Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Jun 2022
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October 14, 2022
When Potatoes were Illegal
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QotD: High school
Those of us on the back nine of our lives remember high school as a process of differential diagnosis. You try on a certain set of social roles to see which, if any, fit. You don’t go out for the baseball team because it’s the first step to making the Majors. Really, you might not even like playing baseball all that much. You go out for the baseball team because you want to be a Jock. If you make the team, you’re a Jock for a while, leading the Jock life and learning its lessons. If you don’t make the team, you go find something else — the Debate Club, heavy metal music, whatever — and learn the lessons those lifestyles teach.
You didn’t understand this back then, of course, but your parents did, and — crucially — your teachers did. If you wanted to be a Metalhead this semester, they’d treat you like a Metalhead, complete with the “Why are you wasting your potential (and ruining your ears) with that godawful noise?” They’d make a show of having a Very Serious Conversation with you about the dangers of drugs and satanism … knowing full well that you weren’t on drugs, weren’t sacrificing virgins to Moloch (if for no other reason than you didn’t actually know any girls), and would, in fact, come back as a clean-scrubbed Preppie after summer break your junior year.
The key word in “adolescent rebellion”, after all, is adolescent. All of that stuff was just practice. If it proceeded in the normal way, what going through all the permutations of high school identity taught you was:
- you’re a fairly normal person; and
- that’s ok.
In other words, you are not a collection of externals — clothes, music, hairstyles. You’re you. The externals can change, fairly radically — remember that one summer you broke your nose trying to be a skater? — but there’s a core in there that’s you. Which is great, because it means that you are just a person who takes customer service calls in a cubicle farm to pay the bills; they’re not going to put “Here lies Bill, a Customer Service Representative” on your tombstone.
Severian, “The Basic College Girl”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-24.
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October 12, 2022
Medically assisted suicide in Canada
In Common Sense, Rupa Subramanya discusses how quickly MAID (Medical Assistance in Death) became a commonality in Canada:
Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS in severe pain. The argument for helping them die is clear: Death is imminent. Why should they be forced to suffer?
In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible. In this respect, Canada was hardly alone: The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide. So do ten states in the U.S.
In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064 — accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year.
There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died. In 2017, only 34 MAiD deaths were in the 18- to 45-year-old category. In 2018, that figure rose to at least 49. In 2019, it was 103; in 2020, 118; and in 2021, 139.
Today, thousands of people who could live for many years are applying — successfully — to kill themselves.
Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent. Progressive Vancouver Island is unofficially known as the “assisted-death capital of the world”, doctors told me.
Why the dramatic increase? Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable”. This included applicants like Margaret Marsilla’s son, Kiano.
In 2023, those numbers are almost certain to rise.
Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors”. According to Canada’s Department of Justice, parents are generally “entitled to make treatment decisions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.” (The federal government does not define “mature”, nor does it specify who determines whether one is mature. On top of that, the doctrine varies from one province to another.)
Dr. Dawn Davies, a palliative care physician who supported MAiD when it was first conceived, said she had “tons of worries” about where this might lead. She could imagine kids with personality disorders or other mental health issues saying they wanted to die. “Some of them will mean it, some of them won’t,” she said. “And we won’t necessarily be able to discern who is who.”
Hugh Scher, an attorney advising Margaret Marsilla, told me: “While other countries have explored extending assisted suicide to minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent. Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, having already removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.”
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October 6, 2022
The pendulum swings back toward institutionalization
During the 1950s and 60s, many mental institutions were shut down due to concerns about the way the patients in those institutions were being treated. Those suffering from mental health issues were, to a large degree, just discharged into the larger community with few supports to help them re-integrate. Today, the concerns about severely mentally ill peoples’ actions may be pushing the system back toward some form of formal re-institutionalization, as Michael Shellenberger reports for Common Sense:
William Norris, shackled sitting upright on his bed at Bedlam, 1838.
Engraving by Ambroise Tardieu, Des maladies mentales Esquirol via Wikimedia Commons.
Though it is difficult to get an exact estimate, a large body of research makes clear that people like Zisopoulos, Mesa, and Simon are just three among hundreds of cases of people in New York alone — to say nothing of cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and others — in which mentally ill people off their medication have assaulted or killed people. And if you think the problem is getting worse, you are right.
In 2021, felony assaults in New York’s subway were almost 25 percent higher compared to 2019, despite a lower ridership because of the pandemic. The number of people pushed onto tracks rose from 9 in 2017 to 20 in 2019 to 30 in 2021. Psychiatrists and emergency department workers in San Francisco and Los Angeles tell me that they have seen a significant increase in homeless patients in psychotic states over the last few years.
How have we arrived at the point where we leave people with psychosis to their demons, and leave the public to take their chances? How have we allowed so many of our cities to have no decent plans or places for the burgeoning number of the violent mentally ill on the streets?
There are two major forces at work. The first is that the U.S. never created a functioning mental health care system. The second is that powerful groups have effectively prevented dangerously mentally ill people from getting treatment.
Starting in the late 19th century, the U.S. created large psychiatric hospitals, often in the countryside, known as asylums, for the mentally ill. Asylums were a major progressive achievement because they delivered, for many decades, significantly more humane, evidence-based care to people who, until then, had often been neglected, abused, or even killed.
But by the middle of the 20th century, the reputation of psychiatric hospitals was in tatters — and deservedly so. Conditions in many of them were appalling, even barbaric. People who were not severely mentally ill were sometimes subjected to years of involuntary hospitalization.
Many reformers just wanted better funding and oversight, but other reformers were more radical, and proposed shutting the hospitals down entirely and replacing them with community-based clinics. Some reformers claimed that serious mental illnesses were the result of poverty and inequality, not biology, and argued that they could be cured through radical social change.
The reformers largely won. State hospitals were shut down in droves before sufficient community centers could be built to treat the suffering. Over the next two decades, as state mental hospitals emptied out, many released patients ended up on the street, or incarcerated. Those community clinics that did start operating tended to treat “the worried well” — those suffering from comparatively low-level anxiety and depression, rather than psychosis.
Decades later, governments were still cutting funding for the treatment of the mentally ill. New York State in 2010 reduced Medicaid reimbursement for inpatient stays of the mentally ill in hospitals beyond 12 days. As a result, New York hospitals released the mentally ill earlier than they should have. From 2012 to 2019, the number of mentally ill adults in inpatient psychiatric care in hospitals and mental institutions in New York City declined from 4,100 to just 3,000. Meanwhile, the number of seriously mentally ill homeless people rose from 11,500 to 13,200.
The story is similar in California. Between 2012 and 2019, more than one-third of the group homes in San Francisco that served mentally ill and disabled people under the age of sixty closed their doors. Why? The measly Medi-Cal and Medicare reimbursement of $1,058 per person per month, and rising estate prices, made it more valuable for the private owners of group homes to sell than to keep operating them.
At the national level, the same dynamic was in play. The U.S. as a whole lost 15,000 board and care beds for the mentally ill and disabled between 2010 and 2016. Today, approximately 121,000 mentally ill people are conservatively estimated to be living on America’s streets.
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October 4, 2022
“… apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI”
And you thought the stuffy old National Science Foundation was only supporting pale, stale, cisgendered white male research? Think again!
I’ve written many times about the National Science Foundation and its increasingly politicized conception of “science”. As an independent federal agency with a nearly $9 billion budget, the NSF is a behemoth in the world of academic science, shaping research agendas and the future of the professoriate. And apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI. Here’s a current funding opportunity for scientists:
The federal agency that funds research projects like “Probing Nucleation and Growth Dynamics of Lithium Dendrites in Solid Electrolytes” is moving hard into the business of social justice, with career-making grants that will focus STEM researchers on the problem of racial grievances. Here’s how much money is available for that racial equity program:
The premise underlying this turn toward equity-focused science projects is that “science scholars who are underrepresented in STEM produce higher rates of scientific novelty”. Innovation is grounded in race and ethnicity; the more gloriously intersectional you are, the more creative you become. Imagine the boldness of a transgendered Asian Pacific Islander astrophysics, and how much newer and fresher our conception of the universe is when it doesn’t come from straight white males.
And so the NSF wants to fund “diversity champions” who will freshen up our science with BIPOC innovation — which means adding more sociologists to the team of geophysicists: “When developing proposals, the PI team should acknowledge the need for increased engagement from social and behavioral science experts to address issues related to BAJEDI in the geosciences and include these best practices and experts in proposed projects.” […]
It’s a real cultural revolution in the world of academic science.
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October 3, 2022
“Still, what about the boys?”
Janice Fiamengo on the far-from-impartial emphasis of concern on young people being pushed toward radical “solutions” to gender dysphoria:
Last year, conservative educational institution Prager U published “Why Girls Become Boys“, a short video by journalist Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, published in 2020. Shrier’s focus is evident from the titles: girls. Previously, Shrier had been profiled in an interview with Candace Owens when she was still working on the book. Though the interview is now three years old, its canvassing of teen transitioning — in a discussion that moves from concern about girls being “seduced” into trans, to anger at society’s failure to protect girls from boys who transition — provides a fairly accurate representation, I believe, of conservative positioning on this subject. Girls who transition are seen as victims; while boys who transition are seen (if they are seen at all) as predators.
This double emphasis is clear in the interview. Shrier and Owens describe the collusion of media influencers, the public school system, woke punditry, and medical authorities to encourage girls (but not boys, it seems) to consider their gender identity “fluid”. Feelings of discomfort are too readily interpreted as signs of a trans identity. Girls can be made to believe themselves trans very quickly, sometimes simply from viewing one or more internet videos; and schools are not required to tell parents if their daughter begins identifying as male. From age fifteen, girls can find gender clinics willing to prescribe testosterone without their parents’ consent; a girl can have her breasts amputated as early as age sixteen. The lifetime of dependency on hormones (their consequences unknown), the risky surgeries, and the tragic missed opportunities — of motherhood in particular, but even of having breasts — were emphasized by both pundits.
It’s almost impossible to imagine these two women discussing the tragedy of losing a penis, of being denied the opportunity to become a father, of being denied the joy of male sexuality.
From this point, the conversation moved seamlessly into discussing the victimhood of girls forced to share their private spaces — and of course their sporting competitions — with biological males (often called “men” as in “Men are invading girls’ sports”). These males are not discussed as vulnerable innocents duped into taking body-altering hormones or undergoing dangerous surgeries. No imaginative effort was spent on why these boys want to live as trans female. The underlying assumption seemed to be that boys’ transition, far from being an attempt to relieve real distress, is an act of appropriation of female experience. The boys were depicted as aggressors who invade girls’ locker-rooms and deny girls opportunities (or, even worse, masquerade as trans in order to prey on girls sexually). Are there boys made uncomfortable in their change rooms or other private spaces by the presence of biological girls? The question seems never to have occurred to Shrier and Owens.
Shrier and Owens agree in decrying feminism for failing to protect girls and for failing (allegedly) to affirm femininity and girlhood. “Girls aren’t being told how wonderful it is to be a girl!” Their own feminist — or at least female-centered — assumptions are clearly evident in their conviction that the trans phenomenon is about multiple harms to females, harms which must always take precedence over the legitimate needs and experiences of males. And in fact, contrary to what Shrier and Owens seem to believe, there are many feminists who vehemently denounce biological male incursions into female bodies and spaces; many of them, such as Meghan Murphy, Julie Bindel, and Sheila Jeffreys, to name only a few, advocate from an avowedly anti-male perspective.
Shrier might respond that the overwhelming majority of adolescents who believe themselves to be trans are female (as she states in her Prager U video). This may be true (a recent Psychology Today article puts the number at greater than 80% female) but does not mitigate my objection. Teen suicide is about 80% male (more on this later), but it is hard to imagine concerned pundits ignoring the troubles of girls. Many discussions of teen suicide, in fact, make much of the fact that girls attempt suicide more often than boys, downplaying the fact that boys carry out their suicides in such distinctively high numbers. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to a focus on girls’ difficulties in adolescence — except when it improperly ignores and even maligns boys.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the vast majority of young people seeking “gender-affirming” therapy were males hoping to become trans-females. In the last few years, that proportion has flipped completely.
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October 2, 2022
Robert Heinlein’s “Crazy Years” have nothing on real headlines in 2022
Ed West on what he calls the “triumph of the blank slate” in western culture:
As a depressive conservative who always sneered at the new atheist movement, I’ve enjoyed a certain, almost masochistic smugness about the way the sharp decline in American religious practice has led to a proliferation of wacky beliefs. I told you so, I laugh, as our boat heads for the rocks and certain doom for all of us. And every month I read something else in the media which makes me think, with the best will in the world and a sincere belief in improving our lot, that country’s ruling class is losing its grip on reality.
To take one recent example, an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it “reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years”.
The author stated that “though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential”.
Quoting an academic who claim “that sex differences aren’t really clear at all” the author reported of some studies showing that “the gap they did find between girls and boys was likely due to socialization, not biology”.
On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that “maternal instinct is a myth that men created”. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that “The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.”
Even the most prestigious science magazines increasingly make claims about sex that a decade ago would have seemed wacky. Just recently, Scientific American stated that “Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”
If you find any of these beliefs strange, then you might need to “educate” yourself about “the science” because this is the direction of travel now. This kind of stuff is everywhere, growing in popularity in all areas, but all ultimately having the same common inheritance — the blank slate.
Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.
With its subtitle “the modern denial of human nature”, Pinker’s worked looked at the various ideas that had emerged out of academia and into wider society: that rape was not about sex, that hunter-gatherer societies were peaceful, that sex differences were learned, all of these beliefs having the common theme that humans are born with infinitely malleable minds and that that life outcomes are entirely shaped by society.
Pinker felt, quite reasonably, that many of these comforting beliefs were on the way out. Of the idea that differences in intelligence were entirely environmental, he wrote that “even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity”. And yet this historical curiosity continues to flourish, and 20 years after publication, the blank slate is stronger than ever. More so than in 2002, it’s taboo to discuss the genetic components of human intelligence or the biological factors involved in differing male and female behaviour. The ground has shifted – towards the blank slate.
Pinker is an optimistic Whiggish liberal who has since produced books looking at the decline of violence and making the case that things are getting better — that’s taken a wobble this decade, but I think he’ll be proven right, even if I think the new atheist-aligned cognitive psychologist has a slight blind spot about religion. In the Blank Slate he argued that worthy progressive goals should not rest on untrue scientific assumptions about human nature. When those ideas are proven false, the political argument will crumble too — and yet this hasn’t happened. Instead the taboos just grows stronger.
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October 1, 2022
“Father” – Fritz Haber – Sabaton History 113 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published 29 Sept 2022Fritz Haber is a controversial historical figure. He was responsible for scientific advances that fed billions, yet he created weapons of mass destruction that filled millions with terror. This is his story.
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September 28, 2022
There are two kinds of people online talking about mental illness: those suffering with mental illness and those glorying in the attention they get for faking it
Freddie deBoer on the phenomenon of mental health culture online and the two primary kinds of participants (my headline over-dramatizes the case he’s actually making):
I was not, at first glance, inspired with confidence by this Washington Post piece on online mental illness culture. The piece has a header image of a “mental illness influencer” lounging in bed, taking a selfie. I’m someone who’s committed to de-glamorizing mental illness, and I’ve been begging people to stop romanticizing pathology for a long time. I suppose there’s an implied critique in that photograph, but it’s not ideal.
On substance, Tatum Hunter’s piece fails the way so many others have failed in this milieu: it studiously avoids the possibility that some people who talk about their mental illnesses online don’t really have them. I’m not specifically talking about simple fraud and lies, which I suspect are rare, but rather the weird combination of hypochondria, Munchausen’s syndrome, and social contagion that we see all around us in these spaces. Spend any time at all in these communities on Tumblr or Tik Tok and you will find many people, most of them young, who are using mental illness as a means to self-define, to differentiate themselves from the hordes of other people they see online who are just like them. I’ve written again and again about why it’s a bad idea to want to be your mental illness, and it’s even worse to want to be mentally ill, period – not just bad for other people, but bad for you. But there are people who have become influencers and garnered hundreds of thousands of followers on their apps of choice by performing mental illness. People use their disorders to chase clout. That’s just reality.
Hunter considers the problems of misdiagnosis, of self-diagnosis, of people undertaking mental health care on the advice of internet randoms rather than under the care of a doctor, but nowhere does she seriously consider the possibility that the basic problem for many people is that they believe they have mental disorders they don’t in fact have. I think doing so is seen, at this point, as a kind of identity crime, and thus unlikely to be found in the Washington Post.
But hypochondria exists. Munchausen’s syndrome exists. Psychosomatic illness exists. I can get people to admit to those realities in the abstract, now, but they stay entirely in the abstract – to suggest that any group of people is suffering under those conditions, rather than under authentic mental illness, is treated as a sin. This was my biggest disappointment with Ross Douthat’s book on his chronic illness, which I quite liked overall; Douthat never stops his narrative to ask whether any of the people who believe themselves to be sick from chronic illness actually aren’t. (Surely he himself suffered, but because of the woo and mysticism found in that space, an accounting was necessary.) And I don’t know how we confront the spiraling number of people claiming to have illnesses for which there are no objective tests without being frank about the existence of hypochondria, Munchausen’s, and psychosomatic illness – particularly when people insist on deepening the social incentives by giving the sick more and more attention.
Even for the authentically ill, online culture is fraught. The meta-problem with pieces like that in WaPo, obviously, is that by giving certain members of this community the glamour shot treatment (literally in this case), they’re creating direct incentive for people to make illness their identity -and to not get better. Young people understand the allure of being seen; they don’t yet understand the horror of being frozen in other people’s gazes. They don’t understand the costs of being defined. There have been many opportunities for me to make myself the mental illness guy, certainly including financial opportunities. Perhaps I’ve already fallen into that trap, despite my efforts to remain a generalist. But I’ve fought to avoid that because I know just how painful and limiting self-definition can become. I’m sorry to pull wizened old guy here, but young people don’t understand. They don’t understand that pinning yourself down that way can produce a kind of horror.
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September 27, 2022
Is Kayla Lemieux the leading edge of LGBT tolerance or a “dude gaming the system”?
Back on September 16, I posted a link to the then-breaking story of the teacher in Halton whose prosthetic breasts had poked into news headlines everywhere: “This is either the teacher of the year (come on, you know that’s inevitable because reasons) or someone doing an epic physical and psychological parody of our culture right now.” It’s nearly two weeks later, and we’re still not really clear on which of those two possibilities is closest to the truth. At PJ Media, Athena Thorne is making a case for the epic prank case:
There is the most titillating rumor being bandied about the interwebs right now. And while it may or may not be true, it’s certainly food for thought. It concerns “Kayla Lemieux”, the infamous trans-woman shop teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School (OTHS) in Ontario, Canada.
An anonymous poster on an online forum recently made a claim about Lemieux’s shop class back when “Kayla” was still Mr. Kerry Luc Lemieux. The post reads:
This dude is gaming the system. An anon here yesterday was in this dude’s class. This teacher was almost fired for ‘toxic masculinity’ last year, as well as not embracing woke culture. He’d drop redpills to his class, such as how silly gender neutral bathrooms are. The school board hates him.
He’s now upping the ante to exploit the very clown world the school and society itself created. His long game is most likely to get fired, and then sue for discrimination. There is no other explanation… No better way to troll clown world than to become an over-the-top caricature of a woman.
File this allegation under “Huge if True” (lol). Imagine for a moment that the anonymous person is telling the truth. If that is the case, then this teacher is the greatest hero the sane world has fronted yet.
If Lemieux is indeed pranking the school board, then he is a genius. When images of the trans-busty high school shop teacher began spreading like wildfire online, the outrage was swift and formidable. OTHS and the Halton District School Board (HDSB) went on the defensive — and it quickly became evident that they had painted themselves into a corner with their mindless commitment to “inclusion”.
“We are aware of discussion on social media and in the media regarding Oakville Trafalgar High School. We would like to take this opportunity to reiterate to our community that we are committed to establishing and maintaining a safe, caring, inclusive, equitable and welcoming learning and working environment for all students and staff”, said OTHS in an email sent to parents and obtained by feminist news site Reduxx.
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September 22, 2022
QotD: In my 20s … and in my 40s
Me in my 40s: Sleeps with head at slightly different angle than usual. Spends 3 weeks taking painkillers for neck pain whilst sobbing and wondering if my life will ever be the same again.
Amanda (@Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2022-06-13.
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September 20, 2022
QotD: Why purple was such a rare colour in the flags of the pre-industrial era
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-04-02.
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September 19, 2022
There’s a difference between “caring what kids think” and “pandering for kids’ attention and affection”
Rob Henderson wonders why so many adults these days are clearly desperate for the approval of young people:
During my recent re-watch of the entirety of Mad Men, which takes place in the 1960s, a recurring thought entered my mind: This was the last generation where young adults behaved like they were older than their real age. Don Draper is around thirty-five at the start of the series, and carries himself in a more adult manner than many 45 year olds today.
Recently, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who stated that “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys”.
Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age.
Which is perhaps one reason why boomers are so easy to mock. They don’t act their age.
[…]
About two years later, I was at a breakfast gathering with some other students on campus. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious, and spent most of the time answering questions from students.
And in his answers, he continually returned to variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it’s up to you guys to fix it. I’m so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been, because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.”
This mystified me. This guy was well into his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experiences in leadership roles, was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was a little older) that older adults are relying on them.
In the military, we thought of those senior to us as the leaders. It was okay to give feedback, of course. Commanding officers would regularly consult lower ranking and enlisted members to see what was working and what could be improved. But that happens only after getting through the filter of the initial training endeavors.
I remember in the first week of basic training, our instructor declared, “I don’t want any of you [expletive] thinking you are doing anyone a favor being here. I could get rid of all of you clowns and have your replacements here within the hour.” (This was 2007, well before the recruitment crisis).
My 17-year-old brain heard that thought, yeah, he’s probably right. I thought of the bus loads of other ungainly young guys I saw stepping off and being confronted with “Pick ’em up, and put ’em down” and other mind games from the instructors while waiting in the endless in-processing lines.
So then I got to college and learned that even though any seat, at least at selective schools, can be filled immediately with a bright applicant (top colleges reject thousands of them each year), students are never ejected for disrespecting professors or anyone else. In the military the first message was, you are a peon and less than nothing and we can easily have you replaced (this changes as you advance in rank, of course — at least to some degree). In college, the first message was, you are amazing and privileged and a future leader (and marginalized and erased) and you will never lose your position here among the future ruling class. That feeling of whiplash will forever linger in my mind.
[…]
Older adults crave validation from the youth, which is one reason they are mocked. Young people sense their desire to be seen as cool and deprive them of this by taunting them.
This desire for esteem may be why older adults won’t exert any authority in response to energetic young conflict entrepreneurs who yell at them or threaten them.
Older adults want to be on the side of youth. So desperate to pencil themselves out of the “old” category. Every parent wants to be the “cool parent”, every professor wants to be the “cool” professor. You can be cool and still be an authority figure. Maybe decades of imbibing the worst of U.S. pop culture made everyone forget this.
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September 16, 2022
How “misgendering” shattered the Green Party of Canada
Canada’s Green Party has never been noted for their tight party cohesion, so my use of the word “shattered” in the headline is a bit over-the-top, I must confess. Jonathan Kay provides a quick outline of the party’s history through the leadership of Elizabeth May, Annamie Paul, and most recently, interim leader Amita Kuttner:
Many grumbled that May was too slow to give up her leadership perch. Yet when she finally did step aside in 2019, the party learned that she’d been the only thing holding the outfit together. By the time the 2021 federal election rolled around, the Greens’ leader was a black Jewish woman named Annamie Paul, who got absolutely trounced in her own riding, winning fewer than 4,000 votes. Paul was then quickly run out of the party leadership during a complicated (and often farcical) internecine battle that involved public accusations of bigotry hurled in all directions, and which (predictably) repelled many of the party’s financial supporters.
On Sept. 27 I began the process of stepping down as Green Party of Canada Leader. Today I sent formal notice of my resignation to the GPC. I will also be ending my membership in the GPC.
It was an honour to work for the people of Canada and I look forward to serving in new ways.— Annamie Paul (@AnnamiePaul) November 10, 2021
One might think things couldn’t get any worse for the Greens. But, thanks to the installation of a 30-year-old interim leader named Amita Kuttner, they very much did.
Kuttner self-describes as non-binary, transgender, and pansexual. When asked, “What are your preferred pronouns?” in a 2019 interview, the one-time astrophysicist replied, “they/them”, but then elaborated as follows:
When I write my pronouns, I sometimes write all of them: they/them, she/her, he/him, because I don’t care. There will be days where I’m not always even aware of what my gender is, and I will notice it based on how someone addresses me and whether I respond. I was in choir for many years, and they’d say, “women sing now”, “men sing now”. And I would find myself starting with one or the other group, even though I was obviously supposed to sing soprano. I’d be like, “Oh, I guess I’m feeling that today.”
And yet, despite the fact Kuttner apparently can’t always figure out “what my gender is”, and claims not to “care” in any case, the interim leader felt the need to issue a lengthy statement on September 6th detailing the allegedly devastating emotional effects that ensued when the pronoun descriptor “she/elle” appeared in the electronic caption that sat alongside Kuttner’s name during a Green Party of Canada Zoom call, instead of the Kuttner-approved “they/he/ille”. Indeed, Kuttner described the ordeal as evidence that the Greens were infected by a “system of oppression”:
What happened here impacted me much more than a slip of the tongue. It made me feel hurt and isolated at a moment that should have been filled with inspiration and anticipation … This incident is reflective of a larger pattern of behaviours that a few in the party are perpetuating. Over the years, the party has documented reports which indicate a systemic issue disproportionately affecting Black, Indigenous, and racialized people and 2SLGBTQIA+ people, and I hope many more stories will be able to be shared so that this incident can be a catalyst for change … When things like this happen, people need to see those in leadership positions take some accountability, acknowledge how they have added to this system of oppression and what they must do to break the cycle.
Kuttner’s attempt to weaponize this (apparently very oppressive) instance of miscaptioning forms part of an ongoing civil war that’s been playing out for weeks within the Green leadership. That battle goes to the question of whether the party should proceed with its ongoing party leadership race, or pause it so that Green functionaries can investigate all of the (vaguely expressed) accusations of antisemitism, racism, and transphobia that were flung in every direction during the tumultuous last days of the Annamie Paul era back in 2021.
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September 15, 2022
The promise of grand “green” plans versus the reality when the plans are implemented
Elizabeth Nickson on the contrast between how things like the “Green New Deal” are represented by their proponents and the media and what their actual real-world outcomes are like:
“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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Ever wonder what happens to a region once it is “preserved”? Right now, all through the US and Canada, governments are taking giant bites of land, and locking them down under the guidance of the UN’s Agenda 2030, which means a full 30% of the land and waters will be “saved”. If anyone notices, the local media preens and praises itself. Aren’t we all so wonderful and enlightened and caring, the PR says, and the newspapers copy it line-for-line.
No, it’s terrible. It is possibly the very worst thing ever. Set-aside land degrades. There aren’t enough bureaucrats in the world to take care of it. Besides out in the forest or up on the ranges is decidedly not where a civil servant wants to be. As a result none of them know what they have done. It’s a loop, politicians, stupid women and beta males, civil servants engaged in a masturbatory celebration of their goodness and triumph over commerce. From hipster neighborhoods all over North America a song of self-praise rises like smoke into the air.
Except now, right now, I sit in a smoke haze courtesy of the set aside forests in Washington State which are burning. Look, this is simple to think through. In the early 90’s Clinton ratified the spotted owl preservation plan and hundreds of millions of acres of forest were left to themselves, no cutting, no grazing, no firewood collection, no thinning, no fire breaks, no removal of dead trees, especially not beetle-killed trees. In fact, no touch.
What happens when a formerly industrial forest is left to itself? A thousand tiny trees start to grow right up against each other. They grow like carrots that haven’t been thinned. They grow so thick they can’t get light. They draw all the water from the ground, they end up like tinder. Around them brush grows — it too cannot get light or much water so it too is desiccated. It grows up the trees, trying to get at the water in the trees, and acts as a fire ladder
Boom.
Massive canopy fires, which, since they decommissioned the roads into the forest, are very very difficult to either brake or put out.
On every single environmental metric, in every single system, these people destroy the land. What they do is exactly the opposite of what they claim. They take massive amounts of tax money to “save” land and then they destroy the resource. And the towns in the resource area. And the families, and the tax base.
I could go through every environmental goal, and tear it apart. None of them use science that is provable. It can’t be duplicated, its assumptions are wrong, its statistics fiddled. Tens of thousands of papers are used to create these policies, written by the environment movement through its NGOs, funded by rich morons from old families, most of whose ancestors created environmental devastation themselves. I can refute the math and assumptions of EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM given a maximum of four hours and one phone call. No one challenges these studies, and these abominations then become law. Law that destroys the water and land.
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