Quotulatiousness

March 14, 2023

Social media, selfies, and depression

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

In The Free Press, Jonathan Haidt notes the inflection point at which young liberal women started to become depressed at a much higher rate than the rest of the population — a trend that has continued for over a decade:

In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the COVID shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.)

I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret.

Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.

Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19–24, 2020.
Graphed by Jon Haidt.

In recent weeks — since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens — there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction — Gimbrone, Bates, Prins & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs”. Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major U.S. survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89).

Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).

The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,

    Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data:

    Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.

After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word ‘selfie’ entered the popular lexicon.”

Turkey has always been the awkward ally in NATO, but for how much longer?

Filed under: Europe, Middle East, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Strategika, Zafiris Rossidis examines the shift of Turkish sentiment away from its longstanding role in the NATO alliance and toward a more Russian-friendly and more independent stance in international affairs:

Turkish flag.
Photo by Burak Su via Wikimedia Commons.

A poll conducted in December 2022 by the Turkish company Gezici found that 72.8% of Turkish citizens polled were in favor of good relations with Russia. By comparison, nearly 90% perceive the United States as a hostile country. It also revealed that 24.2% of citizens believe that Russia is hostile, while 62.6% believe that Russia is a friendly country. Similarly, more than 60% of respondents said that Russia contributes positively to the Turkish economy.

Turkey began to distance itself from the United States as early as 2003, when it refused the passage of American troops to Iraq. In 2010, it destroyed the U.S.–Israel–Turkey triangle, breaking up with Israel. In 2011, Turkey implemented a policy in Syria that was hardly in line with U.S. interests. The final distancing took place in 2016, with the July coup, for which Turkey blamed the United States.

Turkey considers itself very important to the United States but declares that Ankara can live without Washington. This concept has become the point of departure for Turkey in its quest to reconstitute the Ottoman Empire. Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu declares that the Turkish government will design the new world order with the help of Allah, and Western powers will eat the dust behind almighty Turkey (December 8, 2022).

According to a RAND Corporation volume on Turkey, there are four scenarios for the future of Turkish strategic orientation: 1) Turkey will remain a difficult partner for the United States; 2) Turkey will become democratic and unite with the West; 3) Turkey will be between East and West, but have better relations with powers such as China, Iran, and Russia, than with the U.S. and the EU; and 4) Turkey will completely abandon the West.

From the evidence in the case of the Russian–Ukrainian war, Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran justify the Russian invasion since NATO and the EU have designs on their neighborhood. Above all, they are united by a common hatred for the West. They are frenemies and they know it: on the contrary, the U.S. tends to invest in frenemies as if they were true friends.

The U.S. observed the rapprochement of Turkey and Russia without renouncing the traditional alliance with Turkey, which today has no longer such importance. Turkey was useful when it was an “enemy” of the USSR and the U.S. made far too many concessions for the sake of this useful enmity. In short, there is some inertia in the modification of the principle “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, as of course “the friend of a friend is my friend”. Turkey’s role in NATO worries the U.S., as Ankara–Moscow relations have acquired some shared strategic characteristics.

?he attraction between the two countries lies in their equally authoritarian governance models and the fact that their strategic culture and operational codes bear similarities: Both countries are revisionist, aggressive, and assertive in their regions; both countries claim to be encircled, which they use as a pretext for their unilateral actions; and both countries have militarized their foreign policy, waging hybrid warfare, resorting to proxy warfare, and blackmailing countries that offer resistance. Russia and Turkey cooperate on natural gas and oil pipelines; Russia has sold weapons such as the S-400 missile system to Turkey; Russia has provided technical assistance in the construction of Turkey’s nuclear plants; the two nations have collaborated in Central Asia (i.e., Azerbaijan); they import and export each other’s commodities; and Turkey has illegally transported Russian fuel to China and Iran, thereby bypassing sanctions on Russia, to mention only a few.

But the big issue for U.S.–Turkey relations against the backdrop of the Russian–Ukrainian war has four strands: First, the issue of the important role Turkey plays in the grain export agreement, which if cancelled will create a food crisis in Africa. Second, Turkey’s blackmailing of the NATO candidacies of Sweden and Finland. Third, the Turkish application to purchase the F-16 and the possible conflict between Congress and the Biden administration over the administration’s request to grant Turkey the license to do so. Finally, Turkey’s non-adoption of NATO sanctions against Russia. The possibility of Erdoğan using a strategy of tensions with Greece (e.g., multiple violations of Greek airspace, aggressiveness in the Aegean, weaponization of immigration, threats of bombing Athens with the new “Tayfun” short-range ballistic missile) to rally the electorate around his party and detach it from any opposition — all recent polls have AKP trailing the opposition — prior to the June election is one explanation for Turkey’s behavior that is being considered by the U.S., which nonetheless is angered that Turkey is the only NATO country that has not adopted the sanctions against Russia.

QotD: Facebook’s entire structure is designed to prevent information “going viral”

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

Imagine that you came up with something amazing to share with people. Let’s pretend that you created the most amusing video in the world. Or came up with the funniest joke anyone has ever heard. Or maybe you have just experienced something remarkable that millions of people would want to know about. Or let’s assume you took a photograph that would blow people’s minds. Or perhaps you have just composed the catchiest tune ever.

You might think that social media is where to go to share this very cool thing, and watch it go viral. And, in fact, that happens on Twitter and a few other platforms. I’m not always right in forecasting which things I post will go viral, but a few times every year I will share something on Twitter that grabs people’s attention so much that it gets tens of thousands of retweets and likes. Millions of people might see it.

That’s what going viral is all about.

Now here’s the kicker. I put up that same item on my Facebook author’s page, and the company will actively work to prevent people from seeing it. And adding insult (a company specialty), they will send me an alert telling me: This post could go viral if you pay us money for promoting it.

At first glance, this just seems another way to maximize profits. And who can blame Mark Zuckerberg for wanting to get a few more dollars in his bank account? Let’s feel some pity for a guy who just lost $100 billion.

But the real devastating part of this story is that Facebook is actually preventing users from sharing the funniest joke in the world. Facebook actually hates seeing some videos go viral, even if they are the most amusing things on the web. Every day they work to prevent folks from seeing a mind-blowing photo — and many other things that can’t be monetized.

This can’t be good for the user experience. This can’t be what users want, or what they would tell the company in a focus group or via market research.

And it certainly can’t be good for business.

So I’m amused when I hear how Facebook is envious of TikTok, which has much superior user engagement. Well, duh. Of course TikTok has greater engagement — that’s because Facebook has put systems in place to prevent entertaining things from going viral. They are now scrambling to work around this tiny detail, but they won’t succeed.

I’ve reduced my Facebook posts by at least 70%, and this was the main reason. I can’t be the only person who has responded in this way.

It’s not in the company’s DNA to promote interesting things on its platform. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Facebook’s recent attempt to imitate Substack collapsed in total failure. I knew that would happen on day one — because Facebook will never let writers go viral on the platform. Mr. Z. wants to get paid before anything goes viral, and that’s the exact opposite of Substack’s successful formula — which rewards the creator more than the platform.

When Facebook initially launched this touted publishing platform, somebody asked me what I thought about it. “Facebook has the power to give a writer access to millions of readers,” I replied, “but they will never let it happen. The entire internal structure of the company is designed to prevent this.”

The speed of the collapse, however, was surprising. Facebook announced the launch of Bulletin on June 29, 2021. Facebook announced the termination of Bulletin on October 4, 2022.

Even King Henry VIII’s wives lasted longer than that.

Ted Gioia, “How Web Platforms Collapse”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-05.

March 13, 2023

People in high places like “Pryam Farll”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the kakistocratic “elites” of the west and the dangerous policies they’ve been pushing:

How our leaders are seen by the people, their prey.

Around early Trump, a character calling himself Pryam Farll acquired a host of “friends” on Facebook among the most influential intellectual activist/writers on the right. He claimed to be a member of the Danish Royal Family, related to Prince Phillip, who spent Christmas at Sandringham, mentored Prince Harry and who read Putin’s email. He hated Putin with all his strength, claimed to be a General in US Intelligence, had worked in Reagan White House, and spent his time dropping into NATO, the EU, and Defence Departments in countries adjacent to Russia in the service of marshalling power against Putin, surrounding him with armies and bases and, as it turns out, bioweapons labs. He was also, tongue-in-cheek, “6’8″, devastatingly handsome and mind-blowingly rich”. He posted a dozen times a day, hilarious, way too bright, and substantive. Around the time that the first lie emerged about the Russia Hoax, which he claimed to have helped invent, he said he was in at the War Office in Romania, and to “start no trouble whilst he worked”.

Then he vanished.

And whether he was a genius kid in the basement or a mock-up by MI6 counter-intelligence meant to influence the influential, he serves as a type, the type that got us into this mess, where we are ghost-walking into nuclear conflict. The British since McKinder have had it out for the Russians and Russia-hate is baked into their intellectual class. Did the U.S. blow up Nordstream? Maybe, maybe not, but we very probably paid for it. More like MI6 and General Farll did the deed, and theirs is the ghastly world we now inhabit.

The early neo-cons promoted war as a way to get the “common” people “exhilarated and unified”. Get them off rock and roll, sex and shopping onto a spiritual crusade for “democracy”, they thought, demonstrating one of the aspects of this type: they didn’t have much fun in high school.

Iraq 1 and 2 were a result of this thinking. And now Ukraine. This crowd has spent almost a decade since Trump’s throwaway remark that maybe we should ally with Russia, stirring up hate. This entirely, entirely to cover for their thefts and crimes. And now they present us with another opportunity to be exhilarated and unified. Aren’t we just blessed?

If the Ukraine had signed and executed Minsk 2, we wouldn’t be in this mess. This was created by slender boy-men like Antony Blinken and little-girl-women like Samantha Power and Victoria Nuland, playing the Great Game without any notion of the actual effect of their ambitions on those they see as servile nothings, good for tax dollars like us, or foreign meatsuits to bomb to death. They have killed or wounded 500,000 Ukrainians in the last two years. Britain alone has issued 190,000 visas to terrified Ukrainians. Soros’s 2014 Color Revolution, where they installed a puppet over an actually elected Russian-friendly President, started the rush and ever since it’s all Pryam Farll angling for nuclear conflict.

[…]

Of course this is all centered around the intellectual fatuity of the Davos plan to enslave humanity in a technocratic prison because “climate change”. Russia under Putin is rapidly reclaiming its thousand year old culture, reintegrating the church, refusing the revolting ambi-sexual garbage of our culture. Davos couldn’t tolerate that. Plus Davos Man wants Russian resources, the vast wealth locked up in the steppes and Siberian wastes can power unimaginable wealth. So, they are willing to destroy the culture that created Tolstoy. No other literature approaches Russia’s in its prime, nor is there a more transcendent music. This is what Big Money and Davos want to bend to the west’s corrupt values? Imagine the arrogance it takes to decide to destroy a 1000 year old culture. And one that is nuclear-armed. And to do it with the bodies of Ukrainians.

They will spend eternity experiencing the pain of those families they ruined in service of their vanity. The sooner we get rid of them, the better.

Good “peacetime” generals versus good “wartime” generals

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

“Shady Maples“, a serving Canadian Army officer, explains why the skills and talents that allow an officer to rise to general rank in peacetime have no direct relationship with how that officer will perform in a shooting war:

Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army in Burma.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.

I am not the first person to make these kinds of observations. Jim Storr has written about peacetime promotion culture in the British Army and Thomas E. Ricks did the same with U.S. Army. Here is an excerpt from Storr:

    It appears that many of those whom the British Army promoted in peacetime during the twentieth century were found wanting on the outbreak of war. Promotion to high command in peacetime very much reflects the values of existing senior commanders, themselves largely the products of a peacetime promotion system. To that extent it reflects deeply held values, and has an obvious impact on operational effectiveness in war.

    Roughly two-thirds of those who commanded formations in the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] of 1940 were either sacked, retired immediately, or were never given another formation to command in the field.

Ricks describes a similar phenomenon occurring in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. Many senior leaders who had risen during peacetime couldn’t perform under real-world conditions. Under the stern hand of George C. Marshall, then Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, generals were removed from command at a rate that is unheard of today. Many of those who were fired had glowing records and some went on to redeem their reputations in later commands, which suggests that they had been promoted too soon or too high above their level of competence.

More recently, Russia has been churning through general officers in Ukraine, seemingly desperate to find someone who can achieve Putin’s war aims. If an army systematically promotes its officers above their level of competence in peacetime, then clearly their selection and assessment criteria are not aligned with the actual job requirements.

To illustrate the point, Storr compares careers of Second World War British Field Marshals. The first, Field Marshal John Verreker a.k.a. Lord Gort, was Commander-in-Chief (C.-in-C.) of the BEF during its disastrous efforts in France in 1940.

    [Gort] was the epitome of the system: young, highly decorated, charismatic, promoted through and entirely within the system. He was only 51 when appointed CIGS [Chief of Imperial General Staff] … As C.-in-C. of the BEF, he “fussed over details and things of comparatively little consequence” and had a “constant preoccupation with things of small detail”.

After he oversaw the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, Gort was removed from command and served out the rest of the war in non-combatant posts. It should be noted that Gort was not a bad soldier. During the First World War, he rose from the rank of captain to acting lieutenant-colonel and in the process earned the Distinguished Service Order (with bar) and the Victoria Cross. It was during the interwar years that Gort ascended from the substantive rank of Major to Field Marshal. Battles may be won with good-enough tactics and a lot of chutzpah, but Gort was unprepared for the complexities of wartime command at the strategic level. He did, however, excel at playing politics.

For contrast, here is Storr’s description of Field Marshal William “Bill” Slim:

    [The] 47-year-old Bill Slim was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1938, perhaps at the last possible opportunity. Slim had not been to Sandhurst; he had gained his commission “through the back door” and had come from a modest background. The outbreak of the Second World War saw him commanding a brigade in East Africa. Within four years he was commanding the Fourteenth Army in Burma … Slim was obviously not the product of a stable heirarchy in peacetime. His rise to fame came entirely during wartime. He was arguably one of the greatest British generals of the twentieth century. The contrast with Gort could not be more marked.

For his part, Ricks has a takes a wider view of how the post-war U.S. Army made some officers too big to fail:

    Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq were all small, ambiguous, increasingly unpopular wars, and in each, success was harder to define than it was in World War II. Firing generals seemed to send a signal to the public that the war was going poorly.

    But that is only a partial explanation. Changes in our broader society are also to blame. During the 1950s, the military, like much of the nation, became more “corporate” — less tolerant of the maverick and more likely to favor conformist “organization men”. As a large, bureaucratized national-security establishment developed to wage the Cold War, the nation’s generals also began acting less like stewards of a profession, responsible to the public at large, and more like members of a guild, looking out primarily for their own interests.

It seems like loyalty up became more important than loyalty out.

When did the “elites” of the West become so bumbling and incompetent?

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

Chris Bray on the blatant decay of western political leadership on display at the #Twitterfiles hearing in Washington D.C.:

I should probably just go back to sleep for a decade, because Walter Kirn always has it covered:

I was trying to be clever about this yesterday, but it should be said plainly for the space aliens who eventually find the ruins of our former civilization and have to use the surviving digital evidence to report to their superiors on the collapse of the earth losers.

The most striking thing about the average member of the contemporary political class — the “elite”, and yes, I know — isn’t that they’re almost invariably wrong, or that they’re never interesting, or that they have no wisdom of any kind that ever shines through anything they do, ever. Instead, the most striking thing about the contemporary political class is that most of them can’t actually speak, in the sense that you ask them something and then they think and then words come out. Here, watch:

Even in the screenshot, her face is pointed downward at a piece of paper. She’s only ever reading. She’s looking at prepared questions and giving voice to a script, like a much dumber Anne Hathaway. And, yes, what the script says is idiotic — Matt Taibbi gets paid for his journalismz!!!!! (unlike members of Congress, who take a vow of poverty and work for free) — but the more interesting thing to me is that this person, in her fifty-trillionth term in Congress, can’t say what she thinks without reading it. Mr. Taibbi, it says on this piece of paper that you are a very bad person.

They don’t know anything. They don’t think anything. They have no ability, no insight, no value to offer. So they make our laws.

March 12, 2023

Zhukov hits the Ground Running – WW2 – Week 237 – March 11, 1944

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

World War Two
Published 11 Mar 2023

The Soviets launch not one, not two, but three offensives in Ukraine this week, designed to destroy the entire southern wing of the German forces. The Japanese counterattack against the Americans on Bougainville finally begins after months of preparations, but there are more Japanese attacks elsewhere that get going: the operation to invade India.
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Jack Benny and Mel Blanc – The Man of a Thousand Voices | Carson Tonight Show

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

Johnny Carson
Published 18 Nov 2022

Original Airdate: 01/23/1974
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March 11, 2023

Why Japan Surrendered in WW2: Stalin or the Bomb?

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 10 Mar 2023
It’s common wisdom that the nuclear bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the Japanese surrender at the end of the 2nd World War. However, there has been a fierce historical debate if this narrative omits the role of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945 — or if this invasion was actually the main cause for the surrender.
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M240 Bravo: America Replaces the M60

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Nov 2022

In 1977, the US military adopted the FN MAG as the M240 in vehicular configuration to replace the less-than-successful M73/M219 machine guns. The USMC would get an early start adapting the 240 to ground configuration (the M240G), but it wasn’t until 1995 that the Army formally replaced the M60 with the MAG in M240B layout. The M240B has a number of differences from the standard MAG:

– Single-position gas regulator, giving about 600 RPM
– Picatinny rail on the top cover for mounting optics
– Front heat shield over the barrel to prevent heat mirage
– Top cover can be closed with the bolt either forward or back

The M240B has since been adopted by the Marines as well, and served extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a quite heavy gun (24+ pounds) but very well liked by its users for being exceptionally rugged, dependable, and accurate. The one we have today is in pristine condition, and one of just 11 transferrable examples registered in the US.
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March 10, 2023

Having solved all other problems, Congress now investigates … (checks notes) … the Protestant Reformation

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

Chris Bray respectfully outlines some of the questions the honourable Congressmen Congresspersons Congressentities Representatives would be likely to pose to the witnesses:

Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, 1517.
Painting by Ferdinand Pauwels (1830-1904) via Wikimedia Commons.

1.) Mr. Luther, you — sorry, having trouble with my reading glasses. It says here you … mailed 95 feces to a door? Do you feel that it was appropriate to put something like that in the mail?

2.) Mr. Calvin, sir, you have raised numerous objections to the elevation of the host. Shouldn’t you be equally concerned about the elevation of the hostess? Don’t you feel that gendered terms are problematic?

3.) For all the witnesses, I’m told you wish to choose your own pastures. Isn’t that a question best left to the farmers?

4.) Gentlemen, you apparently propose to dissolve the monasteries. But most of them are, in my understanding, made out of big rocks, with very solid walls. Wouldn’t that take a prohibitive amount of acid to dissolve those? Have you done an EIR?

5.) I must very candidly inform the witnesses that I cannot agree to your premise, and I frankly find it absurd to say that faith alone is the cause of salivation. Do you have credentials in the science of digestion?

The evolution of a slur

Filed under: Britain, History, Japan, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander traces the reasons that we can comfortably call British people “Brits” but avoid using the similar contraction “Japs” for Japanese people:

Someone asks: why is “Jap” a slur? It’s the natural shortening of “Japanese person”, just as “Brit” is the natural shortening of “British person”. Nobody says “Brit” is a slur. Why should “Jap” be?

My understanding: originally it wasn’t a slur. Like any other word, you would use the long form (“Japanese person”) in dry formal language, and the short form (“Jap”) in informal or emotionally charged language. During World War II, there was a lot of informal emotionally charged language about Japanese people, mostly negative. The symmetry broke. Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60. This isn’t enough to make a slur, but it’s enough to make a vague connotation. When people wanted to speak positively about the group, they used the slightly-more-positive-sounding “Japanese people”; when they wanted to speak negatively, they used the slightly-more-negative-sounding “Jap”.

At some point, someone must have commented on this explicitly: “Consider not using the word ‘Jap’, it makes you sound hostile”. Then anyone who didn’t want to sound hostile to the Japanese avoided it, and anyone who did want to sound hostile to the Japanese used it more. We started with perfect symmetry: both forms were 50-50 positive negative. Some chance events gave it slight asymmetry: maybe one form was 60-40 negative. Once someone said “That’s a slur, don’t use it”, the symmetry collapsed completely and it became 95-5 or something. Wikipedia gives the history of how the last few holdouts were mopped up. There was some road in Texas named “Jap Road” in 1905 after a beloved local Japanese community member: people protested that now the word was a slur, demanded it get changed, Texas resisted for a while, and eventually they gave in. Now it is surely 99-1, or 99.9-0.1, or something similar. Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.

This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern — World War II — is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.

He also explains how and when (and how quickly) the use of the word “Negro” became extremely politically incorrect:

Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said — in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him — that “Negro” was a slur — and because people believed him it became true.

March 9, 2023

“… the French Resistance effect is beginning to appear: After the Nazis leave France, everyone says they were always with the Resistance”

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

Chris Bray notices what we’re not supposed to be noticing:

French women accused of collaborating with the Germans are paraded through the streets by members of the French Resistance after liberation, Summer 1944.
Original photo from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia Commons.

Almost two years ago, with a moral panic still consuming the world and the narrative shift far in the future, the journalist Laura Dodsworth published a tough, concise, well-argued book describing the very deliberate efforts of the British government to create a widespread state of fear — that’s the title of the book, by the way — that would paralyze ordinary people and compel them to comply with harsh and repressive public health measures. You’ll be shocked to hear that she was attacked and vilified; one prominent review called State of Fear “an outrageously dumb book selling conspiracy hooey”.

Then, in 2023, Isabel Oakeshott gave us the halfwit government minister Matt Hancock’s pathetic whatsapp messages — in which he clumsily babbles about creating a state of fear to get the public to obey the government — and the rest is history. Laura Dodsworth was demeaned and defamed, and then she was vindicated.

Moral panics always fade. Manufactured crises always crack and collapse. Propaganda always has a “sell by” date, and then it turns rancid. The effect is comparable to what Warren Buffett says about a recession: When the tide goes out, you can see who’s been swimming naked.

This is where we are with the January 6 narrative, as the most horrible attack on Our Democracy™ since the Civil War collides with the image of a dork in Viking horns calmly wandering the hallways with a police escort. The political class is taking it well.

This image speaks:

That’s violent insurrectionist Jacob Chansley walking calmly through a crowd of police officers who aren’t making the slightest effort to stop him. That’s what happened. Other things also happened, and some of them involved violence and broken windows, but this is the act in the center ring of the circus. Now, the lawyer who represented this violent insurrectionist says plainly that Jacob Chansley was the victim of Brady violations, and other January 6 defendants are racing to raise the same point in court. The tide is going out.

[…]

And it seems possible to me, or rather it seems likely to me, that the French Resistance effect is beginning to appear: After the Nazis leave France, everyone says they were always with the Resistance. As narratives shift, and the moral meaning of an act during a moral panic is recoded, people may begin to remember their choices differently. We’ll see.

Want to feel more depressed? Spend more time with your smartphone

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

Freddie deBoer is convinced that much of the reason for widespread depression among teenagers can be traced directly to their obsessive devotion to the online world through their smartphones:

Are smartphones to blame for the mental health crisis among teens? The debate has picked up steam lately, in part because of the steady accumulation of evidence that they are indeed, at least partially. (As you know, I’m a believer.) Jonathan Haidt has done considerable work marshaling this evidence. But there’s an attendant question of how phones make kids miserable, if indeed they do. In this post I offer some plausible answers. This is mostly just speculation and I don’t know if the proffered explanations can be tested empirically.

I want to start by establishing a sort of meta-layer on which a lot of these problems rest. We might be inclined to say that these problems are inherently problems of the internet/online life/digital culture, rather than smartphones as such; you can be hurt by what I’m going to describe from a laptop as well as from a smartphone. And I think that’s right, except for one key difference: ubiquity. No matter how portable and light it is, you’re not reflexively checking your laptop on the subway platform or in the bathroom. The iPhone took all of the various pathologies of the internet, made it possible for them to be experienced repetitively and at zero cost morning and night, and dramatically scaled up the financial incentives for companies to exploit those pathologies for gain. You can certainly have an unhealthy relationship with the internet when it’s confined to your desktop. But phones make relentless conditioning and reflexive engagement a mass phenomenon.

The other overriding factor here is the fact that adolescents are still developing mentally, and thus are likely more susceptible to these problems.

Constant exposure to unachievable conditions. Back in my youth, you might watch an MTV show about how rich people lived, or leaf through a magazine like US Weekly, and be exposed to opulence and material excess. Or you might go on vacation and see how the other half lives if you took a tour of the Hollywood hills or whatever. You were perfectly well aware that rich people and their privileged lives existed. But then you turned off the show or you put down the magazine or your vacation ended, and unless you were born rich, you lived in an environment that of necessity was modest and real. Your friends might have lived in nice houses, but you didn’t see riches everywhere you looked, and your definition of what a hot girl looked like was mostly derived from the girls you went to school with. Your environment conditioned the scope of your desires.

Now, exposure to lifestyles that are completely unachievable is constant. Instagram is a machine for making you feel like whatever you’ve got isn’t enough. (That’s how it functions financially, through advertising idealized lives.) There are young people out there who have arranged their various feeds such that they’re always a few seconds away from seeing concerts they can’t attend, cars they can’t drive, houses they can’t live in, clothes they can’t wear, women they can’t fuck or whose bodies they can’t have, places they can’t travel to, food they can’t eat, and lives they can’t live. When I was young, if I wanted to see a picture of a Ferrari, I had to seek out a picture of a Ferrari. It was hard to see suggestive photos of intimidatingly hot women, which is why the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was a big deal. Mostly, the world around you was quotidian and its pleasures attainable. What can it be doing to these generations of young people, having completely unrealistic visions of what life is like being shoved into their brains all the time? How could their actual lives ever compare?

(Incidentally, I am thoroughly convinced that a majority of self-described incels are men who could find meaningful and fulfilling sexual and romantic success, both short-term and long, but who have developed such a wildly unrealistic idea about what actual human women look like that their standards are laughably high. And it’s easy to make fun of that, but I also think that the conditioning inherent to constantly looking at filtered and photoshopped pictures is powerful.)

March 8, 2023

“By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges”, cousin marriage “makes the development of civil society more difficult”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on what he calls the worst western foreign policy disaster since 1204, the Iraq quagmire:

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, better known in the West as “Baghdad Bob” or “Comical Ali”, Iraqi Minister of Information for President Saddam Hussein.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the greatest western foreign policy disaster since the Fourth Crusade. It was the pre-eminent modern-day example of folly, driven by wishful thinking, utopianism and a lack of interest in history and how human societies differ. This was mostly carried out by good people, including our own Tony Blair, and promoted by thoughtful and humanitarian commentators who thought they were making the world a better place.

The White House regime which brought chaos and misery to Iraq were most of all entranced by The Weekly Standard, the now-defunct magazine most associated with neoconservative foreign policy. Had any of them read The American Conservative instead, they might have avoided the whole tragedy. In particular they ought have read Steve Sailer’s “The Cousin Marriage Conundrum“, printed in the run-up to the invasion and in which the author made a seemingly curious argument for why nation-building in Iraq would fail — its high rates of cousin marriage.

Pointing out that between 46 and 53 percent of Iraqis who married did so to first or second cousins, Sailer wrote that: “By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges”, cousin marriage “makes the development of civil society more difficult”. The neocon dream of jumpstarting democracy was therefore clearly doomed to failure.

Even those with a cursory knowledge of the country knew that Iraq was split between Sunni and Shia Arabs, as well as Kurds in the north, each group’s area of dominance roughly corresponding to three former Ottoman provinces. However, these were further subdivided into “smaller tribes, clans, and inbred extended families — each with their own alliances, rivals, and feuds”, in total about 150 tribes comprising some 2,000 clans.

Saddam’s politics were mired in blood, in both senses. He came from the al-Bu Nasir, a tribe comprising some 25,000 people based in the town of Tikrit, and his regime was filled with his relatives. His political career had begun in 1957 when the 20-year-old had joined the revolutionary Ba’ath (“Resurrection”) Party, following his uncle Kharaillah Tulfha, who had fought against the British in the Second World War. Tulfha would become his father-in-law, for Saddam also married his first cousin, although he later took a second wife. Family life wasn’t entirely harmonious, and the man who introduced that couple, Saddam’s food taster, was later stabbed to death by the dictator’s psychotic eldest son Uday at a party thrown by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

The unfortunate food taster was an Assyrian Christian, and within Saddam’s regime religious minorities could rise high, as is often the case in empires, because they presented no threat. His foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was also a Christian, his birth name being Mikhail Yuhanna.

The family was everything in Saddam’s Iraq. Mark Weiner wrote in The Rule of the Clan of countries governed by “clannism” that: “These societies possess the outward trappings of a modern state but are founded on informal patronage networks, especially those of kinship, and traditional ideals of patriarchal family authority. In nations pervaded by clannism, government is co-opted for purely factional purposes.” The inevitable result of clannism is kin-based corruption whereby resources, positions and other rewards are monopolised by family groups. In these societies, Weiner wrote, “the nuclear family, with its revolutionary, individuating power, has yet to replace the extended lineage group as the principle framework for kinship or household organisation”.

The Weekly Standard was called the in-flight magazine of Air Force One, but presumably there weren’t that many White House staffers reading the American Conservative at the time, a publication started by Pat Buchanan, the great Republican critic of neocon foreign policy. So the Coalition blundered into a disastrous invasion that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, wrecking Iraq and leaving many areas newly-divided along sectarian lines, while minorities like the Christians and Mandaeans were driven almost to extinction.

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