Quotulatiousness

January 15, 2022

Merely to be accused of transphobia is enough proof for condemnation

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

Jean Hatchet on the plight of Staffordshire University professor James Treadwell, who has been anonymously accused of “transphobia” … and therefore must be punished:

Yesterday evening Professor James Treadwell, a criminologist at Staffordshire University, announced his dismay on Twitter at being accused of “transphobia”. The details are vague, even to him. He has not been presented with evidence and he doesn’t and may never know who has accused him.

He wrote: “Ok to hell with it. I have been told by my employer @StaffsUni albeit only verbally that I am being investigated for Transphobia after formal and official complaints about my Twitter conduct. Read my tweets. Go figure.”

Go figure indeed. It is completely baffling. The issue is Professor Treadwell’s tweeting in favour of the right of female inmates to a single-sex prison estate. In a series of tweets on 27 December 2021, Professor Treadwell outlined his experience of the manipulative behaviour of violent sex offenders who will use loopholes to “game” the criminal justice system. He was clear that his tweets were not directed at the transgender community. He wrote:

“The idea that sex offenders are manipulative individuals who would exploit systems and laws could only be unreal to those who do not know how manipulative sexual offenders can be. All groom, seek to exploit and control.”

And he made very clear that his tweets weren’t attacking the transgender community:

“It isn’t about trans people, it’s about bad people who will exploit the law from self interest and work within a legal framework (that could protect women’s spaces) to do as they want and get what they want. You think that won’t happen, you don’t know how many sex offenders act.”

Who would be better placed to discuss this issue than a leading criminologist who has worked with some of the worst sex offenders in the country? The polite and well-informed tweets hit the nerve of public opinion on the topic of trans-identified men incarcerated in the female prison estate and were widely, mostly supportively, distributed.

Today, Professor Treadwell is in the awful position of fearing for his job; for a few tweets about a subject that he is specifically qualified to speak on. Meanwhile an effective message is simultaneously sent to his academic colleagues nationwide, that they could be targeted next. He is not the first and he won’t be the last. Many criminologists are choosing to look the other way. Professor Treadwell felt that he could no longer do so. His professional integrity appears to be exactly what he is being persecuted for.

January 14, 2022

People who tell “noble lies” are still liars who should not be trusted

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, China, Government, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Matt Ridley considers why so many scientists went along with the disinformation campaign to obscure or discredit the lab-leak theory on the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.
In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Jeremy Farrar – who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Who’s Who of virology – had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.

Now, however, we have an email from Farrar, sent on Sunday 2 February to Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It recounts the overnight thoughts of two other virologists Farrar had consulted, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute, as well as Farrar’s own thoughts. Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.

January 13, 2022

Canadians believe we have the world’s best healthcare system … we’re sadly deluded about that, as the pandemic has demonstrated

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

In The Line, Harrison Ruess points out how far down the international “league table” Canadian healthcare ranks, despite our fervent beliefs that it’s our healthcare system that somehow “defines” what it is to be Canadian (I’ve honestly never understood that particular belief):

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Millions of Canadians are extremely proud of our health-care system. They defend it and are utterly convinced of its greatness. They react with hostility to any hint of change.

But on what basis could Canada make a claim to health-care greatness?

According to OECD data, on life expectancy Canada ranks 16th. On morality rates from avoidable causes, we’re 23rd. On cancer survival rates we range from 13th down to 18th, depending on the cancer type. On the number of one-year-olds vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, we rank an abysmal 37th (even the U.S. is higher here at 27th. Gulp.). One area where we do rank closer to the top is spending as a proportion of GDP, where we sit at seventh.

In modern parlance of TL;DR, what the OECD data says is that Canada spends a disproportionately large amount of money to get strongly mediocre health outcomes.

For an overall picture we can look at the World Health Organization’s ranking system, which measures, “responsiveness (both level and distribution), fair financing, and health inequality, in addition to the more traditional goal of population health.” Here, Canada ranks 30th overall.

“But …” I’m sure you’re about to say … “Canada has universal health care!”

Yes. And that’s good. But the shortfall of that argument is that dozens of other countries have universal health care and many also have far better overall outcomes. In short, universal health care access is not a unique feature in Canada. For instance, a few notable countries from the WHO’s top 10 include France, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Austria, and Japan. These are hardly countries that let citizens go bankrupt or die in the streets when they need health care.

So why are we so darned committed to defending the Canadian status quo?

I genuinely can’t make sense of it. Canadians are smart, sensible people. We want the best for ourselves and our children. But at the same time, we have a very long history of refusing to change and improve our health care despite every piece of evidence that says we desperately must do better. The COVID pandemic has made this especially clear over the last couple years, but none of this is new.

As Robyn Urback recently asked in the Globe & Mail, “When do we admit Canada’s health-care system just isn’t working?” and as Matt Gurney pondered on TVO, “When can we start trying to make it [better]?”

January 8, 2022

“We are a sexually dimorphic species, and men and women are different”

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

A statement like that on Twitter or other social media platforms might run you the risk of denunciation, cancellation, and a plethora of accusations of transphobia, but it isn’t the intent of Robert King to troll the hypersensitive online:

No, this carving isn’t directly related to the article … but it is eyecatching.

We are a sexually dimorphic species, and men and women are different. Evolution has designed us to be different. Realising that we evolved through slow steps, rather than just popping into being in an act of creation, has implications. For one thing, it means that men and women have their own separate evolutionary histories, as a result of differing (although not wholly different, of course) selection pressures. Resisting this truth — pretending that men and women are a sort of silly putty, totally moulded by social forces — has already had serious consequences in medical science, and it also has implications for my field of study.

I study the nature and function of the female orgasm. It might surprise people that there is even a set of questions about this phenomenon, but it is one of the most vexed fields in evolutionary biology. I do not claim that we have solved the puzzle of it. However, I do claim that we know a lot more about female orgasm than we used to. For example, female orgasm is multi-faceted in nature (unlike male orgasm) and is associated with a host of complex, fertility-related, functions. Male orgasm has but one (and a pretty-well understood one at that) fertility related function: reinforcing sexual behaviour. How is it that these stark differences between the sexes have been missed?

A major reason is that sex researchers, in some cases even self-described feminists, have often persisted in treating female orgasm as a mere adjunct to male orgasm. On this view — the by-product view — only male orgasms have a function. Female ones exist as a sort of afterthought of nature. Thus, clitorises have been routinely compared to (functionless) male nipples by, among others, the influential palaeontologist, Stephen Jay Gould. However, this comparison does not stand up to scrutiny. Clitorises are not substandard penises. For starters, they are large, four inches in length, on average. They are highly complex, but their structure — including muscular, erectile, and sensitive tissue — is mostly internal.

The external part — the glans — is highly sensitive, but so is the rest of it, when appropriately aroused. Clitorises connect to their own dedicated area of brain (the somatosensory cortex) utterly distinct from the male version. To see some of this for yourself you could read any number of excellent works by, for example, the brilliant anatomist Helen O’Connell.

If the structure that generates female orgasm is at least as, if not more, complex than the male counterpart, then it makes little sense to assume that the female version depends on the male one. This is doubly true of the event of orgasm itself, prompting the eminent biologist Robert Trivers to quip of female orgasms that “One has to wonder how often Steve [Gould] has been near to that blessed event to regard it as a by-product.” That may be a tad unkind — but it raises a rather important point. If we restrict ourselves to studying female orgasm, or human sexual behaviour generally, in the laboratory alone, then we run a very real risk of missing out on crucial aspects.

Let me make this point more concrete. Over the last couple of years, zoos and wildlife parks across the planet have seen a huge upswing in births, among species previously thought to be sexually frigid — like Pandas. Why? Simple. No humans were about. The animals had some privacy from prying eyes. Does it really stretch imagination to appreciate that the full range of human sexual responses might be also muted when under laboratory conditions? Inefficiency is a hallmark of good sex, and humans use the privacy of the boudoir to do more than make each orgasm as rapidly as possible. We use this space to find out about one another.

January 7, 2022

Desert War – Dysentery, Disease, and Dehydration – WW2 Special

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Environment, Germany, Health, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 6 Jan 2022

North Africa. The Axis and Allies are fighting each other but even more, they’re fighting the desert itself. The men of the desert burn during the day and freeze at night. They do most of their fighting on a litre of water and a packet of army biscuits. What is life in such a hostile environment?
(more…)

January 6, 2022

The war on “ultra-processed food”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Our self-imagined “elites” have a new crusade to prosecute — the crusade against “ultra-processed food”:

In “public health”, the name of the game is to interfere with people’s lives without having your own choices meddled with. This is straightforward with smoking since the philosopher kings of the nanny state don’t smoke. Alcohol is more tricky since most of them drink, but minimum pricing — which was introduced in Ireland yesterday — offers the perfect way to penalise ordinary people while leaving fine wine and craft beer unaffected.

The war on food poses the trickiest problem since its pretext — obesity — is the result of over-consumption and physical inactivity rather than the consumption of any specific type of food. “Junk food” is too narrow since most people interpret it to mean “fast food” from a handful of restaurant chains. And so, in the absence of an obvious dietary culprit, the “public health” lobby is shifting towards a crusade against “ultra-processed food”.

Most people don’t know what this means, but it sounds bad if you have an instinctive objection to industry and modernity. Perhaps it evokes thoughts of “chemicals” and “E numbers”. Certainly, it sounds like the opposite of the “natural”, “organic” and “home made” food so beloved of those who think they are superior to other people. It is, however, a classic “public health” bait and switch. Just as people didn’t realise that a ban on “junk food” advertising would result in adverts for cheese and butter being banned, people won’t realise what a war on ultra-processed food means for them until it is too late.

In a deranged op-ed in BMJ Global Health, some of Mike Bloomberg’s minions from Vital Strategies call for tobacco-style regulation of “ultra-processed food”, starting with warning labels.

    Simply put, ultra-processed foods are foods that can’t be made in your home kitchen because they have been chemically or physically transformed using industrial processes. They are recognisable on the supermarket shelf as packaged foods that are ready-to-eat, contain more than five ingredients and have a long shelf-life. The industrial processing, as well as the cocktail of additives, flavours, emulsifiers and colours they contain to give flavour and texture, make the final product hyper-palatable or more appealing and potentially addictive, which in turn leads to poor dietary patterns.

    With more than half the total calories consumed in high-income countries coming from ultra-processed foods and rapid increases in low- and middle-income countries, these products are exposing billions of people to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, depression and death.

Scary stuff, eh? Alas, they don’t give any examples of ultra-processed foods so let us instead turn to a recently published study about them …

    Baked goods, including cakes, pastries, industrial breads, and soft drinks ranked among the top contributors to sales of UPFDs [ultra-processed food and drinks]

According to the the British Heart Foundation, ultra-processed foods include …

    Ice cream, ham, sausages, crisps, mass-produced bread, breakfast cereals, biscuits, carbonated drinks, fruit-flavoured yogurts, instant soups, and some alcoholic drinks including whisky, gin, and rum.

I’m not sure how hard liquor made the cut, but I suppose if you’re going be a fun sponge you might as well go all the way.

“When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Health, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Chivers reviews a recent book from Lee McIntyre, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason:

Imagine you bought a book with the title How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil. You open the book, and read the author earnestly telling you how important it is that you listen, and show empathy, and acknowledge why the people you’re talking to might believe the things they believe. If you want to persuade them, he says, you need to treat them with respect! But all the way through the book, the author continues to refer to the people he wants to persuade as “contemptible idiots who are kind of evil”.

At one stage he even says: “When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting.” But he continues to do it, and frequently segues into lengthy digressions about how stupid and harmful the idiots’ beliefs are. Presumably you would not feel that the author had really taken his own advice on board

This is very much how I feel about How to Talk to A Science Denier, by the Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre.

McIntyre wants to help us change people’s minds. Specifically, to help us change the minds of these strange, incomprehensible people called “science deniers”. He addresses five main groups of “deniers”: flat earthers; climate deniers; anti-vaxxers; GMO sceptics; and Covid deniers.

This is, on the face of it, an important project. It’s a truism that the world is polarised, and our sense of shared reality is under attack. If there is some way of learning how to talk across difference, and to persuade without attacking, that might go a long way to bridging our various divides, not just the five he discusses.

The framing is that McIntyre goes and meets representatives of these groups and tries to persuade them out of their wrong beliefs. He goes armed with social-psychology research about how best to persuade people. His big trick (which I think is a good, if limited, one) is asking: what evidence would it take to make you change your mind?

But the whole book is premised on one idea: McIntyre is right, and the people he is “talking to” are wrong.

[…]

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories?

Ah, but for McIntyre these aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracies. The distinction is “between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).”

January 2, 2022

QotD: Female preference for dominant males

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

In what follows, I will argue that sexual selection liberated sexual dominance from its coercive, ancestral demons. Specifically, I posit that ancestral women, when faced with the prospect of mating with a coercive and dominant man, a non-coercive and non-dominant man, or a non-coercive albeit dominant man, usually opted for the third option.

The first reason for this is the value of male dominance in competition with other males. Specifically, if a man exhibits dominance during courtship and copulation, he is signalling his ability to successfully compete with other men for social status in male hierarchies. Women are attracted to high-status men because such men are either genetically superior, have the resources necessary to invest in a woman and her children, or both. Although some degree of sexual conflict between men and women is expected, a man’s non-coercive dominance during courtship and copulation may say something about his ability to stand his ground in interactions with other men.

The second reason that women prefer dominant men is the fact that other women prefer dominant men. This is not a tautology. My high school American History teacher, Ms. Gibbs, once told us an anecdote about Benjamin Franklin. It was said that old kite-flying Ben would surround himself with average looking women at dinner parties so as to grab the attention of the more attractive ones. Whether true or not, Ben Franklin’s supposed exploits are supported by research on what makes men attractive. Specifically, women are attracted to men whom other women — especially physically attractive women — find attractive. So, if other women find dominant men attractive, it would benefit a woman to mate with a dominant man because any son born of such a union would inherit his father’s dominance and thereby help to spread his mother’s genes. This hypothesis — the so-called sexy-son hypothesis — suggests that whatever other benefits a man might accrue through his dominance, it is simply enough for women to consider it “sexy” for it to be sexually selected into the male line of our species.

Most of the time, however, traits that are preferred by members of the opposite sex communicate something important about the bearer of those traits in addition to sexiness per se. As I will elaborate in my discussion of sexual subordination, sexually selected traits are often selected by prospective sex partners because they are honest, costly signals of an individual’s genetic status. So, for example, a man who is capable of exhibiting dominance, while curbing it just enough to not come off as coercive, may be communicating something important about his physical and psychological state. Specifically, if a man is able to toe the fine line of sexual dominance (and even exhibit a certain amount of passionate aggression) without veering over into the danger-zone of coercion, he may be a good catch, indeed. The subtlety, tact, and finesse required to accomplish this should not be dismissed. As it happens, being a successful “dom” (i.e., a sexually dominant or sadistic individual in the BDSM scene) requires such subtlety, tact, and finesse. As Philip Miller and Molly Devon write in Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns:

    The ideal [dominant] controls himself, so that he might control his submissive. He will, as a stern dominant, cause tears to flow, and as lover, kiss them away … He understands that to own a woman, one must court the mind with intelligence and humor; win the spirit with compassion and warmth; and take the body with determined strength … He is the honorable sadist who uses pain to extend the bounds of pleasure, vigilant that no harm comes of the hurt.

Understanding the evolution of consensual sexual dominance is half the battle. As BDSM practitioners are never tired of saying, the “sub” (i.e., the submissive or masochistic individual in a BDSM interaction) is just as active a participant as the dom. Some further assert that the sub actually controls the scene and that it is the dom who has to read or intuit the needs, desires, fears, discomforts, and pleasures of the sub.

Gregory Gorelik, “What Sadomasochism Can Teach Us About Human Sexuality”, Quillette, 2017-04-04.

December 30, 2021

HogmaNO! Scottish government warns Scots not to cross the border to celebrate Hogmanay

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

In Scotland, one of the traditions of the winter is Hogmanay (spelled umpteen different ways), the last day of the old year, but Scottish public health and government officials are trying to keep the Scots away from the English border this year:

Scots have been urged not to travel to England for new year celebrations to get around the more stringent Covid-19 restrictions north of the border.

There is no travel ban currently in place to stop people going to England, where nightclubs are still open.

But Deputy First Minister John Swinney said doing so would go against the “spirit” of Scottish Covid-19 measures.

He said travelling would be “the wrong course of action” due to the “serious situation” with the Omicron variant.

Case numbers in Scotland hit “alarming” record highs over Christmas and Boxing Day, with the faster-spreading strain now accounting for the majority of all infections.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon — who is to update MSPs in a virtual sitting of the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday afternoon — said she expected the figures to rise even more in the days ahead.

Scots have been encouraged to stay at home as much as possible, and to limit any social gatherings to no more than three households.

Large events such as Edinburgh’s traditional Hogmanay street party have been cancelled, with extra curbs in hospitality settings and nightclubs shut down entirely.

Clubs remain open south of the border, where no new restrictions are being imposed, but Mr Swinney told BBC Breakfast that he would “discourage” anyone from travelling to England to see in the new year.

He said: “People are free to make their own judgments. But what we have got recognise is that Omicron is a serious threat to absolutely everybody within our society and we have all got to take measures to protect ourselves by limiting our social contacts and connections and by complying with the restrictions we have in place.

Despite the Scottish government’s warnings, English pubs along the (currently) undefended border are expecting over a hundred thousand thirsty Scots to invade on the 31st:

English border pubs are expecting upwards of 100,000 Scottish and Welsh revellers to cross into England on New Year’s Eve amid mounting anger at Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford for cracking down on festivities.

December 18, 2021

The bully doesn’t actually want you to do this one thing they demand, they want your constant submission to all demands

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

Charles Eisenstein on the ongoing relationship between the citizens of most western countries and their governments:

The relationship between our governing authorities and the public today bears many similarities to the abuser-victim dynamic. Facing a bully, it is futile to hope that the bully will relent if you don’t resist. Acquiescence invites further humiliation. Similarly, it is wishful thinking to hope that the authorities will simply hand back the powers they have seized over the course of the pandemic. Indeed, if our rights and freedoms exist only by the whim of those authorities, conditional on their decision to grant them, then they are not rights and freedoms at all, but only privileges. By its nature, freedom is not something one can beg for; the posture of begging already grants the power relations of subjugation. The victim can beg the bully to relent, and maybe he will — temporarily — satisfied that the relation of dominance has been affirmed. The victim is still not free of the bully.

That is why I feel impatient when someone speaks of “When the pandemic is over” or “When we are able to travel again” or “When we are able to have festivals again.” None of these things will happen by themselves. Compared to past pandemics, Covid is more a social-political phenomenon than it is an actual deadly disease. Yes, people are dying, but even assuming that everyone in the official numbers died “of” and not “with” Covid, casualties number one-third to one-ninth those of the 1918 flu; per-capita it is one-twelfth to one-thirty-sixth. As a sociopolitical phenomenon, there is no guaranteed end to it. Nature will not end it, at any rate; it will end only through the agreement of human beings that it has ended. This has become abundantly clear with the Omicron Variant. Political leaders, public health officials, and the media are whipping up fear and reinstituting policies that would have been unthinkable a few years ago for a disease that, at the present writing, has killed one person globally. So, we cannot speak of the pandemic ever being over unless we the people declare it to be over.

Of course, I could be wrong here. Perhaps Omicron is, as World Medical Association chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery has warned, as dangerous as Ebola. Regardless, the question remains: will we allow ourselves to be held forever hostage to the possibility of an epidemic disease? That possibility will never disappear.

Another thing I’ve been hearing a lot of recently is that “Covid tyranny is bound to end soon, because people just aren’t going to stand for it much longer.” It would be more accurate to say, “Covid tyranny will continue until people no longer stand for it.” That brings up the question, “Am I standing for it?” Or am I waiting for other people to end it for me, so that I don’t have to? In other words, am I waiting for the rescuer, so that I needn’t take the risk of standing up to the bully?

If you do put up with it, waiting for others to resist instead, then you affirm a general principle of “waiting for others to do it.” Having affirmed that principle, the forlorn hope that others will resist rings hollow. Why should I believe others will do what I’m unwilling to do? That is why pronouncements about the inevitability of a return to normalcy, though they seem hopeful, carry an aura of delusion and despair.

In fact, there is no obvious limit to what people will put up with, just as there is no limit to what an abusive power will do to them.

H/T to Perry de Havilland for the link.

December 17, 2021

Scott Alexander on the risk of ancient plagues returning

Filed under: Environment, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The other day, Scott Alexander responded to a hair-on-fire New York Magazine piece of hysteria-mongering about climate change warming up arctic zones that may still harbour ancient plagues that can return:

I’m a little nervous talking about this, because I am not a microbiologist. But I haven’t seen the proper experts address this properly, so I’ll try, and if I’m wrong you guys can shout me down.

(Also, the real microbiologists are apparently “self-injecting [3.5 million year old bacteria] just out of curiosity” and we should probably stay away from them for now)

I think we probably don’t have to worry very much about ancient diseases from millions of years ago.

Animal diseases can’t trivially become contagious among humans. Sometimes an animal disease jumps from beast to man, like COVID or HIV, but these are rare and epochal events. Usually they happen when the disease is very common in some population of animals that lives very close to humans for a long time. It’s not “one guy digs up a reindeer and then boom”.

If a plague is so ancient that it’s from before humans evolved, it’s probably not that dangerous. In theory, it could be dangerous for whatever animal it originally evolved for — a rabbit plague infecting rabbits, or an elephant plague infecting elephants. And then maybe after many rabbits are infected, some human might eat an infected rabbit and get unlucky, and the plague might mutate to affect humans. But I don’t think this is any more likely than any of the zillion plagues that already infect rabbits jumping to humans, and nobody is worrying about those.

The story about anthrax is a distraction. The fact that someone got anthrax from a corpse frozen in permafrost is irrelevant; there is anthrax now, and you could get it from a perfectly fresh corpse or living animal if you wanted. It’s adapted to animals and it can’t spread from person to person. Just because you got an irrelevant-to-humans modern animal disease when you dug up a modern animal, doesn’t mean you’re going to get a dangerous-to-humans disease from an ancient animals.

But I’m more concerned about recent human plagues coming back.

Not bubonic plague; that one is another distraction. The reason we don’t get more Black Deaths isn’t because yersinia pestis died off or mellowed out. It’s because we have good sanitation and pest control.

And doctors whose knowledge of medicine doesn’t begin and end with “look like a creepy bird”

But the 1918 Spanish flu has, as far as I know, legitimately died out. Lots of people like saying that in a sense it’s still with us. This NEJM paper (with a celebrity author!) points out that it’s the ancestor of all existing flu strains. But most of these flu strains are less infectious than it was. This didn’t make sense to me the first, second, or third time I asked about it: why would a flu evolve into an inferior flu? Sure, it might evolve into a less deadly flu because it’s perfectly happy being more infectious but less deadly. But I think the Spanish flu was also especially infectious; so why would it evolve away from that?

December 14, 2021

The Omicron variant of the Wuhan Coronavirus

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

Jim Treacher gets to the essential question about the dreaded and fast-spreading Omicron variant that the media somehow always forgets to ask:

We’ve seen a lot of headlines about the Omicron variant, which is the latest thing we’re all supposed to panic about. That’s how it works: You must be driven into a perpetual state of hysteria. You must never be allowed a moment to stop and catch your breath and think about what’s happening, because you might fall into badthink. The latest name for that is Omicron.

Omicron! OMG!! Run around like a headless chicken!!!

But here’s a question that none of our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press are asking, because they have no incentive to ask: How many people have died of Omicron?

Like, in the entire world. It doesn’t need to be a precise number. A rough estimate is fine. You can round up to the nearest 10.

Anybody? Hello?

I’m not sure how trustworthy Snopes is, but they say the number so far is … zero.

Zip.

Zilch.

Goose egg.

1 – 1.

None.

So please excuse me if I don’t freak the hell out every time somebody gets Omicron. Every story about it lists the number of cases but glosses over minor little details. Like what happens to the people who get it.

Do they get sick?

If so, how sick do they get?

If not, what’s the problem?

The media is just selling fear, as usual. Yes, COVID-19 is real, and a lot of people have died. No, nobody is dying from this Omicron variant. That’s good news, which is why the “news” isn’t interested.

Of course, on the weekend British PM Boris Johnson announced the death of someone in Britain who had contracted the Omicron variant … but it’s not clear if the person’s death was a direct result of that infection. So, we know at least one person has died with the Omicron variant, but we don’t know if it was from it.

December 11, 2021

QotD: In praise of getting stinkin’ drunk

Filed under: Health, History, Humour, Middle East, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A lot of this has come to mind because I’ve been reading an interesting new book — Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland. Using history, science, myth and popular culture, Slingerland defends getting drunk. Drinking has always played a role in “enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.” There is archaeological evidence that brewing precedes baking.

Slingerland admits the problem of problem drinking. Yet he convincingly argues that the downside of booze has been addressed at length over the last 30 or 40 years. It’s time, he observes, for some pushback against the “puritanical discomfort with pleasure lurking in the background of scholarly discourse.” Slingerland decries “our current age of neo-prohibition and general queasiness about risk,” and exports “the simple joy of feeling good.”

Slingerland, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia in Canada, then goes even further, positing that by causing humans “to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal … intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups.”

That is to say, without Budweiser and red wine, civilization might not have been possible. For our ancestors, intoxication was “a robust and elegant response to the challenges of getting a selfish, suspicious, narrowly goal-oriented primate to loosen up and connect with strangers.” Brewing vats and drinking vessels were found at a 12,000-year-old site in Turkey. When humans began to sow crops and domesticate livestock, it allowed us to get over distrust and work in larger numbers, giving rise to towns and then cities. Slingerland: “It is no accident that, in the brutal competition of cultural groups from which civilizations emerged, it is the drinkers, smokers and trippers who emerged triumphant.”

Mark Judge, “Drunk: The Vital Pleasure of Getting Hammered”, SpliceToday, 2021-09-01.

December 10, 2021

QotD: The media and the replication crisis

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

Here is the iron law of medical — in fact all scientific — studies in the modern world: most do not replicate. This has always been true of studies that supposedly find some link between doing [thing we enjoy] and cancer. This of course does not stop the media from running with initial study results based on 37 study participants as “fact”. The same is true for studies of new drugs and treatments. Most don’t pan out or are not nearly as efficacious as early studies might indicate. We have seen that over and over during COVID.

Warren Meyer, “A Couple of Thoughts on Medical Studies Given Recent Experience”, Coyote Blog, 2021-08-31.

December 8, 2021

Pandemic authoritarianism in the EU will be the death of Europe’s liberal traditions

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Greece, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says we’re watching the “death of Europe” driven by the authoritarian instincts of government and EU leaders in thrall of public health officials:

Europe is on a precipice. It has marched, blindly, towards something very much resembling tyranny. Austria will shortly criminalise those who refuse the Covid vaccine. Germany looks set to follow. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is wondering out loud if every member state should do likewise and make offenders of those who reject this form of medication. In Italy you are deprived of your livelihood rather than your liberty if you say no to vaccination: the unvaxxed are not permitted to work. Anywhere. In Greece, everyone over the age of 60 must pay the government 100 euros for every month they remain unvaxxed. As if the Greek government, in cahoots with its masters in Brussels, had not immiserated Greek pensioners enough already.

Police in Rotterdam opened fire on people protesting against Covid restrictions. Three were seriously injured. Austrian cops have wielded batons and shields against the thousands who took to the streets of Vienna to say no to mandatory vaxxing. In Brussels, the black, bureaucratic heart of the EU project, water cannons and tear gas were unleashed upon citizens agitating against vaccine passes. The irony is almost too much: in the European quarter of Brussels, the very part of Europe in which the modern European sensibility was forged by politicians, experts and technocrats, ordinary people make a blow for freedom and the forces of this supposedly liberal new continent beat them down. Rarely has modern Europe’s bluster about “human rights” and “respect” been so savagely exposed.

What is happening in Europe right now is nothing short of terrifying. We are not merely witnessing another round of Covid restrictions. This isn’t just the introduction of another set of emergency measures that some people believe are necessary to stave off the latest Covid wave and the Omicron threat lurking on the horizon. No, we are living through a chilling overhaul of the entire relationship between the state and the individual, with the state empowered to such an extraordinary degree that it can now instruct its citizens on what to inject into their bodies, and the individual so politically emaciated, so denuded of rights, that he no longer even enjoys sovereignty over himself, over that tiny part of the world that is his own body and mind. We are witnessing the violent death of European liberalism and the birth pangs of a new and deeply authoritarian era.

Many seem not to recognise how serious a development mandatory vaccination is. Even those of us who are pro-vaccination, who have been happily vaxxed against Covid-19, should look with nothing less than horror upon the proposal that it should be an offence not to be vaccinated; that a citizen should be fined thousands upon thousands of euros if he refuses this treatment. One of the ideas being discussed in Austria ahead of its mandatory vax law that will be introduced in February is that citizens who refuse vaccination will be summoned to a local court. If they ignore the summons twice they will face a fine of 3,600 euros. If they continue ignoring the state’s demand that they receive medical treatment that they do not want, they’ll be fined 7,200 euros. These are life-ruining fines. There is no talk – yet – of imprisoning people who reject the vaccine, but the Austrian state is making it crystal clear that it will happily wield its power to propel the unvaxxed into destitution.

[…]

This spells the end of freedom as we know it. Bodily autonomy is the foundation stone of self-government, and self-government is the thing that gives freedom meaning. If we do not enjoy sovereignty over our minds and our flesh, then we are not free in any meaningful way. And it won’t just be the minority of people who feel forced to receive the vaccine whose freedom will suffer under this new regime of state power over people’s bloodstreams and muscles and flesh – everyone’s freedom will. The state diktat determining that only those who receive a certain form of medical treatment will get to enjoy freedom will make freedom itself contingent upon doing what the state wants you to. Even the vaxxed will not be truly free people in this world. Rather, we will be the beneficiaries of state favour, the enjoyers of small privileges, in return for our agreeing to receive an injection. We will have a license from on high to go about our daily lives. And we will know that that license could swiftly be revoked if we refuse medical treatment in the future. The redefinition of “freedom”, the making of liberty contingent upon submission to medicine, will throttle the rights of all of us – vaxxed and unvaxxed alike.

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