Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2023

Crime on Toronto’s public transit system is merely a symptom of a wider social problem

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

As posted the other day, Matt Gurney’s dispiriting experiences on an ordinary ride on the TTC are perhaps leading indicators of much wider issues in all of western society:

“Toronto subway new train” by BeyondDC is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Caveats abound. Toronto is, relatively speaking, still a safe city. The TTC moves many millions of people a week; a large percentage of whom are not being knifed, shot or burnt alive. And so on. We at The Line also suspect that whatever is happening in Toronto isn’t happening only in Toronto, but Toronto’s scale (and the huge scope of the TTC specifically) might be gathering in one place a series of incidents that would be reported as unconnected random crimes in any other city. A few muggings in Montreal or Winnipeg above the usual baseline for such crimes won’t fit the media’s love of patterns as much as a similar number of incidents on a streetcar or subway line.

Fair enough, duly noted, and all that jazz.

But what is happening out there?

Your Line editors have theories, and we’ve never hesitated to share them before: we think the pandemic has driven a portion of the population bonkers. We’d go further and say that we think it has left all of us, every last one, less stable, less patient, less calm and less empathetic. For the vast majority of us, this will manifest itself in many unpleasant but ultimately harmless ways. We’ll be more short-tempered. Less jovial at a party. Less patient with strangers, or even with loved ones. Maybe a bit more reclusive.

But what about the relatively small majority of us that were, pre-2020, already on the edge of deeper, more serious problems? What about those who were already experiencing mental-health issues, or living on the edge of real, grinding poverty?

It’s not like the overall societal situation has really improved, right? COVID-19 itself killed tens of thousands, and took a physical toll on many more, but we all suffered the stress and fear not just of the plague, but of the steps taken to mitigate it. (Lockdowns may have been necessary early in the pandemic, but they were never fun or easy, and that societal bill may be coming due.) Since COVID began to abate, rather than a chance to chill out, we’ve had convoys, a war, renewed plausible risk of nuclear war, and now a punishing period of inflation and interest-rate hikes that are putting many into real financial distress. We are coping with all of this while still processing our COVID-era stress and anxiety.

The timing isn’t great, is what we’re saying.

And on the other side of the coin, basically all our societal institutions that we’d turn to to cope with these issues — hospitals, social services, homeless shelters, police forces, private charities, even personal or family support networks — are fried. Just maxed out. We have financial, supply chain and, most critically, human-resource deficits everywhere. The people we have left on the job are exhausted and at their wits’ end.

This leaves us, on balance, less able to handle challenges than we were in 2020, due to literal exhaustion of both institutions and individuals. Meanwhile, against the backdrop of this erosion of our capacity, our challenges have all gotten worse!

It’s not hard to do the mental math on this, friends. It seems to us that in 2020, the policy of Canadian governments from coast to coast to coast, and at every level, was to basically keep a lid on problems like crime, homelessness, housing prices and shortages, mental health and health-care system dysfunction, and probably others we could add. One politician might put a bit more emphasis on some of these issues than others, in line with their partisan priors, but overall, the pre-2020 status quo in Canada was pretty good, and our political class, writ large, basically self-identified as guardians of that status quo, while maybe tinkering a bit at the margins (and declaring themselves progressive heroes for the trouble of the tinkering).

But then COVID-19 happens, and all our problems get worse. And all our ways of dealing with those problems get less effective. It doesn’t have to be by much. Just enough to bend all those flatlined (or maybe slightly improving) trendlines down. Instead of homelessness being kind of frozen in place in the big cities, it starts getting worse, bit at a time, month after month. The mental-health-care and homeless shelter systems that weren’t really doing a great job in 2020, but were more or less keeping big crises at a manageable level, started seeing a few more people fall through the cracks each month, month after month. Those people are just gone, baby, gone.

The health-care system that used to function well enough to keep people reasonably content, if not happy, locks up, and waitlists balloon, and soon we can’t even get kids needed surgeries on time.

The housing shortage goes insane, and prices somehow survive the pandemic basically untouched.

The court system locks up, meaning more and more violent criminals get bail and then re-offend, even killing cops when they should be behind bars.

None of these swings were dramatic. They were all just enough to set us on a course to this, a moment in time where the problems have had years to compound themselves and are now compounding each other.

Here’s the rub, folks. The Line doesn’t believe or accept that any of the problems we face today, alone or in combination, are automatically fatal. We can fix them all. But we need leaders, including both elected officials and bureaucrats, who fundamentally see themselves as problem fixers, and who understand right down deep in their bones that that is what their jobs are, and that they are no longer what they’ve been able to be for generations: hands-off middle managers of stable prosperity.

January 20, 2023

“… any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Government, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander wants to sign up — like so many of us — for a post-Davos world:

The whole World Economic Forum/Davos experience is one part Bond villain parody, one part clout seeking billionaires, one part megalomania, a heaping cup of greed, and a dash of rent seeking.

In 2023 things have reached the point where any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion. Amazing to see people who claim to be American conservatives or lovers of liberty attending in an non-ironic, non-protesting capacity.

This wannabee gaggle of quasi-oligarchs and autocrat throne sniffers represents everything that is wrong with the human desire for control, power, and to crush the individual for fun and profit.

They pretend to be the world government in waiting that no one asked for, no one wants, and trust me on this — no one wants to live under. Being unaccountable to the people is their ideal state.

If you don’t know what I am referring to above, shame on you. Google it yourself, but I couldn’t help but giggle when I read the title from this article by Gideon Rachman at The Financial Times; Geopolitics threatens to destroy the world Davos made.

Really? It is? Then by all means let’s have MOAR!

    …the 2023 WEF — the first to take place in its regular winter location since the pandemic began — could be seen as signalling a return to normalcy. However, China’s sudden abandonment of its zero-Covid policy has raised fears that a new wave of variants could emerge.

    And, even if a fresh pandemic phase is avoided, Covid has left its mark on the way governments and businesses think about globalisation. The assumption that goods and commodities can always be shipped easily around the world has been shattered.

Except for the mentally fragile few and those who leverage power through them, the world is over COVID like it is over the flu. The last three years has been a clarifying event bringing in to stark relief those autocracy worshipers and hypocrites who hold individual rights in contempt. It also helped us see the existential danger a free people can face when they put themselves at the mercy of governments who see a crisis opening a door for an easy grasp at additional powers they will never want to give back.

The past the Davos set desired failed the future that is our present, but that doesn’t give pause to any of them. The Davos view of the future where everyone (except for those at the top) lives in a pod, eats bugs, owns nothing but is “happy” is at best dystopian, at worst justifies at some point if they are not stopped, open global revolt against the ruling class with all the violence and blood that comes with it.

[…]

Simply unacceptable in democratic nations that the will of the people might promote change in political leadership. Next thing you know, they might want even more free speech and redress of grievances.

    Those world leaders who are present might do well to take the funicular up to the Schatzalp Hotel, which served as Mann’s model for the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain. The hotel’s view is the best in Davos — it may offer a chance for quiet reflection on how to prevent war and natural disaster from once again engulfing the global economy

Unspoofable.

Perhaps they should reflect on how they encouraged Russian aggression and European vulnerability to hydrocarbon blackmail? Should they take a moment to see how they look the other way as the PRC engages in wholesale oppression of their Muslim minority? Are they proud of their dividends derived from almost unimaginable levels of air and water pollution flowing out of PRC’s slave labor run factories?

Unlikely — they might miss out on the next party.

A post-Davos world?

How do we bring it here faster?

Christopher Snowden on our latest “Clown World” alcohol guidelines

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

At Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, Christopher Snowden pokes gigantic holes in the stated justification for the latest Canadian drink consumption recommendations (also mentioned in this post yesterday):

Canada is on the brink of making itself an international laughing stock by cutting its drinking guidelines from two drinks a day to two drinks a week. The previous guidelines were only set in 2011 so Canadian drinkers can be forgiven for being suspicious about this dramatic change. The evidence base has not significantly changed in the interim. The evidence for the health benefits of moderate drinking has continued to pile up.

The only thing that has really changed is that neo-temperance zealots like Tim Stockwell have tightened their grip on alcohol research. Stockwell and his “no safe level” pal Tim Naimi both live in Canada and are both authors of the report that has made the ludicrous new recommendations.

I have been saying for over a decade that the “public health” plan is to get the guidelines down to zero so they can start regulating alcohol like tobacco. The evidence does not support this fundamentally ideological campaign and so the evidence has been dropped in favour of fantasy modelling and cherry-picking.

[…]

A Canadian “standard drink” contains 13.45 grams of alcohol. Three standard drinks equals 40 grams. Four standard drinks equals 53 grams. The meta-analysis has no data on people who drink so little, so the claim that colon cancer risk increases at three or more standard drinks is not supported even by the authors’ own preferred source.

As for breast cancer, which can only affect half the population and is partly why most countries have different guidelines for men and women, the report cites this meta-analysis of 22 studies, 13 of which found no statistically significant association with drinking. It pooled the studies and reported a 10 per cent increase in risk for people drinking 10 grams of alcohol a day. As with the colon cancer study, this was the minimum quantity studied so it tells us nothing about Canadians who drink 3-5 standard drinks.

In terms of mortality, another meta-analysis found that light drinking was not positively associated with any form of cancer, including breast cancer, and was negatively associated with cancer in a couple of instances […]

As countless studies have shown, heart disease and stroke risk is substantially reduced among light and moderate drinkers. For example, a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies (which track people’s drinking habits and health status over a number of years and are the most reliable studies in observational epidemiology) found that drinkers were 25 per cent less likely to die from coronary heart disease than teetotallers. The evidence for strokes is similar.

This is main reason why life expectancy is longer for moderate drinkers and the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality is J-shaped.

The authors of the Canadian report essentially ignore all this evidence and instead focus on a cherry-picked meta-analysis written by Stockwell, Naimi and pals which massively adjusted the figures to arrive at their desired conclusion. This is inexcusable.

At The Line, Jen Gerson points out the utter absurdity of public health officials doing their best Carry Nation bar-smashing imitations while at the same time pushing for “harm reduction” policies for cocaine, heroin, and other illegal narcotics:

“Bayer Makes Heroin” by dog97209 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

“The guidance is based on the principle of autonomy in harm reduction and the fundamental idea behind it that people living in Canada have a right to know that all alcohol use comes with risk,” noted the CCSU and, hey, yeah!

I like to understand my risks so that I can make informed decisions.

But you know what else poses significant risk?

Lots of morphine and cocaine.

I think this is generally known. But God help you if you want to engage in a conversation about the risks society might be courting with safe supply or even harm-reduction strategies, and have fun being labelled a Conservative troglodyte who just wants suffering addicts to die in the street. You’re probably just a rich, callous asshole who opposes all of these evidence-based policies who blows second-hand smoke into the faces of your children while drinking your sixth beer of the night at the local pub. Just shut up and pick up those discarded needles in your yard, you monster.

I was picking on Health Canada previously, but they’re hardly the only ones who display a bizarre split-personality on these issues. Any story by or on the CBC on the matter of alcohol use now sounds like something straight out of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Yet just try to find critical reporting on safe consumption sites or safe supply policies. Almost all of it is uniformly glowing.

[…]

Obviously, I don’t think that our public-health officials are telling Canadians that heroin takes the edge off a hard day better than a glass of red or a pint of beer. But did we learn nothing over the course of the pandemic about the importance of consistent and clear public-health communications? The target audience for this is not those who have carefully studied harm reduction and substance use disorders. It’s people who just like to have a drink with dinner.

If our governments want to maintain any credibility, they can’t be uptight about how many glasses of pinot noir we drink, and then appear to be loosey goosey on heroin. It’s just impossible to take that kind of suck-and-blow at face value, but that’s exactly how this messaging will come across to people who aren’t closely engaged with this issue. “The government wants to give free hard drugs to junkies but thinks my cocktail is a problem?”

January 19, 2023

You must be protected from coworkers who threaten your health … by bringing in cake?

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

Christopher Snowden knows a slippery slope when the media pushes another nanny state health concern as serious as cake in the workplace:

    If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.

Who is this co-worker from hell? Who is this whining, snivelling infant demanding that the rest of the world forfeits their small pleasures because she has no self-control?

It is none other than the head of the Food Standards Agency, Susan Jebb, who is in The Times tomorrow comparing cakes to passive smoking.

The full quote reads:

    “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment”, she said. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Indeed they were, Susan, before people like you took that choice away to such an extent that even a pub that put up a sign saying “SMOKERS ONLY” on the door and employed no one but smokers would still forbidden from accommodating them.

I’ve made a few slippery slope arguments in my time — contrary to midwit opinion, they are often valid — but even I never imagined that a workplace smoking ban would evolve into a workplace cupcake ban. Talk about the thin end of the wedge!

    While saying the two issues were not identical, Jebb argued that passive smoking inflicted harm on others “and exactly the same is true of food”.

To inflict something on someone implies that it is done without their consent. In that sense — and leaving aside the question of whether wisps of secondhand smoke are actually harmful — passive smoking doesn’t inflict harm on a person who knowingly goes to a smoky pub. The same is obviously true of someone who offers you a cake. If they held you down and physically shoved it down your throat, that would be a different matter, but surely that is already illegal under some law or other?

Meanwhile, Canadian nanny state enablers are trying to do battlespace prep to get the government to mandate new warning labels to containers of alcoholic beverages and to significantly cut the already low maximum “recommended consumption”:

… a report on the new drinking guidance released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction says the warning labels could inform consumers about serious health risks including cancer, the number of standard drinks in a container and the benefits of limiting consumption to two drinks a week.

“Consuming more than two standard drinks per drinking occasion is associated with an increased risk of harms to self and others, including injuries and violence,” the report says.

The guidance is based on the findings of a panel of 23 experts who reviewed nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed studies as part of a two-year process that also considered feedback from 4,845 people during an online public consultation process in spring 2021.

The most recent available data show that alcohol causes nearly 7,000 cancer deaths each year in Canada, with most cases being breast or colon cancer, followed by cancers of the rectum, mouth and throat, liver, esophagus and larynx. Liver disease and most types of cardiovascular diseases are also linked to alcohol use.

The guidance updates Canada’s Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines set in 2011, when two drinks a day were considered low risk and it was believed that women could safely consume up to 10 drinks a week and men could have 15 drinks.

January 15, 2023

One last dance for Davos?

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the “walls closing in” but this time it isn’t “on Trump”, but it might be “on the World Economic Forum” and their enablers:

Klaus and his gang were in full egomaniacal flight last week in Davos. I wonder how secretly scared they were, swanning around in their $30,000 Loro Piana topcoats dreaming of what … a nice quiet prison? Their liability for this latest attempt to escape the whirlwind through forced pharmaceuticals and the construction of the Biomedical Security State, must be dawning on them. It was always a possibility, but they figured the populace — thanks to their equally witless behaviourists — were so dumb they’d consent to being permanently damaged and think it was the fault of the extreme right. And climate change.

[…]

In Australia, the more Covid shots you’ve had, the more Covid you get and the more you die. The unvaccinated sail by relatively unperturbed.

Did you know that Big Pharma takes between $8 to $10 Trillion out of the US economy every year? GDP is only $23 Trillion. That’s a lot of money to claw back by every injured person, every family who lost a wage earner, a mother, a treasured child. This is a profit center for the great unwashed unmatched in human history. A massive transfer of wealth from the .01% to us.

They are all liable: every executive, every celebrity, every film producer, every hospital chief, every newspaper publisher, every television station owner, every multinational media company, every medical center, every university, every employer, every politician who forced and bullied people. Their wealth is about to become ours.

QotD: The uncertain “certainties” of war in space

Filed under: Books, Military, Quotations, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The comments for that post were very active with suggestions for technological or strategic situations which would or would not make orbit-to-land operations (read: planetary invasions) unnecessary or obsolete, which were all quite interesting.

What I found most striking though was a relative confidence in how space battles would be waged in general, which I’ve seen both a little bit here in the comments and frequently more broadly in the hard-sci-fi community. The assumptions run very roughly that, without some form of magic-tech (like shields), space battles would be fought at extreme range, with devastating hyper-accurate weapons against which there could be no real defense, leading to relatively “thin-skinned” spacecraft. Evasion is typically dismissed as a possibility and with it smaller craft (like fighters) with potentially more favorable thrust-to-mass ratios. It’s actually handy for encapsulating this view of space combat that The Expanse essentially reproduces this model.

And, to be clear, I am not suggesting that this vision of future combat is wrong in any particular way. It may be right! But I find the relative confidence with which this model is often offered as more than a little bit misleading. The problem isn’t the model; it’s the false certainty with which it gets presented.

[…]

Coming back around to spaceships: if multiple national navies stocked with dozens of experts with decades of experience and training aren’t fully confident they know what a naval war in 2035 will look like, I find myself with sincere doubts that science fiction writers who are at best amateur engineers and military theorists have a good sense of what warfare in 2350 (much less the Grim Darkness of the Future Where There is Only War) will look like. This isn’t to trash on any given science fiction property mind you. At best, what someone right now can do is essentially game out, flow-chart style, probable fighting systems based on plausible technological systems, understanding that even small changes can radically change the picture. For just one example, consider the question “at what range can one space warship resolve an accurate target solution against another with the stealth systems and electronics warfare available?” Different answers to that question, predicated on different sensor, weapons and electronics warfare capabilities produce wildly different combat systems.

(As an aside: I am sure someone is already dashing down in the comments preparing to write “there is no stealth in space“. To a degree, that is true – the kind of Star Trek-esque cloaking device of complete invisibility is impossible in space, because a ship’s waste heat has to go somewhere and that is going to make the craft detectable. But detectable and detected are not the same: the sky is big, there are lots of sources of electromagnetic radiation in it. There are as yet undiscovered large asteroids in the solar-system; the idea of a ship designed to radiate waste heat away from enemies and pretend to be one more undocumented large rock (or escape notice entirely, since an enemy may not be able to track everything in the sky) long enough to escape detection or close to ideal range doesn’t seem outlandish to me. Likewise, once detected, the idea of a ship using something like chaff to introduce just enough noise into an opponent’s targeting system so that they can’t determine velocity and heading with enough precision to put a hit on target at 100,000 miles away doesn’t seem insane either. Or none of that might work, leading to extreme-range exchanges. Again, the question is all about the interaction of detection, targeting and counter-measure technology, which we can’t really predict at all.)

And that uncertainty attaches to almost every sort of technological interaction. Sensors and targeting against electronics warfare and stealth, but also missiles and projectiles against point-defense and CIWS, or any kind of weapon against armor (there is often an assumption, for instance, that armor is entirely useless against nuclear strikes, which is not the case) and on and on. Layered on top of that is what future technologies will even prove practical – if heat dissipation problems for lasers or capacitor limitations on railguns be solved problems, for instance. If we can’t quite be sure how known technologies will interact in an environment (our own planet’s seas) that we are intimately familiar with, we should be careful expressing confidence about how future technology will work in space. Consequently, while a science fiction setting can certainly generate a plausible model of future space combat, I think the certainty with which those models and their assumptions are sometimes presented is misplaced.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: August 14th, 2020”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-14.

January 14, 2023

Of course the Egyptologists would deny it – Great Pyramid conspiracy theories

Filed under: Africa, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander looks at one of the persistent Great Pyramid conspiracy theories:

The Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) in Giza, Egypt, the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Photo by Nian Aldin Thune via Wikimedia Commons.

Some conspiracy theories center on finding anomalies in a narrative. For example, Oswald couldn’t have shot Kennedy, because the bullet came from the wrong direction. Or: the Egyptians couldn’t have built the Pyramids, because they required XYZ advanced technology. I like these because they feel straightforwardly about styles of processing evidence

(Remember, I use the word “evidence” in a broad sense that includes bad evidence. By saying that some conspiracy theory has “evidence”, I’m not suggesting it’s justifiable, just that someone somewhere has asserted that they believe it for some particular reason. For example, someone might say they believe in alien abductions because of eyewitnesses who claim to have been abducted; I’ll be calling the eyewitnesses “evidence” without meaning to assert it is any good.)

Consider the pseudohistory claims I discuss in The Pyramid And The Garden. The Great Pyramid’s latitude in standard notation equals, to within seven decimal places, the speed of light in tens of millions of meters per second. In a strict sense, this is a one-in-a-million chance, although the post tries to explain why this might be less impressive than it sounds.

So the evidence in favor of “aliens who knew the speed of light built the Great Pyramid” is that it would explain this otherwise baffling coincidence. The evidence against is everything else we know about history, archaeology, architecture, and common sense. Why would superadvanced aliens have visited Earth, created one primitive stone structure, and left without doing anything else? Why does the Great Pyramid look so much like other Egyptian pyramids, and fit into our narrative of Egyptian history so well? What about marks on the Great Pyramid suggesting it was made with primitive tools? Et cetera.

You can sort of see how someone with weird evidence-processing styles might get this wrong. The fact on the right is compact, simple, and quantifiable (the two numbers match to about six digits, so it’s a one-in-a-million coincidence). The facts on the left are vague and holistic.

The mainstream archaeologist has to explain away the evidence on the right. Maybe “has to” is a strong phrase — they can just say “that’s weird, but the common sense evidence is so great that I choose to dismiss it as coincidence”. But it’s an awkward hole in their theory. I talk about how you might go about explaining it away here.

But the conspiracy theorist has to explain away the evidence on the left. This is a harder task. Sometimes you can just stretch a lot of things to make it work — I’ve seen people argue that the supposed mentions in Egyptian texts are less definitive than imagined. But one very strong explanation would be “archaeologists are so invested in protecting the mainstream narrative that they cover up all the evidence that would prove me right”, ie a conspiracy. This neatly sweeps aside a lot of the problem.

QotD: What would it be like to always believe you’re right?

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

I think I’m starting to see it now. The weird disconnect between [progressives’] personal behavior and their collective behavior has always baffled me. We all had great fun with that journalist who called Barack Obama “sort of God”, but it was so funny, in part, because all Leftists present themselves as “sort of God” — I have never been so certain in my judgment, so secure in my righteousness, about anything as the typical Leftist is about everything. I’m pretty comfortable saying “I don’t know” when I really don’t know …

This is not because I’m such a humble guy. If anything, it’s the reverse — it’s because “being right” is such an important part of my self-concept that if I’m going to put my reputation on the line, I need to really BE right. And as we all know, 99% of being right comes from acknowledging all the times you were wrong. Admitting I don’t know when I really don’t know is painless. Admitting I was wrong when I thought I was right stings, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as my own inner self-knowledge of being wrong. That really stings, and so I’d rather take the pain of admitting I was wrong any number of times to the much greater pain of actually being wrong on something fundamental.

To the Leftist, none of that computes. They’re always right. About everything. They literally can’t be wrong. And if what they were right about yesterday is 180 degrees from what they’re right about today, well, that’s just Reality reconfiguring itself. The Earth is stable; it’s the sun and stars that are moving around it. And if that leaves you with deferents and epicycles and retrograde motion and all that, well, so be it. See above, re: the physical impossibility of them being wrong …

… at least as individuals. But get them in a group, and all of a sudden a whole roomful of sort-of-Gods turns into a persecuted minority, even when everyone in the group agrees with everyone else. Even when the group, collectively, controls everything. If you think it’s bad in politics, y’all, go to a faculty meeting at the nearest college. To hear them tell it, the wolf is always at the door. Donald Trump and his jackbooted stormtroopers really are lurking behind every bush, waiting to jump out and pour bleach on them while yelling “This is MAGA country, bitch!” They’re afraid of their own students, because they just know those kids are out there thinking Unapproved Thoughts, and somehow those Unapproved Thoughts can physically harm them … even though they control the grade book, and can — and of course do — punish Unapproved Thought with extreme prejudice.

[…]

If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the answer might be as simple as: They can’t abstract, so they’re literally physically incapable of Reality-testing their heuristics. The Experts have given them the TORAH (that’s The One Right Answer, H8rz!), and since they can only evaluate individual cases as they come into view — they can only micro-focus on each parked car in the lot, to return to the earlier metaphor — they can’t draw the really-obvious-to-non-autists conclusion that they are not a persecuted minority, but in fact control everything.

Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.

January 13, 2023

“Forced teaming”

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

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay provides us with our new term of the week:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

I learned a new term this week: “Forced teaming“. It describes what happens when a group of people — say, gay men and lesbian women — are forbidden from breaking ranks with some larger constituency, such as (in this case) the LGBT movement.

The example I’m discussing here is one that Quillette writers have been exploring for several years now. As author Allan Stratton noted last year, the central ideological fixation of many transgender-rights activists is the negation of biological sex as a meaningful marker of human identity. The true source of sexual attraction, they will insist, isn’t the reality of sexed male and female bodies; but rather an abstract gender spirit lodged within our souls, which somehow broadcasts itself in a way that prospective romantic partners are able to sense and interpret. As Stratton notes, this mythology isn’t just flagrantly wrong. It’s also homophobic to such extent that it denies the sexually defined nature of gay identity. Moreover, this homophobic element can’t be excised from gender ideology without fatally undercutting the (typically unspoken) mission of many biologically male trans activists, since giving up this claim “would be to admit that a lesbian isn’t going to be attracted to a male body, no matter how many times she is assured that the body in question belongs to someone who identifies as a woman.”

On Wednesday, Montreal-based Substacker Eliza Mondegreen provided an eyewitness report that helps illustrate what the “forced teaming” of ideologically non-compliant LGB men and women now looks like. The Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism (CHRLP) at McGill University had planned to host a January 9th talk about the tension between sex and gender identity, to be delivered by Robert Wintemute, a professor of Human Rights Law at King’s College London. According to the event page, he was to discuss “whether or not the law should be changed to make it easier for a transgender individual to change their legal sex from their birth sex, and about exceptional situations, such as women-only spaces and sports, in which the individual’s birth sex should take priority over their gender identity, regardless of their legal sex.”

Though Wintemute seems the furthest thing from a bigot (or even a conservative), he is loathed by many trans activists due to what they see as an act of unforgivable apostasy. In 2006, Wintemute co-authored something called the “Yogyakarta Principles“, an international manifesto demanding that unfettered self-identification be recognized as the one and only means of distinguishing men from women. But he later recanted, declaring that “a key factor in my change of opinion has been listening to women”. Needless to say, many of Wintemute’s former activist friends then began treating him like Lord Voldemort. And Montreal’s Gazette newspaper, echoing such denunciations, darkly warned readers that the visiting human-rights professor had “ties to LGB Alliance, an advocacy group described by various LGBTQ2+ organizations and activists as a transphobic hate group”. (In truth, the LGB Alliance is simply a British charity that, as its name suggests, signal-boosts lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals who believe that the interests of L, G, and B are now sometimes at cross-purposes with T.)

British feminists, who by now are well used to progressive mobs shutting down speaking events in the name of trans solidarity, may guess the rough contours of what happened next. A self-described “transfeminist sapphic activist” named Celeste Trianon compared Wintemute to a “cannibal”, and announced a protest, suggesting that followers should “bring out the pitchforks”.

The greatest conspiracy in ancient art

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, Greece, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Reel
Published 7 Sep 2022

Do we have a bias against colour in classical art?

Matt Wilson explores prejudices that have built up over centuries – leading to what has been labelled ‘chromophobia’, the subject of an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Wilson finds out why we don’t value colour, questioning a centuries-old misunderstanding. As Chroma’s curator Sarah Lepinski tells him: “It’s important that audiences come to understand the way they see ancient Greek and Roman sculpture isn’t the way it was first created.”
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January 7, 2023

Propaganda to support the narrative

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

Chris Bray is definitely possibly most likely not kidding around here:

We can’t award the gold medal yet, because the contestants are still showing up at the starting line.

Elsewhere at Substack, A Midwestern Doctor recently highlighted some of the most egregious vaccine propaganda that appeared during the current forever-pandemic, in a piece that has the potential to safely and effectively vaccinate your mind against bullshit:

But now we need to add a new example from the current week, because Peter Hotez exists and keeps publishing. His latest piece of analysis calmly warns that the new variant is maybe possibly or not the Most Worstest Evuh, in a huge rhetorical first that tries to overcome Covid exhaustion with louder hysteria:

tHiS oNe iS diFFeReNtttttttttt&#*$*$%^#&@, Version 957,1095,397.02. Your next winter of severe illness and death will be everything you were promised in your first winter of severe illness and death, we swear. If you died last time, JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU DIE AGAIN THIS TIME, FOOL.

How can you spot propaganda? Like this, from a paragraph near the bottom of Hotez’s latest:

    Unfortunately, XBB.1.5 is still too new to have clinical data in-hand to show exactly what vaccines mean in terms of warding it off. At the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, we, like other groups, are scrambling to look at our own vaccine’s effects on XBB.1.5. However, the writing is on the wall here — boosting is your best bet at protecting yourself and your loved ones.

First sentence: We have no data about this. Third sentence: The thing we have no data for is your best bet to do the thing that we have no data for.

Every claim Hotez makes is a version of this maybe-definitely-uncertainty-certainty soup, telling you he doesn’t know while telling you that he knows

December 31, 2022

If Hell is “other people”, then the deepest level of Hell must be “other high school students”

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

Tom Knighton on a recent post from FEE about the awfulness of the school experience for a lot of students:

“Leaside High School entrance Toronto Ontario Canada” by ammiiirrrr is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .

I was never a big fan of school. While I always thought education was important, I never liked school itself.

Part of that was because I was the kid most likely to get picked on, but even when that wasn’t happening, I still didn’t like it. Learning boring stuff while not getting to delve deeper into interesting topics just made it a chore to be endured.

Couple with the fact that cruelty is such a part of the “educational experience”, it’s no wonder that I didn’t like it.

Hell, even when everyone was being chill, the fact that I didn’t fit in did a number on me, including a time when I genuinely wanted to end my own life. I don’t talk about that kind of thing much, but it was a stark reality of that time.

[…]

Granted, I always chalked my difficulties at the time — and I’m much better now, I should note — with a number of things besides the structure of school itself. Mostly the fact that it was a small school, I was the weird kid, and while I had friends, I never felt like I really fit in.

Yet I can’t rule out that the structured nature of education at the time contributed greatly to the problem.

As noted in the original piece, the patterns for suicidal behavior in teens don’t match up with adults. That tells us that there’s something at play other than just the weather, the temperature, or whatever.

Regardless, it raises serious questions about our schools as an environment. Teachers and administrators would tell you that they strive to create a nurturing environment for students of all ages. I’m pretty sure most of them mean it, too.

Yet these studies suggest that they’re failing. Miserably.

But let’s not ignore the possibility that much of this may well be because, frankly, kids can be little sociopaths. They’re mean. They’re cruel. Someone will seek out those they perceive as weak and victimize them while others get to enjoy the show, even while being glad they’re not the target.

Then there’s the fact that it’s impossible to hide from any deficiencies you might have, including social deficiencies just as good fortune with finding romantic partners of your preferred sex and that’s going to play a role as well.

December 21, 2022

QotD: The Spoon Theory

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

The blogger Christine Miserandino, who has lupus, coined the term spoonie in a 2003 post called “The Spoon Theory”. A spoon, Miserandino explained, equates to a certain amount of energy. The Healthy have unlimited spoons. The Sick — the spoonies — only have a few. They might use one spoon to shower, two to get groceries, and four to go to work. They have to be strategic about how they spend their spoons.

Since then, the theory has ballooned into an illness kingdom filled with micro-celebrities offering discounts on supplements and tinctures; podcasts on dating as a spoonie; spoonie clubs on college campuses; a weekly magazine; and online stores with spoonie merch. In the past few years, spoonie-ism has dovetailed with the #MeToo movement and the ascendance of identity politics. The result is a worldview that is highly skeptical of so-called male-dominated power structures, and that insists on trusting the lived experience of individuals — especially those from groups that have historically been disbelieved. So what do spoonies need from you? “To believe; Be understanding; Be patient; To educate yourself; Show compassion; Don’t question”.

Spoonie illnesses include, but are not limited to, serious diseases like multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease, but also harder-to-diagnose ones that manifest differently in different people: polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), endometriosis, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, dysautonomia, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, gastroparesis, and fibromyalgia. Another spoonie illness is myalgic encephalomyelitis — or chronic fatigue syndrome — which has now been linked to long Covid.

These illnesses are often “invisible”: To most people, spoonies may appear healthy and able-bodied, especially when they’re young. Many of the conditions affect women more frequently, and most are chronic illnesses that can be managed, but not cured. A diagnosis often lasts for a lifetime, while symptoms come, go, morph, and multiply.

Spoonies find community in having complicated conditions that are often hard to identify and difficult to treat. That’s why a lot of spoonies include a zebra emoji in their social media bios, borrowed from the old doctor’s adage: “When you hear hoof beats, look for horses, not zebras.” In other words: assume your patient has a more common illness, rather than a rare one.

The spoonie mantra might be: I am the zebra.

Although the term is relatively new, the spoonies fit into a long history of women having amorphous, hard-to-diagnose conditions. Since ancient times, women who were diagnosed under the general category of “hysteria” were prescribed treatments such as sex, hanging upside down, and the placement of leeches on the abdomen. Then, in the 19th century, the new field of psychoanalysis concluded that women with hysteria were not suffering from physical disorders, but mental ones. Whether the women’s inexplicable pain was a function of their brains or of their bodies — or of each other (see mass hysteria), or of the devil (see Salem, 1692) — has always been a fraught subject.

And then the internet arrived and created a 21st century version of Freud’s Vienna, in which everyone was always on the couch, perpetually the patient.

Suzy Weiss, “Hurts So Good”, Common Sense, 2022-09-06.

December 20, 2022

Coming of the Sea Peoples: Part 2 – The Old and New Chronology of the Bronze Age

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 2 May 2021

The Late Bronze Age is a story of collapse. From New Kingdom Egypt to Hittite Anatolia, from the Assyrian Empire to Babylonia and Mycenaean Greece, the coming of the Sea Peoples is a terror that threatens the end of all things. Between April and July 2021, Sean Gabb explored this collapse with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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December 18, 2022

Euthanasia, Canadian-style

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan considers the alarming growth of euthanasia in Canada:

Front view of Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I mention all this as critical background for debating policies around euthanasia or “assisted dying” (a phrase that feels morbidly destined to become “death-care”.) Oregon pioneered the practice in the US with the Death with Dignity Act in 1997. At the heart of its requirements is a diagnosis of six months to live. Following Oregon’s framework, nine other states and DC now have laws for assisted suicide. Public support for euthanasia has remained strong — 72 percent in the latest Gallup.

But this balance could easily get destabilized in the demographic traffic-jam to come. In 2016, euthanasia came to Canada — but it’s gone much, much further than the US. The Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) program is now booming and raising all kinds of red flags: there were “10,000 deaths by euthanasia last year, an increase of about a third from the previous year”. (That’s five times the rate of Oregon, which actually saw a drop in deaths last year.) To help bump yourself off in Canada, under the initial guidelines, there had to be “unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be relieved under conditions that patients consider acceptable”, and death had to be “reasonably foreseeable” — not a strict timeline as in Oregon. The law was later amended to allow for assisted suicide even if you are not terminally ill.

More safeguards are now being stripped away:

    Gone is the “reasonably foreseeable” death requirement, thus clearing the path of eligibility for disabled individuals who otherwise might have a lifetime to live. Gone, too, is the ten-day waiting requirement and the obligation to provide information on palliative-care options to all applicants. … [O]nly one [independent witness] is necessary now. Unlike in other countries where euthanasia is lawful, Canada does not even require an independent review of the applicant’s request for death to make sure coercion was not involved.

This is less a slippery slope than a full-on, well-polished ice-rink. Several disturbing cases have cropped up — of muddled individuals signing papers they really shouldn’t have with no close relatives consulted; others who simply could not afford the costs of survival with a challenging disease, or housing, and so chose death; people with severe illness being subtly encouraged to die in order to save money:

    In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told [patient Roger Foley] that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day”. Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care. “Roger, this is not my show”, the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”

It’s hard to imagine a greater power-dynamic than that of a hospital doctor and a patient with a degenerative brain disorder. For any doctor to initiate a discussion of costs and euthanasia in this context should, in my view, be a firing offense.

Then this: in March, a Canadian will be able to request assistance in dying solely for mental health reasons. And the law will also be available to minors under the age of 18. Where to begin? How do we know that the request for suicide isn’t a function of the mental illness? And when the number of assisted suicides jumps by a third in one year, as it just did in Canada, it’s obviously not a hypothetical matter.

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