Quotulatiousness

July 13, 2024

Did you blink and miss Gender Empathy Gap Day?

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

Don’t worry, unlike so, so many other formal days (or months, or seasons …) in the calendar devoted to this or that or the other real and imagined causes, celebrations, or acknowledgements, Gender Empathy Gap Day isn’t observed anywhere:

Remember these examples of virtue signalling? Can you imagine them doing the same for boys or young men?
Image from The Fiamengo File.

Few people have heard of Gender Empathy Gap Day, a day inaugurated in Germany in 2018 to raise awareness about our societies’ remarkable indifference to the suffering of men and boys. Not surprisingly, it has no official status in any country.

Most people, if asked, will insist that it is women and girls who suffer. We expect men and boys to apologize for their advantages and educate themselves about issues affecting women and girls. Animus against men is socially acceptable, even approved. “I bathe in male tears” is a popular feminist slogan, and university professors write mainstream opinion pieces with unironic titles like “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”

The Gender Empathy Gap Day doesn’t advocate a contest over which sex has it worse. It does advocate recognition of our collective inability or unwillingness to see the full humanity of men.

Academic researchers Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic have compiled data showing that both females and males tend to have more positive associations with women than with men. Researchers have also confirmed a much higher in-group bias amongst women, meaning that women feel more empathy towards other women than towards men, while men also feel more empathy for women.

Whether it’s homelessness (61% male), homicide (78% male victims), suicide (79% male), workplace fatalities (93% male), prison incarceration (93% male), or a host of other issues, men and boys do suffer. Yet according to the research of Dr. Tania Reynolds, we tend to associate agency with maleness and the capacity for victimhood with femaleness, seeing men and boys as active doers rather than as sufferers deserving concern.

As a result, we are tolerant of harsh punishments for male criminal offenders, but not for women. In 2012, Sonja Starr, a professor of Law, published the results of her study of discrepancies in criminal sentencing that showed a very large gender gap in the punishment of women for the same crimes committed by men. Starr’s extensive study found an average 63% sentencing gap that harshly disadvantaged men. She also discovered that “Female arrestees are […] significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted”.

The gap in punishment results because we all — including prosecutors, judges, and juries — incline to the belief that women who commit crimes were led into their law-breaking by others, usually men, and had limited choices because of poverty, childhood abuse, mental illness, or addiction. We hesitate to deprive young children of the care of their mothers, while we are content to see fathers behind bars. As Starr points out, however, male offenders have also “suffered serious hardships, have mental health or addiction issues, have minor children, and/or have ‘followed’ others onto a criminal path”.

Author Glen Poole has noted that such indifference to male difficulties is built right into the stories our society tells about itself. He points out that when a large number of men are killed — whether in war, accident, or natural disaster — mainstream news sources report on people killed, making the sex of the victims invisible. It is not news when men and boys die.

When women or girls are killed or harmed, they are rarely if ever referred to as people. Their suffering is news.

QotD: The need for social status

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

Human beings become more preoccupied with social status once our physical needs are met. In fact, research reveals that sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is more important for well-being than socioeconomic status. Furthermore, studies have shown that negative social judgment is associated with a spike in cortisol (hormone linked to stress) that is three times higher than non-social stressful situations. We feel pressure to build and maintain social status, and fear losing it.

It seems reasonable to think that the downtrodden might be most interested in obtaining status and money. But this is not the case. Inhabitants of prestigious institutions are even more interested than others in prestige and wealth. For many of them, that drive is how they reached their lofty positions in the first place. Fueling this interest, they’re surrounded by people just like them — their peers and competitors are also intelligent status-seekers. They persistently look for new ways to move upward and avoid moving downward. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim understood this when he wrote, “The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs.” And indeed, a recent piece of research supports this: it is the upper class who are the most preoccupied with gaining wealth and status. In their paper, the researchers conclude, “relative to lower-class individuals, upper-class individuals have a greater desire for wealth and status … it is those who have more to start with (i.e., upper-class individuals) who also strive to acquire more wealth and status”. Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else.

Furthermore, other research has found that absolute income does not have much effect on general life satisfaction. An increase in relative income, on the other hand, has a positive effect. Put differently, making more money isn’t important. What’s important is making more than others.

Rob Henderson, “Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class — A Status Update”, Quillette, 2019-11-16.

June 29, 2024

Oh no! The filthy proles are getting too many calories! Let’s re-impose rationing!

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall suggests that the regular “viewing with alarm” thumbsuckers about purchased meals having “too many calories” are actually an indication of a strong desire by the great and the good to stick their regulatory noses into the lives of ordinary people:

“Indian take away in Farrer Park” by Kai Hendry is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

This headline is, of course, wrong.

    Some takeaway meals contain more calories than daily limit, UK study finds

There is no daily limit. We do not have laws stating how much food we are allowed to eat. Of course, there are those who want there to be such laws but there aren’t, as yet. What there is is a series of recommendations about the limits we should impose upon ourselves:

    Some takeaway meals contain more calories in one sitting than someone is advised to consume in an entire day, a study of British eating habits has revealed.

That’s better.

    Cafes, fast-food outlets, restaurants, bakeries, pubs and supermarkets are fuelling the UK’s obesity crisis because so many meals they sell contain dangerously large numbers of calories, it found.

That’s not better. Because a plate of food containing a lot of calories is not a danger. Eating many of them might be but that the average household can get a gutbuster for some trivial portion of household earnings is a glory of modern civilisation, the very proof we require that we’re all as rich as Croesus.

And this is actually true too. That we are gloriously rich and it’s our food supply that proves this. As Brad Delong likes to point out back 200 years (yes, about right, 1820s is as it was really changing but 300 years would be better) it took a full day’s work to be able to gain 2,000 calories a day for a day labourer. There are 800 million out there still living at that standard of living. We can buy 2,000 calories — if we go boring stodge — for 30 minutes work now.

By history and by certain geographies we are foully rich these days. Which is the complaint of the wowsers of course. They’re a revival of the puritans and their sumptuary laws. How dare it be true that people fill their bellies with food they actually like?

    Six out of 10 takeaway meals contain more than the 600-calorie maximum that the government recommends people should stick to for lunch and dinner in order to not gain weight, according to the research, which was carried out by the social innovation agency Nesta.

    One in three contain at least 1,200 calories – double the recommended limit.

And? So, folk can buy lots of food for not much money. This is the very thing that makes having a civilisation possible — cheap food. My wife and I do indeed partake of an Indian occasionally — and find the takeout portions rather large. So, we have one amount for lunch or dinner and we’ve a refrigerator in which to keep the excess for a supper or snack another day. This is not beyond the wit of man to organise.

We don’t order in food very often, but when we do we usually manage to get both dinner on the night and lunch on the morrow from a typical order. If the nosey parkers have their way, they’d limit what we were allowed to buy — for our own good, of course — so we’d almost certainly still pay the same amount for less food. Such a deal!

June 27, 2024

Tim Worstall offers a rule-of-thumb for physical fitness

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

Rather than digging deeply into the esoterica of current research on the human body, Tim Worstall suggests there’s a handy rough metric you can use to judge your own physical fitness in any given area that sounds helpful:

“Exercise Running Fitness Physical Activity – Credit to https://homethods.com/” by homethods is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

If you can do the whatever it is in under twice the Olympic time for it then that’s just fine. You may, at that point, step off the treadmill and go get more dip.

Not that I have any expertise in such things as fitness — just the normal amount of forced labour true of anyone who went through public school. It still seems to me to be a good guide.

True, the accuracy of this varies depending upon the specific activity. Managing 100 metres in 20 seconds is not a huge call — only just managing it would have small children jeering perhaps. But a mile in 8 minutes, yes, that does require a certain level of fitness and one that’s also indicative of, well, being at a certain level of fitness. Not that I’m going to do anything so gauche as check this, but that sounds like about the fitness tests for middle aged men in the military (longer if it’s in full kit).

One recent Tour de France time trial was around the 45 km mark. Which they did in 45 to 49 minutes (again, from memory) and doing 45 km in 90 minutes is something the average club cyclist would do on Granny’s bike, with the basket in front. A professional cyclist would need to add a sheepdog to the basket to be that slow. But being able to crank out 45 km on a bike — in that hour and a half — is showing a level of fitness that I take to be just fine for the average couch lizard.

So too the mile swim. Olympic swimming is 1500m, in 14 minutes or so. So, a mile in half an hour? That looks quite testing but if I can get close to that (in my 60s) then I’m happy. I can swim a mile, which in itself is a reasonable level of fitness, but that time would, I think, qualify as being “fit enough”.

It’s possibly true that this guide is more accurate at the longer distances. For being able to even perform the longer distances is itself a guide to fitness and the time recorded is less of an issue. It would also be possible that personal experience is playing a part here — I’ve always been comparatively better at longer. Few fast twitch fibre. So the “Worstall’s” could well be “As applies to Worstall” rather than something more general.

I’ve always been bad at endurance sports, but I’ve done fairly well in sprint-style, “twitchy” sports where you need fast reactions rather than long, slow-burn exertion. Tim’s rule of thumb seems to be more useful for runners, swimmers, etc., than for badminton players or fencers.

June 25, 2024

QotD: Progress and decline

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

The past has always interested me more than the future. This backward-looking tendency has only been reinforced by reaching, somewhat unexpectedly, the age of 70. I can’t say that I don’t feel my age because I don’t know what feeling any particular age is like — but one repeatedly hears that 60 is the new 40, 70 is the new 50, and so on; certainly, the human aging process has slowed since I was born. When I look at photos of people who were 50 in the year of my birth, 1949, they look much older and more worn-out than do 50-year-olds now; and if I had lived only to my life expectancy at birth, I would be dead these last four years.

So progress must have occurred in the intervening time, despite the pessimism that infects those who, like me, are of retrospective temperament and hypersensitive to deterioration. It is not hard to enumerate many things that have improved. They relate principally, but not only, to material conditions. My best friend when I was very young was one of the last children in Britain to suffer from polio, which paralyzed him from the waist down. The quickest form of written communication was then the telegram, and anything other than local telephone calls had to go through an operator. To call across the Atlantic required a reservation and was ferociously expensive; the resultant conversation always seemed to take place during a violent storm. In England, the food was generally disgusting, and meals were to be endured as a regrettable necessity instead of enjoyed (it puzzles me still how people could have cooked so badly). Cars broke down frequently, and every November, pollution produced fogs so thick that you couldn’t see the hand in front of your face (I loved them). Rationing continued for eight years after the war, and disused bomb shelters, present in every park, were where illicit sexual fumbles and smoking took place. Incidentally, for an adult male not to smoke was unusual (75 percent did so); we must have lived in a perpetual fog of foul-smelling tobacco, to judge by the distaste caused by even a single lit cigarette in these virtuous times. Poverty, as raw necessity, still existed. Murderers were sometimes hanged — as well as, more rarely, the innocent. Overt racial prejudice was, if not quite the norm, certainly prevalent.

Yet not everything has improved, though the deterioration has been less tangible than the progress. To give one example: by age 11, I was free to roam London, or at least its better areas, by myself or with a friend of the same age. The sight of an 11-year-old child wandering the city on his own did not suggest to anyone that he was neglected or abused. I remember, too, the evening papers piled up at newsstands; people would throw coins on top of the pile and take their copy. It never occurred to anyone that the money might get stolen; nowadays, it would never occur to anyone that the money would not be stolen. The crime statistics bear out this sea change in national character.

Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.

June 24, 2024

Little humans, from “humorless little poop machines” to creatures with a sense of humour

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia cross-posted an article from Daniel Parris that answers the eternal question “when do humans develop a sense of humour?”

… a large body of academic research examines the intersection of humor, aging, and cultural mores. So today, we’ll explore how our sense of humor forms and transforms with age, and the physiological factors driving our comedic sensibilities.

How Does Our Sense of Humor Change Over Time?

We are born humorless little poop machines. We can’t make funny voices, we can’t do bits, and we can’t engage in wordplay — we simply eat, sleep, poop, cry, and poop again. And then, amidst this onslaught of poop, a sense of humor begins to emerge.

The Early Humor Survey (EHS) is a standardized questionnaire designed to assess a child’s humor-processing abilities in the first four years of life. EHS survey data (which is collected from parents) reveals that our sense of humor begins emerging in infancy, typically around the four-month mark. During this period, babies respond to simple stimuli with laughter and begin producing humor.

Even more striking is how humor development differs by task, as comprehension and appreciation of nonsense, puns, and trickery are all learned at varying rates.

Once we exit adolescence, comedic interactions begin to wane, and we laugh less often.

A 2013 Gallup survey documenting the frequency of humorous interactions suggests the existence of a “humor cliff” as we age — each year, we laugh a little less than the previous one. Humor fades until we’re 80, at which point we chuckle a bit more (what a relief).

While captivating, this visualization is also misleading. Popular interpretations of this data suggest that as people mature, their appreciation for humor declines, as if this trait were a single stock trending up or down. Instead, a person’s comedic sensibilities are defined by an assortment of preferences that remain fluid throughout our lives.

A substantial body of research examines how comedic taste varies with age, exploring our reactions to different humor styles at various life stages. One such study published in Current Psychology presented respondents with a series of humorous statements and then assessed each subject’s affinity for four distinct joke types:

  1. Self-enhancing Humor: finding comedy in everyday situations, often by humorously targeting oneself in a good-natured way.
  2. Affiliative Humor: using humor to strengthen social bonds and enhance relationships by sharing jokes and amusing stories that make others laugh while avoiding negativity.
  3. Self-defeating Humor: Involves individuals making jokes at their own expense to gain approval or avoid conflict, sometimes undermining their self-esteem.
  4. Aggressive Humor: Making jokes or remarks that ridicule, belittle, or demean others, often intended to assert dominance or express hostility.

Ultimately, the study found that with age, people appreciate self-enhancing humor more, and they value affiliative, self-defeating, and aggressive stylings less.

A similar study of 4,200 German participants found that we increasingly prefer incongruity resolution as we age, an approach marked by unexpected or contradictory elements that lead to a comedic surprise. In joke format, this genre includes a setup pointing toward one outcome, with a punchline that delivers a surprising twist, such as “I just flew in today, and boy, are my arms tired!”

June 21, 2024

QotD: Identity fetishism

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

This is going to sound really weird, but bear with me: I’d like you to check out Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, by Sam Fussell. It was written in the early 90s (I think) describing the bodybuilding scene of the mid-1980s, and when I first read it, twenty-odd years ago, it came off like the tale of a recovered alcoholic, or more accurately a well-controlled schizophrenic — the male version of all those mental illness memoirs the chicks were into back then (Prozac Nation; Girl, Interrupted, and so on). Certainly Fussell himself pitched it that way — he says that even bodybuilders call their thing “the disease”. From the Current Year’s perspective, though, it looks a lot more like the leading edge of an increasingly common phenomenon that I’m going to call “identity fetishism”.

Fussell is almost embarrassingly frank about why he got into bodybuilding: He was terrified. A scrawny, desperately insecure guy, he just couldn’t handle the social pressures of life in New York. He saw muscles as armor. If he made his exterior so intimidating that no one would want to get close to him he’d never have to get close to anyone. The whole thing is a sustained exercise in fremdschämen — Fussell is a hard guy to like before his transformation, and frankly repulsive afterwards. It’s a short read, and fascinating, but it’s not an easy one.

Do slog through it, though, and I think you’ll see what I mean. The thing that prevents so many of us from really getting into the Left’s headspace, I think, is sheer exhaustion. Forget hardcore SJWs for a sec; just think of what it must take to be, say, a hipster. I mean, seriously, just look at this fucking hipster. The time, the money, the sheer goddamn effort it must take! I’m bushed just writing about it, and that’s nothing compared to what Fussell did.

If you’re a weightlifter, you know. If you’re not, trust me, you don’t want to know. Same deal with endurance athletes, of course, and so on — I’m sure “runner’s high” is real, and it’s great, but son, I really don’t want to experience it. I have experienced “the pump”, famously described by Arnold himself as “like cumming”, but trust me, drugs are a lot better if you just want to get high, because getting to “the pump” fucking hurts. A lot. See Fussell for details.1

Much easier, then, to invest all that time and energy and money into an outward show that, though it no doubt costs as much — perhaps more! — isn’t nearly as painful (I’m sure getting elaborate tats hurts, but if the choice was between that or legs day, I’d be The Illustrated Man). Best of all, of course, is one that doesn’t take anything but time — you know, like, say, Twitter …

All that no doubt seems like a long ride for a short payoff, but unlike my infamously lax attitude towards “the Classics”, I’m going to insist that if you want to get the point of this one — and I consider it important enough to have invested all these words in it — you’re really going to have to go read the book. Fussell is self-aware enough to see himself for what he is, and the Twitterati are of course oblivious, but the psychology is the same. It’s a fetishized identity, and it’s terrifying, because those are our rulers.

Severian, “Identity Fetishism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-24.

    1. Worst of all, you don’t get it during “legs day”, the most excruciating part of weightlifting, which is why so many guys skip it. It’s nothing but pain. I was never more than a moderately serious weightlifter back in my youth, but that’s the sole criterion of seriousness — do you skip legs day? If yes, then get back to Planet Fitness, you poseur.

June 15, 2024

In Germany, it can be dangerous to “participat[e] in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembl[e] one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources”

Filed under: Germany, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

German government control over what people can say online seems like something Justin Trudeau would love to have (and, in fact, is working toward) here in Canada:

Almost two years ago, on 26 July 2022, a German Twitter user known only as MicLiberal posted a thread that culminated in his criminal trial this week. His is but the latest in a long line of such prosecutions – the tactic our rulers increasingly favour to intimidate and harass those who use their freedom of expression in inconvenient ways.

MicLiberal committed his alleged offence as Germany was still awakening from months of hypervaccination insanity. Science authorities and politicians had spent the winter decrying the “tyranny of the unvaccinated“, demanding that “we have to take care of the unvaccinated, and … make vaccination compulsory“, firing people who protested institutional vaccine mandates on social media and denouncing the unvaccinated for ongoing virus restrictions and Covid deaths. Our neighbour, Austria, even went so far as to impose a specific lockdown on those who refused the Covid vaccines. Culturally and politically, those were the darkest months I have ever lived through; they changed my life forever and I will never forget them.

MicLiberal’s thread aimed only to memorialise some of the crazy things the vaccinators had said. It opened with this tweet:

    We were complicit!

    We marginalised, defamed, discredited, insulted and cancelled people. On behalf of science!

    By popular demand, this brief thread with statements that should not be forgotten:

There ensued nothing but a series of citations, most of them wholly typical samples of vintage 2021/22 vaccinator rhetoric, much of it not even that remarkable. For example, MicLiberal included this statement from Andreas Berholz, deputy editor-in-chief of the widely read blog Der Volksverpetzer:

    Fact-check: The unvaccinated remain the main drivers of the pandemic.

[…]

You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.

Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them“. On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism”. The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence”. MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation”.

We must take a moment to ponder this truly amazing argumentation, which would seem to criminalise such things as participating in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembling one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources. In each of these cases, of course, it is the prosecutors and the judges eager to apply Paragraph 126a to their political opponents who get to decide what is “wrong”.

The good news in all of this is that the court acquitted him of these creative charges, but the prosecution has given notice that they intend to appeal.

W.H.O. the hell do they think they are?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Christopher Snowden on what he calls a “new low” for the World Health Organization (WHO) in a report issued earlier this week that sounds like Karl Marx was one of the writers:

The WHO European Region published a new report today, written mostly by British ‘public health’ academics. It is quite revealing. For example …

    This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs [“health-harming industries”] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist. Instead, they must regulate other HHIs [“health-harming industries”], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.

That’s just one paragraph, but there’s a lot it in.

Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to “health-harming industries” but to private industry and the free market in general.

Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry.

Thirdly, they want to regulate all “health-harming industries” in the same way as they regulate tobacco. These industries include alcohol, food and fossil fuels, but the report also mentions pharmaceuticals, infant formula, gambling, firearms, healthcare (!) and sugary drinks. As the quote above makes clear, they think that all private industry damages health in some way.

This is all there in black and white and there is much more of the same in the report. This is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is in an official WHO document.

When people show you who they are, believe them.

I have written about this for The Critic …

    If this sounds to you like Bolshie talk, you might be onto something. It is further confirmation that the modern “public health” movement is an arm of the hard left presented as an arm of medicine. It would be tempting to tell the authors to stay in their lane, but anti-capitalist nanny statism is their lane. For over a decade, such academics, mostly from Britain and Australia, have been pumping out studies about the “commercial determinants of health” and the “corporate political activity” of “unhealthy commodity industries”. The new WHO report is a sort of greatest hits collection. Last year they published a whole series of articles in the Lancet in which they claimed that there is “growing evidence that neoliberalism has been damaging to health” and called for “a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems”.

    Half-baked Marxist rhetoric has been rife in the social sciences for decades, but these people have a vaguely coherent point to make and are pursuing a serious, if terrifying, agenda. Since they do not believe in human agency, they assume that people only make “unhealthy choices”, such as eating processed ham, because the system that controls them has been rigged by big corporations. They say in today’s report that “consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice”. Fortunately, public health academics know what the right choice is and could impose it on a grateful population if it were not for the pesky free market. Hence their rage against capitalism, which extends to suspicion of intellectual property, international trade, share buybacks, impact assessments (because they allow businesses to engage with policy-makers) and even the EU single market.

Further to what I say in the article, I’d add that it is to the UK’s shame that so many of the authors of this report are British. They include quackademics that I have been making fun of for years, such as Anna Gilmore, Mark Petticrew and May van Schalkwyk. Between them, they constitute a small clique of talentless, fanatics and/or grifting social scientists who have constructed a world of unreality for themselves by publishing endless low quality journal articles which they and their colleagues then reference and self-reference. It is profoundly depressing that they are now dangling the corpse of the WHO — which was once a great institution — on pieces of string.

QotD: Is there more craziness these days or is it just the volume turned up to 11?

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

… Is there, in fact, more lunacy in the Current Year, or is it just louder? He argued that there’s more. I argue that there’s not. Victorians, for instance, were world-class eccentrics. Just to stick with the breakfast cereal theme, consider that Kellogg’s corn flakes were based on some weird theory of digestion that was designed to combat the scourge of masturbation. No, really — the Sylvester Graham referenced in that article is the guy behind graham crackers, which were designed for similar reasons. See also “Fletcherism”, which counted Thomas Edison among its adherents. And that’s just food! Water, electricity, magnetism, you name it, there’s some weird Victorian health fad attached to it. Throw in the peccadilloes, sexual and otherwise, of just the widespread missionary movements, and you’ve got all the crazy you can handle, and then some.

Contrast this to the Current Year, where, much like breakfast food, what seems to be a bewildering variety of lunacy can be boiled down to just a few basic types. “Wokeness” is a madlib with just two variables: ____ is either racist or sexist, pick one. (I suppose you can combine them, but you’ll notice that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d predict, because the blacks hate the gays and the feminists hate everyone, so going full retard ends up getting you in a lot of trouble with your coreligionists).

Severian, “Mail Bag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-11.

June 10, 2024

The FDA has a jaundiced view of psychotherapy involving the use of MDMA (aka “Ecstasy”)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh indulges in a minor “I told you so” after the FDA’s expert panel recommended against the agency permitting any medical use of MDMA, despite some experiments indicating it does have therapeutic value:

Ball-and-stick model of the 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine molecule, also known as MDMA, or ecstasy, a well-known psychoactive drug. Based on the crystal structure of MDMA hydrochloride, as determined by X-ray diffraction.
Color code: Carbon, C: black, Hydrogen, H: white, Oxygen, O: red, Nitrogen, N: blue.
Image by Jynto via Wikimedia Commons.

Hopes for research into therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs received a setback last week, one that your correspondent saw tripping (geddit?) up the road in advance. An expert panel published its official advice to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on permitting medical use of MDMA, the synthetic nightclub enhancer that we’re afraid the kids probably still aren’t calling “ecstasy” or “molly”.

There is long-recognized potential for MDMA to be combined with classical psychotherapy in treating emotional disorders, notably post-traumatic stress (PTSD), and now there are some small, limited studies showing evidence of positive effects.

But the FDA’s scientists weren’t very impressed with this evidence, and they voted almost unanimously against creating a therapeutic exception to the illegality of ecstasy, which the U.S. Controlled Substances Act classifies as a “Schedule 1” drug, right next to heroin. The panel’s advice isn’t binding on the agency, which is crawling in somewhat good faith toward recognizing the understudied medical potential of psychedelics. But the vote emphasizes the inherent problems that drugs face, once they are defined in law as “recreational”, in winning over skeptical scientists.

Reason magazine’s great drug-war correspondent Jacob Sullum has a thorough discussion of the issues. The existing research, despite some impressive headline results, has garden-variety issues with dropout rates, follow-ups and occasional researcher shenanigans. But the big problem, which defies easy technical solution, is with scientific blinding of the research subjects.

Scientific trials of the modern kind are predicated upon separating illusory placebo effects from genuine treatment effects. Researchers expect that a high-quality study will have a control group that receives sham treatment or none at all, and good practice requires that experimenters and their guinea pigs are both blind to who is in what group.

News flash: most people can tell whether they’ve been really given a psychedelic drug. Indeed, most doctors can tell whether they’ve given a patient a genuine psychedelic drug, and how much of it. Many placebo-controlled trials on psychoactive drugs, perhaps most of them, thus suffer from an alleged problem of broken blinding. (Have a glance, for example, at Table 2 in this review of blinding procedures in psychedelic studies.)

May 30, 2024

QotD: Is a “Pickup Artist” just an amateur method actor performing “fake it until you make it” drills?

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

The underlying principles of Game are sound, because they come from the world of advertising. Heartiste was very good about referring to the marketing background — sociobiology may have provided the theory, but marketing, particularly Robert Cialdini’s seminal Persuasion, provided the practice. Social proof, consistency and commitment, all that jazz, it’s just marketing, and marketing certainly works … as far as it goes. I’m not privy to the numbers (not being a senior exec at a major corporation), but I’m pretty sure that an ad campaign that verifiably produced a 5% increase in sales would be a smashing success. An ad campaign that got 10% would make you Don Draper, a legend in the field who is also complete fiction.

Which forces us to consider a second question: How much of Game’s “success” is just practice? I’d wager very long money that no one, in the history of seduction, has ever said “I hit on fifteen girls a day, but I never seem to get anywhere”. And that of course is the very first thing the Game gurus have you do — just approach girls, dozens of them every day. Practice any skill for an hour a day and you’re bound to get a lot better pretty quickly. If you stink at golf, for instance, go hit a bucket of balls every day after work; in a month you’ll be dramatically better than you were, even if — make that especially if — you were terrible to start with.

Then throw in the marketing-style success rate. A 5% sales increase might not seem that big, but it’s millions of dollars. So, too, “scoring with 5% of your approaches” is a stunning success rate compared to 0%, especially since, you know, it’s sex, which our culture has taught us is the only meaningful standard.

Finally, though I will cheerfully admit to never having been a PUA, or anything close to it, I’ve read a fair amount of their stuff, and it seems to me that what they’re teaching is “how to fake self-confidence”, which is to say, they’re teaching Method acting. The theory is that you “fake it ’til you make it” — that is, by acting self-confident at all times, eventually you’ll really be self-confident. That virtue is as virtue does, and vice versa, goes back at least to Aristotle, so I’m certainly not going to argue with it. I’m simply going to point out that self-confidence, though of course very real, is more than just a set of behaviors, though our culture makes it very difficult to distinguish the two … and, worse, makes both of them very difficult to distinguish from “just being an asshole”.

Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.

May 24, 2024

Bernie Sanders finally finds a group of rich people who he thinks shouldn’t have to pay

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As Tim Worstall points out, Bernie Sanders’ latest campaign is starkly at odds with his usual “make the rich pay” schtick:

“Bernie Sanders” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

It’s possible to think that Bernie Sanders, Senator that he is, is more than a little confused. Well, he’d not be the first elderly politician to suffer that fate. Nor the first socialist. It is necessary for me to be fair here though — one of his honeymoons he took in the Soviet Union. Which makes perfect sense to me — after all, there was bugger all else to do there other than your own wife.

However, here we’ve got him complaining about the cost of the new miracle drugs:

    Bernie Sanders has urged Denmark to rein in its most valuable company, Novo Nordisk, and force it to slash prices on popular weight loss and diabetes treatments Ozempic and Wegovy, taking his fight to lower “outrageously high” drug prices in the United States to the company’s doorstep as its profits soar amid ongoing struggles to meet booming appetite for the revolutionary drugs.

Hmm, dunno how well that’s going to work with the Danes really. Yes, to some extent they’re milder than when they tried to rape and pillage the entirety of Europe but not wholly. My brother worked out in Afghanistan (feeding the troops) and he had a Danish unit rotate through. So he tells me their senior sergeant type carried a double bladed axe on his backpack — it didn’t come back clean from every patrol either. They’re not all equality and gender rights these days, you know?

So, we can imagine a certain portion at least of the Danish population celebrating this rapine of Medicare’s pockets by the simple expedient of selling a weight loss drug that actually works — which is, when we come to think of it, something of an innovation. Fen-Fen didn’t work after all. Hey, you know, Vinland failed but we’ll get ’em this time? We’re charging high prices because we can?

A second pass at the argument would be that the drugs are in fact incredibly cheap. When it was shown that the same drug — semaglutide — works in stopping (that’s “stopping” as in ceased, stopped, dead, like Bernie’s career would if it were ever proven he had taken part in an act of voluntary capitalism) chronic kidney disease. So much so that the very day they announced the trials on the drug were being stopped a year early, so obvious was the success, the share prices of all the dialysis provision companies dropped 20 and 30%. That is, at near whatever price, this drug is a money saver. Which is, you know, good. J Foreigner turns up with this thing that saves America, Americans, lives and money and yet Bernie whines — so like a socialist, eh? Capitalism with markets makes us the humans who are living highest on the hog, ever, but they really never do stop whining about it, do they?

But Bernie’s real complaint is that Americans are paying more to burn off the cheeseburgers than everyone else has to. But from everything else Bernie says about anything at all this is at it should be — the rich should pay.

Back to our basics. The basic drug development problem is that the development of a drug is a public goods problem. It costs $2 billion to get a drug through the FDA and gain approval to actually sell it. Yes, of course we should slaughter much of the regulation that makes it cost that much (personally, against character type, I only recommend capture and humane release for the actual bureaucrats) but that’s another matter. It does. But if everyone can just copy the drug at that point then no one will spend $2 billion. So, OK, patents, so the developers have a decade (the patent is two decades, it takes a decade to gain approval) to make their $2 billion back then anyone can copy it. The price falls to manufacturing cost plus normal profit level and we’re about as good as we can get. This is not a perfect system but for mass market drugs it’s about as good as we’re going to get.

May 22, 2024

Scott Alexander reviews The Others Within Us

Filed under: Books, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses teh new hawtness in psychotherapy as expounded in Robert Falconer’s new book The Others Within Us:

Internal Family Systems, the hot new1 psychotherapy, has a secret.

“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.

Sufficiently new and popular therapies are hard to get. Therapist training starts slow – the founder has to train the second generation of therapists, the second generation has to train the third generation, and so on. IFS says they have a 10,000 person wait list for their training program. So lots of people have heard great things about IFS, maybe read a manual or two, but never tried it or met anyone who has.

What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self — a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses — and various Parts — little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.

For example, you might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it — maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby — maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain, and you won’t blame her if you get close to someone and have to break up again. Then you see a vision of Sabby stepping aside, maybe turning off the Windmill Of Relationship Sabotage or something like that, and then you never sabotage your relationships again. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the core.

All of this is the classic version everyone learns from the manual. Before we get to the secret, let’s examine two big assumptions in more detail.

First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover — not invent, discover — that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance — again, not invent — Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn — not decide — whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.

(After reading the IFS manuals, I tried most of their tricks for initiating this sort of trance and meeting Sabby or whoever. I got nothing. I notice most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines, ie the same people who often get multiple personality disorder after the slightest hint from a therapist that this might happen. We’ll get back to this analogy later.)

The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.

The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.

    1. Some people object to me calling it “new” – it was developed in the 1980s, and has been popular since the early 2010s. Still, the therapy landscape shifts slowly, and even an exponentially-growing therapy takes a long time to get anywhere.

May 17, 2024

“Once a mind is infected with Climate Change, bioweapons are just another kind of carbon credit”

Filed under: Education, Health, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jo Nova presents evidence of a university professor — a vulcanologist — who perhaps has more sympathy for the volcanoes he studies than the human race:

Let’s just say, hypothetically, that someone wanted an excuse to reduce global population, or limit competing tribes and religions, there’s a scientific hat for that. Climate Change is the ultimate excuse for mass death — done in the nicest possible way and for the most honorable of reasons. But isn’t that what they all say: Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, Heavens Gate — death makes the world a better place?

The cult that pretends it isn’t a cult sells itself as “science”. I mean, what the worst thing you can think of? Would that be one degree of warming, or the Black Death?

In Bill McQuire’s mind the catastrophe is not when billions of innocent people die.

One hundred years from now, what would our great grandchildren prefer: that the world was slightly cooler or they were never born at all? If you hate humans it’s a terrible dilemma …

Bill McGuire, vulcanologist, accidentally put his primal instincts in a tweet last weekend:

Thirty years of telling us that humans are bad has consequences. As Elon Musk said” They want a holocaust for humanity.” It turns out a televised diet of one-sided climate projection by mendicant B-Grade witchdoctors might be a dangerous thing for mental health. If only Bill McQuire had seen a skeptic on TV?

Predictably the McGuire tweet spread far, and got crushing replies so the Emeritus Professor deleted it, as all cowards do, yelling at us:

To which the winning reply was:

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