Quotulatiousness

August 11, 2021

“What war is for a soldier, global pandemic is for a health professional – most might never wish for it, but it is what they have been preparing for their whole lives”

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

I spent most of my life avoiding the healthcare profession … not from antipathy but from the awareness that others almost always needed access far more than I did. That changed for me at the end of 2015, although I still avoid bothering any of “my” healthcare professionals for anything that isn’t fairly clearly urgent and I’d like to maintain as low a level of contact with doctors, clinics, hospitals, and other outposts of the profession as much as I can. That said, most of the doctors, nurses, and other professionals in that line of work I’ve dealt with have been professional, competent, and (within normal limits) friendly. This doesn’t mean I don’t take Arthur Chrenkoff‘s concerns quite seriously:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

If it’s up to our health experts – doctors, scientists and researchers, administrators and bureaucrats – we will never return to the “old normal”. If it’s up to our health professionals, COVID restrictions – border closures, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, etc. – will go on and on in the foreseeable future. The advent of COVID and its never ending mutations and strains might, in fact, mark the end of our life as we knew it and herald the “new normal”, ever under the shadow of a rolling pandemic.
Why? Because our health experts and professionals are enjoying it too much.

Before you get outraged at my imputation, let me assure you I don’t mean the medical-industrial complex out there is hooting with joy and cracking up bottles of champagne to celebrate every new variant. By and large – and not being able to peer inside the souls of men and women I prefer to give them benefit of the doubt, though you, my reader, might have a different opinion about just how large in “by and large” is – they are honourable people with best intentions at heart. They want to save lives, prevent needless pain and suffering, minimise risks and banish sickness, save the grandmas from being killed and save the young from unforeseen long term consequences of what for them is generally a mild infection. These people take their Hippocratic Oath seriously, even those who are not medical practitioners and so not explicitly bound by it.

No, by enjoyment I really mean the satisfaction of what ancient Greeks called thymos, and which can be broadly translated into contemporary realities as the the desire to be valued and the desire for recognition.

What war is for a soldier, global pandemic is for a health professional – most might never wish for it, but it is what they have been preparing for their whole lives. It’s their time. It can be frustrating being a health expert during ordinary times; you are just one of many different voices competing to be heard about your priorities, opinions and your vision for a better life for all. Now, you are centre stage. You are important and respected. People, from a next door neighbour to the Prime Minister or the President, seek your guidance, listen to you, act on your input, appreciate your expertise. You finally have influence, real influence, if not actually a degree of control. What you say goes. The media hang on your every word, punters out there are your captive audience, leaders feel more or less strongly obliged to follow – after all, you’re the expert, you know what you’re talking about, you have the answers. Finally, you count, you really count, big time. Years of hard study and years of hard work have come to fruition, previous frustrations fall away. Millions of people appreciate your contribution and are grateful for your public service. You are a hero who is trying to keep the dragons at bay, save people from harm and death. This is not your everyday toil, patient by patient or a demographic by demographic; hell, this is the entire population, the whole humanity. There can’t be anything bigger or more important than that. Professional and public rewards are nice, but it’s not even about that – it’s the satisfaction of job well done, of having made a difference, of having made an impact, having done good.

Once you have tasted and experienced this God-like power to order entire societies according to your best designs, once you acquire this unparalleled position, with its influence and its quasi-saintly public status, do you really want to give it back and retreat again into the previous obscurity when hardly anyone listens to you?

August 9, 2021

1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Environment, France, History, Military, Pacific, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 6 May 2020

In 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies erupted in the most explosive volcanic eruption in human history. The explosion affected the world’s climate, changing history in surprising ways. The History Guy recalls the forgotten history of the year without a summer.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

You can purchase the “offshore” bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…​

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

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Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy​

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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Script by THG

#volcano​ #thehistoryguy​ #history

From the comments:

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
11 months ago
A viewer complained that much of the footage of volcanoes were volcanoes dissimilar to Tambora. Notably, Tambora is a stratovolcano. Lava from stratovolcano eruptions tends to be very viscous and cools quickly, whereas much of the footage in the episode is from shield volcanos in Hawaii, which produce free-flowing lava. Please understand that I can only use media in the Public Domain. I did not mean to misinform the audience by using the available footage and photographs.

August 7, 2021

Ancient and medieval medicines

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

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the medicinal knowledge of our ancestors and suggests that the mockery we usually heap on them is at least somewhat misplaced:

Portrait of Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus, generally known as Galen of Pergamon from The Lancet.
Engraving by Georg Paul Busch via Wikimedia Commons.

We’re very used to mocking the obscure-sounding remedies of our distant ancestors. It’s hard to take them seriously when their go-to remedies were to remove some blood or take a horoscope. Or, if you were wealthy, to swallow concoctions containing emeralds, sapphires, or obscure animal parts. With the benefit of hindsight, the trajectory of medical improvement seems obvious and linear, as we became attuned to the benefits of hygiene, introduced anaesthetics, and identified the real causes of disease.

But in some ways hindsight is misleading. Our ancestors may not have always understood why things worked, but they were often surprisingly good at finding things that actually did work — but which were discarded prematurely by the onward march of science, when everything we thought we knew was put to the test. Some sixteenth-century alchemy actually got results. The mechanical ventilation of confined spaces, albeit invented by following the erroneous idea that noxious airs caused disease, appears to have inadvertently saved lives. And long before germ theory became the dominant model of disease, many cities on the Mediterranean had special areas or islands — Lazarettos — to quarantine arrivals from plague-ridden ports.

Even the most outrageous of remedies could have something to them. Physicians once prescribed mercury to treat syphilis, effectively the HIV/AIDS of the early modern world, which in the late eighteenth century may have affected one in five Londoners. But mercury, albeit poisonous, appears to have worked along the same lines as chemotherapy, hopefully killing the disease before the cure killed the patient. It could be effective, though probably only under certain conditions. In the 1880s mercury was switched out for bismuth salts, which worked similarly — bismuth is a heavy metal, but far less toxic to humans than it was to the disease. Even the anti-syphilitic wonder drugs of the early twentieth century, Salvarsan and Neosalvarsan, were toxic compounds of arsenic, albeit far less unpleasant. Treating the disease successfully was often a matter of picking the right poison.

Syphilis, along with a host of other bacterial diseases, was finally conquered with the use of newly-discovered antibiotics like penicillin in the 1940s. But antibiotics actually have a much longer history — even if nobody understood how exactly they had worked.

QotD: “The English spoke of the ‘German custom’, the French referred to the vice allemande, and Italians called gay men and women ‘Berlinese'”

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

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Germany was closely associated with homosexuality. The English spoke of the “German custom”, the French referred to the vice allemande, and Italians called gay men and women “Berlinese”. Queer people existed across Europe, of course, but German thinkers actively studied non-heteronormative sexualities and openly debated the rights of queer people, inaugurating the field of sexology. In the first decade of the twentieth century, more than a thousand works on homosexuality were published in German. Researchers from England to Japan cited German sexologists as experts and often published their own works in Germany before their home countries.

The Weimar Republic, the zenith of modernism, witnessed new social liberalization and experimentation. Fritz Lang premiered his Expressionist film Metropolis in 1927, Alfred Döblin published his dizzyingly innovative novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929, and the following year Hannah Höch unveiled her Dadaist photomontage Marlene. And alongside reinventing traditional forms of artistic expression, Germans began interrogating gender roles and sexual identities. As the historian Clayton Whisnant observes, “Perhaps more than anywhere else, Weimar Germany became associated with experimentation in sexuality.” Berlin was the undisputed queer capital of Europe. By 1900, over fifty thousand gay men and lesbians lived there, and countless more visited, looking for friendship, love, and sex. By 1923, some hundred gay bars in Berlin catered to diverse groups: men and women, the old and the young, the affluent and the working class. Nightclubs like the Mikado, the Zauberflöte, and the Dorian Gray became international hot spots, and the city’s elaborate queer balls attracted worldwide attention. Associations offered opportunities for socializing and political organization. Crucially, relaxed rules of censorship allowed for the publication of dozens of pulpy gay novels, queer periodicals, and even personal ads. The British writer Christopher Isherwood, whose account of his thirties stay in Germany inspired the musical Cabaret, put it simply: “Berlin meant boys.” In 1928, the poet W. H. Auden similarly described the German capital as “the bugger’s daydream.” In her famous guide to the Berlin lesbian scene from the same year, Ruth Margarete Roellig concluded, “Here each one can find their own happiness, for they make a point of satisfying every taste.”

The experience was different for trans people. The Third Sex [likely the world’s first magazine devoted to trans issues] bore the subtitle “The Transvestites”, but at the time, the historian Laurie Marhoefer notes, the term meant different things to different people. German speakers were in the middle of developing a critical vocabulary to describe the expansion of recognized identities. Karl-Maria Kertbeny coined the word homosexual in 1869, and in 1910 Magnus Hirschfeld invented the term transvestite. It described both cross-dressers and transgender people. According to contemporary self-reports, some transvestites considered themselves homosexual, but most did not. Many wore clothes traditionally associated with the opposite sex only on special occasions. Others lived fully as a gender different from their sex at birth. A majority seemed interested in passing and adhering to expectations of respectability, while a minority sought to challenge the normative order. Gender affirmation surgeries were available — the first such operation was conducted in 1920 by, no surprise, a German doctor — but uncommon. From today’s perspective, it is therefore unclear whether an individual who identified as a transvestite in thirties Germany, including Hans Hannah Berg, was what we would today consider transgender, nonbinary, a cross-dresser, or something else altogether. In the very first issue of The Third Sex, an essay by Dr. Wegner acknowledges the richness of the term. “Just as people are all different in their outward appearance and inner attitudes, so are the characteristics of transvestites.” Many queer activists in the Weimar Republic were concerned that the population of gender variant people was too fragmented. Trans people were not as visible or as organized as gays and lesbians. Friedrich Radszuweit, the leader of the Federation for Human Rights and the publisher of several queer periodicals, saw a solution. To foster a trans community, he produced The Third Sex.

Matthew H. Birkhold, “A Lost Piece of Trans History”, The Paris Review, 2019-01-15.

August 5, 2021

Sarah Hoyt on “scientific government”

Filed under: France, Government, History, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise (which came out a few days ago, but I’ve been very busy), Sarah Hoyt outlines the genesis of the push for “scientific government” to save us all from ourselves and set right all the ills of the world:

Look, guys, since the middle of the 19th century, the idea of “scientific government” has been running around with pants on its head screaming insults at passerbys.

I like to say we’re still suffering from the consequences of WWI, but things were if not terminal very ill before then. Kings and emperors and Lord knows what else had got the idea of “science” and “permanent progress” stuck in their pin-like heads, which frankly couldn’t retain much more than the correct fork. And there were pet “scientists” and philosophers (the distinction was sometimes arguable. I mean, after all while doing experiments on electricity the 18th century was also fascinated with astral projection and other such things, and made no distinction. And the 19th was not much better.)

By the 20th century with mechanics and the Industrial Revolution paying a dividend in lives saved and prosperity created, these men of “science” were sure that it was only a matter of time till humanity and its reactions, thoughts and governance were similarly under control. And in the twentieth they expected us to become like unto angels.

Now, is there science that saved lives and created the wealthiest society every in the 20th century. DUH. Who the hell is arguing it. Oh, wait, there’s an entire cohort of people denying it. Not so many in the US — I think it’s hard to tell the real thing from foreign idiots posing. But in any case a minuscule contingent — but in France I know there’s a ton of them. They’re running with the bit in their teeth against rationality (I swear to bog) and thought and science. And trying to rebuild the religion of the middle ages. I read them and shake my head.

You see, you have to separate rationality and science from what the government and experts TELL you is rationality and science.

Yes, I know that France built a “Temple to Reason” and you know what? That by itself tells you their revolution was self-copulating and not right in the head. But you don’t need to go that far. Anyone who says they’re “for science” and want equality of results among disparate humans is not reasonable. Or reasoning. Or rational. They are however for sure completely and frackingly insane.

But I do understand the temptation, because so much of what’s being sold as “science” in the schools is not science but the worn out dogmas of people too stupid to know science if it bit them in the fleshy part of the buttocks.

I mean, never mind 2020. Which … you know? Remember how the flu vanished? Turns out the rat bastards were using a test that diagnosed flu as COVID. No, seriously. Malice or stupidity? I don’t know. And neither do you. Probably yes in most cases, though a lot of people have a ton of “learned stupidity”.

Even before 2020 a lot of our ideas on how things worked were lies, particularly those that hinged on or supported the leftist ideas of human kind. Things like Zimbardo’s (Is he dead yet? I need to know when to mark myself safe from being kidnapped by Zimbardo for crazy experiments. No, he really did that.) prisoner experiments; or the rat habitat experiments that supposedly showed that overpopulation had all sorts of bad effects, and therefore we should stop having kids. Turns out those effects are from the loss of social role. Which honestly, anyone who has looked at a conquered country could tell them. Of course, anyone who had looked at mice would also know they’re not humans, but never mind that. […] In fact, practically everything we think we know about psychology or sociology is likely to be a load of crap, if not outright faked.

And history, which is not really a science. Oh. Dear. Lord. Like, you know, the early form of internationalism, with international supply chains and empires caused WWI and … nationalism was blamed for it. Makes perfect sense … in hell.

In fact all this “science” stuff needs to be judged on one thing only: Does it make human lives better/save them? Or is it the astral projection of economics, sociology and psychology? By their fruits, etc.

July 30, 2021

The British government reaches deep into the bag of “nudge” tricks yet again

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

Britain’s public health boffins have got the government agitated enough to try major incentives to encourage British shoppers to buy healthier, lower-calorie foods. Tim Worstall explains that, because those shoppers are human beings, this suite of incentives won’t do at all what Nanny expects them to do:

Now consider how it has to work. You go shopping, you present your DimbleCard and gain points for the healthiness of that shopping basket. Lettuce and carrots galore, super, free ticket to London on the choo choo.

So, where are the chocco biccies? If you buy them when presenting your card then no choo choo for you. What happens?

The lettuce and the carrots are bought on the card, the chocco biccies are not. Everyone simply does two transactions, with DimbleCard and sans. Lots of free choo choo and no change, whatsoever, in diet.

Yes, of course people will do this. For that’s what people do. Survey the landscape of incentives in front of them then maximise their utility, the outcome, in the face of them. It’s a restricted rationality, restricted by knowledge, but it is there. Everyone will fiddle the system because that’s what it is to be human. Collecting the fire from the lightning strike is fiddling the universe, that’s just what we do.

This being why so many clever schemes to encourage or deter this or that just don’t work. This being why those detailed plans for men, if not mice, gang aft into idiocy. Because we out here, hom sap, will play whatever system there is to our benefit.

No, this will not work out like supermarket loyalty cards. Yes, it’s true, most of us do use them. But the incentive is for us to do so. The more we do use them then the more discounts we gain, the better off we are, even at the cost of that data. How does this new government one work? The less we buy of certain things the better off we are. So, less of those things will be bought using the cards.

It is not possible to insist that people must use the card to buy things. Well, not unless we’re about to descend into the dystopia desired by Caroline Lucas it’s not. There might be a card reader at the point of purchase but the supermarkets will not demand that a sale can only happen when a card is read.

Therefore there will be those sales which gain points which make prizes. There will also be those DimbleCardless sales which do not gain points, or even demerits, and are done without their being registered in the system.

July 27, 2021

Sir Terry Pratchett – The Science of Discworld

Filed under: Books, Humour, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Trinity College Dublin
Published 9 Aug 2012

The Science of Discworld – with Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen at SCIENCE GALLERY, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland in June 2012, as part of Dublin City of Science 2012

July 25, 2021

The Line editors clearly loved crafting their “Dicks in space!” headline

Filed under: Business, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a fellow space nerd, I welcome the editors of The Line to our number:

You’ve probably noticed by now that your Line editors are space enthusiasts. It’s been an interesting few weeks on that front. Sir Richard Branson flew out of the atmosphere, into free-fall (not zero-G, you scientific illiterates!), on a Virgin Galactic space plane. That said, he didn’t get high enough to cross the Kármán line, which, in the absence of any real international agreement on where the Earth ends and space begins, is as close as we come to a functional definition of the edge of space. (It’s an altitude of 100 km, for those wondering.) Jeff Bezos, of Amazon wealth and fame, did cross that line this week, along with three passengers, including Wally Funk, which was cool, if you’re into that sort of thing. (We are.) Bezos was riding a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket; Blue Origin is a company he founded and funded with his own gigantic wealth.

Look, let’s face facts — your Line editors are into space. We just are. But yeah, we agree that space policy is important enough and complicated enough to warrant debate. Reasonable people can have different views on this stuff. And we also agree that there are important debates to have about the accumulated wealth of billionaires, and the distorting effects that wealth can have on politics and society.

But unlike a bunch of ya’ll, we don’t get confused about a debate over income inequality and a debate over space travel. You can despise Bezos, Amazon and everything he’s done there, and still recognize that what he is doing on the space front is important. Everyone rolling their eyes at Bezos matching space flight capabilities that the Soviets and Americans achieved literally 60 years ago is allowing their desire to rack up some sweet Twitter likes with a snarky dunk blind themselves to the fact that Bezos (and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is way ahead of Blue Origin) aren’t just recreating earlier capabilities, they are massively improving on them.

So yeah, Blue Origin can now do what the Soviets and U.S. could do 60 years ago, but they’re doing it more safely, more efficiently and much, much more sustainably than national space agencies did. Reusability isn’t a frill, it’s a massive game-changer. And as much fun as it is to snort when these private-sector companies recreate an existing capability, do you really think they’re going to stop there?

Branson’s company could be written off as a tourism play for the affluent. Fair enough. Except that making space flight economically viable is the first step to ensuring that capability is both sustainable and more broadly accessible in the long run. Further, Bezos and especially Musk are inventing new and transformative space-flight capabilities. They are materially pushing back against the final frontier in ways that we simply have not before. It won’t matter unless we choose to do anything with these new capabilities, and your guess is as good as ours as to whether or not we will. But we could. That’s huge.

As huge as the gigantic dick-shaped rocket Bezos rode up. Yeah, yeah. We snorted, too. But, like, seriously, folks — making penis jokes about the shape of an object dictated by aerodynamic considerations isn’t quite as witty as you think: the rockets are shaped like penises because they literally have to be in order to work. Having a giggle is fine, but if you actually think you’re making a real point about misogyny and fragile male egos when you get snippy (ahem) about a schlong-shaped rocket, well, we’d love to see what happens when your very emotionally vigorous and feminist vagina-shaped space vehicle hits max Q. So long as we aren’t aboard it or in the landing area for its hurtling debris.

Our main point still stands: don’t let your cynicism and even revulsion at these guys blind you to what they’re doing. Bezos isn’t gonna stop at Yuri Gagarin-vintage accomplishments. Musk sure hasn’t. This’ll matter. It’s time to get serious. They are.

July 23, 2021

Panic is infectious, and the dying media are a primary vector

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

In City Journal, John Tierney looks at the two lethal waves of contagion the world has suffered since 2019, the Wuhan Coronavirus itself and the media-driven panic that almost certainly resulted in far more deaths than the disease that triggered it:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom — and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so — unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse. The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that — unless drastic measures were taken — intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.

This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science”. What had originally been a limited lockdown — “15 days to slow the spread” — became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?

The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.

July 19, 2021

QotD: Antifa

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

As noted here many times, it helps if you think of Antifa not as a political movement but as a metastasising personality disorder, a Cluster B contagion. An attempt to dominate by deranged and spiteful egos, rendered in shattered glass and burning livelihoods. They will never be satisfied and can never be appeased, merely encouraged and emboldened by any concession, any excuse, any hesitation.

They destroy and burn and intimidate, and beat people senseless, because they enjoy it. It’s something they wish to do, and choose to do, repeatedly. It makes them feel powerful. Everything else is a pretext, a rationalisation, a lie:

    This is us taking the high road. This is us trying to create a world filled with love.

David Thompson, commenting on “Files of the Severely Educated”, DavidThompson, 2021-04-18.

July 15, 2021

Out: “War is the health of the state”, In: “Pandemic restrictions are the health of the nanny state”

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

British MP Andrew Lewer on the inability (and determined unwillingness) of western governments at all levels to back away from all the restrictions they’ve been able to impose on their citizens since the start of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

The list goes on. By the government’s own calculations it [banning advertising for “junk food” on TV] will reduce children’s diets by a meagre five calories a day – the equivalent of a third of a cherry tomato. And watch out for those Government figures. Pardon the pun, but given that they add weight to the arguments of those opposing their intrusiveness into our lives, would anyone be amazed if new and revised figures emerged during the course of detailed legislation? But even if the impact of these proposals was amplified by “the science”, it would still come at too high a cost to individual freedom and liberty.

And this is just the thin end of the wedge. For a moment back in winter, it looked like we had woken up and smelt the full English breakfast. It was reported that the advertisement ban would be discarded, which allowed the free market minded to hope, especially given the disbanding of Public Health England, that this might signal pushback against nanny state intrusion. Alas, no.

The appetite for ill-conceived, unworkable ideas is growing: we have plans to force pubs to disclose the number of calories in every drink they serve, just as they begin to fill their tills after months of lockdown. Plans to end deals like “buy one get one free” on foods high in fat, sugar and salt – a regressive measure that will hit the poorest consumers hardest while doing nothing to reduce our waistlines. Plans for further legislation around nutritional labelling – adding cost, probably not adding clarity.

We left the EU in part as a reaction to over-regulation. I remember well during my time as an MEP how skewed towards large corporations the regulatory regime could be in Brussels. If, having taken the difficult and painful decision to leave the bloc, we fail to roll back the overreach then people will start to ask what the last four years was all about. If freedoms regained are never applied, then what was the point? The food laws will diminish freedoms in everyday life, not just those of the important, but more esoteric and common room kind, that our political elites from time to time do remember to respect.

July 14, 2021

QotD: The unlikely hermaphrodites in The Left Hand of Darkness

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m strange only in that I was very young and that the book that caused this reaction was a classic of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Let me start by saying that I LIKED the book. Loved it even. Mostly because it was different and it made me think. (Like other books of the time, it didn’t age well, mostly on language, but also structure, which I guess was innovative and daring at the time, but strikes me as “too early seventies” for words. Now this might be JUST ME but there’s a whole batch of books — one Heinlein — I can’t stand to re-read. I came of age in the seventies and eventually grew to loathe that false-craft feel of art at that time. No one else is forced to agree with me.)

But part of what made me think — because my relaxing reads are books on evolution and animals and their biology and behavior (guys, I read Konrad Lorenz for fun) is that the left (and at the time anyone with even vague intellectual pretensions was at the very least soft left, because the zeitgeist was) was very funny about humans.

They often opened their books on humans by gesticulating broadly at imaginary religious fanatics and rubbing said fanatics’ noses in the fact that “we are animals. No, we’re really animals.” And then proceeded to go a little bananas, sometimes in supposed non-fiction, like Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape, which assured us only humans killed their own species, or something equally ridiculous (I read it at around 14 or 15, I just remember his thesis that humans were uniquely vile made me snort-giggle at the time. Because, you know, you can sustain that if you’re religious, and say humans should aspire to the divine image, but if we’re really just animals, there is NO vile. We do what instinct and nature tell us, no judgement, right?)

But mostly this dysfunction showed in science fiction, particularly at the time. “We’re just animals. If we just changed/removed/tweaked x y z we’d be communitarian, sharing, no war animals.”

The way hermaphrodites behave in TLHOD made me snort/giggle too for various reasons, the first being that hermaphrodite species on Earth (granted mostly very small) have some of the most violent mating behaviors in the world. Makes sense since at least in live-bearing, or for that matter those who care for eggs, species, the cost falls on the one who carries young or sits on eggs. The other one just goes off, whistling his merry way and lives to mate another day. So in a species where either of the couple can bear, there would be a “war” (There are several books on war of the sexes in various species, which has led to things like praying mantises and duck penises.) to determine who bears. And yes, she did get right that in an intelligent species, value would have to be put on children-of-the-body or no one would want to do it. (Or most children would be conceived by rape. Which to be fair, is most hermaphrodite species on Earth.)

What she got wrong, related to that, is then having the kids raised in some sort of hippie dippie commune.

In fact, the whole setup makes perfect sense as a professional woman’s fantasy. “I want to have kids, but someone else raises them, and it will be the perfect communitarian family and no one will think it’s bad if I’m not there, or take no more interest in them than in any of the family kids.”

In point of fact, from evolutionary POV, an hermaphrodite species would have a hell of an attachment to their own biological “of the body” kids, for the simple reason that otherwise, being intelligent and able to circumvent instinct, no one would have kids “of the body” and those born of rape would be abandoned to die. World’s shortest species/race/breed.

Yes, I’m sure that some human (and these were supposed to be modified humans) tribes have done the communitarian child raising, but it’s not the norm, it’s not usually as communitarian as it looks and … oh, heck, even extended family raising the kids, which it sort of is, is nowhere nearly what US leftists think it is. There’s squabbles, politics, and the mothers very much care and “pull” for their own kid.

Anyway, it amused me because it was nowhere near the only. There was this trend back then for hermaphrodite modified humans that somehow made them more cooperative/better at not warring, etc, which I found absolutely mind bogglingly bizarre and made me wonder why people thought injecting the fierce young-protecting instinct of the female into a species at large would make it more sharing and caring, not the other way around. (And lord, study any society with multiple concubines and wives. Women protect THEIR children, there is no sisterhood or love all babies, when yours is in the mix. Some of the most horrific tales of mankind are the vengeance wrought by a woman on rival women AND THEIR BABIES.)

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Remaking People”, According to Hoyt, 2018-11-19.

July 10, 2021

The early growth of “Dianetics”, later known as Scientology

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Religion, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, David S. Wills outlines the early years of L. Ron Hubbard’s quasi-religion that eventually turned into a full-fledged cult:

In the 21st century, Scientology has become a synonym for “cult”. Thanks to an array of investigative exposés and testimony from former members, few people in the Western world are unaware of at least some of the Church’s fantastical beliefs and more alarming behaviours. Sixty years ago, however, it was viewed quite differently. Scientology — or dianetics, as it was originally known — was an appealing idea to many intellectuals and creatives at a time when the world was rapidly changing and notions that had once been taken for granted were suddenly being tossed out of the window. In science, art, and philosophy, accepted norms were being turned on their heads, and in the 1950s and ’60s, L. Ron Hubbard’s ideas — peddled as an alternative to psychiatry — fit quite nicely among the emerging doctrines dreamed up by his contemporary thinkers.

Indeed, the original concepts that launched Hubbard’s movement were not as outrageous as those that define it today. Among these, the idea of “engrams” and the “reactive mind” were perhaps the most appealing. Hubbard theorised that humans are marked by unconscious traumas that essentially pre-determine “aberrant” behaviour. Naturally, he claimed that his organisation held the key to removing these traumas and freeing people from a great deal of suffering. Stripped down to its fundamentals, dianetics seemed to be no more implausible than the strange new ideas espoused by Freud and Jung, or even those previously espoused by Nietzsche.

Of course, there were always oddball beliefs bundled in as well, and as the years went by, these became more prominent. Hubbard — a science fiction author prior to his metamorphosis into quasi-religious guru — enjoyed adding new elements of fantasy to his central theories, layering sci-fi storylines on top of one another until his movement had become an extravagant sort of space opera. The more obvious cult-like elements would emerge in due course: charging adherents for advancement in the organisation; trapping them with manipulation and blackmail; the development of esoteric jargon known as “Scientologese” that made it almost impossible for real communication to take place between members and outsiders; and shocking campaigns of harassment against critics and apostates.

In the early days, however, none of this was particularly obvious. Hard as it is to believe now, many intelligent people were once drawn to Scientology out of an overabundance of curiosity, and its absurdities were generally perceived as harmless, affable eccentricities. Among those lured into the fold of this mysterious new organisation were two of the most important authors of the 20th century: Aldous Huxley and William S. Burroughs. Although Hubbard’s own novels elicit little more than derision from critics, his ideas wormed their way into some very influential books and left an indelible mark on American literature.

When people first hear about Huxley’s and Burroughs’s interest in Scientology, they typically express some degree of shock and/or scepticism. These men were highly intelligent thinkers famous for their insightful criticisms of the dominant culture. And both wrote extensively on the topic of coercion — Huxley was keenly aware of how humans could be manipulated into subservience by technodictators, and Burroughs was fascinated by the idea that language could be employed for the purposes of mind control. How then could they have fallen for the very thing they critiqued?

July 8, 2021

The initial findings of our months-long dietary natural experiment

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

As we’ve all been told many, many times by the food nannies, access to fast food restaurants makes us fat. The food is too greasy, too salty, too tasty for our feeble wills to fight so we just engorge ourselves on those bad calories. We eat too much fast food and we get fat. Case closed. Well, that’s what we’ve been told. Our recent fast food deprivation diets say something else again:

“Camden Fast Food” by It’s No Game is licensed under CC BY 2.0

OK, well, we’ve just had a grand experiment, haven’t we? Peeps haven’t been able to queue at Maccy D’s to get their greaseburger. People have had to – and have had time to – buy actual food and then prepare it for themselves at home.

Which is something that does rather kill the case about those burgers. Because what has been happening is that we’ve been – in the absence of greaseburgers – been eating more.

No, really:

    Using data on millions of food and non-alcoholic drink purchases from shops, takeaways and restaurants, the study found that the pandemic led to calories from restaurant meals falling to zero during the UK’s first national lockdown. That increased somewhat over the summer and declined again as restrictions in the hospitality sector were reintroduced in the autumn.

    However, this was more than offset by a large increase in calories from takeaways, which peaked at more than double the usual levels in the UK’s second national lockdown in November 2020.

    Overall, people increased their calories from raw ingredients by more than those from ready-to-eat meals and snacks and treats, with the pandemic leading to a shift in the balance of calories towards foods that required home preparation.

It’s that last paragraph that’s important. More home food preparation was being done from raw ingredients. And yet calorie consumption rose.

The report said the most plausible explanation for the sustained increase over the pandemic was higher consumption rather than changes in household composition, food waste or stocking up.

The study is specific to Britain, but it’s highly likely that the same results will be observed in Canada, the United States, Australia, and many other places. But I wouldn’t expect it will be given much coverage, like so much these days that contravenes the messaging that our dying media all seem to prefer to spread.

QotD: Psychopaths

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

Came across this today. Psychopath “diagnostic criteria”. These are all direct quotes.

  • Psychopaths show a disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.
  • They fail to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours.
  • They are always deceitful … They are nasty, aggressive con artists.
  • They are massively impulsive and fail to plan ahead.
  • They show irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights and assaults.
  • They manifest a reckless disregard for the physical and psychological safety of others.
  • They are consistently irresponsible. Repeated failure to sustain consistent work behaviour … are their hallmark.
  • They show lack of remorse. They are indifferent to, or rationalize, having hurt, mistreated or stolen from another … It can seem that labelling them as anti-social is a serious understatement.

From Furnham, Adrian. 50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need to Know. London: Quercus Publishing, p. 25. The heading of the chapter is “Seem Sane”. This is the statement at the start of the discussion:

    Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt or loyalty to anyone but themselves.

Anyway, I just thought I would mention it.

Steve Kates, “Psychopath ‘diagnostic criteria'”, Catallaxy Files, 2021-04-07.

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