians had “a great deal of trust” in public health officials. Two years later that had plummeted to 37 per cent.

We have recently enjoyed months of being able to ignore COVID-19. Even the relentlessly, uniquely pessimistic Canadian media seemed to have exhausted themselves. So I found it a bit jarring to see Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, suddenly back on the TV this week admonishing us to “get your mask ready” for fall and book yourself in for a booster. Dr. Kieran Moore, Tam’s counterpart at Queen’s Park, is due in the coming days to give Ontarians what will likely be a similar update.

If this year’s flu/RSV/COVID season is as bad as last, it will be fascinating to see how Canadians react. Perfervid opposition to masking and vaccination are minority positions: In the midst of last year’s autumn surge in childhood hospitalizations, a Nanos Research poll found 69 per cent of Canadians would support a return of mask mandates “if authorities deem(ed) it necessary”.

But are people ready to hear it, again, from the same public-health officials who have all-but destroyed their entire field in the last three years — seemingly without realizing it? It will be intriguing to see.

Tam’s original sins remain totally unexplained — at an official inquiry, for example, hint hint — never mind expiated. For days and weeks in early 2020, while our peer countries were closing borders and preparing for a pandemic, Tam assured us “the risk to Canada is low”. She lied that World Health Organization rules prohibited us from closing borders. She told us masks were worse than useless, and the only excuse anyone can offer is that she was fibbing to prevent Canadians from hoarding PPE. (I think she actually believed it. Either explanation is a firing offence.)

Remember the utterly incoherent advice the Public Health Agency of Canada provided to incoming travellers in the early days? Remember the built-to-fail, purely political quarantine hotels that Tam said weren’t necessary until they suddenly were — just as she said 14-day quarantine at home wasn’t necessary until it suddenly was? We were weeks if not months behind most of our peer countries. Regardless of your position on any given restriction, none of it made any sense.

September 15, 2023

The old “war of the sexes” has been won decisively by women … and the aftermath won’t be pretty for any of us

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

I saw an article earlier today in The Free Press on the plight of young men in the dating scene these days (discussed earlier this month here and in July here). In short, men who don’t meet certain arbitrary minimums will have almost no chance with modern women in their age cohort. If you’re not at least six feet tall (males average 5’9″ worldwide), earn at least six figures (US men average under $60K per year), and have a penis at least six inches long (official estimates say American men average 5.1″ to 5.5″), you might as well give up on the dating scene.

Tom Knighton links all that from the Free Press article with some advice for young men on the off-chance they ever do have a date:

First, let’s look at this from Fox News, where a mother laments some of the issues at college with regard to Title IX and rape accusations.

    If my two sons were starting college this Fall I would tell them this: be doubly sure you get consent — for her sake and yours. Maybe even record that consent (how romantic!). Your education and future may depend on it.

    Under Biden’s proposed Title IX rules, if a college student is accused of sexual assault or harassment, he will no longer have the right to a live hearing, to cross-examine his accuser and witnesses, or to be represented by an attorney. Instead, a school administrator can decide to forgo a hearing and weigh the “credibility” of each party on his own, acting as investigator, judge, and jury in the case.

    The standard for determining guilt will also be weakened from “clear and convincing” to a “preponderance of the evidence” — in other words, that there’s a 50.1 percent or greater chance an assault occurred. Not great odds in what are often “he said, she said” cases.

    …

    College students — mainly young men — should be worried. Biden’s Title IX changes are a reversal of rules implemented by the Trump administration in 2020, and a return to the “believe all women” attitude laid out in the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter.

This suggests a fraught landscape for young men, many of whom might just decide not to risk it.

As it is, our educational system actually favors women in many ways.

The primary, middle, and high school classrooms are constructed in a way that actually favors the way girls typically learn as opposed to how boys do. As a result, girls tend to get better grades and a leg up on getting into college.

Further, as a protected class, even before the recent Supreme Court ruling, women had a bit of an edge at being accepted to college under affirmative action guidelines, though race did tend to play a larger factor.

Now you’re favoring women’s position in a “he said/she said” environment of sexual assault allegation, even when there’s no other evidence. I say this because I’ve covered these stories off and on for years now. That’s how it happens in a surprising number of cases.

It’s a situation where young men are disfavored and operating at a disadvantage from day one, then it gets worse from there.

Schools often have all kinds of support services for female students on top of the support services open to all students. Guys, however, get no such help.

With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that women graduate college at a much higher rate than men.

The relationship between graduating university and earning a higher salary isn’t as robust as it used to be, but it’s still financially advantageous to have a degree in most careers. More and more women do and fewer and fewer men do. That means more higher-income women are competing for fewer high-status men. That tiny proportion of men benefit disproportionally from their increasing rarity in the dating pool.

Men aren’t graduating college at a similar rate to women? Well, who cares? At least women aren’t being kept out of education.

Men can’t find romantic partners and instead, turn to online porn? Well, who cares? At least women are empowered enough to be picky.

I’m not saying we should dictate anything to do with people’s personal choices, but we could at least start to realize that young men are in crisis mode and that we might want to do something about that before we have real problems.

Then we have the potential decrease in the population as fewer and fewer families are starting and I just don’t see good things happening going forward.

Large numbers of angry young men with no chance at forming relationships with women and generally under- or unemployed? This is not a scenario for a happy or stable future.

September 11, 2023

QotD: The nature of human memory

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

Perhaps the best newspaper columnist is the one whose columns are the least predictable? That may be going too far: too much novelty is exhausting, and we need an anchor for our expectations. But I well recall a friend saying that her favourite newspaper pandered to her preconceptions so much she didn’t really need to bother reading it; she could just think hard about everything she already held true. We scribblers should hope to do better.

One would not want a life of endless novelty, if only because that would mean a procession of superficial impressions and comparisons. Static, surprisingly, is impossible to compress without losing information, because its randomness makes prediction or interpolation impossible. Yet static is also meaningless. Too many random novelties, too fast, produces a lived experience not unlike static.

One of the virtues of experience is that it can attune us to subtle details and deep connections: “a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower”. (It may also allow us to draw out meaning from a brief allusion to a larger body of work.) But if repeated experience becomes humdrum, and we do not look for the depths, our days will be thin and forgettable.

So if you want a full life, rich with memories, keep searching for new experiences. That is far easier for the young than the old, but it should be possible for anyone. Surprising conversations are always there for the having and, while a holiday on the other side of the world is a costly (if reliable) source of vivid experiences, novelty is affordable for almost anyone in the form of new music, books, even walking an unfamiliar path through your own home town. It is always worth seeking out whatever is excellent — but for vivid memories, the same old excellence is not quite enough. Freshness matters, too.

Tim Harford, “Why going on holiday gives us more memories”, Financial Times, 2019-04-26.

September 9, 2023

7 Ways to Suck at Badminton

Filed under: Health, Humour, Sports — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Swift Badminton
Published 27 Sept 2019

This video will give you 7 tips and tricks to become a worse badminton player.
(more…)

September 6, 2023

QotD: Functional delusions

Filed under: Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Many of us go to our graves thinking that if only we had had enough time we should have triumphed in some way or another. A few of my patients claimed that, had it not been for some trifling injury to them that was somebody else’s fault, their career would have taken off, as in fact it was just about to do before the injury was done them. This was absurd, for — objectively considered — there was no indication that they would ever have amounted to very much. On the whole, overweight 38-year-olds do not become world-famous athletes, nor do people become concert pianists who take up the piano at the age of 50. But my patients would claim compensation as if their new careers were established fact rather than mere fantasy.

Did they really believe what they were claiming? The human mind, as I am sure many people will by now have observed, is a complex instrument, and works at several levels at the same time. Hence one can be sincere and fraudulent at the same time. It isn’t necessary to be a psychoanalyst to believe in the reality and prevalence of self-deception; indeed, it is necessary to be a kind of Candide not to believe in them, and to be utterly impervious to self-examination into the bargain.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Grand Illusion”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-08-19.

September 5, 2023

“… the misogyny myth persists because both sexes want to believe it”

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

In City Journal, John Tierney disassembles the “misogyny myth” of modern culture:

Misogyny is supposedly rampant in modern society, but where, exactly, does it lurk? For decades, researchers have hunted for evidence of overt discrimination against women as well as subtler varieties, like “systemic sexism” or “implicit bias”. But instead of detecting misogyny, they keep spotting something else.

[…]

If you haven’t heard of this evidence, it’s because of the well-documented misandrist bias in the public discussion of gender issues. Scholars, journalists, politicians, and activists will lavish attention on a small, badly flawed study if it purports to find bias against women, but they’ll ignore — or work to suppress — the wealth of solid research showing the opposite. Three decades ago, psychologists identified the “women-are-wonderful effect”, based on research showing that both sexes tended to rate women more positively than men. This effect has been confirmed repeatedly — women get higher ratings than men for intelligence as well as competence — and it’s obvious in popular culture.

“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning”. Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”? If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be a “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson, and commercials wouldn’t keep showing wives outsmarting their husbands. (When’s the last time you saw a TV husband get something right?) Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.

Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies — and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.

The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males — a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.

Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.

September 4, 2023

“… the ‘Teachers should tell parents’ people outnumber the ‘Teachers must not tell parents’ folks by something like four-to-one”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the free-to-cheapskates segment of The Line‘s weekly round-up post, they discuss the suddenly “brave” Conservative provincial premiers jumping onto a hot culture war topic on the side of the vast majority of Canadians:

New Brunswick now has Policy 713, that requires teachers or school officials to notify parents and obtain consent if a child younger than 16 wishes to change his or her name or pronouns. Saskatchewan has announced a similar proposal; Ontario is considering one, too.

The Line looks upon these proposals with extreme skepticism. To be frank, we wish the provinces weren’t doing this. We think it’s strategically misguided: every moment a Conservative spends defending “parental rights” is a moment in which they are not talking about highly salient economic issues that affect far more people. Further, we don’t trust their motives. Either they’ve decided to pick this fight because they thought parental consent was going to be a winner for them, or they simply felt pushed into it by the more excitable elements of their respective bases. (We assign a probability assessment of absolute zero to the notion that the leaders might be doing this out of moral conviction.)

So yeah, it’s cynical and exploitive policy, but gosh, is it ever popular policy, too. Polling shows it’s like 80-per-cent approval popular.

Because of course it is.

Again, we stress that we don’t support the imposition of sweeping legislation. Absent evidence of abuse or mismanagement, we think parental notification of social transition should be handled on a case-by-case basis. In the midst of a moral panic on trans issues, we’d prefer to keep politicians as far away from this third rail as possible, with long pointy sticks and cages if necessary.

However, we also recognize that cynicism cuts both ways. We have also borne witness this week to some hysterical rhetoric from those who seem to seriously believe that schools should be forbidden from sharing this information, if the minor in question so chooses.

These people are in the minority, as we suggested above. The polling shows that the “Teachers should tell parents” people outnumber the “Teachers must not tell parents” folks by something like four-to-one. This is the kind of lopsided result you almost never see on contentious policy issues — the numbers are what we would expect if we asked Canadians “Is ice cream tasty?” or “Do you enjoy cuddling a puppy?” And of course this is so. Parents are, generally speaking, not going to have a whole lot of time for the suggestion that children will be better off if the state, at any level, adopts a policy of withholding information from them.

We don’t support what the conservative premiers are doing, because we think they’re doing it for cynical reasons, but we would absolutely oppose any policy that goes in the opposite direction. And the majority of the country — a massive supermajority — is onside with us on this one.

There are no easy answers here, because we do not dismiss the concerns raised by the minority. We absolutely agree and accept that there are going to be families and parents that may react badly, even dangerously, to their child changing their name or pronoun. But the answer isn’t to involve teachers and schools in a coverup; it’s to have policies in place that give any child that may fear for their safety all the help they need, including, if necessary, intervention. To this end, we would note that teachers are mandatory reporters — they must report a variety of issues (or concerns) because society has learned through tragedy and horror what happens when parents and other guardians are excluded from knowing details of their child’s life. If teachers have reasonable grounds to suspect abuse, mental health issues and more, they are legally required to inform authorities and families. Limiting their ability to inform parents would cut against this necessary and overdue progress. Further, we have already passed laws banning “conversion therapy.”

Your Line editors support the right of trans people to live lives of legal equality, safety and dignity, and we honestly believe that most Canadians would agree with us on that. We also note that the rising tide of trans activism has raised complicated concerns that exist at the edges of reasonable accommodation, and must necessarily raise thorny concerns about how we manage competing rights between disadvantaged people. Can minors consent to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? Is it fair to allow trans women who enjoy the permanent physical advantages bestowed by male puberty into female athletics? When should trans men be permitted in women’s prisons and shelters, if ever? These questions demand a thoughtful and nuanced response. They don’t disappear the moment someone screams “trans women are women!” and threatens to kill that bigoted TERF J.K. Rowling. They aren’t resolved by hysterics and warnings of suicide.

By staking out maximalist positions on the most difficult topics, and granting no ground for concession and compromise, trans-rights activists have polarized their own cause. Shouting down critics worked for a while, but the pendulum is now rapidly swinging back to the plumb line. Labelling every concerned parent a transphobe is tired and played out. It’s failing as a strategy of persuasion. Which brings us to the current moment; the place of four-to-one support for cynical policies proposed by conservative premiers. Keep it up, and we suspect it’ll be nine-to-one in short order.

Backlashes are rarely measured, sane, or logical, and we fear this one is already teasing out some very dark and long-repressed demons, even among people who once counted themselves allies of LGBTQ people and causes. We are seeing this backlash in a rise in hate crimes, growing counter-protests, and in a decline in support for LGBTQ people generally. And, yes, we are seeing it in in heavy-handed and misguided legislation both here and in the U.S. We aren’t arguing that any of this is justifiable; rather, we are merely noting that it has long been inevitable and predictable. We were warned.

One of the only real questions we have is how self-styled progressive parties and leaders are going to navigate trans issues when the population is very much not on their side. We talk a lot about how the conservatives are beholden to the most vocal minorities within their parties; but we fear that the progressives suffer the same fundamental problem.

We’d like to think that the Liberals and the NDP will handle trans issues maturely, responsibly and well. But we know better. They’ll go all in, setting everyone up for a very nasty confrontation that we think they’ll lose, and badly. Brace yourselves, friends.

September 3, 2023

Online dating apps

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The modern dating scene is evidently catastrophic for the majority of men:

After all, dating apps digitally castrate 85 percent of men.

On Bumble, sixty percent of women say they’re looking for a six-foot-tall or taller man. Just 30 percent will drop their requirements one inch lower. Just 15 percent of women would consider a man just one inch shorter than the average 5’9 man. Shorter than that? Your chances fall with each descending inch. Understandably, 80 percent of men lie about their height. Why? Dating apps are merciless, Latin American economies. Most women on dating apps like Tinder and Bumble seek the top 20 percent of men, leaving the rest to compete for a small portion of the dating pool. Reader, I’m not bearing a tall grudge from a short height, I’m six-foot-two.

When I was younger, we used to meet people in person. This antiquated exercise was meritocracy in action.

For the genetically ungifted, that is, the ordinary 80 percent of men, this was the great leveller.

No matter how short or aesthetically unblessed, meeting in person gave all a fair hearing. As the great Christopher Hitchens once wrote, there’s a good reason why men employ humour and why women tend to value a man’s mastery of humour.

Dating apps are anti-merit. Essentially, they provoke a biological feudalism that determines your prospects before you escape the womb.

The 5’9 guy with good humour, high intelligence, seasoned wit, and good manners? Nope.

Social media mutates the ideal into the ordinary. Every man is six-foot-plus. Every woman resembles a Reality TV star: big lips, ballooning bum, bouncing boobs.

In this strange, digital landscape, some porn-addled men use dick pics as a greeting. Three-quarters of women have endured such “greetings”.

Dating apps are a primitive world in which some men say “hello” by showing you their rather ugly organs.

Offline, leery weirdoes masturbating vigorously (Is there any other way?) on the night Tube often end up in jail or in the newspaper. Endearingly, the Daily Telegraph still calls this “performing a sexual act” as if on a stage before a ticket-waving audience and a shrivel of critics.

Reader, I’m no reactionary prude — I’m spiritually French — the only people on earth a majority of whom think adultery is an invigorating hobby rather than a grave sin.

The business of life works better without a screen and an algorithm.

Unsurprisingly, presenting oneself as a product on the “dating marketplace” degrades self-esteem, afflicts mental health, and corrodes our sense of reality. I’m no philosopher, but maybe our burgeoning mental health crisis has something to do with our living as if products on a shelf to be thumbed over by complete strangers.

As Rob Henderson reported last year, the world of dating apps is a hellscape for everyone but the tiny minority of men who get a “swipe right” from vast numbers of women:

Some findings on dating apps:

  • 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
  • Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
  • Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
  • Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
  • 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
  • In terms of attractiveness, 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.
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