Quotulatiousness

April 2, 2023

“Digital blackface” (and it’s not Justin Trudeau trying on fresh face paint)

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

Kat Rosenfield on the desperate efforts of the terminally online to make “digital blackface” a cancellable crime for white people:

Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

Ozempic versus the make-believe world of “Healthy at Every Size”

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

Poor Americans are being propagandized that being fat — even to the point of being unable to carry on ordinary tasks — is “perfectly healthy” at the same time that the glitterati, the wealthy, and the mediagenic are getting thinner thanks to diet, exercise, and (it’s an open secret) drugs and cosmetic surgery. Along comes an antidiabetic drug that was found to have an interesting off-schedule property:

If you, a commoner, encountered a feudal lord in the year 1200, the latter would likely be wearing fine armour, carrying a well-polished sword, and riding a horse. Upon seeing these visual cues, you would address him properly, lest he punish you for failing to show proper deference. But as the centuries passed, particularly in the years following the American and French revolutions, this notion of privilege faded; the rich might be a class apart, but at times they might be dressed much like you, even if their apparel was slightly better-made.

Today, however, the rich are separating themselves in perhaps the most obvious way of all: by perfecting their bodies, rather than what they put on them. The rich are fit and the poor are fat: reams of research confirms that the prevalence of obesity decreases as income increases. In the United States, where 41% of the entire population is obese — compared with 25% in the United Kingdom — it is a rare wealthy person who is morbidly overweight (blimp-sized Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and portly former New Jersey governor Chris Christie are outliers). Increasingly, the rich in late middle age have come to resemble Jeff Bezos and Sarah Jessica Parker: ripped to shreds and almost certainly “enhanced” with various anti-ageing drugs and techniques, ranging from steroids and growth hormones to Botox injections and liposuction.

Into this mix comes semaglutide, an antidiabetic medication better known by its trade name Ozempic. Sold by pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, the drug, which reduces food intake by curbing appetite and slowing digestion, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat obesity in 2021. Since then, celebrities and fitness influencers have routinely shared before-and-after pics captioned with details of their courageous weight-loss journeys, which entailed jabbing themselves with a 1.5ml pen that contains a month’s worth of doses and costs roughly $900 without insurance.

Predictably, stories about Ozempic have proliferated in the tabloids and on social media. Some see the drug as a challenge to the celebrity movement that touts “fat acceptance”, and brought us the “slim-thick” era of curvy female superstars. They argue that Ozempic may work hand-in-hand with the return of the “heroin chic” look of the late Nineties. As interesting as it is to consider where these mixed messages might lead us — to a culture in which poor people are told it’s fabulous to be obese, while the rich get ever thinner and fitter — if this is a conspiracy, it’s not a new one. The rich have lusted after youth, beauty and fitness, in others and themselves, since time immemorial, always keeping the poor as downtrodden as possible while pacifying them with bromides about equality, liberty and fraternity. Ozempic, then, is not simply the key to thinness; those who pay for it are buying even more distance between themselves and the hoi polloi.

In short, this appears to be yet another sign that the elite are headed toward some sort of crude transhumanist utopia, complete with gene therapy and designer-baby selection. Some may scoff that this is science fiction, but this future looms: once they’re sufficiently fine-tuned, gene editing tools will likely eradicate heart disease, muscle wasting, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions in embryos that are still in utero — but their price will be nothing short of staggering. Similarly expensive gene therapies will enhance the overall performance of already-healthy humans, raising ethical questions about whether these procedures should “improve” a person or merely “fix” a condition. The rich, of course, will leave those debates to the philosophers and pay upfront for the best bodies that their considerable resources can buy. Already, news stories abound of billionaires pursuing immortality, with a few commentators trying to sanitise the pursuit by arguing that the research will somehow benefit even the least of us.

April 1, 2023

Athenian or Visigoth? Western civilization or barbarism?

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore recalls Neil Postman’s 1988 essay titled “My Graduation Speech”, which seems even more relevant today than when he wrote it:

Alaric, King of the Visigoths, entering Athens in 395 AD.
Public domain illustration originally published in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1920 via Wikimedia Commons.

What seemed to bother Postman was a nagging suspicion that modern humans were taking civilization for granted. This sentiment was more clearly expressed in one of Postman’s less-known literary works, his 1988 essay titled “My Graduation Speech“.

In his speech, Postman discusses two historic civilizations familiar to most people today — Athenians and Visigoths. One group, the Athenians, thrived about 2,300 years ago. The other, the Visigoths, made their mark about 1,700 years ago. But these civilizations were separated by much more than time, Postman explained.

The Athenians gave birth to a cultural enlightenment whose fruits are still visible today — in our art, education, language, literary works, and architecture. The Visigoths, on the other hand, are notable mostly for the destruction of civilization.

Postman mentions these peoples because, he argued, they still survive today. Here is what he wrote:

    I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoths are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea.

But what ideas? What values? Postman explains:

    To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question — these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a person can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.

    To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind’s most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To a Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence in distinguishable from another. A Visigoth’s language aspires to nothing higher than the cliché.

    To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread which holds civilized society together is thin and vulnerable; therefore, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the center of the universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affectation and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper.

    To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behavior. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word “idiot”. A modern Visigoth is interested only in his own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community.

Postman said all people must choose whether to be an Athenian or a Visigoth. But how does one tell one from the other? One might be tempted to think that education is the proper path to becoming an Athenian. Alas, Postman argued that this was not the case.

    I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees. My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we may fairly say they are closet Visigoths.

Postman concluded his speech by expressing his wish that the student body to which he was speaking would graduate more Athenians than Visigoths.

The production of educated barbarians was relatively low in 1988, despite Postman’s pessimism. The production of such modern-day Visigoths is unimaginably higher now than the tail end of the Cold War when he was writing. I fear we have already made our decision … and may God have mercy upon our souls.

March 30, 2023

The use and mis-use of wargames

Filed under: Gaming, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Cheating in wargames must be approximately five minutes younger than wargames themselves … famously, the Imperial Japanese Navy didn’t like the outcome of wargaming what became the Battle of Midway and “cheated” by refloating the aircraft carriers shown as sunk in the simulation and Wehrmacht General Paulus ran a wargame that showed Operation Barbarossa would fail and he was also told to ignore the results and ended up in Stalingrad. Lessons can be learned from formal wargames, but as CDR Salamander points out, a wargame outcome can be custom-tailored as the leaders require:

Not this kind of civilian wargame … a real wargame run by professional military staff!

One of the things that will get my eye twitching faster than about anything else is when someone responds to a question or concern with a, “Well, in our wargames …”

Bullshit.

That may work for civilians or under-briefed lawmakers who lack the depth in military matters, but anyone who has run or been part of a wargame knows that you can design one to give you the outcomes you want.

Planning assumptions etc … it is all flexible.

Wargames, done right, don’t tell you the future, but they do help inform gaps in your OPLAN, thinking, or expectations of the enemy … and shortfalls you might have.

At the POLMIL level — where our most senior uniformed and civilian leaders live — you have distinctly different concerns than Tactical, Operational, or — if your Planning Confession separates Strategic from the POLMIL level — Strategic level.

For the senior uniformed leader to make this statement, as if it were a bolt out of the blue, is simply gobsmacking;

    A “big lesson learned comes out of Ukraine, which is the incredible consumption rates of conventional munitions in what really is a limited regional war,” General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee.

    “If there was a war on the Korean peninsula or a great power war between United States and Russia, United States and China, those consumption rates would be off the charts,” he said.

Whose charts? Who made them and using what metrics and dataset?

Yes … that is a lesson for most out there … but it should not be for the CJCS. Hell, I remember certain aspects of updating the OPLAN for Korea a quarter century ago when we beat the drum that, “We don’t have enough ____ and only a few days of ____ before we are combat ineffective.”

This. Is. Not. New.

As we mentioned last July, magazine depth has been a chronic shortfall for a long time.

I have trouble believing that the CJCS is shocked, SHOCKED, that this is an issue.

It isn’t a “lesson learned” — it is a lesson ignored.

One of the easiest, most obvious-to-the-accountants economy any military can make is to scrimp on the inventory of live ammunition … if there’s no war, much of the stored munitions must be disposed of at a cost, and what’re the chances they’ll throw a war before the next election? Plus, if there’s only so much in storage, it’s not economical to have the training allowance of ammunition go up, so you can reduce the resupply levels and free up money in the budget for sexier, more mediagenic toys.

“Nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program” … except those few that make your life easier

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

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander reacts to the US government’s new moves to make telehealth less useful for as many people as possible:

“Live telehealth demonstration” by CiscoANZ is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Telemedicine is when you see a doctor (or nurse, PA, etc) over a video call. Medical regulators hate new things, so for its first decade they ensured telemedicine was hard and inconvenient.

Then came COVID-19. Suddenly important politicians were paying attention to questions about whether people could get medical care without leaving their homes. They yelled at the regulators, and the regulators grudgingly agreed to temporarily make telemedicine easy and convenient.

They say “nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program”, but this only applies to government programs that make your life worse. Government programs that make your life better are ephemeral and can disappear at any moment. So a few months ago, the medical regulators woke up, realized the pandemic was over, and started plotting ways to make telemedicine hard and inconvenient again.

The first fruit of their labor is DEA-407, which makes it hard for telemedicine doctors to prescribe controlled substances. Controlled substances are drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, Xanax, or Ambien that the government has declared to be potentially addictive. The new rules say that telemedicine doctors can no longer prescribe these (or, in some cases, can prescribe them one time in an emergency).

Why don’t I like this decision? I am a telepsychiatrist. I work with about a hundred psychiatric patients who, for one reason or another, prefer online to physical appointments:

  • Some live in small towns that don’t have psychiatrists of their own
  • Some have agoraphobia, chronic pain, or some other condition that makes it hard for them to go to an office.
  • Some move around a lot and like to be able to see their psychiatrist whether they’re in LA or SF.
  • Some live hundreds of miles away from me, but know and trust me for some reason, and would rather see me than someone closer to them.
  • Some appreciate the fact that I charge lower rates than psychiatrists who have offices, because I don’t have to pay for Bay Area commercial real estate and pass those costs on to my patients.
  • Some work during work hours, and like being able to see me from their office instead of taking half the day off to travel to my location.
  • Some like convenience and dislike inconvenience

As a psychiatrist, a big part of my job is prescribing controlled substances. For example, most guidelines agrees that the first-line treatment for severe ADHD is stimulant medications (eg Adderall or Ritalin). And although psychiatrists hate to admit it, the first-line treatment for temporary crisis anxiety, especially when it’s so bad that the patient isn’t able to listen to your clever plans to solve it with therapy, is benzodiazepines (eg Valium or Klonopin). You can’t be a good well-rounded psychiatrist without the option to sometimes prescribe these drugs.

“Well, your patients will have to find a different psychiatrist, or transition off of them”. Nobody ever finds different psychiatrists. Some of my patients are a bad match for my style or areas of expertise, and I’ve tried very hard to find them different psychiatrists, and it never works. Maybe there are no other psychiatrists in their area. Maybe the psychiatrists in their area don’t take the right insurance, or are too far away from mass transit. Maybe the psychiatrists have six month long wait lists. Sometimes it’s just that my ADHD patients get distracted and forget they were supposed to find new psychiatrists, and I can’t hold their hand literally all the time. As for transitioning off the medications, some patients absolutely cannot function at all without them. Did I mention that if you come off of some of them too quickly, you can literally die?

QotD: Revealed preference in the teenage hellscape of high school

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

This demonization of masculinity conflicts with the reality that any boy can see with his own two eyes: The cutest girls in school are attracted to the most masculine boys, and masculine not just in terms of physical traits, but also in terms of personality traits — confidence, assertiveness, “swagger”. Here we see a problem with what Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi calls the feminine-primary social order. Every observant man knows that there is a yawning chasm between (a) what women say they value most in a man and (b) the kind of man women actually go for. Listen to what women say, and you’d think they are magnetically attracted to “sensitive” guys. Watch what women actually do, and you can see that women obviously don’t actually care about “sensitivity”. Women want men who are tall and muscular and, ceteris parabus, rich, although no amount of money is going to make a short chubby guy sexy. As for the claim that women go for “sensitive” guys, anyone with two eyes and a brain knows this is nonsense. You don’t see throngs of lovestruck college girls chasing after guys who major in sociology or English literature (unless, of course, these guys are also tall, muscular and rich). No, it’s the jocks and frat boys who get the best action on campus, and if you pay attention to the choices women make, you’ll begin to suspect that their professed preference for “sensitive” men is the exact opposite of truth. That girl who was lecturing you about your need to be more “sensitive” will, with surprising regularity, end up falling head-over-heels for some selfish creep or dimwit brute who can’t even spell the word “sensitivity”.

Robert Stacy McCain, “Conflicting Signals”, The Other McCain, 2019-05-23.

March 29, 2023

The Grauniad something something glass houses something something throwing stones

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Ashley Rindsberg recounts the details we know so far about the Guardian‘s embarassing historical project to find out about the newspaper’s links to the slave trade:

The Guardian prides itself on being one of the most Left-leaning and anti-racist news outlets in the English-speaking world. So imagine its embarrassment when, last month, a number of black podcast producers researching the paper’s historic ties to slavery abruptly resigned, alleging they had been victims of “institutional racism”, “editorial whiteness”, “microaggressions, colourism, bullying, passive-aggressive and obstructive management styles”. All of this might smack of progressive excess, but, in reality, it merely reflects an institution incuriously at odds with itself.

Questions about The Guardian‘s ties to slavery have been circulating since 2020, when, amid the media’s collective spasm of racial conscience following the murder of George Floyd, the Scott Trust announced it would launch an investigation into its history. “We in the UK need to begin a national debate on reparations for slavery, a crime which heralded the age of capitalism and provided the basis for racism that continues to endanger black life globally,” journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson wrote in a June 2020 Guardian opinion piece about the toppling of a statue of 17th-century British slaver Edward Colston. A month later, the Scott Trust committed to determining whether the founder of the paper, John Edward Taylor, had profited from slavery. “We have seen no evidence that Taylor was a slave owner, nor involved in any direct way in the slave trade,” the chairman of the Scott Trust, Alex Graham, told Guardian staff by email at the time. “But were such evidence to exist, we would want to be open about it.” (Notably, Graham, in using the terms “slave owner” and “direct way”, set a very specific and very high bar for what would be considered information worthy of disclosure.)

The problem is that the results of the investigation, conducted by historian Sheryllynne Haggerty, an “expert in the history of the transatlantic slave trade”, have never been made public. When contacted with questions about what happened to the promised report, Haggerty referred all inquiries to The Guardian‘s PR, which has remained silent on the matter. (The Guardian was asked for comment and we were given the stock PR response The Guardian gave following the podcaster’s letter.) But what we do know is this: according to Guardian lore, a business tycoon named John Edward Taylor was inspired to agitate for change after witnessing the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when over a dozen people were killed in Manchester by government forces as they protested for parliamentary representation. Two years later, Taylor, a young cotton merchant, with the backing of a group of local reformers known as the Little Circle, founded the paper.

“Since 1821 the mission of The Guardian has been to use clarity and imagination to build hope,” The Guardian‘s current editor, Katharine Viner, proudly proclaims on the “About us” page of the paper’s website. Part of this founding myth concerns one of the defining social and political issues of the day, slavery, which the Little Circle members, including Taylor, vigorously opposed as a moral affront. “The Guardian had always hated slavery,” Martin Kettle, an associate editor, wrote in a 2011 apologia on why during the Civil War the paper had vociferously condemned the North while equivocating on the South.

That may be true, but it also presents an incomplete picture. The Manchester Guardian, as the paper was then known, was founded by cotton merchants, including Taylor, who were able to pool the money needed to launch the paper by drawing on their respective fortunes. While none of these men, many of whom were Unitarian Christians, is likely to have engaged in slavery, they didn’t just benefit from but depended upon the global slave trade that provided virtually all of the cotton that filled their mills. As Sarah Parker Remond, an African American abolitionist, said upon visiting Manchester in 1859: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125 million worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”

March 28, 2023

WEIRD World – basing all our “assumptions about human nature on psych lab experiments starring American undergraduates”

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

Jane Psmith reviews The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich:

Until 2002, diplomats at the United Nations didn’t have to pay their parking tickets. Double-parking, blocking a fire hydrant, blocking a driveway, blocking an entire midtown Manhattan street — it didn’t matter; when you have diplomatic plates, they let you do it. In the five years before State Department policy changed in November 2002, UN diplomats racked up a whopping 150,000 unpaid parking tickets worth $18 million in fines. (Among other things, the new policy allowed the city to have 110% of the amount due deducted from the US foreign aid budget to the offending diplomats’ country. Can you believe they never actually did it? Lame.) Anyway, I hope you’re not going to be surprised when I say that the tickets weren’t distributed evenly: the nine members of Kuwait’s UN mission averaged almost 250 unpaid tickets apiece per year (followed by Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, and Mozambique, each between 100 and 150; the rest of the top ten were Albania, Angola, Senegal, and Pakistan). The UK, Canada, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway had none at all. The rest of the rankings are more or less what you’d expect: for example, Italy averaged three times as many unpaid tickets per diplomat as France and fifteen times as many as Germany.

What did the countries with the fewest unpaid parking tickets have in common? Well, they generally scored low on various country corruption indexes, but that’s just another way of saying something about their culture. And the important thing about their culture is that these countries are WEIRD: western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. But they’re also, in the grand scheme of human history, weird: their inhabitants think differently, behave differently, and value different things than most humans. Among other things, WEIRD people are individualistic, nonconformist, and analytical. They — okay, fine, we — are particularly hard-working, exhibit low time preference, prefer impersonal rules we apply universally, and elevate abstract principles over contextual and relationship-based standards of behavior. In other words, WEIRD people (as Joseph Henrich and his colleagues pointed out in the influential 2010 paper where they coined the phrase) are outliers on almost every measure of human behavior. Wouldn’t it be silly for an entire academic discipline (and therefore an entire society ideologically committed to Trusting The Experts) to base all its assumptions about human nature on psych lab experiments starring American undergraduates? That would give us a wildly distorted picture of what humans are generally like! We might even do something really dumb like assume that the social and political structures that work in WEIRD countries — impersonal markets, constitutional government, democratic politics — can be transplanted wholesale somewhere else to produce the same peace and prosperity we enjoy.

Ever since he pointed out the weirdness of the WEIRD, Henrich has been trying to explain how we got this way. His argument really begins in his 2015 The Secret of Our Success, which I reviewed here and won’t rehash. If you find yourself skeptical that material circumstances can drive the development of culture and psychology (unfortunately the term “cultural Marxism” is already taken), you should start there. Here I’m going to summarize the rest of Henrich’s argument fairly briefly: first, because I don’t find it entirely convincing (more on that below), and second, because I’m less interested in how we got WEIRD than in whether we’re staying WEIRD. The forces that Henrich cites as critical to the forging of WEIRD psychology are no longer present, and many of the core presuppositions of WEIRD culture are no longer taken for granted, which raises some thought-provoking questions. But first, the summary.

Henrich argues that the critical event setting the West on the path to Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic was the early medieval western Church’s ban on cousin marriage. That might seem a little odd, but bear in mind that most of the humans who’ve ever lived have been enmeshed in incredibly dense kin networks that dictate obligations, responsibilities, and privileges: your identity is given from birth, based simply on your role as a node in an interdependent network. When societies grow beyond the scale of a family, it’s by metaphorically extending and intensifying these kinship bonds (go read our review of The Ancient City for more on this). These kinship networks perpetuate themselves through marriage, and particularly through marriage to relatives, whether blood or in-laws, to strengthen existing connections. Familial or tribal identities come first, before even the claims of universal religions, as when Wali Khan, a Pakistani politician, phrased his personal allegiances as “I have been a Pashtun for six thousand years, a Muslim for thirteen hundred years, and a Pakistani for twenty-five.” You could imagine Edwin of Northumbria or Childeric saying something pretty similar.

Then, beginning in the 4th century, the western Church began to forbid marriages to relatives or in-laws, the kinship networks began to wither away, and alternative social technologies evolved to take their place. In place of the cousin-marriers’ strong tight bonds, conformity, deference to traditional authority, and orientation toward the collective, you get unmoored individuals who have to (or get to, depending on your vantage point) create their own mutually beneficial relationships with strangers. This promotes a psychological emphasis on personal attributes and achievements, greater personal independence, and the development of universalist social norms. Intensive kinship creates a strong in-group/out-group distinction (there’s kin and there’s not-kin): people from societies with strong kinship bonds, for instance, are dramatically more willing to lie for a friend on the witness stand. WEIRD people are almost never willing to do that, and would be horrified to even be asked. Similarly, in societies with intensive kinship norms, you’d be considered immoral and irresponsible if you didn’t use a position of power and influence to benefit your family or tribe; WEIRD people call that nepotism or corruption and think it’s wrong.

The Rise of the US Army Air Forces

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Mar 2023

The United States Army Air Force, USAAF, is the most powerful air force in the world. Alongside the Royal Air Force, it is winning the air war against the Luftwaffe. But things weren’t always like this. At the outbreak of war, the USAAF could not hold a candle to its allies or enemies. How have the Americans managed to turn things around?
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Miles Davis – “Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio”

Filed under: Europe, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Miles Davis
Published 23 Mar 2021

“Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio” by Miles Davis
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March 27, 2023

The war against fertility

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray:

The effacement of women’s bodies is changing from a cultural signal to a battlefield maneuver. The acceleration of the presence of men as dominant participants in women’s sports, the growing intensity of casually monstrous blue zone attacks on families and parenting, the emergence of drag queens — men playacting as women, burlesque cartoons about sexual identity — as The Most Important Symbol Ever (and something children should definitely see) …

… and now this:

That’s footage from a Let Women Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand, where women arguing that “women” are “adult human females” were physically attacked by a mob of “transwomen” — by men — and their allies. It’s very progressive when men dressed as women silence women and hurt them. More here, also linked above.

In the opening paragraph of this post, you may have thought that one of the things I mentioned was different than the other things — that the blue state assault on families and parenting isn’t specifically gendered, and is equally an assault on the role of mothers and fathers. And it is. But.

It seems to me that the very very strange thing breaking out all over the world — or all over the Anglosphere, because I don’t see Nigeria and Peru and Singapore going all-in on transgendered everything — is loaded with subtext about a febrile loathing for fertility. In policy, we’re incentivizing childlessness, and disincentivizing childbearing. Birthrates are declining sharply, and were declining even before the mRNA injections, while blue state governments work on laws that tell would-be parents their children can vanish from their custody on political pretexts. Who has the future children while the state says that hey, nice family you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it?

I suspect the reason so much hate and rage is being directed at women is that their bodies can produce babies, which means that the hate and rage is being directed at the future. Peachy Keenan, who’s all over this stuff in multiple forums, wrote recently about Hicklibs on Parade, describing “how deeply the postmodern, anti-human gender ideology has penetrated into what we used to call ‘middle America'”:

    In Plano, Texas last fall, an “all-ages” drag brunch attracted some unwanted attention from people who thought they lived in a conservative state. At the brunch — which was held at Ebb & Flow, an eatery in an upscale strip mall — a buffoonish man in a dress wearing cat ears sings, “My p*ssy good, p*ssy sweet, p*ssy good enough to eat”, while flashing his underwear.

    In the video from the event, a four-year old girl stares in shock as the “drag” performer twerks and grinds for the ladies in attendance.

    The people in the crowd watching this man systematically strip away a little girl’s innocence look like nice friendly Texans; plump grandmas and families and the types you’d run into at the local Costco. They are not hipsters; they are not edgy. They look normal!

    This is what makes all of this so striking. These slightly downmarket Texan and Midwestern prairie home companion women have, historically, been the only thing holding this rickety old country together.

QotD: Homo electronicus and the problem of instant communications

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

There are lots of problems with instant communications, and they really need a whole post (or series, or book) to themselves, but one is particularly relevant here. As discussed above, it’s not the technology itself, it’s the application. The internet, like TV, is one of those gadgets that are almost impossible not to use. If it’s there, you’re going to log on – it takes serious, frustrating effort not to. Try it!

One obvious consequence of this is that it turns the whole world into a giant hen party. Karen has always been with us, probably with equal prevalence. But as late as the mid-1990s, she’d have to confine her scolding to PTA meetings and places like that. But now everyone has the Internet, and social media’s a thing, and it’s just sitting there, compelling you to use it. Woman’s natural role as the guardian of the tribe’s mores becomes Karen-ism on crack.

Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.

March 26, 2023

Plandemic? Manufactured crisis? Mass formation psychosis?

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, James Delingpole lets his skeptic flag fly:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus …

Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the “pandemic”, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the “pandemic” became.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this “pandemic” remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis”.

In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this “pandemic” really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since “Spanish Flu” a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.

Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, “Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.” But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.

Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.

This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.

It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.

We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.

Germany Invades Hungary – WW2 – Week 239 – March 25, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, India, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Mar 2023

Germany occupies Hungary this week to prevent any possible Hungarian defection from the war, the Soviets continue pushing back the Axis in Ukraine, pressing them ever more toward Romania, the Japanese advance on Imphal and Kohima continues, but Allied attacks in Italy and Japanese ones on Bougainville come to their ends.
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Billy Joel – “The Downeaster Alexa“

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Billy Joel
Published 3 Oct 2009

In 1989, Billy Joel released his album Storm Front, a successful album that hit #1 on the Billboard 200 charts and went quadruple platinum. Watch the official music video for “The Downeaster Alexa“, about the hard lives of Long Island fishermen.
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