Quotulatiousness

October 8, 2018

The tyranny of testosterone, or why we shouldn’t lie to our kids

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

Sarah Hoyt, in the latest Libertarian Enterprise tries to talk to young women about the biological reality and how to avoid being fooled by Hollywood fantasy:

Myself and accomplice, neither of us fainting maidens, first went to the cabinet store, and found that cabinets we could barely move with much effort between the two of us were hefted around effortlessly by teenage employee who probably weighed all of 90 lbs and therefore less than either of us, and had arms like boiled spaghetti, but who had the blessings of testosterone making him much stronger than either of us.

I first ran into this with younger son, who at fourteen looked like a twig which I could have broken over my knee (he’d just grown two feet over the previous year, going from a foot shorter than I to a foot taller. This was also the year in which I was unreasonable and would turn around when he came in the room and say “shower, now” even though he’d already showered twice that day. I.e. to quote our old neighbor “that poor boy is being beaten with a stick made of testosterone. Mothers of boys will get it. At least mothers of boys who went through growth spurt from hell.) We went to the store to get cement to repair a crack in a garden path. The bags were 100 lbs. I tried to lift it and (partly because it was at foot-level and was an awkward floppy bulk) just couldn’t budge it.

Younger son gave the theatrical teenage sigh, reached past me, grabbed the bag and threw it into our shopping cart, leaving me open-mouthed in surprise.

So every time 90 lb girl beats a 300 lb trained fighter on TV remember that. And for the love of heaven explain to your daughters that it’s play fantasy. The daughter of old friends of ours has fallen for this hook line and sinker and was telling older son she could beat him. Older son actually has muscles (he was the one who helped me renovate two Victorians from the ground up and build two balconies. He also does all the sawing by hand.) He’s six one but projects taller. He also happens to be built like a brick ****house, as the men on my side of the family are. (As a little girl I keep insisting my cousins were wardrobes. If you think of the old fashioned wardrobe, seven feet tall and six feet wide, that’s the impression they projected.) That poor girl is five five and skinny for her height. She couldn’t even push older son back if he decided to stand still. She MIGHT be able to fend him off long enough to run away, if she fought like a cornered cat and gouged eyes and bit (I’ve done something like that in similar circumstances, but there’s a reason I’m never without a weapon.) but that’s about it.

Watching her brag to my least excitable, very patient son who just sighed and didn’t even bother contradicting her, I thought how lucky she was in her choice of male to annoy. But if she keeps it up, sooner or later her luck will run out.

We shouldn’t lie to the young, and all our fiction and most of our movies lie about what women can and can’t do, all in the name of “there is no difference between men and women.” (“Except men are defective women” is implied.)

September 20, 2018

QotD: Parenthood

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

What know I about 3 am feedings, Spongebob Squarepants, day care pickups or those special moments when one finds oneself on one’s knees, covered in vomit, as one’s darling child wails uncontrollably? I mean, it all sounds horrible, but I expect that it would be even worse to live it, fighting tears of exhaustion and a post-partum pouch.

[Incidentally, current parents should note that y’all are not doing a good job of selling this child-bearing thing to those of us who are as yet non-reproductive. You know, if you actually succeed in communicating all of the dreadfulness of your parental lives to us, as so many articles currently seem intent upon doing, your social security benefits are going to look pretty darn sad in thirty years or so. But I digress.]

Jane Galt, “Focus on the family”, Asymmetrical Information, 2005-02-18.

September 18, 2018

QotD Breastfeeding

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

I threw out the baby books that I had been given after the first week of breastfeeding. All those promises/warnings of “don’t be surprised if you experience multiple orgasms while nursing”. Hey, I was always up for multiple orgasms which was no doubt why I had three children in four years but the reality is only a dominatrix could think that the initial stages of breastfeedings could produce an orgasm. Even after the extreme pain vanished there was never the slightest chance of orgasm which leads me to speculate that other people have a much more bizarre sexual life than I could possibly imagine. And if the books were will filled with such utter rot about breastfeeding; I wasn’t willing to chance the rest.

Kate “The Last Amazon”, “When Biology is Destiny”, The Last Amazon, 2005-03-02

September 17, 2018

“Nazis on Drugs” – Wehrmacht & Meth – Wunderwaffe?

Filed under: Germany, Health, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Military History not Visualized
Published on 17 Aug 2018

There some over-blown claims out there that the “Blitzkriege” were mainly achieved due to the use of Meth (Pervitin) and that historians had ignored this issue. Is it true or false? In this video we take a look at Pervitin, the Wehrmacht, the early German victories aka “Blitzkriege” and various aspects. Was Pervitin a Wunderwaffe? Was the Wehrmacht on Meth? How long was it used? And some aspects.

September 5, 2018

Mind Your Business Ep. 1: Breaking the Mold

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

Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 4 Sep 2018

Join host Andrew Heaton as we profile the stories of interesting entrepreneurs from around the country for FEE’s newest series, Mind Your Business.

In this episode, we’ll meet Jeremy Umansky. He’s a chef with a true passion for unusual food and his unique brand of cuisine is making a big splash in the culinary world.

September 4, 2018

Debunking claims from The Technology of Orgasm

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

Alex Tabarrok linked to this paper [PDF] examining the claims that have long since become embedded in academia but appear to have no factual basis at all:

You know the story about the male Victorian physicians who unwittingly produced orgasms in their female clients by treating them for “hysteria” with newly-invented, labor-saving, mechanical vibrators? It’s little more than an urban legend albeit one transmitted through academic books and articles. Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, the authors of a shocking new paper, A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm, don’t quite use the word fraud but they come close.

    The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel Maines is one of the most widely cited works on the history of sex and technology. Maines argues that Victorian physicians routinely used electromechanical vibrators to stimulate female patients to orgasm as a treatment for hysteria. She claims that physicians did not perceive the practice as sexual because it did not involve vaginal penetration. The vibrator was, according to Maines, a labor-saving technology to replace the well-established medical practice of clitoral massage for hysteria. This argument has been repeated almost verbatim in dozens of scholarly works, popular books and articles, a Broadway play, and a feature-length film. Although a few scholars have challenged parts of the book, no one has contested her central argument in the peer-reviewed literature. In this article, we carefully assess the sources cited in the book. We found no evidence in these sources that physicians ever used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical treatment. The success of Technology of Orgasm serves as a cautionary tale for how easily falsehoods can become embedded in the humanities.

I was not surprised when I ran a quick search for the cover of the Maines book (embedded above) and the vast majority of images returned were NSFW.

August 31, 2018

QotD: Victim mentality

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

Does feeling like a victim make one behave more or less selfishly? Imagine that an individual feels wronged by an everyday event: An executive sees a colleague receive a promotion that she feels she deserved instead; an academic finds out that he is once more assigned to a tedious committee, whereas his colleagues seem miraculously spared; an author is about to send off a manuscript when a computer glitch erases weeks’ worth of work, and she is penalized for missing her deadline.

As these individuals contemplate their unfortunate lot, how motivated would they be to help others? One could imagine that individuals who have received the short end of the stick would be especially motivated to help others, to redress other wrongs, or to make themselves feel better with the warm glow that comes from doing good. In this article, we make the opposite prediction: We propose instead that feeling wronged gives people a sense of entitlement to obtain positive outcomes — and to avoid negative ones — that frees them from the usual requirements of social life. Whereas individuals typically contend with a strong norm of benevolence that encourages helping and curbs egoism, we propose that wronged individuals, because of their heightened sense of entitlement, feel relieved from this communal obligation and therefore exhibit more selfish intentions and behavior.

[…]

Our research has shown that people who have just been wronged or reminded of a time when they were wronged feel entitled to positive outcomes, leading them to behave selfishly. They no longer feel obligated to suffer for others and therefore pass up opportunities to be helpful. By contributing to our general understanding of the determinants of selfishness, this research points toward one possible impediment to people’s engagement in charitable behavior. Future research in this vein thus has the potential to identify novel methods to encourage altruism in people who feel wronged, thereby stemming the cycle of suffering-to-selfishness suggested by our research.

Emily M. Zitek, et. al., “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010-02.

August 30, 2018

Britain “forgets” to regulate e-cigarettes, youth smoking drops substantially

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

Last month, Matt Ridley sang the praises of the regulators who didn’t regulate:

A selection of e-cigarettes
Photo by Ecig Click via Wikimedia Commons.

Britain is the world leader in vaping. More people use ecigarettes in the UK than in any other European country. It’s more officially encouraged than in the United States and more socially acceptable than in Australia, where it’s still banned. There is a thriving sector here of vape manufacturers, retailers, exporters, even researchers; there are 1,700 independent vape shops on Britain’s streets. It’s an entrepreneurial phenomenon and a billion-pound industry.

The British vaping revolution dismays some people, who see it as a return to social acceptability for something that looks like smoking with unknown risks. Yet here, more than anywhere in the world, the government disagrees. Public Health England says that vaping is 95% safer than smoking and the vast majority of people who vape are smokers who are partly or wholly quitting cigarettes. The Royal College of Physicians agrees: “The public can be reassured that ecigarettes are much safer than smoking.”

Lots of doctors are now recommending vaping as a way of quitting smoking. It is because of vaping that Britain now has the second lowest percentage of people who smoke in the European Union. The youth smoking rate in the UK has fallen from 26% to 19% in only six years.

How did this happen here? It’s partly the fault of the advertising executive Rory Sutherland; he is the Walter Raleigh of this revolution. In 2010, he walked into an office in Admiralty Arch to see an old friend, David Halpern, head of David Cameron’s new “nudge unit”, formally known as the Behavioural Insights Team. Sutherland pulled out an electronic cigarette he had bought online, and inhaled. By then, several countries including Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia had already banned the sale of electronic cigarettes — usually at the behest of tobacco interests or public-health pressure groups. California had passed a bill banning them, though Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor, had vetoed it. It looked inevitable that Britain would follow suit.

“I was a very early convert,” Sutherland tells me now. “Partly because I was a longtime ex-smoker myself who found them much better than constant relapses; I was also interested in the placebo effect they offered by mimicking the act of smoking. But I was almost equally fascinated by the psychology of the people who instinctively wanted to ban them.”

Halpern took notice. He knew the theory of “harm reduction” — that it is more effective to give somebody the lesser of two evils than insist unrealistically on immediate abstinence. So he asked his nudge team to get digging. Over coffee at No 10, he was surprised to learn that even the anti-smoking group Ash was leaning in favour of ecigarettes. So when public-health nannies started calling for them to be banned, Halpern made sure the government resisted.

In his book Inside the Nudge Unit, Halpern wrote: “We looked hard at the evidence and made a call: we minuted the PM and urged that the UK should move against banning e-cigs. Indeed, we went further. We argued we should deliberately seek to make e-cigs widely available, and to use regulation not to ban them but to improve their quality and reliability.”

H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.

August 24, 2018

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

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

I hadn’t heard of ROGD syndrome before, but a recent Barbara Kay column explains the concerns about it:

I have met and spoken with such parents (of daughters with ROGD). They love them deeply. They are not transphobic in the least. But since none of these girls ever expressed any sign of discomfort with their natal sex before adolescence, the parents were resistant to uncritical affirmation. Gender crossover is a momentous life change, minimally involving permanent, sterilizing, off-label hormonal treatment. These parents quite properly expected a thorough exploration of possible underlying root causes that, attended to, might well mitigate against such life-altering treatment. They felt in their bones that the “wrong body” was no more their daughters’ primary problem than too much weight is the primary problem for anorexics.

A newly published study validates these parents’ concerns. “Rapid-onset gender dysphoria in adolescents and young adults: A study of parental reports,” by Lisa Littman, a researcher in the department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown University’s School of Public Health, is the first empirical academic descriptive exploration of “the psychosocial context of youth who have recently identified as transgender with a focus on vulnerabilities, co-morbidities, peer group interactions, and social media use.”

Littman notes that adolescent-onset of gender dysphoria is relatively new for natal females. Prior to 2012, little to no research had been done on it. Most available research on adolescents with gender dysphoria includes only those with onset during childhood and is not generalizable to the adolescent-onset genre. Before 2012, there were only two clinics (one in Canada and one in The Netherlands) with enough data amassed to provide empirical information on gender-dysphoric adolescents. Both institutions concluded that management is more complicated in these cases than with early-onset dysphoria, and that individuals with adolescent-onset were “more likely to have significant psychopathology.”

[…]

Almost invariably, these teenagers spend an inordinate amount of time on certain websites, notably Tumblr and Reddit. Here they can find advice on how to lie to clinicians: “Get a story ready in your head … keep the lie to a minimum” and “look up the DSM for the diagnostic criteria for transgender and make sure your story fits it.” Almost a third of the AYAs brought up the threat of suicide as a reason for transitioning; this is also something they are coached in. Some made up stories of childhood trans yearnings, presumably to impress gender therapists. One child actually edited her perfectly ordinary childhood diary to include material suggesting she had always been gender dysphoric.

Parents often felt betrayed by the unprofessional attitudes of clinicians they consulted: psychologists, pediatricians, gender therapists and endocrinologists. Many were resistant to exploring other sources of distress, or hostile to parental testimony regarding their children’s fabrications. One parent reported, “When we tried to give our son’s trans doctor a medical history of our son, she refused to accept it. She said the half-hour diagnosis in her office was sufficient … ” Another reported on her child’s therapist’s credulity: “I overheard my son boasting on the phone to his older brother that ‘the doc swallowed everything I said hook, line and sinker. Easiest thing I ever did.’ ”

August 23, 2018

Cultural Appropriation Tastes Damn Good: How Immigrants, Commerce, and Fusion Keep Food Delicious

Filed under: Americas, Business, Food, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published on 1 Aug 2018

Writer Gustavo Arellano talks about food slurs, the late Jonathan Gold, and why Donald Trump’s taco salad is a step in the right direction.
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Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

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The late Jonathan Gold wrote about food in Southern California with an intimacy that brought readers closer to the people that made it. The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic visited high-end brick-and-mortar restaurants as well as low-end strip malls and food trucks in search of good food wherever he found it. Gold died of pancreatic cancer last month, but he still influences writers like Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.

Arellano sat down with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie to talk about Gold’s legacy, political correctness in cuisine, and why Donald Trump’s love of taco salad gives him hope in the midst of all of the president’s anti-Mexican rhetoric. The interview took place at Burritos La Palma, named by Gold as home to one of the five best L.A. burritos.

August 20, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – Lies – Extra History

Filed under: Health, History, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 18 Aug 2018

Series writer Rob Rath is here to tell us about all the moving pieces and complex storylines he researched to write our Flu Pandemic episodes.

August 13, 2018

History of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Filed under: Health, History, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published on 23 Jan 2018

The History Guy remembers humanity’s deadliest flu outbreak, the influenza pandemic of 1918.

The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.

August 12, 2018

1918 Flu Pandemic – The Forgotten Plague – Extra History – #6

Filed under: Health, History, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 11 Aug 2018

Why did everyone forget about the flu pandemic so fast? Partly because its effects were intermingled with the death and depression of World War I, and partly because we chose to forget.

August 9, 2018

Scottish schools’ proposed gender initiative will encourage gender uncertainty in 5-year-olds

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

Joanna Williams explains why authority figures actively undermining one of the few certainties in a young child’s world is bound to cause much more harm to many children:

Education Scotland, regional NHS boards and the Scottish government jointly came up with this new gender initiative’s daft – sorry, draft – guidelines, which are set to come into effect from 2019. The plan is to tell children: ‘Your sex is what you are told by a doctor when you are born. Most people are told they are a male child (a boy) or a female child (a girl).’ But this ridiculous statement contradicts everything children will later learn in biology lessons. Babies are not ‘told’ they are a particular sex in some odd conversation between parents and midwives on the labour ward. The overwhelming majority of babies actually are male or female, boys or girls. Sex is not a lottery. It doesn’t depend on how the doctor happens to be feeling at a certain point in time. It is there in the child’s genitals and in their chromosomes. Telling children that sex is simply something that is arbitrarily announced by a doctor is a lie.

But propagating this lie and encouraging children to believe that sex is a random declaration allows teachers to go on to tell children: ‘Your gender is what you decide.’ In other words, children will be told to ignore the evidence they see before them every time they go to the toilet or get undressed. Ignore what the nasty doctor said. And ignore what family members have wickedly led them to believe. Not only does this undermine parents, it also heaps a lot of pressure on to the shoulders of five-year-olds. Most find it difficult enough to decide what to have for breakfast. Their brains are full of Minecraft, superheroes or Friendship Fairies. They worry about dinosaurs coming back to life and unicorns not being real. It is hard to see how telling children this age that one of the few things they know for certain isn’t certain after all can do anything other than cause distress.

But the problematising continues. ‘People might think they know your gender because of the clothes you wear or the things you like to do’, children will be told. But, of course, these people are wrong: ‘You are a unique person, you know who you are.’ This confuses two separate issues – gender stereotypes and actually being a boy or a girl. It also seriously underestimates children. The youngest children distinguish between boy stuff and girl stuff; they know whether they are a boy or a girl and which clothes and toys they are supposed to like. But while some children might police gender stereotypes with enthusiasm, others do not. They know, better than the Scottish government it seems, that you can play football and still be a girl or dress up as a princess and still be a boy. Even those keen to enforce gender conformity at age five may well rebel by the time they are 15. And so what if they don’t? If a boy enjoys being a boy and wants to grow up into a man, is that really so bad?

QotD: Gandhi the man

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

Gandhi rose early, usually at three-thirty, and before his first bowel movement (during which he received visitors, although possibly not Margaret Bourke-White) he spent two hours in meditation, listening to his “inner voice.” Now Gandhi was an extremely vocal individual, and in addition to spending an hour each day in vigorous walking, another hour spinning at his primitive spinning wheel, another hour at further prayers, another hour being massaged nude by teenage girls, and many hours deciding such things as affairs of state, he produced a quite unconscionable number of articles and speeches and wrote an average of sixty letters a day. All considered, it is not really surprising that his inner voice said different things to him at different times. Despising consistency and never checking his earlier statements, and yet inhumanly obstinate about his position at any given moment, Gandhi is thought by some Indians today (according to V.S. Naipaul) to have been so erratic and unpredictable that he may have delayed Indian independence for twenty-five years.

For Gandhi was an extremely difficult man to work with. He had no partners, only disciples. For members of his ashrams, he dictated every minute of their days, and not only every morsel of food they should eat but when they should eat it. Without ever having heard of a protein or a vitamin, he considered himself an expert on diet, as on most things, and was constantly experimenting. Once when he fell ill, he was found to have been living on a diet of ground-nut butter and lemon juice; British doctors called it malnutrition. And Gandhi had even greater confidence in his abilities as a “nature doctor,” prescribing obligatory cures for his ashramites, such as dried cow-dung powder and various concoctions containing cow dung (the cow, of course, being sacred to the Hindu). And to those he really loved he gave enemas — but again, alas, not to Margaret Bourke-White. Which is too bad, really. For admiring Candice Bergen’s work as I do, I would have been most interested in seeing how she would have experienced this beatitude. The scene might have lived in film history.

There are 400 biographies of Gandhi, and his writings run to 80 volumes, and since he lived to be seventy-nine, and rarely fell silent, there are, as I have indicated, quite a few inconsistencies. The authors of the present movie even acknowledge in a little-noticed opening title that they have made a film only true to Gandhi’s “spirit.” For my part, I do not intend to pick through Gandhi’s writings to make him look like Attila the Hun (although the thought is tempting), but to give a fair, weighted balance of his views, laying stress above all on his actions, and on what he told other men to do when the time for action had come.

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.

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