Quotulatiousness

September 11, 2023

The DOJ versus SpaceX

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was a bit boggled when the US Justice Department announced it was going after Elon Musk’s SpaceX for alleged discriminatory hiring practices:

Image from SpaceX website.

The Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, the California-based spacecraft manufacturer and satellite communications company founded by Elon Musk.

In its lawsuit, the DOJ accused SpaceX of only hiring U.S. citizens and green-card holders, thereby discriminating against asylees and refugees in hiring, an alleged violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Musk denied the allegations and accused the government of weaponizing “the DOJ for political purposes”.

“SpaceX was told repeatedly that hiring anyone who was not a permanent resident of the United States would violate international arms trafficking law, which would be a criminal offense,” Musk wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

It’s uncertain if the DOJ is actually targeting SpaceX (more on that in a minute), but George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok quickly found a problem with the DOJ’s allegations.

“Do you know who else advertises that only US citizens can apply for a job?” Tabarrok asked. “The DOJ.”

Tabarrok even brought the receipts: a screenshot of the DOJ job website that explicitly states, “U.S. Citizenship is Required.”

So, if Musk is discriminating against non-U.S. citizens in his hiring practices, so is the DOJ.

This makes the lawsuit prima facie absurd on one level. However, one could also argue that there could be good reasons to discriminate in hiring. And as is usually the case, for better or worse, the government gets to decide when it’s OK to discriminate and when it’s not OK.

And that’s where things get hazy.

Musk and others claim that companies such as SpaceX are legally required to hire U.S. citizens because of International Traffic in Arms Regulations, a federal regulatory framework designed to safeguard military-related technologies.

The DOJ disagrees. So who is right? It’s difficult to say, Tabarrok pointed out.

“The distinction, as I understand it, rests on the difference between US Persons and US Citizens,” he wrote on Marginal Revolution, “but [SpaceX is] 100% correct that the DoD frowns on non-citizens working for military related ventures.”

In other words, SpaceX appears to have been trying to comply with Department of Defense regulations by not using non-citizens in military-related work, and in doing so, it may have run afoul of the DOJ.

The tiny town that became a beacon of hope on 9/11

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

60 Minutes Australia
Published 12 Sept 2021

The 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks is understandably a time of deep sadness as the world remembers an act of evil that’s still hard to believe. But for some it’s also a chance to celebrate the opposite: kindness, compassion and the very best of humanity. In the mayhem of the day that saw terror raining from the skies, American airspace was shut down, and a tiny town in a remote part of north eastern Canada suddenly found itself the destination for commercial passenger aircraft ordered to land immediately. Seven thousand plane people with nowhere else to go were about to discover the delights of the wonderful community of Gander.
(more…)

September 10, 2023

Time for NFL running backs to set up their own union?

Filed under: Business, Football, Sports, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s been known for a few years, but has been brought into clear focus during this NFL offseason that the position of running back — historically one of the most important positions on the field after the quarterback — has been steadily devalued by NFL teams. Superbowl-hopeful teams no longer centre their game plan around a workhorse running back, with more and more plays being passes to wide receivers and tight ends rather than running the ball. During the 2023 offseason, several big-name running backs went public with their frustrations over new contracts. The NFL Players Association, the union for players to negotiate with the NFL’s owners, has not been as proactive for running back concerns so a break-away RB union is back under discussion:

… running backs — whose job includes receiving handoffs from the quarterback, catching passes, and blocking — are getting pummeled like never before by bigger, stronger, faster NFL players. Which means that when their contracts are up, running backs are more damaged than they used to be.

What’s more, the drama has shifted: running backs used to score a lot, but now the action revolves around quarterbacks and wide receivers.

That explains why team owners are increasingly hiring rookies to be their running backs and, instead of investing in them long-term, replacing those rookies with other rookies at the end of their first contract.

So, running backs — having suffered tons of concussions, ankle sprains, and other injuries — never see the big, second-contract payday other NFL players land. Like the Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ $450 million contract or the $120 million deal wide receiver Tyreek Hill signed with the Miami Dolphins.

All of which explains how Harris has become a leading advocate for a running-backs-only union — and the unlikely face of the new American labor movement.

“I agree with my running back brothers around the NFL — history will show that you need running backs to win — we set the tone every game and run through walls for our team,” Harris tweeted in July, after three of his fellow running backs failed to secure long-term deals with their teams.

The new union, which would be separate from the NFL Players Association, was first proposed in 2019, when the International Brotherhood of Professional Running Backs filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board.

When Harris was asked in June what he thought of the idea, he said: “I’m open to it.”

He is joined by Tennessee Titans running back Derrick Henry, 29. Known as King Henry, he tweeted in July: “At this point, just take the RB position out the game then. The ones that want to be great & work as hard as they can to give their all to an organization, just seems like it don’t even matter. I’m with every RB that’s fighting to get what they deserve.”

Granted, professional running backs, with an average salary of $1.8 million, make a lot more than nurses, pilots, public school teachers, and everyone else in a union, but the money is declining, and they increasingly feel as though they’re being exploited by management at the same time the NFL is seeing record success. In 2023, the NFL secured $130 billion in new media deals. Of the top 100 network television broadcasts in the country last year, the league accounted for 82, and that figure is going up. On top of all that, game attendance is nearing an all-time high.

Bulgaria at War with Everyone – WW2 – Week 263 – September 9, 1944

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

World War Two
Published 9 Sep 2023

This week the USSR invades Bulgaria … who’ve also declared war on Germany, and who are still at war with the US and Britain, so Bulgaria is briefly technically at war with all four at once. Finland signs a ceasefire, the Germans are pulling out of Greece, the Warsaw and Slovak Uprisings continue, Belgium is mostly liberated, and across the world, the Japanese enter Guangxi, and there are American plans to liberate the Philippines.
(more…)

September 9, 2023

The US military’s recruiting crisis

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

As I joked earlier this year after one or another of the US services reported falling significantly short of their recruiting goal, “I find this hard to believe now that Uncle Sugar is not only willing to fund your gender transition, but will then guarantee that you won’t be sent into a combat zone.” Kulak has been reading some histories of the 20th century and was surprised to find that the recruiting problem faced by most military organizations in that time was having too many good recruits:

This was after WW1! Millions of young men had just died as part of regiments many little different than this. And yet there was this much demand from young men to be part of the martial world.

This is because the Military and military life was ACTUALLY a good career move, and ACTUALLY formed life long bonds in the early 20th century.

Amidst the population boom of the early 20th century and all the excess young men with little inheritance… the military and militia life was a major vehicle for social mobility and aspiration and forming social connections…

So what changed? Why is it almost completely the opposite in early 21st century America?

These attitudes survived the world wars, even the western front of WW1 …

But they were devoured by Vietnam and the Civil Rights era.

Implicit in a lot of 19th and 20th century militarism was the vision of “Every Soldier a Citizen, Every Citizen a Soldier” this ethos was first expressed during the french revolution … It was aspirational. The subjects divorced from the state and military were now armed and able to participate in civic and military life, they were now citizens … of course by the early 20th century this sounds very menacing… Soldiers must obey orders, every day … if every citizen is a soldier, and bound to obey, on pain of death, that’s Totalitarianism.

You can make a strong case that US military recruiting never fully recovered from the Vietnam era, even through the temporary boost of the post-9/11 patriotic rush.

America has gone from over 1% of the population actively serving at any one time to nearly a third of that.

The “Professionalization” of the US military to an “All Volunteer force” has in effect just been a cover for this collapse in recruiting capacity.

America’s military isn’t significantly structurally different. These aren’t really professionals.

Your average 3 year contract private isn’t making some obscene Yuppie amount of money for his ambitious professional commitment. A private makes under 30k a year. A Second Lieutenant, with a university degree and years of professional development, who may have had to plan out his career from 16 years old getting a Congressman’s letter of recommendation to attend West Point or another service academy … Makes 40-60k a year.

US GDP per capita is 72k. If that Lieutenant had gone to a second tier school and gotten a Computer Science degree he’d be making 6 figures and have vastly more control over his life.

It’s not a good career move, in the 1780s or 1900s and ambitious scion of a decayed noble family desiring to conquer the world might want to become an artillery officer… Today he wants to work on wall street or at Google.

Even if you’re starting out from a very rough place there ar almost certainly a dozen better things you could do to advance yourself faster, for better money, and with less effort than joining the Military.

The only appeal of the US military, for decades now, has been to people who really want to escape their situation, who really felt they needed to hard reboot their life, or who are really drawn to military life out of sheer love of it.

And then the Army went woke.

The long-serving senior officers of every branch of the US military are now locked in to pushing diversity in all its manifold ways, to the point of knowingly discouraging non-diverse service members out of the way to make room for this month’s gender, racial, or other quotas.

So America’s effective recruitment capacity and civic feeling will continue to collapse even as Americans hate each other and their government even more.

You think recruit capacity is bad now? Wait til they imprison Trump.

The Republican race – “There don’t seem to be a lot of takers for ‘pretending this is normal'”

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

Mark Steyn on the establishment GOP’s attempt to run the 2024 campaign as though nothing has changed other than the calendar:

I mentioned on Monday that on his long-running Radio Derb John Derbyshire drew his listeners’ attention to an observation of yours truly:

    I can’t improve on Steyn — nobody can — so I’ll just quote him from that piece.

I always feel Derb thinks I’m a bit of a pantywaist on the hardcore issues, but in today’s America even a reasonably sentient pantywaist should be able to get to the nub of the issue. Here’s the bit Derb quoted:

    So two years later the American Right still talks about the justice system and the election campaign as if either term means what it does in functioning societies. As I said above, I don’t intend to comment on this week’s Trump indictment either, nor do I wish to talk about who would make the best president, who has the best platform, who has the skill-set to implement the platform … That would be all well and good if we were in, say, France, but, when the dirty stinking rotten corrupt U.S. justice system is criminalizing political opposition, there’s no point pretending this is a normal situation, right?

“There’s no point pretending this is a normal situation, right?” And yet at least three-quarters of the candidates in that Republican debate insisted on doing just that: This is just a normal quadrennial election in the greatest country in the history of countries where we’re renowned around the planet for our uniquely peaceful “peaceful transfer of power”, etc, etc.

Sorry, I don’t buy that — and evidently nor does the GOP base. Which is why Trump has a forty-point lead over his nearest rival, and Nikki Haley’s alleged triumph on stage in that debate has seen her numbers soar to — stand well back! — 6.1 per cent. The avowedly normal vice-president, senator and three governors nipping at her heels can barely muster ten percent between them. There don’t seem to be a lot of takers for “pretending this is normal”.

John Derbyshire quoted me in the context of the latest sentences on the January 6th “insurrectionists”. Dominic Pezzola broke a window at the Capitol and was given ten years; the government had asked for twenty. Joseph Biggs moved a crowd-control barrier and was sentenced to seventeen years; the government had wanted him banged up for thirty-three.

So the prosecutors and the judges seem to have reached a cozy understanding that, whatever sentence the former demand, the Court will be totally reasonable and cut in half. You want another? The feds demanded thirty years for Zachary Rehl; the judge gave him fifteen. And this is after two-and-a-half years in gaol awaiting their “constitutional right” (don’t wave that constitution at me!) to a speedy trial.

Oops, wait, I spoke too soon. The US Attorney wanted thirty-three years for Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, but this time the judge decided to up it to two-thirds of the feds’ demand: twenty-two years. For a guy who wasn’t in Washington on January 6th.

All this of course in an ugly and violent land where actual career criminals who like to beat up disabled women with their own canes have the run of the playground. And with the connivance and support of the Democrat Party, even when very occasionally it all goes wrong for one of their own.

Oh, well. Mr Tarrio is a Proud Boy. I’m not really a Proud Boys type, if only because their founder, Gavin McInnes, has been a bit of an arse about me re Cockwombling Cary Katz and the CRTV cases. Still, I’m all about first principles — and a decade for breaking a window is not, even by lousy American standards, the verdict of a “justice” system.

September 8, 2023

Johnson M1941 rifle

Filed under: History, Military, Pacific, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Dec 2013

Melvin Johnson was a gun designer who felt that the M1 Garand rifle had several significant flaws — so he developed his own semiauto .30-06 rifle to supplement the M1. His thought was that if problems arose with the M1 in combat, production of his rifle could provide a continuing supply of arms while problems with the M1 were worked out. The rifle he designed was a short-recoil system with a multi-lug rotating bolt (which was the direct ancestor of the AR bolt design). When the Johnson rifle was tested formally alongside the M1, the two were found to be pretty much evenly matched — which led the Army to dismiss the Johnson. If it wasn’t a significant improvement over the Garand, Ordnance didn’t see the use in siphoning off resources to produce a second rifle.

The Johnson had some interesting features — primarily its magazine design. It used a fixed 10-round rotary magazine, which could be fed by 5-round standard stripper clips or loose individual cartridges. It could also be topped up without interfering with the rifle’s action, unlike the M1. On the other hand, it was not well suited to using a bayonet, since the extra weight on the barrel was liable to cause reliability problems (since the recoil action has to be balanced for a specific reciprocating mass). Johnson thought bayonets were mostly useless, but the Army used the issue as a rationale to dismiss the Johnson from consideration.

However, Johnson was able to make sales of the rifle to the Dutch government, which was in urgent need of arms for the East Indies colonies. This is where the M1941 designation came from — it was the Dutch model name. Only a few of the 30,000 manufactured rifles were delivered before the Japanese overran the Dutch islands, rendering the rest of the shipment moot.

At this point, Johnson was also working to interest the newly-formed Marine Paratroop battalions in a light machine gun version of his rifle. The Paramarines needed an LMG which could be broken down for jumping, light enough for a single man to effectively carry, and quick to reassemble upon landing. The Johnson LMG met these requirements extremely well, and was adopted for the purpose. The Paramarines were being issued Reising folding-stock submachine guns in addition to the Johnson LMGs, and they found the Reisings less than desirable. Someone noticed that thousands of M1941 Johnson rifles (which could also have their barrel quickly and easily removed for compact storage) were effectively sitting abandoned on the docks, and the Para Marines liberated more than a few of them. These rifles were never officially on the US Army books, but they were used on Bougainville and a few other small islands.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com

September 7, 2023

QotD: Techno-pessimism

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

Unfortunately, by any objective measure, most new things are bad. People are positively brimming with awful ideas. Ninety percent of startups and 70 percent of small businesses fail. Just 56 percent of patent applications are granted, and over 90 percent of those patents never make any money. Each year, 30,000 new consumer products are brought to market, and 95 percent of them fail. Those innovations that do succeed tend to be the result of an iterative process of trial-and-error involving scores of bad ideas that lead to a single good one, which finally triumphs. Even evolution itself follows this pattern: the vast majority of genetic mutations confer no advantage or are actively harmful. Skepticism towards new ideas turns out to be remarkably well-warranted.

The need for skepticism towards change is just as great when the innovation is social or political. For generations, many progressives embraced Marxism and thought its triumph inevitable. Future generations would view us as foolish for resisting it — just like Thoreau and the telegraph. But it turned out that Marxism was a terrible idea, and resisting it an excellent one. It had that in common with virtually every other utopian ideal in the history of social thought. Humans struggle to identify where precisely the arc of history is pointing.

Nicholas Phillips, “The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism”, Quillette, 2019-06-06.

September 6, 2023

Some key planks from Scott Alexander’s presidential platform

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

I was a bit surprised to find that Scott Alexander has decided to toss his hat into not one, but two party primaries for the 2024 presidential nomination:

The American people deserve a choice. They deserve a candidate who will reject the failed policies of the past and embrace the failed policies of the future. It is my honor to announce I am throwing my hat into both the Democratic and Republican primaries (to double my chances), with the following platform:

Ensure Naval Supremacy And Reduce Wealth Inequality By Bringing Back The Liturgy

The liturgy was a custom of ancient Athens. When the state needed something (usually a new warship) it would ask for volunteers among its richest citizens. Usually one would step up to gain glory or avoid scorn; if nobody did, the courts were allowed to choose the richest person who hadn’t helped out recently. The liturgist would fund the warship and command it as captain for two years, after which his debt to the state was considered discharged and he was given a golden crown. Historians treat the liturgy as a gray area between voluntary service and compulsory taxation; most rich Athenians were eager to serve and gain the relevant honor, but they also knew that if they didn’t, they could be compelled to perform the same service with less benefit to their personal reputation.

Defense analysts warn that America’s naval dominance is declining:

    Only 25 per cent of America’s 114 commissioned surface combatants (cruisers, destroyers, and littoral combat ships) are less than a decade old. By comparison more than 80 per cent of China’s 141 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes have been commissioned in the past decade. In the same time period, the United States commissioned 30 surface combatants … The nearly 600-ship Navy of the late 1980s deployed only 15 per cent of the fleet on average. Today, with fewer than 300 ships, the US Navy deploys more than 35 per cent to service its global missions, contributing to a material death spiral.

So America is short on warships. But it is very long on rich people with big egos. An aircraft carrier would cost the richest American billionaires about the same fraction of their wealth as a trireme cost the richest Athenian aristocrats. So I say: bring back the liturgy!

The American rich already enjoy spending their money on exciting vehicles — yachts for the normies, rockets for the more ambitious, Titanic submersibles for the suicidal. Why not redirect this impulse towards public service? Imagine the fear it would strike into the hearts of the Chinese when the USS Musk enters Ludicrous Mode in the waters off the Taiwan Strait, with Elon himself at the wheel. Imagine how efficiently the USS Jeff Bezos will deliver its payloads! And does anyone doubt that billionaires – usually careful to avoid taxes — will jump at the chance to do this?

The Athenians had a parallel liturgy for rich people who would select and sponsor theater productions, but I think we can skip this one for now.

[…]

Legalize Lying About Your College On Resumes

Colleges trap Americans in a cycle of burdensome loans and act to reinforce class privilege. I have previously advocated making college degree a protected characteristic which it is illegal to ask people about on job applications. But this would be hard to enforce, and people would come up with other ways to communicate their education level.

So let’s think different: let’s make it legal to lie about your college on resumes (it is already not technically illegal to lie on a resume, but companies can ask for slightly different forms of corroboration which it is illegal to lie on). Everyone can just say “Harvard”, and nobody will have any unfair advantage over anyone else.

Start An Internet-Pop-Up Trade War With The European Union

For too long, Americans have groaned under the weight of foreign cookie-related-pop-ups which they and their elected representatives have no control over. It’s time to fight back.

When I am elected, I will mandate that all American websites serve popups to European Union residents explaining why the GDPR is annoying and why it affects even Americans who have no say in it. If the Europeans want to be able to access Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other US-based site without clicking “I understand” every time they reload it, they’ll have to pressure their government to do something about GDPR.

Appoint Donald Trump Constitutional Monarch

This would require a constitutional amendment, but I’m sure I could convince enough people.

The British experience suggests that the role of a constitutional monarch is to flaunt how rich they are, get 24-7 news coverage regardless of whether or not they do anything interesting, and have scandals. Donald Trump is the best person in the world at all three of these things

Trump wants to be on top, but is not that interested in governing. Meanwhile, American liberals (by revealed preference) want to continue thinking about him every hour of every day forever, but also don’t want him to govern. Constitutional monarchy would satisfy everyone’s preferences. If Trump is destined to destroy democracy — and everyone agrees that he is — let’s make it happen as gently and non-destructively as possible.

Obviously the royal family can’t participate in regular electoral politics, which means no Trump would ever be able to run for office ever again. This is the only way we are ever getting rid of them, you know this is true, please don’t throw away this chance.

I would support reverse primogeniture-based inheritance — ie the youngest son takes the throne — just so we can have a “King Barron”.

“[T]he preemptive hype about [Bottoms] has been fundamentally false, fundamentally dishonest about what constitutes artistic risk and personal risk in 2023″

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

Freddie deBoer — whose new book just got published — considers the way a new movie is being marketed, as if anything to do with LGBT issues is somehow still “daring” or “risky” or “challenging” to American audiences in the 2020s:

Consider this New York magazine cover story on the new film Bottoms, about a couple of lesbian teenagers (played by 28-year-olds) who start a high school fight club in order to try and get laid. I’m interested in the movie; it looks funny and I’ll watch it with an open mind. Movies that are both within and critiques of the high school movie genre tend to be favorites of mine. But the preemptive hype about it — which of course the creators can’t directly control — has been fundamentally false, fundamentally dishonest about what constitutes artistic risk and personal risk in 2023. The underlying premise of the advance discussion has been that making a high school movie about a lesbian fight club, today, is inherently subversive and very risky. And the thing is … that’s not true. At all. In fact, when I first read the premise of Bottoms I marveled at how perfectly it flatters the interests and worldview of the kind of people who write about movies professionally. As New York‘s Rachel Handler says,

    [Bottoms has] had the lesbian Letterboxd crowd, which treats every trailer and teaser release like Gay Christmas, hot and bothered for months. After attending its hit SXSW premiere, comedian Jaboukie Young-White tweeted, “There will be a full reset when this drops.”

And yet to read reviews and thinkpieces and social media, you’d think that Bottoms was emerging into a culture industry where the Moral Majority runs the show. One of the totally bizarre things about contemporary pop culture coverage is that the “lesbian Letterboxd crowd” and subcultures like them — proud and open and loud champions of “diversity” in the HR sense — are prevalent, influential, and powerful, and yet we are constantly to pretend that they don’t exist. To think of Bottoms as inherently subversive, you have to pretend that the cohort that Handler refers to here has no voice, even as its voice is loud enough to influence a New York magazine cover story. This basic dynamic really hasn’t changed in the culture business in a decade, and that’s because the people who make up the profession prefer to think of their artistic and political tastes as permanently marginal even as they write our collective culture.

Essentially the entire world of for-pay movie criticism and news is made up of the kind of people who will stand up and applaud for a movie with that premise regardless of how good the actual movie is. And I suspect that Rachel Handler, the author of that piece, and its editors at New York, and the PR people for the film, and the women who made it, and most of the piece’s readers know that it isn’t brave to release that movie, in this culture, now. And as far as the creators go, that’s all fine; their job isn’t to be brave, it’s to make a good movie! They aren’t obligated to fulfill the expectation that movies and shows about LGBTQ characters are permanently subversive. But the inability of our culture industry to drop that narrative demonstrates the bizarre progressive resistance to recognizing that things change and that liberals in fact control a huge amount of cultural territory.

And here’s the thing: almost everybody in this industry, in media, would understand that narrative to be false, were I to put the case to them this way. This obviously isn’t remotely a big deal — in fact I’ve chosen this piece and topic precisely because it’s not a big deal — and I’m sure most people haven’t thought about it at all. (Why would they?) Still, if I could peel people in professional media off from the pack and lay this case out to them personally, I’m quite certain many of them would agree that this kind of movie is actually guaranteed a great deal of media enthusiasm because of its “representation”, and thus is in fact a very safe movie to release in today’s Hollywood — but they would admit it privately. Because “Anything involving LQBTQ characters or themes is still something that’s inherently risky and daring in the world of entertainment and media, in the year of our lord 2023” is both transparently horseshit and yet socially mandated, in industries in which most people are just trying to hold on and don’t need the hassle.

“[W]hy does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? … it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it”

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

Patrick T. Brown in The Free Press on how he had to leave out the full truth on climate change to get his paper published:

If you’ve been reading any news about wildfires this summer — from Canada to Europe to Maui — you will surely get the impression that they are mostly the result of climate change.

Here’s the AP: Climate change keeps making wildfires and smoke worse. Scientists call it the “new abnormal”.

And PBS NewsHour: Wildfires driven by climate change are on the rise — Spain must do more to prepare, experts say.

And The New York Times: How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii Into a Tinderbox.

And Bloomberg: Maui Fires Show Climate Change’s Ugly Reach.

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it.

The paper I just published—”Climate warming increases extreme daily wildfire growth risk in California” — focuses exclusively on how climate change has affected extreme wildfire behavior. I knew not to try to quantify key aspects other than climate change in my research because it would dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.

This matters because it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals; in many ways, they are the gatekeepers for career success in academia. And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives — even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

[…] as the number of researchers has skyrocketed in recent years — there are close to six times more PhDs earned in the U.S. each year than there were in the early 1960s — it has become more difficult than ever to stand out from the crowd. So while there has always been a tremendous premium placed on publishing in journals like Nature and Science, it’s also become extraordinarily more competitive.

In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.

In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

September 5, 2023

“… the misogyny myth persists because both sexes want to believe it”

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

In City Journal, John Tierney disassembles the “misogyny myth” of modern culture:

Misogyny is supposedly rampant in modern society, but where, exactly, does it lurk? For decades, researchers have hunted for evidence of overt discrimination against women as well as subtler varieties, like “systemic sexism” or “implicit bias”. But instead of detecting misogyny, they keep spotting something else.

[…]

If you haven’t heard of this evidence, it’s because of the well-documented misandrist bias in the public discussion of gender issues. Scholars, journalists, politicians, and activists will lavish attention on a small, badly flawed study if it purports to find bias against women, but they’ll ignore — or work to suppress — the wealth of solid research showing the opposite. Three decades ago, psychologists identified the “women-are-wonderful effect”, based on research showing that both sexes tended to rate women more positively than men. This effect has been confirmed repeatedly — women get higher ratings than men for intelligence as well as competence — and it’s obvious in popular culture.

“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning”. Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”? If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be a “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson, and commercials wouldn’t keep showing wives outsmarting their husbands. (When’s the last time you saw a TV husband get something right?) Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.

Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies — and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.

The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males — a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.

Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.

QotD: “Karl Marx was right after all”

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Alas, as my fictional namesake said somewhere, time has a habit of turning all our lies into truths. It turns out Karl Marx was right after all. Who, I ask you, is more cartoonishly evil, more like the caricature capitalist of paranoid Communist fantasies, than Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? Tim Cook? Jack Dorsey? Sundar Pichai?

We’re actually living, comrades, in the class-warfare world Marx preached in the 1840s. Everything Marx said about the factory owners of the First Industrial Revolution, that seemed so luridly absurd that even other Socialists criticized him for it, is true of the tech fascists of the Biden-Harris Revolution. Solzhenitsyn cites Russian writers from the late nineteenth century noting that Marxian socialism would end up as nothing more than dialectically-constructed feudalism, and lo, here we are. America in 2021 looks almost exactly like the USSR looked upon Lenin’s death …

… that was 1924, gang, and in case you’ve forgotten, what happened next was a vicious intra-Party civil war, in which Stalin crushed his enemies. AOC makes a pretty unlikely Trotsky, but it’s no less ludicrous than the thought of Nancy Pelosi as Koba … but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We’ve been noting here for years that the modern Left is dedicated to being the Hollow Men in all things. They’re Revolutionaries without a Revolution — they go on and on (and on and on and on) about fighting the power and sticking it to the Man, even though they, themselves, have been the Man since at least 1974. They’re moralizers without morality — you’ll be scolded for not being as perverse as humanly possible. And, of course, their politics is a cult of personality without the personality — not even Orwell or Kafka could’ve come up with the Party installing an obvious dementia patient as its figurehead, not even if you’d dropped LSD in their tea.

As always — and yes, even in the depths of Stalin’s terror — the real rulers are the nomenklatura, the apparatchiki. Not even Koba the Dread can be everywhere. Being Hollow Men, our Postmodern Leftist masters have decided to dispense with the whole Kremlin thing. Who needs the NKVD, the gulag, the dreaded Lubyanka? The Junior Volunteer Thought Police “fact checking” everything on social media will do it for free, and much more efficiently, at which point their fellow travelers in the banking system will simply cut the badthinkers off. The only reason the gulag persisted after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was that the Soviets, those fools, wanted to exploit their natural resources themselves, to build things themselves; labor camps were thus integral to the Soviet economy. Our masters don’t care about that, and their masters, the Chinese, certainly don’t. Much more efficient, and psychologically effective, to let the unperson simply starve in the middle of the town square, pour encourager les autres.

But hey, at least we’ll have some fun figuring out who the new Trotsky is. Again, my money’s on AOC — she’s so stupid that she’s bound to do something irrecoverably dumb sooner or later, after which she gets the digital icepick. That’ll be a hoot. Enjoy what parts of the spectacle you can, comrades – if you’re a student of human folly, you’re going to love the next few decades, because Marx was right about that too, the bastard — second time as farce.

Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.

September 4, 2023

The temptations of envy

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

Rob Henderson discusses the phenomenon of envy in the modern world:

A couple of sample items in the social comparison scale are “I often compare myself with others with respect to what I have accomplished in life” and “I often compare how I am doing socially (social skills, popularity) with other people.”

Social comparison, by definition, is relative. Here is a question often used in these kinds of scales.

Suppose you are presented with two options:

A. You get 2 weeks of vacation; your coworkers get 1 week

B. You get 4 weeks of vacation; your coworkers get 8 weeks

A sensible, rational, objective person should choose B. One week of vacation versus 4 weeks is a no-brainer. But a surprisingly high number of people will choose A over B.

Consider the reality of working in an environment in which you know everyone gets twice as much vacation time as you. It’s unfair. And as we’ve discussed before, our preoccupation with the idea of fairness is in part rooted in concerns about status.

So what are some of the traits associated with social comparison orientation?

Unsurprisingly, social comparison orientation is associated with the Dark Triad personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism), fear of failure, interest in exhibiting status, FoMo (Fear of Missing Out), utilitarian moral preferences, malicious envy, and benign envy. We’ll discuss the difference between these two forms of envy later.

The utilitarian finding is interesting. When you present trolley problems to people high on social comparison orientation, they are more likely to report that they would flip the switch to kill one person or push the fat man off the bridge in order to save five people. They seem to favor cold calculations for decision-making, which may be why they tend to score highly on psychopathy.

Narcissism is unsurprising. People who compare themselves with others are more likely to be preoccupied with their social image and want others to admire them and think highly of them.

This is of course related to fear of failure. Failure means that you come off looking comparatively worse than others. Social comparers are interested in status displays, that’s not a surprise given the link with narcissism.

In fact, some researchers have found that narcissistically-oriented people often report intense reactions to the perception of others’ envy. They experience a hidden sadistic satisfaction in causing a sense of inferiority and painful feelings in others.

Social comparers report greater levels of Fear of Missing Out, because if they are left out or excluded, this reflects poorly on them. Most people want to be a part of the excitement, but social comparers have an especially intense desire to be among those who are seen.

And this brings us to envy.

What is envy? Plainly, it is the emotional consequence of upward social comparison. Envy is an emotion that regulates the navigation of status hierarchies.

It is a painful emotion. People might say they will occasionally feel pride, or greed, or lust, but seldom do people confess to feelings of envy. To confess to envy is to acknowledge that you believe someone else has more status than you. Few people are eager to intentionally lower themselves in this way.

Envy is an unpleasant feeling, as many of your emotions are. But negative emotions are evolutionarily adaptive. Envy alerts you when you might be falling too low on the status ladder. It is a kind of status leveling mechanism.

Here’s how some psychologists have described it:

    At its core, envy is born out of the perceived danger to lose respect and social influence in the eyes of others … envy’s function may be to foster the motivations to re-gain status or harm the superior position of others.

What does envy look like? Here’s a still from season 1 of the superb television series Mad Men.

Here, two advertising executives, Peter Campbell and Paul Kinsey, are reacting to their colleague Ken Cosgrove, who has just told them one of his stories was published in a prestigious magazine. Ken’s colleagues are smiling and congratulating him, but you can observe a bit of surprise, a bit of skepticism, and an attempt to show Ken that they are happy for him but also surprised that he had this talent for writing. It’s a way of being cordial while also communicating that Ken shouldn’t get too full of himself. This kind of contorted smile might be a uniquely American expression, because Americans are culturally conditioned to suppress envy and be happy for one another’s success. This is a good cultural practice, in my view.

There’s a term used in New Zealand and Australia called “Tall Poppy Syndrome”. The idea is that tall poppies, or people who rise too far up beyond others, get cut down because the smaller poppies are envious. Bids for status can incur envy in other people. If you try to achieve something, others might attack you or resent you or cut you down in some way. Some of you may be familiar with the crabs in the bucket metaphor, and this is similar to that idea of crabs at the bottom of the bucket pulling down the crabs higher in the bucket. People are often intuitively aware of this, which is why people conceal their desire for wealth or status or power.

Our own little Cyberpunk Dystopia

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kulak suggests we get comfortable with the tropes of Cyberpunk Dystopias, since we’re already living in one:

One need not spend long in radical or dissident Right discourse to encounter talk of Psy-ops and demoralization campaigns.

Some of this traces back to Yuri Besmenov’s work on subversion, some to speculation about “Operation Mockingbird” type media manipulation schemes, and some to simply obvious symbolic work being done for seeming for no reason except to horrify, offend, “blackpill”, and create a sense of helplessness amongst regime enemies.

One can point to the massive sentences for Jan 6th protestors, the recent charges of Trump (outside any norm or existing political theory or constitutional theory), or most ridiculous: Dystopia Porn news stories.

I recently heard a story repeated by a commentator of a news story of a trans-woman working with doctors to be amongst the first to receive a womb transplant which would allow a biological male to gestate a baby, this person was excited, completing the South Park plotline (seriously 2005 s09e01 “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” look it up), stating that they were excited that they might be the first trans-woman to get an abortion.

Why would the medical establishment play along and at least pretend to enable this obviously malicious and self-destructive wish? Why would the media bother to report such a crazy person’s putrid desire?? This religious commentator could only describe it as “satanic”, and speculated that it was a psy-op meant to break decent people’s will …

Setting aside the question of intention, and whether it wasn’t “just” medical professionals salivating at a paying guinea pig, and the media looking for clicks that aligned with their propaganda …

Why would it demoralize!?

Abortions happen by the hundreds of thousands annually, and the nightmare of the trans-medical process is visited on thousands of souls more sympathetic than this South Parkian weirdo every year … outside of the immediate outrage, such a bizarre one-off intersection of the two is basically of no broader political import … indeed if one is of the social conservative set one has seen rather major political victories on both fronts, with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the end of adolescent gender treatment across wide sections of Europe.

And yet for this one-off story of someone saying they would like to do something evil and stupid … you got outrage and horror and many an invocation of “It’s so over”.

What are the point of Psy-ops? What is the goal of demoralization?

Well as a perfidious leaf I am uniquely positioned to tell you, indeed, indeed one might say my country only exists because of the greatest psy-op in human history …

No not anything to do with Trudeau sr. or the liberal government’s corruption and bribery to keep Quebec from leaving …

The founding Canadian Psy-op occurred in 1812 … carried out by the greatest psychological warfare operative in human history, and Canadian national hero:

General Sir Isaac Brock

According to former President Jefferson, the conquest of Canada was to be “just a matter of marching” … indeed it should have been, the woefully outnumbered British Regulars and under-trained Canadian Militia should have been in no position to hold Upper Canada (now Ontario) and by rights should have lost what is now English Canada to American expansion … The defence of Canada depended on keeping America’s superior numbers on the far side of the St Lawrence/Great Lakes waterway bound up and unable to deploy in force for such an invasion …

… a seemingly hopeless task since they already had a beachhead for such an invasion at Fort Detroit (site of the current, well former, major city).

So Brock went on the attack, marching on Detroit with vastly inferior numbers to even the garrison.

His 1300 men of three different nationalities (British, Canadian, and Native) attacked 2500 unified defenders across the massive Detroit River, in a prepared defensive position.

It should have been suicide … he didn’t lose a single man.

Brock dressed his militia in excess redcoat uniforms of British regulars to make it appear as if he had more professionally trained soldiers … then throughout his maneuvers created the illusion that he had vastly more men than his opponent, marching his men in circles to create the illusion from the walls of the fort that he had thousands more than reality.

He then wrote to his opposite general William Hull begging him to surrender, stating that he did not believe he could control his 3000 Indian allies (in reality just 600) and prevent scalping and war crimes once battle broke out.

Hull wrote back asking for three days to arrange the surrender, Brock gave him three hours.

Once surrendered, Hull’s men spat on him seeing the inferior force they had just turned their guns over to.

At a court martial General Hull was sentenced to be shot, however, President Madison commuted his sentence to mere dismissal from the service … beginning a 200+ year-long tradition of US military retreat and lack of accountability.

In 1945 Canadian forces would repeat this obscene tactic at the battle of Zwolle, when soldier Leo Major single-handedly tricked ~1500 German soldiers into believing they were surrounded by superior forces and retreating.

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