Quotulatiousness

July 11, 2023

Western legacy media is suffering from an overdose of Professionally Correct speech

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman can’t help but notice this phenomenon:

When the question of alcohol and health came up on “Doctor Radio”, a satellite radio program, all of the participants agreed that evidence showed that consuming a moderate level of alcohol, something like one beer a day for a woman, one or two for a man, or the equivalent in other drinks, was good for you, better than no alcohol at all. All of them also agreed that they would not advise their patients to do so.

Why? They mentioned that there were problems with prescribing something that depended on the exact dosage and that a higher level of consumption was likely to lead to auto accidents, but distinguishing one beer a day from three is not a difficult problem even for those who are not doctors. My conjecture was that the real explanation was the reluctance of doctors to appear to be on the wrong side. Everyone knew that alcohol was a bad thing, a source of auto accidents and various medical (and other) problems. By giving a truthful account of the medical evidence the doctors on the program might appear to be pro-alcohol; all good people are anti. Hence they had to qualify their conclusion as a purely theoretical matter, not something that would affect what they told their patients. Think of it as a different version of PC — Professionally Correct speech.

A similar pattern exists for ice cream. Multiple independent studies have found evidence that consuming ice cream reduces the chance of getting diabetes — and found ways of explaining the evidence away. In several cases they have gone so far, in public statements, as to report that yogurt is protective against diabetes, other dairy products are not, when ice cream in their study showed as strong, in some studies a stronger, effect than yogurt.

Yogurt, as everyone knows, is a healthy food. Ice cream, as everyone knows, is bad for you.

From time to time I see a news story on some piece of scientific research that somewhat weakens the case for taking strong action against global warming. I believe that every time I have seen such a report it was accompanied by a quote from the researchers to the effect that global warming was a serious problem and their work should not be taken as a reason to be less worried about it. They almost certainly believed the first half of that, but their work was a reason to be less worried even if not to stop worrying.

Good people are on the side that believes that warming is happening, is anthropogenic, is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. Bad people deny one or more of those claims. If that is what all the people who matter to you, such as the fellow members of your profession, believe, and you are so unfortunate as to produce results that strengthen the bad people’s case, it is prudent to make it clear that you are still on the side of the angels. Just as, if you are so unfortunate as to be an honest doctor aware of the evidence in favor of alcohol, it is prudent to make it clear that you have not transferred your allegiance to demon rum.

The obesity crisis … fuelled by iatrogenic public health warnings about certain food groups

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

Here’s The Armchair General with another example of what he calls COGOs – Crisis of Government Origin:

So, after the decades-long crusade against saturated fats, we have a population that has been repeatedly told that fat will kill us. So, many people eschewed fats in favour of salt and sugar. Which, apparently, are also bad for us.

But without saturated fats, remember, people are not going to feel sated. So, what is likely to happen? Well, just what did happen — never feeling full, people feel hungry throughout the day so eat continually through the day: a behaviour known as “snacking” …

    Nutritionists believe many people are obese not because they binge on fatty main meals but because they indulge in constant grazing throughout the day without even realising it.

    This pattern, dubbed “auto-eating”, involves resorting to snacks and treats at the slightest indication of hunger.

Or, rather, people always feel hungry because they have been told to avoid saturated fats. And they snack on chocolate bars and biscuits and small things that provide a pleasant sugary boost.

Combine this with an increasingly sedentary population — both at home and at work — and other comforts (such as central heating which leads to fewer calories being expended on maintaining body temperature), and…

BOOM! You have an obesity problem.

And now — nearly seventy years after some arrogant doctors used some extremely dodgy studies to enhance their reputations, we now know that what we were told about the harms associated with saturated fats was all absolute bollocks.

And so, once again, we can demonstrate another Crisis of Government Origin (COGO), ably assisted by the arrogant fuckers of the medical profession.

Unfortunately, the government legislation is already in place, and it will take at least three years for the fuck-nuggets in politics to catch up — if they ever do. After all, they are going to have to undo decades of medical advice, government food advice, leaflets, bus adverts, nutritionist training, and social conditioning.

Just another reason why governments should stay the hell out of our private lives. Such up — and fuck off.

July 8, 2023

During the pandemic, governments across the world chose the worst way to respond

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

In City Journal, John Tierney explains why western governments’ almost universal grabbing of extraordinary powers was the worst possible way to handle the public health crisis of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.

Governments around the world seized unprecedented powers during the pandemic. The result was an unprecedented disaster, as recently demonstrated by two exhaustive analyses of the lockdowns’ impact in the United States and Europe. Both reports conclude that the lockdowns made little or no difference in the Covid death toll. But the lockdowns did lead to deaths from other causes during the pandemic, particularly among young and middle-aged people, and those fatalities will continue to mount in the future.

“Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times,” says Lars Jonung of Lund University in Sweden, a coauthor of one of the new reports. He and two fellow economists, Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University and Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, sifted through nearly 20,000 studies for their book, Did Lockdowns Work?, published in June by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in London. After combining results from the most rigorous studies analyzing fatality rates and the stringency of lockdowns in various states and nations, they estimate that the average lockdown in the United States and Europe during the spring of 2020 reduced Covid mortality by just 3.2 percent. That translates to some 4,000 avoided deaths in the United States — a negligible result compared with the toll from the ordinary flu, which annually kills nearly 40,000 Americans.

Even that small effect may be an overestimate, to judge from the other report, published in February by the Paragon Health Institute. The authors, all former economic advisers to the White House, are Joel Zinberg and Brian Blaise of the institute, Eric Sun of Stanford, and Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago. They analyzed the rates of Covid mortality and of overall excess mortality (the number of deaths above normal from all causes) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They adjusted for the relative vulnerability of each state’s population by factoring in the age distribution (older people were more vulnerable) and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (which increased the risk from Covid). Then they compared the mortality rates over the first two years of the pandemic with the stringency of each state’s policies (as measured on a widely used Oxford University index that tracked business and school closures, stay-at-home requirements, mandates for masks and vaccines, and other restrictions).

The researchers found no statistically significant effect from the restrictions. The mortality rates in states with stringent policies were not significantly different from those in less restrictive states. Two of the largest states, California and Florida, fared the same — their mortality rates both stood at the national average — despite California’s lengthy lockdowns and Florida’s early reopening. New York, with a mortality rate worse than average despite ranking first in the nation in the stringency of its policies, fared the same as the least restrictive state, South Dakota.

July 6, 2023

“Too many complaints? That’s racism. Too few complaints? Well, that’s racism, too.”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Amy Eileen Hamm reports on how the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) acted on its concern that not enough complaints against their members were being lodged by First Nations people:

As regular readers of Quillette will know, many Canadian institutions have fervently adopted the cause of “decolonization” — a vaguely defined term that one university describes as the dismantling of “assumed Euro-western disciplinary constructs and traditions”. This can mean anything from abolishing musical scales (which “perpetuate and solidify the hegemony of [the] Euro-American repertoire”); to reimagining our scientific understanding of sunlight, so as to correct “the reproduction of colonialism” that has infected “physics and higher physics education”; to assailing the gender binary through a “decolonizing act of resistance”.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, institutional efforts at “decolonization” generally translate into affirmative-action hiring programs and policies to mandate symbolic (generally empty) gestures such as land acknowledgements. They’ve also created a cash cow for “specialist” administrators and third-party consultants in what is now known as the “equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization” sector. The premise is that decolonization is so difficult and complex that it can only be overseen by said (highly paid) professionals.

My own professional sector, nursing, provides a useful case study. In British Columbia, where I live and work, nurses are licenced by the British Columbia College of Nurses & Midwives (BCCNM), whose offices are located “on unceded Coast Salish territory, represented today by the Musquea?m, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.” In other words, Vancouver.

If a patient feels that he or she has experienced “incompetent, unethical, or impaired nursing or midwifery practice”, he or she can complain to the BCCNM through its complaints portal. It’s not a complicated process. You send an email describing what the nurse allegedly did, when the incident occurred, and whether there were any witnesses. If you’ve already complained to someone else, you’re supposed to note that as well, along with your suggestions for resolving the complaint. That’s it.

But apparently, this process is just too onerous — and even dangerous — for Indigenous people. And so the BCCNM has paid C$97,000 to a self-described “boutique business process management firm” called Novatone, which has duly produced a lengthy report on how to “make the BCCNM complaints process safer for Indigenous Peoples.” The same title — mantra might be a better word — appears at the top of all 50 pages: Looking Back to Look Forward: How Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing must inform the BCCNM feedback process and reflect the principles of cultural safety, cultural humility, and anti-racism.

(For the benefit of those outside Canada, the mystical-sounding phrase, “ways of knowing”, along with its “being” and “doing” variants, has now entered the official idiom as a means to signify the unfalsifiable shaman-like intuitions that supposedly guide the consciousness of Indigenous people throughout every facet of their existence — including, apparently, complaining about the care they receive from nurses.)

Juxtaposed images from the Novatone report, Looking Back to Look Forward, contrast the “colonial, western, linear” nature of existing BCCNM processes with a “wholistic, relational, culturally informed process” that would supposedly align with Indigenous values.

July 5, 2023

The “orgasm gap”, yet another problematic front in the war of the sexes

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

Janice Fiamengo discusses the faked orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally and its role in the ongoing arguments over the “orgasm gap”:

An iconic moment in modern movie history is the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989), when Sally stuns an incredulous Harry with her rendition of a convincing orgasm. Her bravura performance causes shocked silence in the restaurant until one woman, sitting nearby, says admiringly (or enviously), “I’ll have what she’s having.”

The scene and the woman’s amused reaction told of a simple reality with wit and without judgement: some portion of women — perhaps many — are convincing fakers, and even a sexually experienced man will find it hard to be sure.

Many women in the movie audience laughed in recognition, and many men likely scratched their heads, wondering why anyone would need to fake sexual enjoyment. Some men may have remembered times when they faked it too. In the romantic-comedic world of the movie, the scene symbolized one of the differences between the average woman and the average man that only a generous and committed love could bridge.

A few years ago, When Harry Met Sally turned 30 years old, and its anniversary prompted a number of reflection pieces, some turning a harsh feminist lens on the film’s gender politics. In “‘I’ll have what she’s having’: How that scene from When Harry Met Sally changed the way we talk about sex,” Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post found in the fake climax scene a salutary revelation of male sexual arrogance. For Bonos, Harry is a typical macho man, someone who doesn’t care about a woman’s pleasure. The fact that the whole point of his conversation with Sally had been his confidence that he was giving women pleasure simply confirmed his emetic masculinity.

According to Bonos, the fact that some women fake orgasm supposedly reveals that women’s sexual pleasure is “not prioritized” in heterosexual relationships, and Sally’s performance gave sobering evidence of a gendered pleasure gap. It was implicitly the man’s fault that his partner felt the need to lie to him about her sexual satisfaction, and his desire for her to orgasm proved his typically male ego. Bonos’s analysis was an egregious violation of the spirit of the movie but was eminently faithful to the feminist perspective. The politics of grievance had come a long way in three decades.

Right on cue, studies in human psycho-sexuality are now taking up the same theme, alleging a culturally imposed “orgasm gap” between men and women in which men outpace women in the frequency with which they report orgasm during sexual intercourse (86% for men vs. 62% for women, according to one national survey).

Remembering how consistently feminist pundits have expressed outrage at male incels‘ (alleged) sense of “entitlement” to sex, I cannot help but find it ironic how unapologetically researchers assume a female entitlement to orgasm. Apparently, the whole society is to be concerned if women fail to climax every time they have sex, while no one has compassion for young men who face a lifetime of sexlessness. The prime exhibit is “Orgasm Equality: Scientific Findings and Societal Implications“, a paper published in 2020 by three female researchers at the University of Florida. The paper not only surveys the literature on the subject but also makes recommendations for “a world of orgasm equality”.

Why Engineers Can’t Control Rivers

Filed under: Environment, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 4 Apr 2023

💧 The unintended consequences of trying to change the course of rivers
(more…)

July 3, 2023

Nuclear power

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk, by Thomas Wellock. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

Let me put Wellock and Rasmussen aside for a moment, and try out a metaphor. The process of Probabilistic Risk Assessment is akin to asking a retailer to answer the question “What would happen if we let a flaming cat loose into your furniture store?”

If the retailer took the notion seriously, she might systematically examine each piece of furniture and engineer placement to minimize possible damage. She might search everyone entering the building for cats, and train the staff in emergency cat herding protocols. Perhaps every once in a while she would hold a drill, where a non-flaming cat was covered with ink and let loose in the store, so the furniture store staff could see what path it took, and how many minutes were required to fish it out from under the beds.

“This seems silly — I mean, what are the odds that someone would ignite a cat?”, you ask. Well, here is the story of the Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Plant fire, in March 1975, which occurred slightly more than a year after the Rasmussen Report was released, as later conveyed by the anti-nuclear group Friends of the Earth.

    Just below the plant’s control room, two electricians were trying to seal air leaks in the cable spreading room, where the electrical cables that control the two reactors are separated and routed through different tunnels to the reactor buildings. They were using strips of spongy foam rubber to seal the leaks. They were also using candles to determine whether or not the leaks had been successfully plugged — by observing how the flame was affected by escaping air.

    The electrical engineer put the candle too close to the foam rubber, and it burst into flame.

The fire, of course, began to spread out of control. Among the problems encountered during the thirty minutes between ignition and plant shutdown:

  1. The engineers spent 15 minutes trying to put the fire out themselves, rather than sound the alarm per protocol;
  2. When the engineers decided to call in the alarm, no one could remember the correct telephone number;
  3. Electricians had covered the CO2 fire suppression triggers with metal plates, blocking access; and
  4. Despite the fact that “control board indicating lights were randomly glowing brightly, dimming, and going out; numerous alarms occurring; and smoke coming from beneath panel 9-3, which is the control panel for the emergency core cooling system (ECCS)”, operators tried the equivalent of unplugging the control panel and rebooting it to see if that fixed things. For ten minutes.

This was exactly the sort of Rube Goldberg cascade predicted by Rasmussen’s team. Applied to nuclear power plants, the mathematics of Probabilistic Risk Assessment ultimately showed that “nuclear events” were much more likely to occur than previously believed. But accidents also started small, and with proper planning there were ample opportunities to interrupt the cascade. The computer model of the MIT engineers seemed, in principle, to be an excellent fit to reality.

As a reminder, there are over 20,000 parts in a utility-scale plant. The path to nuclear safety was, to the early nuclear bureaucracy, quite simple: Analyze, inspect, and model the relationship of every single one of them.

June 28, 2023

“I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ For Dummies“

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

Jane Psmith reviews The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell, despite it not being quite what she was hoping it would be:

This is not the book I wanted to read.

The book I wanted to read was a detailed guide to bootstrapping your way to industrial civilization (or at least antibiotics) if you should happen to be dumped back in, say, the late Bronze Age.1 After all, there are plenty of technologies that didn’t make it big for centuries or millennia after their material preconditions were met, and with our 20/20 hindsight we could skip a lot of the dead ends that accompanied real-world technological progress.

Off the top of my head, for example, there’s no reason you couldn’t do double-entry bookkeeping with Arabic numerals as soon as you have something to write on, and it would probably have been useful at any point in history — just not useful enough that anyone got really motivated to invent it. Or, here, another one: the wheelbarrow is just two simple machines stuck together, is substantially more efficient than carrying things yourself, and yet somehow didn’t make it to Europe until the twelfth or thirteenth century AD. Or switching to women’s work, I’ve always taken comfort in the fact that with my arcane knowledge of purling I could revolutionize any medieval market.2 And while the full Green Revolution package depends on tremendous quantities of fertilizer to fuel the grains’ high yields, you could get some way along that path with just knowledge of plant genetics, painstaking record-keeping, and a lot of hand pollination. In fact, with a couple latifundia at your disposal in 100 BC, you could probably do it faster than Norman Borlaug did. But speaking of fertilizer, the Italian peninsula is full of niter deposits, and while your revolutio viridis is running through those you could be figuring out whether it’s faster to spin up a chemical industry to the point you could do the Haber-Bosch process at scale or to get to the Peruvian guano islands. (After about thirty seconds of consideration my money’s on Peru, though it’s a shame we’re trying to do this with the Romans since they were never a notably nautical bunch and 100 BC was a low point even for them; you’ll have to wipe out the Mediterranean pirates early and find Greek or Egyptian shipwrights.) And another question: can you go straight from the Antikythera mechanism to the Jacquard machine, and if not what do you need in between? Inquiring minds want to know.3

But I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing “Lest Darkness Fall” For Dummies, which I’ll admit is a pretty niche pitch, because The Knowledge is doing something almost as cool.4 Like my imaginary book, it employs a familiar fictional conceit to explain how practical things work. Instead of time travel, though, Dartnell takes as his premise the sudden disappearance (probably plague, definitely not zombies) of almost all of humanity, leaving behind a few survivors but all the incredible complexity of our technological civilization. How would you survive? And more importantly, how would you rebuild?

    1. I read the Nantucket Trilogy at an impressionable age.

    2. Knitting came to Europe in the thirteenth century, but the complementary purl stitch, which is necessary to create stretchy ribbing, didn’t. If you’ve ever wondered why medieval hosen were made of woven fabric and fit the leg relatively poorly, that’s why. When purling came to England, Elizabeth I paid an exorbitant amount of money for her first pair of silk stockings and refused to go back to cloth.

    3. Obviously you would also need to motivate people to actually do any of these things, which is its own set of complications — Jason Crawford at Roots of Progress has a great review of Robert Allen’s classic The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective that gets much deeper into why no one actually cared about automation and mechanization — but please allow me to imagine here.

    4. Please do not recommend How To Invent Everything, which purports to do something like this. It doesn’t go nearly deep enough to be interesting, let alone useful. You know, in the hypothetical that I’m sent back in time.

QotD: Freud and modern Feminism

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

I recently came across an article about Sigmund Freud’s theory of female psycho-sexual development, in which Taylor Kubota described penis envy as follows: “Women become envious of penises at a young age, when they realize boys derive more sexual pleasure from their penises than girls do from their own sexual organs. Freud said this penis envy grows over time.” This idea, which I had long disregarded and which didn’t correspond to my own experience (as a child I never saw or thought of boys’ penises; as a young woman I had no sense of lack) makes sense now in light of feminism’s decades-long attack on male sexuality. The attack is based, as feminists’ own words and policies indicate, on a febrile mix of resentment, envy, and projection in which the belief that men enjoy sex more than women (and that the enjoyment hurts women, in the typical zero-sum thinking of feminism) has fueled ever-more frenzied attempts at male neutering.

Serious psychotherapists or students of Freud should probably stop reading right now, as I am not attempting a genuine psychoanalytic analysis of feminism or indeed of penis envy, which has been widely dismissed as sexist or justified as women’s accurate recognition of men’s power. My theory — if it deserves that name — stems from the recognition that anti-sex feminism, involving the continual projection onto men of female sexual anxieties and discontents, has a far more extensive pedigree than most people realize, and that much feminist discussion and activism today take for granted that law and public policy are rightly directed towards “equalizing” not only rights or opportunities but also sexual experience itself, by prioritizing female pleasure and diminishing male.

It’s no revelation that many feminist-influenced women are hyper-alert to male advantage while being willfully blind to male disadvantage. In the arena of sexuality, where male and female most intimately and yet mysteriously interact, the irrational ferocity of feminist grievance-mongering reveals itself tellingly. Unwilling and unable to extend sympathetic understanding to male sexual difference, feminist ideology authorizes an envy-fueled anger that far surpasses legitimate caution.

A word about that legitimate caution. Throughout history, well-functioning societies have recognized the threat to civil order — and to women’s safety in particular — of male lust, and have passed laws and constructed codes of behavior to contain and direct it. Fathers and husbands have always been interested in protecting their womenfolk from sexual violence. Feminists, however, while exalting female sexuality as benign and beautiful, have repeatedly refused to recognize any manifestation of male sexuality as good. A mere glance at prominent feminist claims and policy initiatives highlights their continual misrepresentations.

Janice Fiamengo, “Do Feminists Suffer From Penis Envy?”, The Fiamengo File, 2023-03-26.

June 27, 2023

“People’s patience in the face of the daily elitist provocations of Just Stop Oil is nothing short of Herculean”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The virtue-signalling lunatics of the various Extinction Rebellion sub-groups depend far more than they realize on the patience and tolerance of ordinary Britons who are just trying to get on with their daily lives. Wealthy, highly educated, privileged scions of the well-connected may very quickly learn that the well of tolerance they’re drawing from can run dry extremely quickly. Brendan O’Neill says even some of the movers and shakers of the donor class are starting realize the dangers their protest foot soldiers are running:

“Just Stop Oil Courtauld Gallery 30062022” by Just Stop Oil is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

So even one of Just Stop Oil’s wealthy donors is tiring of its classist stunts. Trevor Neilson, a co-founder of the Climate Emergency Fund, which has pumped money into Just Stop Oil, says the eco-irritants’ funereal, road-blocking marches for Mother Earth increasingly come off as “disruption for the sake of disruption“. You have “working people that are trying to get to their job, get their kid dropped off at school [and] survive a brutal cost-of-living crisis”, he says, and then along comes a “pink-haired, tattooed and pierced protester standing in front of their car”. It pisses people off, he said.

He’s not wrong. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that Just Stop Oil, and its mother movement Extinction Rebellion, is riling the workers of Britain. Imagine you’re trying to get to work to earn a crust in tough times and up pops a privately educated, possibly non-binary loon with multi-coloured hair to tell you in a voice breaking with juvenile emotion that Judgement Day is coming. The fainthearts of the liberal media are always aghast when an angry scaffolder or stressed trucker drags one of the green hysterics off the road, but I’m blown away by the restraint of the British public. People’s patience in the face of the daily elitist provocations of Just Stop Oil is nothing short of Herculean.

It is “counterproductive”, says Mr Neilson, to have pink-haired sons and daughters of privilege inconveniencing workers during a “brutal” economic downturn. Again, he’s not wrong. The class-war streak in eco-activism is undeniable. Many Extinction Rebellion types are descendants of money. Writer Harry Mount calls them “Econians”, a green twist on “Etonians”. They’re the “public-school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world”. A survey of 6,000 XR activists who brought London to a halt in April 2019 found they were “overwhelmingly middle-class [and] highly educated”. Anyone who walked through London that month will have heard “Cut carbon emissions!” being cried in cut-glass tones and understood right away that our great city was under siege by vengeful aristocrats still smarting from the Industrial Revolution.

June 26, 2023

QotD: The danger to mental health in a functioning meritocracy

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

We need our illusions or else we could not face the world; or perhaps I should say we need illusions as a genre, if not necessarily the ones we have. There are some illusions, no doubt, that hinder us or harm us, but there are others that sustain us. Humankind, said Eliot (who used the word before it became politically correct), cannot bear very much reality — especially about itself.

The illusion that one would have been a success but for malevolent circumstance is a very necessary one for a lot of people, for there is no more pitiless or cruel a world than a pure and perfectly functioning meritocracy. Such an arrangement would confront everyone, or at least almost everyone, with his own mediocrity, for the mediocre are by definition in the majority. And who is not mediocre by comparison with Mozart? In a pure meritocracy, everyone would find his true, utterly deserved level; but it is a mere prejudice that if there were justice in the world, everyone would be better off. In a pure meritocracy, there would be no paranoid defense against one’s own nullity — one could blame only oneself for it and no one else. That is why the concept of equality of opportunity, besides implying a kind of Brave New World world, is so deeply vicious, and why so many people who promote it are obviously hate-filled. They do not want to serve humanity but torture it.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Grand Illusion”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-08-19.

June 25, 2023

Workers will be forced to stop working to salve the consciences of university-educated elite wankers

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Brendan O’Neill on the Climate Goblin’s latest stunt in Sweden:

Picture the daughter of an opera singer preventing working-class men from doing their jobs. A young woman so well-connected that she probably has presidents on speed-dial physically blocking truck drivers from doing what they do. A child of privilege gathering with her similarly comfortable pals to stop working people from working.

Well, shorn of all the fact-lite bluster about “saving the planet”, that’s exactly what Greta Thunberg’s latest eco-stunt adds up to. The pint-sized prophetess of doom is back in the headlines. This time for getting arrested in Malmo harbour in Sweden, where she and other members of the End is Nigh cult have been holding a sit-down protest to stop oil tankers from leaving and delivering their life-giving cargo to the good people of Sweden and beyond.

The photographs from this temper tantrum disguised as a political protest tell a fascinating tale of the classism and narcissism in green politics. In the middle of the road are the smug-looking youths. One has green hair. Others sport beanie hats. None has ever driven a truck, clearly. Their banners speak of defending Earth from man’s evil burning of the toxic sludge of oil. And in the background are the supposed agents of this evil – the truckers; working men idly standing by their tankers while the world’s media get shots of Greta looking sad for Gaia.

What an apt snapshot of the hierarchy of virtue in what passes for radical politics today. Working-class people reduced to background actors, non-player characters, in a drama feverishly focussed on the jumped-up angst of the privileged. Working men as mere backdrop to the eco-neuroses of the comfortably off. In the moral universe fashioned by eco-influencers and their legion fawners in the political and media elites, the irrational fears of the upper-middle class carry more weight than the living standards of the working class.

It’s a story we see repeated across every act of eco-agitation today. In the UK, the plummy activists of Just Stop Oil, all called Poppy or Edred, block roads and prevent builders, scaffolders, deliverymen, mums and others from carrying out their essential work. The fightback of working men against this imperious imposition on their right to earn a living – witness scaffolders pushing eco-irritants out of the road – has been heartening to see. As a worker at Smithfield meat market in London put it a few years back when Extinction Rebellion types stormed in to speak up for animal rights or something, why should I allow this “happy-clappy mob” to stop me from being “able to pay my bills”?

June 24, 2023

“… every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way”

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

Jen Gerson is irked by the federal government’s latest petty diktat to “save the planet” from single-use plastic bags that bans the use of bags that are not made of plastic:

Those who follow my work will know that I am an unreformed Calgary evangelist. I like this city for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I’m a member of the Calgary CO-OP, a chain of local grocery stores. For those who are lucky enough to enjoy something like this, a co-op offers particular advantages over their conventional counterparts; we get a small share of the profits that the chain earns every year, for example. The stores stock local produce, meats, grain, and processed foods from Calgary-based suppliers, and from nearby farms. CO-OP also provides a number of top-notch house brand supplies. National chains are simply not as nimble, nor as local. They can’t be.

But I admit that one of the things I enjoy most about CO-OP is its green grocery bags. When stores across Canada began to phase out the use of single-use plastic bags, I was despondent. The environmental rationale for the ban was thin, but mostly I was annoyed because I’m chronically disorganized and can never remember to bring reusable bags.

So when CO-OP replaced plastic bags with a fully compostable alternative, I was delighted. Granted, we would have to pay a small fee to purchase these bags, but the per-unit cost was actually less than what we would normally spend on a box of Glad compost-bin liners. So it all evened out.

To make matters even better, unlike paper straws, the compostable bags are superior to their plastic alternatives. CO-OP advertises this point on their site: “They are stronger than a plastic checkout bag. You can carry a medium-size turkey or three bottles of wine with no problem.”

I can also attest to this. The bags are an absolute win for everybody involved.

So when I discovered on Thursday that Ottawa plans to ban these items, considering them a “single-use plastic”, I lost my goddamn mind.

Not only will this represent a small inconvenience for me and my family, but it is also one of the laziest, most idiotic decisions issued from this remote, non-responsive federal government I have yet to encounter.

The bags do not contain plastic.

Let me say that again, because apparently the sound of western voices doesn’t quite travel all the way to the the slower bureaucrats in the back: “THE BAGS DO NOT CONTAIN PLASTIC”. You fucking muppets.

[…]

Look, Ottawa, are you there? Are any of you listening, or am I just screaming into the void? For the sake of the entire country, I hope, I pray that there is somebody with an IQ above 92 capable of not just reading this desperate missive, but of really, truly understanding it.

This shit — this, right here.

This. Shit.

This is why we hate you.

This is why we fucking hate you.

Nobody outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle sees a headline like “New Initiative from Ottawa!” and thinks: “Oh, how exciting. I’m so keen to see what grand notion those crafty MPs in Ottawa have cooked up now! Come, Maude, let us settle ourselves before the The National at Six so we can understand how our fine federal government is working to make our lives better.”

Nobody does that. Because every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way.

The Most Reliable and Versatile Sub-orbital Rockets Ever Made; the Black Brant Sounding Rockets

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Polyus
Published 31 Aug 2018

The Black Brant series of sounding rockets was a great success and a proud contribution to the global race for space. While not as glamorous as an orbital rocket, the Black Brants helped scientists from around the globe research and better understand the Aurora and the Earth’s ionosphere.
(more…)

June 23, 2023

From Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the disinformation and cover-up over the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus

Filed under: China, Germany, Health, History, Media, Politics, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray outlines the utterly amazing situation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on the eve of Hitler launching Operation Barbarossa — where Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would attack Russia despite overwhelming evidence from many sources — to the parallel situation over Covid:

Several sources quite specifically reported to the Soviet government that the Germans would invade around dawn on June 22. Their reports can be found in the Soviet archives in a “folder of dubious and misleading reports”. Then, shortly before dawn on June 22, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Military leaders on the border called in reports of the invasion, and the people they talked to in Moscow declined to believe them. Soviet border troops held their fire, seeing Germans while being ordered to understand that no true invasion could possibly be underway. Stalin knew better, and contradicting Josef Stalin was known to be a fatal mistake. Achieving an entirely avoidable surprise, the Germans destroyed much of the Soviet air force on the ground, parked wingtip-to-wingtip for the convenience of the invader’s bombers.

[…]

An invasion that could have been met with brutal severity from the first moment instead achieved considerable initial success against a supine nation because the Soviet leader, and the chain of subordinates beneath him who were forced to adopt his conception of facts and truth, assumed that things they didn’t wish to believe constituted disinformation. Millions of lives were wasted for that illusion. A society that categorizes inconvenient truths in this way is committing a form of suicide, hiding from hard facts that demand acknowledgment.

Now: In 2021, the lab leak theory was a disgusting lie with “racist roots”.

In June of 2023, the, uh, first people who got sick with Covid turn out to have been, uh, scientists at the lab in Wuhan. BUT THEY PROBABLY HAD SOME BAT SOUP AT THE WET MARKET, IS WHY, or something.

Stupid conspiracy theorists, you people are such MORONS, do you actually bel— okay, that one’s true too.

We’ve somehow developed an industry of professional information barriers, dimwitted parasitical human garbage whose sole function in life is to prevent understanding by pasting “disinformation” stickers on things that you’re not supposed to know.

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