Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2020

ESR on the Wuhan coronavirus

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

He’s backing away from his — to me unfathomable — earlier belief in the accuracy of official Chinese government statistics:

My willingness to believe the official line didn’t stem from any credulity about what the Chinese government would do if it believed the truth wouldn’t serve. As Communists they are lying evil scum pretty much by definition, and denial would have been politically attractive for as long as they thought they could nip the pandemic in the bud. I thought their incentives had flipped and they would now be honest as a way of assisting their own countermeasures and seeking international help.

My first clue that I was wrong about that came from a friend who is plugged into the diaspora Chinese community. According to him, there is terrifying video being sent from Chinese clans to the overseas branches they planted in the West to prepare a soft landing in case they have to bail out of China. Video of streets littered with corpses. And of living victims exhibiting symptoms like St. Vitus’s Dance (aka Sydenham’s chorea), which means the virus is attacking central nervous systems.

My second clue was the Tencent leak. […] the takeaway is that there is now reason to believe that as of Feb 1st the actual coronavirus toll looked like this: confirmed cases 154023, suspected cases 79808, cured 269, deaths 24589.

Compare that with the Johns Hopkins tracker numbers for today, a week later: Confirmed cases 31207, cured 1733, deaths 638. Allowing for the Tencent leak being roughly one doubling period earlier, the official statistics have been lowballing the confirmed case number by a factor of about 8 and the deaths by a factor of about 80. And then inflating cures by a factor of about 12.

Even given what I’d heard about the video, I might have remained skeptical about the leak numbers if someone (don’t remember who or where) hadn’t pointed out that the ratio between reported cases and deaths has been suspiciously constant in the official Chinese statistics. In uncooked statistics one would expect more noise in that ratio, if only because of reporting problems.

So my present judgment, subject to change on further evidence, is that the Tencent-leak numbers are the PRC’s actual statistics. And that has a lot of grim implications.

January 30, 2020

QotD: Nutrition and aging from the middle ages to the 20th century

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

Those of us who didn’t grow up in the first world (second and a half at best!) know d*mn well how people lived in the 20th century, with nominal indoor plumbing, but without a lot of changes of clothing, washers and dryers, heated houses, etc. (The trains from the mountains, where it was colder, in winter, smelled like a mix of VERY unwashed bodies and wood smoke. You never forget that smell.) The particular etc. I have in mind in this case is the lack of refrigeration.

Look Portugal is fertile enough that a careful planner can feed a family on less than an acre of land (particularly the area I come from, apparently one of the oldest inhabited in Europe and whose name in Indo European translated as wet and fertile valley.) I’m sure the food available to us in the 20th century when you could buy improved seeds, etc. was way better than the one available to people in the middle ages.

But … yeah, no. We didn’t eat like people do now. Not even close. For one, meat was fairly scarce. We mostly ate fish (thanks to the coasts!) and vegetables. Oh, and we were relatively lucky. A lot of people got almost no protein. The most common lunch among the people was the “isca” that is a bit of fried flour which might or might not have a couple of shreds of codfish in it. The very poor ate a lot of vegetable soup.

And again this was in the 20th century. In winter vegetables more or less vanished and the only fruit available were the wrinkled, flour-like apples.

Christmas treats were dried fruit, not cookies. It tells you all you need to know. (Yes, it was healthy too except for the scarce protein for most people, but no one said the way we eat is particularly healthy.)

I’m not complaining, but I know that we ate massively better than my parents did in the mid 20th century. And they ate better than their parents. So, kindly, do not tell me some serf on a medieval estate got his choice of however many flavors of ice-cream.

Sure the very rich ate well, if sometimes oddly. But the average person, not so much.

And as for living as long? Yeah, no.

I still remember vividly — as do many our age — when 60 was old, 70 VERY old.

Yes, I’m concerned for my parents in their late eighties. And that’s, as my dad puts it “after 80, that’s old”. But it would surprise no one is they lived another 10 years. Because a lot of people do now. And now one makes a big deal of people who turn 100. (Even though 114 seems to be, a little inexplicably, our hard drop-off limit.)

And besides we KNOW. Shakespeare at 58 — two years older than I’m now — was “very old.”

So kindly take your “people lived about as long,” fold it all in corners and put it where the sun don’t shine, even if people in the arctic in winter will be a little puzzled by it.

Sarah Hoyt, “What if I Told You?”, According to Hoyt, 2019-11-05.

January 21, 2020

The United States Goes Dry – Alcohol Prohibition I THE GREAT WAR

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Law, Liberty, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 20 Jan 2020

In January 1920, after one year of preparation, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution went into effect. From now on alcohol prohibition was the law.

» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
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» SOURCES
Ehmer, K. and Hindermann, B. (2015). The School of Sophisticated Drinking. New York: Greystone Books.
Miron and Zwiebel, “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition”. In the American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 2, pp. 242-247, (May 1991).
Darrow, Clarence, and John Haynes Holmes. Debate On Prohibition. Haldeman-Julius Co., 1924.
Iorizzo, Luciano J. Al Capone. Greenwood Press, 2003.
Nemtsov, Aleksandr. A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia. Stockholm, 2011.
Sullivan, Edward D. Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime. New York: The Vangaurd Press, 1929.
United States Government, “Codification of Internal Revenue Laws, … Published Pursuant to Section 1203(c) Revenue Act of 1926”.
18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ou…
United States Department of Agriculture. “Crop Production Historical Track Records, 2018”. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publication…
Kamieński, Łukasz: “Drugs”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-03-07
Blocker, Jack S Jr. “Did prohibition really work? Alcohol prohibition as a public health innovation.” American Journal of Public Health vol. 96,2 (2006): 233-43.

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January 20, 2020

A Drag Queen speaks out against Drag Queen Story Hour for kids

Filed under: Books, Education, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Libby Emmons reports on a rare bird indeed — a Drag Queen who doesn’t think it’s appropriate to have other Drag Queens visit schools and libraries to read to pre-teen kids:

Drag Queen Kitty Demure has taken to Twitter to speak out against the sexualization of children by woke people co-opting drag culture and rebranding it as an educational tool.

“I have absolutely no idea why you would want [drag queens] to influence your child. Would you want a stripper or porn star to influence your child?”

Demure notes that just as you wouldn’t take your kids out to see porn stars or strippers read stories while in full dress and makeup, you shouldn’t take them to see drag. There’s an effort to introduce kids earlier and earlier to adult sexuality. The idea is that this will help kids be more open-minded and understanding about the difference. What it really does is normalize deviant adult behaviour in children’s minds and override their own instincts. Giving children access to sexual content makes them think this kind of thing is for them, it opens doors that should stay closed until a child is of age.

Demure says here what all of us know: drag culture is adult entertainment. The look is sexualized. The names are sexualized. In fact, the entire concept of drag is a send-up of beauty queen culture. Beauty queen culture is sexualized as well, and while that is sometimes subsumed beneath the surface, it’s obviously fully part of it. That’s what drag plays on. Drag can be lots of fun, but it’s grown-up fun, not for kids.

January 18, 2020

The innovative 1720s

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

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes says the real Roaring Twenties were back in the eighteenth century:

Last week I called the 1720s an era of schemes. 1720 was the year of the South Sea Company’s crash, as well as the collapse of John Law’s Mississippi Company in France. But the decade saw some oft-neglected innovations too. As I never tire of saying, Britain’s extraordinary acceleration of innovation was about all industries, not just the famous ones of cotton, coal, iron, and steam — a point that the 1720s demonstrate perfectly.

For a start, it was the decade in which smallpox began to be systematically eradicated through inoculation. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, having observed the procedure in the Ottoman Empire, had her daughter inoculated in London following an outbreak in 1721. The same epidemic prompted the trialling of inoculation in New England, and the reports of these successes provided the statistical evidence for it to be more widely spread. Soon, through Lady Montagu’s aristocratic connections, even the royal children were being inoculated. Inoculation was still dangerous — it was decades before non-deadly cowpox was discovered to also confer immunity to smallpox — but the 1720s marked the beginning of the end for one of humanity’s greatest killers.

[…]

Most famous, however, was the search for longitude. When at sea, it was relatively easy to tell how far north or south you were, but not how far east or west. The implications for navigation were immense. William Whiston, a protégé of Newton, was in 1714 instrumental in lobbying for the creation of a substantial government prize for a solution, and spent much of the following decades trying to win it. His earliest proposal, along with the mathematician Humphrey Ditton, was for ships anchored at fixed locations to essentially shoot fireworks at fixed intervals. By comparing the difference between seeing and hearing the flashes, you might calculate your longitude (it’s actually not that dissimilar to the principle that underlies GPS).

Marine chronometer “Copie No. 18″, Thomas Mudge, Jr., Robert Pennington, Richard Pendleton, et al, London, 1795 – Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, Dresden.
Photo by Daderot via Wikimedia Commons.

But unlike with the medical advances, the poets were having none of it. As one of them rather crudely put it:

    The longitude miss’d on
    By wicked Will Whiston;
    And not better hit on
    By good master Ditton.
    So Ditton and Whiston
    May both be bepist on;
    And Whiston and Ditton
    May both be beshit on.

Whiston and the other longitude-searchers also investigated using the earth’s magnetic variation — he produced perhaps the first map with isogonic lines, indicating where compass needles dipped — as well as solar eclipses. And as longitude could be found on land by looking at the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons, he tried to develop telescopes so that they could observe such events on the unsteady sea.

Nonetheless, the solution came from one of George Graham’s friends, the clockmaker John Harrison. Starting in the 1720s, Harrison developed a timekeeping device — the marine chronometer — that would keep its accuracy despite the rocking and rolling and atmospheric changes from being at sea. By comparing your local time with the time at Greenwich shown on the chronometer, you could calculate your longitude. (Though by the time his device came into use in the 1770s, another method had been discovered that involved observing the moon).

And of particular interest to woodworkers who also have historical interests:

While scientific minds sought the longitude, consumer items were also being transformed. In the 1720s, a ship’s carpenter to Jamaica, Robert Gillow, was among the first to import mahogany to Britain, creating a tradition of furniture-making in Lancaster that even the fashion-conscious French would come to regard jealously.

January 7, 2020

What Made The American Civil War So Deadly? | Animated History

Filed under: Health, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Armchair Historian
Published 20 Jul 2018

Check out EmperorTigerStar’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j1sJ…

What Made The American Civil War So Deadly?

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January 6, 2020

Gerontophobia – “the most acceptable, widespread prejudice in society today”

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

In Spiked, Ella Whelan discusses one form of prejudice that is not only common, it’s practically proselytizing for new members:

Have you found yourself grimacing at Zimmer frames on the bus? Do you revel in checking the latest census data to see the average age of the nation? Do you retweet sarky comments about “youthquakes” shaking out the old fuddy-duddies? If so, you might be suffering from gerontophobia – the fear and loathing of old people – which is the most acceptable, widespread prejudice in society today.

Ageism is the one “ism” that is given a free pass. Hating on granny is all the rage. Recently, former US president Barack Obama made headlines by talking about “old people … not getting out of the way”.

The 58-year-old is not the only older politician to turn against his age group. Since the Brexit vote, 76-year-old Vince Cable has been railing against older Leave voters. On a panel with me at the How the Light Gets In festival last year, he drew laughs from a Hampstead crowd for mocking Brexit as a “Zimmer-frame revolution”. The author Ian McEwan also denounced his fellow septuagenarians when he delightedly predicted that by 2019, “1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves” could swing public opinion towards remaining in the EU.

The phrase “OK Boomer” went viral last year after a young person posted a clip of herself reacting to a “baby boomer” complaining about “snowflakes” and overgrown teenagers. This derisory response of “OK Boomer”, used to shut down the so-called Baby Boomer generation, was also used by Netflix in one of its social-media posts. It was even used earnestly in the New Zealand parliament by Green politician Chlöe Swarbrick in response to an older colleague.

The instant popularity of the phrase signalled how normalised generational divides have become. There have always been tensions between younger and older generations, but never before has there been so much celebration of youngsters deriding their parents. Rather than rebelling against the old and changing the world, the OK Boomer phenomenon shows how little young people want to interact with older generations, instead preferring petulant put-downs.

Perhaps the most pronounced and sinister ageism came from the wave of interest in Extinction Rebellion (XR), Greta Thunberg and the climate-emergency panic. From Thunberg being named Time person of the year after blaming older generations for stealing “my dreams and my childhood” to XR Youth proclaiming that “adults need to be accountable to the young people”, climate activism isn’t very oldie friendly. Instead of asking questions about what political changes might be made to help the planet, and, more importantly, the people living on it, environmentalism has veered towards a cultish celebration of youth. Fawning adults have handed over all moral authority to schoolchildren.

Greta Thunberg at the EU Parliament, 16 April, 2019.
European Parliament photo via Wikimedia Commons.

January 2, 2020

The 2010s … the best decade (so far) in human history

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

Matt Ridley explains why, despite all the doom and gloom in the daily headlines, the last ten years have been the best by almost any measure:

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with “what about …” questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that “the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking” and “we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet”. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

This does not quite fit with what the Extinction Rebellion lot are telling us. But the next time you hear Sir David Attenborough say: “Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist”, ask him this: “But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?” For example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminium, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources consumed per drink.

As for Britain, our consumption of “stuff” probably peaked around the turn of the century — an achievement that has gone almost entirely unnoticed. But the evidence is there. In 2011 Chris Goodall, an investor in electric vehicles, published research showing that the UK was now using not just relatively less “stuff” every year, but absolutely less. Events have since vindicated his thesis. The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 12.5 tonnes to 8.5 tonnes. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.

H/T to Damian Penny for the link.

January 1, 2020

Dim views of polyamory

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

Claire Lehmann responded to a Tweet from @shamshi_adad on the topic of polyamory:

… which got some amusing responses:

December 31, 2019

A lump of coal minus a canary – December 30th – TimeGhost of Christmas Past – Day 7

Filed under: Britain, Health, History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published 30 Dec 2019

The last day of work of the year for many people is the harbinger of exciting new change. For British coal miners in 1986, it meant the redundancy of the canary in the coal mine.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Tom Maeden and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Tom Maeden
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
Howard Harper-Barnes – “A Sleigh Into Town”
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Johannes Bornlöf – “The Inspector 4”
Jo Wandrini – “Dawn of Civilization”

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 hours ago
So, the year is almost over… it’s a Monday, so many of you might be at work. How was 2019 and how do you hope that 2020 is going to be? For us at TimeGhost it has been a very exciting year indeed. WW2 grew both in scope and viewership, Between 2 Wars is almost completed and we welcomed close to 2,000 new recruits to the TimeGhost Army https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

And all of us, you guys included need to thank them for all the content we were able to bring to you in 2019. Because like nations depend on their defense forces to maintain their independence, we depend on the TimeGhost Army to keep fighting the good fight of education and entertainment. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We look forward to take all of this even further in 2020 as WW2 grows ever more complex, Between 2 Wats concludes, and we come out with new exciting series here on the TimeGhost channel.

December 21, 2019

Expanding the definition again: “terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Offensensitivity hits the eggheads:

Labeling super-smart people with terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech, and should be punishable as such, argues lecturer and Harley-Street psychotherapist Dr Sonja Falck.

Likewise wonk, smarty-pants, and know-it-all: these terms are “divisive and humiliating,” and the “last taboo,” the University of East London egghead said this week while promoting her new book about brainiacs. Such “anti-IQ” words set society’s Einsteins apart, she claimed, with the result that geeks end up “feeling like they’re a misfit and don’t belong.”

Calling someone a swot, whizkid, brainbox, smart-arse, or dweeb may seem “harmless banter,” but it is equivalent to hate speech, she reckons, and should be recognized as such in British law – with punishments including fines and imprisonment. “It is only with the benefit of hindsight and academic research that we realise how wrong we were,” she added.

That academic research includes her new book titled Extreme Intelligence, for which she interviewed 20 nerds for 90 minutes about when they realized they were so very clever.

She then embarked on a “contextual analysis of literature” and decided that calling someone a boffin was equivalent to the worst racial slurs. “The N-word was common parlance in the UK until at least the 1960s,” she said during her book launch, before noting that “other insulting slurs about age, disability, religion and gender identity remained in widespread use until relatively recently.”

Dr Falck does not have a chip on her shoulder, despite the fact that the whole idea behind the book stemmed from the fact that as a child she was offered a place at a school for gifted children but her mother turned it down because she feared it would result in her becoming socially difficult.

December 19, 2019

QotD: The “fitness club” scam

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

As any good cult leader knows, the real money in running a cult doesn’t come from the cultists themselves. It comes from the hangers-on who buy your products and vote for you. Think of it like the gym. Notice how all the gyms these days are called “fitness clubs?” It’s a brilliant marketing move, straight out of the UFO cult playbook. Gyms fitness clubs don’t make their money off the small hard core of people who work out every day. Rather, it’s the people who sign up — who join the club — but never actually go.

Here’s how you talk yourself into a gym fitness club membership: “I need to get in shape. So I’ll buy a club membership. That way, I can go whenever I want.” In Festinger’s taxonomy […] you’re at step 2: You’ve taken a significant action in line with your belief. Gyms fitness clubs add a further refinement of late-20th century marketing, in that they offer you a yuuuuge “discount” off the outrageously-high signup fee, but the underlying psychological process is the same.

And now you’re set up for the disconfirmations — that is, all those times you think about going to the gym, but don’t actually go. Objectively you’re wasting your money, but psychologically you’re committed to the idea of yourself as someone who does “fitness” — you’re in a fitness club, after all! And since everyone you know is doing the same thing — fully 75% of conversations one overhears at Starbucks are soccer moms griping about how they need to work out, but just can’t find the time — you’re in, all the way, […].

The “climate change” scam works the same way. When she’s on the campaign trail pimping the “Green New Deal,” Fauxcahontas Warren knows she doesn’t have to pitch it to the eco-freaks; they’d vote for her no matter what. She has to pitch it to the normies, fitness club-style. That’s where the “climate change” nomenclature really pays off. It’s shockingly easy to get people convinced of a lunatic belief. All you have to do is a) get ’em early, and b) overload them with “evidence.” You know the drill: These days, we’re lectured practically from birth that we must Do Something! for The Environment! … and the “evidence” for this, of course, is the ceaseless, dramatic variation in daily temperature the un-indoctrinated call “weather,” plus all the other dramatic variations in climate that didn’t happen. So long as you pitch it with complete self-righteousness, people with the critical thinking skills of five year olds will fall in line every time.

Then all you have to do is get people to take action … which the government, in all its wonderful helpfulness, has already done: Low-flow toilets, those stupid twisty “light” bulbs, toilet paper that either shreds on contact with skin or sandpapers your asshole off, plastic straw bans, mandatory recycling, you name it. And I’m sure y’all realize by now that the fact that none of this stuff actually works is a feature, not a bug. Since it’s the disconfirmations that get you. That’s the pitch to the normies — you obviously care about “the environment,” in the same way you care about “fitness.” Just as the “fitness club” owners will happily keep cashing your checks while you remain a diabetic lardass, so Fauxcahontas will keep cashing your checks while the weather stubbornly remains the weather …

Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.

December 16, 2019

QotD: The Great Pestilence of 1348

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

Long I have been curious about the Great Pestilence that trimmed the population of Britain and Europe by a third or more, in the fourteenth century. I make too much of it; the plague was a recurring event for centuries before and after. I notice from the tabloids that it is returning, through Africa this time. I know there will be pestilence to come, when we will all think it terribly important. It rivetted attention, I’m sure, in the autumn of 1348, and through the summer of 1349. And yet within a generation it is hardly mentioned.

England, below the Ribble and Tees, is special, thanks to the Domesday Book of the invading, tax-loving Normans, and their general propensity to good record-keeping. The towns and villages ennumerated in 1086 can be traced to the present day; nineteen in twenty are still there. Having figures to start, and through the parish books later, we can track an economic and demographic history with an accuracy possible in no other country. We can know, for instance, of the population boom through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which had slackened well before the “Black Death.” And with that boom, impressive advances in farming, technology, and building, as today. Nothing conduces to technical improvement, as a bit of crowding.

This proportion I cited — the nineteen-in-twenty (or more) — which I have from reading in economic history mostly years ago, fascinates my attention. We know large tracts were depopulated, we find the archaeological evidence easily enough. They were planting rye within the walls of Winchester, and many other towns. Everywhere, they had elbow-room again. Our deep ecologists would have been pleased — those who think life on this planet would be better had a few billion souls not been born. As Christianity, and environmentalism, are mortally opposed, and the fourteenth century was overwhelmingly Christian, I expect complaints of overpopulation were differently expressed at the time. Mostly it would have been moaning from younger brothers about the distribution of inherited land.

Always, there have been younger brothers. Always, there have been survivors. What delighted me was the speed with which all the vacant places were filled. As we’ve seen, too, after ghastly wars, demography abhors a vacuum.

David Warren, “Death the real illusion”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-11-04.

December 15, 2019

From “mascupathy” to “toxic masculinity”

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

Suzanne Venker on the well-aired notion that males are suffering from “toxic masculinity”, and must be “cured” by being more like females:

“End Toxic Masculinity” by labnusantara is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’ve always been fascinated at the ease with which specious ideas spread. One day you’re living your life, and unbeknownst to you, someone who holds a reasonable measure of power has an idea based on his or her “research.” That person tells someone else, and then that person tells someone else, and the next thing you know, this new idea has spread like wildfire and people everywhere who are clamoring for answers to complex problems jump on board and say, “Yes, that’s it! That must be it!” All of a sudden, you start reading and hearing about it in the news. An idea has been born. It is now a fact.

That’s how I imagine we arrived at the bogus concept known as “toxic masculinity,” which was apparently deemed “mascupathy” 10 years go by psychotherapist Randy Flood. Mascupathy, Flood and his colleagues decided, is the failure of a man to shed his traditional manly ways. At that point, he officially has a disease.

“We just believe,” writes Flood in Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing The Malaise of American Manhood, “that there is a disease process that goes on when we raise boys to cut off half of their humanity in order to pursue the pinnacle of masculinity.”

This is the conclusion some, such as Flood, have come to for why men and boys are struggling:

    Women are graduating from college at higher levels. the male suicide rate is four times that of women, men have a harder time moving out of their parents’ homes than women. There are so many statistics that are telling us that men are struggling. Ninety-eight percent of mass shooters are men, but when there is a shooting we don’t talk about men’s mental health.

Actually, many people have addressed men’s mental health. We simply didn’t arrive at the same conclusion. Men and boys aren’t suffering from an overdose of masculinity; they’re suffering from a dearth of masculinity.

How could it be the former when millions of boys come from fatherless homes and when most boys are products of public schools, where only 23% of teachers are male? Single motherhood has skyrocketed over the last five decades — a whopping 40% increase. Who do we suppose is encouraging boys to “pursue the pinnacle of masculinity”? Their mothers and their female teachers?

Hardly. In schools, girls have the upper hand while boys go along for the ride. Their interests and their innate aggression were stifled the moment we got rid of recess and told boys to sit still and read books centered on women and girls. At home, boys of single mothers are largely responsible for themselves, which is why so many get into trouble. To the extent that single mothers are home, they may be very good at mothering. But they can’t be a father.

December 9, 2019

Why do Mosquitoes Prefer some people to others? | James May’s Q&A | Head Squeeze

Filed under: Environment, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published 26 Apr 2013

James May imparts some very interesting facts on mosquitoes. So why do they prefer some people to others?
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Welcome to BBC Earth Lab! Here we answer all your curious questions about science in the world around you (and further afield too).

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